[Dan Brockett]

Hi Jessica:

You may find both of these articles to be helpful in narrowing down your choices for shotguns and lavs.

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/right_mic_brockett.html
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/lavs_brockett.html

All my best,

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

An on-camera light like a Litepanels Mini would improve your video immensely. I had to shoot at basically a barely lit cocktail party. I ran a 650 fresnel for a background light through a celo cuc and I used a Litepanels Mini 5500 Flood model with the full CTO and a diffusion panel for fill on the faces. This setup worked quite well.

A light like this can fill in the faces in backlit situations and can function as a soft key in too dark situations. They are not cheap but in my opinion well worth it. I rented it for U.S. $50.00

IMHO, using auto will give you horrendously bad and inconsistent results. Are you are a cameraman or a camera pointer? Learn your tools and how to control them. In most backlit situations, if you don’t use manual iris and zebras, you will end up with silhouettes. What good is that? Same with focus, autofocus will be useless in bad, lowlight situations like you will be in.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

Hi Jim:

Unfortunately I have experienced the same FCP issues that you have and I still don’t know why either. The good news is that all of the footage has played back correctly. This is definitely an FCP issue, not a P2 issue. The only advice I have received was “upgrade to FCP 6.0, when I had this problem on 5.1.4. I did upgrade but have still had this happen here and there. I was also told it has something to do with exceeding a certain file size per clip, something like 11 minutes when shooting in 720 24P or four minutes on 1080, but I have had the same ingest issue even with clips smaller than those lengths so I don’t know.

I have just been living with it, it is an inconvenience but oh well.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

Hi Todd:

Have you checked out the Cool Lights as well? Richard is selling a pretty sweet little CDM -150 that is a nice light, daylight or tungsten bulbs available, nice little ballast that rides on the lightstand.

I have seen they Alzos but have never used them hands on.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

I bought the Core Melt ImageFlow for stills using Motion and I love it. Motion rocks. Doing movement on stills in FCP is a PITA but in Motion, it is easy and quick.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

Oh yeah, Ned Soltz just reviewed those in DV Mag. He really liked it. Looks like the sweet little setup.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

I have stacks of the Western Digitals. I usually only edit DV on them though. For DVCProHD, I use my RAID, I mainly just use the WDs for storage. They work fine.

I built my own Notebook drives with these sweet little aluminum cases I bought from Other World Computing. I think the case is called a Speedzter 2. Can’t recall which drive I stuck in the cases, I think that the might be Hitachi or ?? Anyway, they work like a dream.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

Yes, I agree, RAID 0 is living dangerously. Fortunately I am not an editor by trade and just use my system for occasional projects for clients. If I were an editor, I wouldn’t chance RAID 0, it’s for cheap dummies like me ;-). It’s an eight drive RAID 0 that I built also so there eight chances for this thing to crash and burn.

At least I hae it all backed up on storage drives.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

While I like the idea of backing up to two physical drives at once, I have found that the WD MyBookPro 1TB drive is nice because it is a RAID 1 500GB drive. Problem is that it’s AC powered only although it has a DC plug.

When I am in remote locations, I usually use a bus powered little notebook drive, then clone it to another drive at night.

It leaves me a little bit exposed to disaster but so far, no problems.

Not sure if there is a bus powered RAID on the market and also not sure at all about the DC plug from car. Might work great, might be a bit unreliable in supplying steady current.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

RAID 0 but I do have backups of everything on other storage drives. My RAID is too small to run it RAID 5 at this point. Once I upgrade the drives to larger drives, will be going RAID 5.

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs