2009 a year of transitional video production!

2009 has been a wired year. To start off with I had the transition of switching from pc to Mac and was still getting used to it and developing HD work flows.

Form a video point of view I’ve had the opportunity to do some fantastic jobs ranging from hart surgery to long running projects documenting and capturing different parts of culture ranging form one-day events to community projects.

HD acquisition has now become the norm HD video content is really taking off on the web and the last part of the HD work flow left to become standard is the delivery at the moment every one wants SD DVDS and HD web clips.

I’ve also noticed a changing in how clients use media both as part of the promotion and there documentation. People now seem to value their media presence much more. This year has been the first time I’ve seen clients take advantage of media convergence where we have shot stills for them and then produced a video. The value for the client is they get stills which can be used in numerous ways but also we can turn them in to video which can be delivered on numerous platforms such as mobile devices the web and disks. For the client this is a grate time you can maximize you commission.

Below are 2 examples of videos I have produced with out shooting video. To the eagle eyed you’ll notice a short piece of video in the one and other video, this was actually shot on the 5dmk2 so although its video it still follows the convergence theme as it’s a still camera not a dedicated video camera!

shooting the woods a film by Dan Craddock

Day 1

Totally gutted about this, its something Id been looking forward to for weeks but the muscle injury was still too bad for me to do the filming. In fact it was so bad I couldn’t even use a boom. The reason I was looking forward to it so much is because it’s being shot on a canon 5dmk2. Now being shot by Iain Jacques and I’m doing the location sound.

The film is being filmed using to cameras the main camera is a canon 5dmk2 the second camera is a sony z1. This is going to be a nightmare in postproduction due to the 5dmk2 being full Rasta and having square pixels and the z1 being 1080i HDV which is an anamorphic format. The second camera is being used by lura Wilkinson. The second camera is there to provide 2 angels but to also give us a back up to the 5d. Andy whitehead had raised the issue of artifact and moray patterns so we decided to play it safe and shoot it on 2 cameras.

The sound is being recorded using a shennhiser me66 mic and sound devices 302 filed mixer. The sound is being recorded on to a zoom 4Hn recorder. The sound recorded by the z1 and the 5d is just for reference.

the zoom 4 recorder

We didn’t get hold of the zoom recorder till late in the day prior to the first day of shooting, to start of with we did have problems with it being over loaded by the 302 mixer, we solved this by using xlr to jack leads. At the moment tit seems to be going well as in we have recorded sound. 

the cables

sound devices 302 mixer and zoom 4 recorder

iain jaques witht eh 5dmk2 70-200mm lens and 2x converter

Shooting the woods day 2

We had a small crew due to people’s schedules. Every one had to do a bit of every thing, Andy whitehead did boom and brought and set up track. Iain carried on the 5dmk2 and lura and fred shard the z1. Fred also did a bit of boom and making of doc, as well as his designated role of clapper boarding. After checking the levels from day one I made some minor adjustments to the zoom 4 recorder. After the second day of filming we have now clocked 24Gbs of 5d footage and almost 1Gb of sound, and about 1.5hours of HDV.

We are now waiting for a 1Tb Gtech drive to arrive so we can start transferring the data.