The End of the World

[Ned Miller]

Think the Flip is a joke? It almost saved my career yesterday…

HERE’S MY UPDATE: Today is late Wednesday afternoon and I just completed (barely) shooting 3 days for a giant international IT consulting firm that had simultaneous large conferences in Chicago/Paris/India. Each site had a pro crew and by early afternoon we had to select best takes and upload at the Westin to Paris so the footage would be edited overnight and shown the following morning at each of the 3 sites. Chicago is 5 hours behind Paris and they edit through the night because India is way ahead of Paris, so you can imagine the pressure.

Well, mid Tuesday AT&T shut down (or perhaps we crashed it?) the Westin’s internet capability because we exceeded their capacity and the place went bonkers! Imagine an IT symposium with no internet!!!! We had been provided a dedicated ethernet vlan line of 4MB but still choked it. Solution: I had my media wrangler/editor rush to his alma mater and upload on their T1 line.

The point of the story is: I came within a hair’s breath of using the client’s Flip camera (although I have never touched one!), double recording the audio on my Panasonic HPX300 P2 camera, and sending the audio separately as a wav or MP3, which probably could have been emailed or taken to Starbucks or Kinkos for an upload, and then synced at the French editors. We were extremely close to doing that! And although I have been a DP for 33 years I am not sure my footage would look any better than a Flip because I had to shoot in the DV codec to keep the file size small, then in FCP export convert into PAL (ugh), upload to Paris, they edited and converted BACK to NTSC (another ugh), and show on hallway plasmas at the hotels and convention centers.

So…It may be useful to have a Flip in one’s toolkit? I suppose soon they will have an audio mini jack input? Or record audio separately like the old film days.

Ned Miller
Chicago Videographer
http://www.nedmiller.com
http://www.bizvideo.com

[Mark Suszko]

Ned, love the dramatic story, and it was well told, but what I take from it is that the flip was not the potential answer, rather, a better and slimmer codec and way to transmit it was. Because it was your transmission/distribution *pipeline* that failed; not the shooting or edit gear. I have long said that the next codec breakthru that enables smooth sharp quality realtime full screen AV over POTS lines is going to revolutionize our business models. That’s not physically, visually sexy, like a camera is; you can’t hold up a codec and look cool using it. But what it DOES is what’s sexy; enabling you to make these kinds of feeds live from the field without an uplink dish or microwave hop, just a phone line.

[Mick Haensler]

[Mark Suszko] ” I have long said that the next codec breakthru that enables smooth sharp quality realtime full screen AV over POTS lines is going to revolutionize our business models.”

Amen Mark. Once this happens, it will change the distribution pipeline forever and open up incredible opportunity for the savvy business owner.

Mick Haensler
Higher Ground Media