Guthrie Andres
Forum Replies Created
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I think it may be decreasing because offensive posts, ones that use four letter words and other bad language are being removed by moderators. Since these posts also tend to be the ones that give the product a single star, the number of single star reviews goes down more than other numbers of stars. Just my theory because I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, even when they don’t necessarily deserve it.
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We actually don’t have anyone operating the station usually, because we are all students, and thus, we all have classes, homework, and everything else associated with college. The station usually runs completely on its own, except when it fails, but that’s a whole different problem. Our entire broadcasting setup is very jury rigged, and would probably make a professional cringe. We’re slowly upgrading, but as it stands right now, there is no “on-air board” per-se. There are volume sliders that can be adjusted on our Globecaster, the volume sliders in the playout program we use, and the system volume of the computer that runs that software. So basically, there are three different places where volume could be adjusted, but none of them are manned.
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Just to clarify, these are college students. I’m a college student too. No little kiddies running around. I’ve heard that fluorescent lights, especially the ballasts, are kind of finicky. I like the look they create, and I like the no heat aspect, but I wasn’t sure about the durability. I did have an alternate idea of getting the two head Kino Flo Diva 400 set though. Oh, and we do have fresnels. The Lowel FREN-L 650’s (discontinued) are fresnels.
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Have you looked into the GoPro Helmet Hero? I’m not really sure how deep you are going, but it’s waterproof in its housing up to 180ft. It also shoots full 1080p video on to SD cards, so you could get a lot of footage on there. It also only costs $300, so you could conceivably get two for different views. They are really fun, and make surprisingly great looking video for their size.
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My small-time college channel just replaced a massive Panasonic DVCPro deck with an AJA Ki Pro and couldn’t be happier. Native ProRes recording saves massive amounts of time, and it has just about any input and output you could want. They even make a solid state drive module for it if you intend to get rough.
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In the Ki Pro config menus there is an option for where what input your audio is coming from. You can choose SDI Embedded or XLR among other things. There is no option for a little bit of each.
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At least with our glidecam you can adjust the position of the camera from side to side as well as front-to-back. that way if the monitor does alter the balance a bit to the side, you can compensate for it. I’ve found that it’s most helpful to have the monitor on the bottom of the sled, since then you can kind of look out for things you’re about to trip over. We use a smallHD DP1 for our monitor and mount it to the front of the sled. It’s nice because it has a built in battery mount, so there is just one HDMI cable leading to the camera. The monitor itself acts as a weight though, so you need to get it into a good viewing position before you start balancing, otherwise when you adjust the monitor it will screw up all your hard work.
-Guthrie -
Oh dear Bob, I’m sorry to make you feel sick. Your personality and comments frequently remind me of Gordon Ramsay on Hell’s Kitchen. In my last post I may have made it sound like we are paying for everything out of our college pockets. The reality is, we have a yearly budget of about $20,000 for operating expenses and then we run large equipment purchases through a committee that controls more funds and we have to justify how the expense benefits the organization and the student body. We don’t have the money of a professional organization, but we are far better off than some. I am certainly aware that this is going to be expensive, and to be honest, I love spending the school’s money because all they do is take my money the rest of the time.
So really, ideally this would be a purchase in the area of $30,000-$40,000, and could integrate with our Blackmagic-design router, and be capable of outputting both SD (preferably composite, though we could use a converter) and HD-SDI. I would also like to be able to upload the programming schedule to our website. Those are really the basic features that I’m looking for. -
Thank you Bob and John for your responses. I realize that nothing in this industry is cheap. Blackmagic-design is a great company and I’m always happy with the pricing of their products. We are looking for something that will have an easy learning curve since none of us are professionals here. I like the look of the software solutions that John suggested, but I’m aware that the more things you tack on to any system, the more demons seem to creep in, and the more things seem to go awry.
Maybe we’ll just end up shelling out 30 grand or so for a Tightrope or Princeton server, since that seems to be a nice all in one system and would integrate with our network over FTP. I think OmniBus is a bit beyond our needs, as we only go out to campus buildings and all our playout is file-based.
We have managed to scrape by over the years with no professional help. We built and configured our own xSAN setup, and we’ve taught ourselves about lighting and live production enough to make a pleasing product as well. While the radio station and newspaper have paid professionals to operate their equipment, we are firmly against bringing in any professionals because we want to be able to do our own thing (we’re college students, go figure). -
Just from personal experience, we’ve had some issues mixing PPC and Intel computers on our Xsan. Sometimes if a project is captured on an Intel, and then opened on a PPC, we will have to reconnect all the media. We are currently running all PPC except for one Intel client. We’ve tried all sorts of things, even backing up the entire SAN, reformatting all the clients, and starting fresh, and these issues still persist. This FY I’m trying to pass through a proposal to upgrade everything else to Intel.
-Guthrie