Alan Hunter
Forum Replies Created
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Tim,
I know this after the facts, or in this case, after the posts. But I couldn’t help but chime a little. Back in the mid 80’s I went into business with 2 other partners (one an independent businessperson, the other an engineer at a local TV station) and needless to say it wasn’t long beofre I realize that partners are like employees, some are good and some are not. At our peak we had 14 employees, a ton of work and life seem to be good. Then after 11 years I decided I needed a change (living on a tropical island can take its toll) and sold out to the reminding partner. Move ahead some a decade and there I was again, back in the production business (and thank God away from television news) with another partner. I’ll never learn! This time my company works for me (we produce a syndicated show) and my employee count is down to four. As for my latest partner, he is history, I learned early on that niether employee or partner are not worth keeping if all they do is couse grief. I guess the point I really want to make is to play to your strengths. Do what you are most capable doing and build from there. In the end you’ll go to the office each and every day wanting, instead of not and you work and money will come with less effort. You can create what ever you want, its just you have to decide what it is you want. Happy New Year!
Golf Guy
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“Programing provided by program providers with annual gross revenues under $3 million” are exempt.”
Interesting! Nothing was ever mentioned regarding the above to us when we spent over an hour on the phone with the FCC back in November. They did say that you could file for an extension of time to convert, but nothing was ever mentioned about revenue. If this is the case, I could have spent the $10,000.00-plus elsewhere in my company.
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If you do ask for an extension, and or a pass on closed caption from the FCC be prepared to have your “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed when you submit your paperwork. Then be willing to wait at least 30 days before they begin the review your paperwork and another 15-30 days for an answer. As mentioned above there is no easy and inexprensive solution to close caption. However, in your case you might want to consider voice recognition software, because it doesn’t seem like you folks script much, if anything at all. Another alternative is to work a deal with a local captioning service (someone at your station should who does it in your market) and have them do it. They will based thier quote on the number of shows you produce each year. Good Luck!
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KT,
What’s the question…small one man band or what? I’ve shot as a one man band for well over a decade now. In fact, I spent 3 years doing my own “live” shots in a large market, with the help of a special live truck (well it wasn’t all that special) but not even the best engineers, truck operators, camera-people, reporters, news directors, you name it could tel the difference. It all has to do with the individual. Yes, there are many “one man bands”, but few who can do it all and do it well!
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Matt,
Are you considering a “software only” program for CC? It is my understanding the 1800 will record line 21 info. However, don’t quote me on it. Use in conjucntion with an encoder it does, software only, that I don’t know for sure.
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Danny,
Glad to hear things are working out for you. Yes, we too send a tape every week to Houston, but we also send one to Chicago and out to Cali. So you can see the software only route made no sense to us. And since we script almost everything its nice to have some newsroom software to work with. I almost feel like I’m working back in…no I don’t want to go there! Anyway, we’ll be burning the midnight oil next week, hoping to have an encoder in house before the end of the week.
Merry Christmas,
Golf Guy
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Bernardo,
The update for 606 should have a self opening file and will update the bios. BazinoZ has a point, you could a problem that will show itself until you start to add different hardware/software. My first thought to these problems is look at the drivers first.
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Danny,
What sort of issues are you having? We too must comply with the FCC mandate regarding closed caption. However, we ware using a “newsroom” based software product together with an enocder to do this. One of the issues we have is that we ship out multiple tapes per week to different sections of the country and relying on a software-based option would have added up to 12 additional hours on labor to the production. This way with our software we use one rundown, and treat it like someone running a prompter during a newscast. We script everything anyway, so this made the most logical sense.
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Bernardo,
Had basically the same problem. What I did was start from stratch. I reinstalled Windows, but did not install SP2. Updated the bios with version 606. Downloaded the latest drivers for the video card. Downloaded Decklink’s 5.2.2 driver. Did a standard bios setup, except with the memory, for some reason ASUS does not recognize my Corsair memory as PC6400 (had to manually set that)and then loaded Adobe, Decklink and other needed software. The system has been pretty stable for the past three days. We do a ton of editing for our syndicated show, so maybe we have solved the problem. I did notice that there are certain DV files (codecs) that Decklink absolutely will not work with, so we try to avoid inserting those into a project.
My system is as follows:
ASUS P5WD2 Premium
Intel Pentium D Dual Core 830
4 250gig SATA disks with 16MB cache (3 in RAID 0 Config.)
1 80gig SATA
1 120gig 133 PATA (system)
evga nVidia GeForce 6600GT 128
2GB DDR2 800 RAM CORSAIR
Antec case with 480 watt Power supply
Decklink card installed in PCI slot 2 -
You would think that with all the money you spent on that product they would at least offer some kind of training.