[Dan Brockett]

Hi Steve:

Who is your policy with? Have you ever had a claim? How was their service? How much coverage and at what approximate cost? I used to have a producer’s policy that covered everything, including E&O, rental, etc. but it went to about $12,000.00 per year so I dropped it as it was too expensive.

I typically fly with only about $10,000.00 to $15,000.00 worth of gear, just tryng to figure out the most economical way to go. I also have about $250,000.00 worth of gear total at my office so I should get a policy that covers everything, burglary, theft, accidents, etc.

Thanks for any tips.

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Hi Harlan:

Wow, cheesy goodness! I was one of the first owners of a Video Toaster back in the day. My suggestion would be to just hunt down a working Toaster, they are still out there and you could score one for just a few hundred bucks. Wish I still had mine. You do know that they were SD only and composite only, right? No HD love, at least on the Amiga versions. I never used the PC version, not sure if they still had the cheese-o-matic Kiki effects, falling sheep, etc.

Good luck,

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Thanks for your reply, finally figured it out right after I posted this. It is not obvious to a non-graphics geek like me.

Thanks,

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Extremely happy with my Sachtler DV-6SB paired with the Miller Solo DV carbon legs. No spreader, can touch the ground or go all of the way up to 72″ high, great tripod, great head. Why have a camera as good as the HVX on a sub-par tripod?

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

Hi guys:

In regards to the sound quality between the two models, I will be able to report to you in a week or two. I, like both of you have two sets of the U100s and have been using them happily for years when I am not renting using client’s Lectros.

I also happen to have a brand new 1800 Series sitting in my safe that Audio-Technica sent me for a magazine review article. I will be A/B testing between the two. I have not used the 1800 set yet but just in unpacking them, I can tell that the construction is not nearly as robust feeling as the U100 in the transmitter or the receiver. A lot less metal and a lot more plastic.

Seems like a nice setup though as far as features.

Good luck with them John. I have never tried rechargeables in mine so I cannot tell you if that light problem is normal. Mine get fresh 9V twice a day when shooting and the little light glows, then goes dark.

Best,

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Jim has it right.

The whole beauty of shooting with P2 is that DVCProHD codec is so small, efficient and easy to work with. The prod co I worked at for the last three years had eight AVID Xpress DV systems laying around so we did do the off-lines on them at DV res and then used the DVCProHD format material for the on-line on a Nitris Symphony. It was a stupid workflow and I told the owner for years to switch to FCP to avoid all of this unnecessary labor but hey, it wasn’t my company.

The HPX-2000 and 3000 are beautiful cameras that create really nice images but unfortunately both lack VFR, which once you shoot with, its hard to give it up.

The HDX is a great camera, I used four of those on the Family Guy 100th Show special. Beautiful images and nice camera but who wants to buy an outdated camera? Tape is really going away quickly.

I was at the first RED LA User Group today and the turnout was really healthy. Of course RED is not the most practical solution for EPK but if you are in that price range, depending on what kind of work you do, it should be considered as well.

I really like the HPX-500. I wish that it had bigger CCDs but the performance that it gets from the CCDs that it has can be impressive. And most importantly, the HPX has VFR! The HDX and HPX-2000 and 3000 do not. Strange product grouping from Panasonic. The two cheapest P2 cameras do have it and the two most expensive ones dont.

Best,

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

Hi Chris:

I have been shooting a lot of P2 for the past three years. I own an HVX-200 and regularly shoot also with the Varicam and HDX-900.

At the last production company I worked at, we shot P2 and archived it out to DVCProHD tape, how’s that for a backwards workflow?

Benefits of P2
Great for shooting – instantaneous response
Can use loop record and not miss the beginning of an event
Easy review and management of clips as you shoot
Only way to use a previously $60,000.00 Varicam codec in a $5,000.00 camera
Most beautiful slow motion, time lapse and VFR you can imagine
Instant ingest for editing
P2 cards, in long run, are cheaper than tape to shoot with

Downsides to P2
Long term archive must go back to tape, either DVCProHD or LTO
Must dump P2 cards as you shoot unless you have a lot of cards (this is becoming less and less of an issue as 32GB and soon 64GB cards become available)
Cards are another significant capital cost
Reader for MBP with Duel Adapter/PC with PCMCIA slot is easy, but for reader for MacPro or PC towers, you must tie up a camera or invest in fairly expensive readers. Most people use a laptop to dump P2 as they shoot so this may or may not be an issue for you
Short term working format becomes hard drives. You must probably invest in a lot of drives. I only consider P2 safe if you always have at least two copies of the media, a working drive and a backup drive.

In a way, it doesn’t matter if you get P2 or not, in production, tape is rapidly dying. In a few years, tape will be an antique rarity. It would probably not be a smart near term decision to invest in tape decks and cameras and other than HDV, tape cameras are becoming more and more rare. Panasonic’s entire line of camcorders will be non-tape, I think they are only making a few tape models at the moment and after NAB with the introduction of the DVX replacement, I think that might be it as far as tape cameras for them.

Best,

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

Hi Shane:

Thanks for the heads up, I knew that you would be up to speed on this. I am not actually buying FX Factory but CoreMelt says that I need to install FX Factory for ImageFlow to function. I am not sure how all of this works together but I will make sure that I download V2 and the update.

Thanks,

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

Martin:

If the FXFactory thing isn’t causing this, you are the victim of the QT 7.4.1 DRM fiasco. One of my clients had this issue and the only way to resolve it is to downgrade your QuickTime with the Pacifist utility. You need to go back down to QT 7.3.

In it’s infinite wisdom, Apple has put a lot of DRM routines into the newest versions of QT, largely due to studio pressure since they are selling more television and films on iTunes. I have seen this problem manifest in several ways..

1. On my friend’s MBP, once he installed QT 7.4.1, his system preferences pane became corrupt and he could not boot the system prefs.

2. Same friend also could capture any P2 clips under 10 minutes but all of the clips over 10 minutes played with just a gray screen with sparkles.

3. Have heard of QT 7.4.1 basically can cripple AE for some users

4. Many users are unknowingly loading the newer versions of QT by just auto update for iTunes. This downloads QT 7.4.1

5. The Pacifist utility costs $20.00 and seems to work pretty well. I have referred three other users t Pacifist and in each case, it got them back going. https://www.charlessoft.com/Pacifist_Documentation/English/index.html

You can research the exact procedure (it is involved) over at the http://www.kenstone.net website.

6. I have also heard of several users going through exactly what you are going through too as far as the log & transfer window with P2. Unfortunately Apple has really screwed up QuickTime for pro users. Beginning at v 7.3.1, with each new update of QuickTime, Apple has tried to fix the things that they have broken on previous versions, but with each newer version, they have broken other weird random things. The main problem is that QuickTime is the backbone of all of the video apps so these little bugs can have long ranging ramifications that nobody even knows about until users start screaming.

Good luck,

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs

[Dan Brockett]

Assuming your talking about driving a vehicle very fast on the edge of control, nearly causing and being involved in multiple collisions in an urban setting, I hope that you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in your budget for the permits, stunt drivers, safety officers, police officers, fire crew, vehicle suport, insurance policy, stunt support crew, camera mounts, ability to pay off lots of business owners who will have to shut down their businesses, etc.

Could be done, but I don’t see how on an indie budget. You will probably have to consider a back lot or an unpopulated area and even then, you will need a lot of support crew and gear. All of this stuff is amazingly expensive to do, that’s why most indie films are of angst-driven 20 somethings talking in apartments, not of car chases. The closest I ever came to this was producing a two car collision scene for a television show. Not exactly a chase, just two cars careening down a road toward each other and the crash and an explosion. To do that :10 sequence on S16 at night cost the production about $250,000.00 and that was quite a few years ago. What you are proposing will cost many times that. Think about the scenery, in a chase, you have to see many different blocks of a location, you can’t keep driving past the same BG elements.

You may have to modify your script or get someone to write a big check to do it and do it well. What do you think all of the Brett Ratners of the world do to blow those $100,000,000.00 plus budgets? Car chases can eat up a good portion.

Best,

Dan

Dan

Providing value added material to all of your favorite DVDs