To P2 or not P2, that is the question…
April 30, 2006
I discuss Panasonic’s P2 technology and workflow in Part 2 of my article about the Panasonic AG-HVX200 camera that appears in the most recent issue of New England Film. As part of my research for the article I put together a music video shoot using P2 workflow and spoke with several filmmakers about their experience including Barry Braverman. I spoke with him about his perspective on P2 technology and its implications on workflow.
A conversation with John Naylor, Director of Grass Valley’s Infinity Camcorder Program
April 28, 2006
I was very impressed by many of the design decisions made by the designers of Grass Valley’s Infinity professional 2/3″ 3-CCD ENG camcorder. At the NAB2006 show I caught up with John Naylor and talked with him about the camera. Naylor is the Director of the Infinity Program, with overall responsibility for the camcorder, the media, and the field recorder. He also has responsibility for Grass Valley’s future developments in the Infinity series. Prior to joining Grass Valley he was with Snell & Wilcox and Kodak. What follows is a slightly edited, yet unabridged transcript of our conversation.
A conversation with Red Digital Cinema’s Ted Schilowitz
April 27, 2006
At NAB this week there was a lot of buzz on the show floor about the Red camera currently in development. I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Ted Schilowitz about Red. Before joining Red he was a Product Manger at AJA Video Systems and part of the team that created video capture cards for Apple’s OS X and the Io box that AJA co-developed with Apple. Ted is a recognized expert in the field of broadcast television and feature films as well as an award winning Director and Producer who has created projects for Discovery Channel, E! Entertainment, Fox, NBC, Nickelodeon, PBS, et al. I interviewed Ted as part of my research for an article I’m writing about NAB2006 for Imagine, however, it was such a fun conversation I decided to post the unabridged conversation here. Enjoy!
Not all RAIDs are created equal
April 20, 2006
I did not emphasize a very important aspect of my discussion of media storage expansion options: a critical aspect of setting up a software RAID array is the utility you use to set up the RAID, and SoftRAID is a better option than Apple’s Disk Utility.
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Media storage expansion options for the Power Mac G5
April 15, 2006
Recently I needed to add more video storage to my G5 editing system and I faced several options, below are the three options I considered. Apple would love to have you buy their XServe RAID, and it’s a beautiful, high performance box, but it’s overkill for the indie filmmakers and others doing tight-budget video editing. If several people were sharing the same media, maybe FibreJet and Xserve RAIDs would make sense for an economical SAN arrangement. But back to my own needs at home, I was deciding between internal SATA expansion, external SATA expansion, or external FireWire 800 expansion.
Sony HVR-A1U Performance in Low Light
April 12, 2006
As a follow-up to my previous writings on the HVR-A1U, here’s a series of video frames from “Boston Haunted” (a 48 Hour Film Project film I worked on this past weekend). The frames taken from the video demonstrate the good and bad of the low-light performance of the Sony HVR-A1U HDV camcorder we used to shoot the piece in Standard Definition DV/squeezed mode.
Remembering John Marshall Premiers at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
April 5, 2006
After a very intense sixteen day editing schedule, Alice Apley and I, with the help of assistant editors Cristina Bauer, Sharon Perpignani, and Tamar Skowronski, have completed editing Remembering John Marshall. It premiers tonight at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as part of Documentary Educational Resources‘ 35th Anniversary celebration being held this month at the museum.
