[Sam Lesante jr.]

I was waiting for a chance to chime in and I think I found it with Mark’s post about the Panasonic Postbox.

Now, I’m only 30 but I’ve been in this business either in front of the camera or in back for at least 15 yrs. I did a local talent show with my father in the 80’s and early 90’s. The only “production” part I can recall is having to type out my lines on the typewriter but it could only be about 5 words or so per line because it had to fit onto the manual telepromter roller which was a wooden board with a roller on each side with a camera looking down at it. And if you did not tape the pages together perfectly, the words would obviously be crooked when readin. I could also recall my father showing me a brand new mic they purchased called a “boom” mic that you could hold farther away when interviewing or set on a floor stand to get tape dancers’ tap noises better.

Then I went to college and we opened a production house where we also produce a local news for our cable system.

We started out using 1/2 inch. Then we got professional and went to the Sony Umatic 3/4″ stuff with a Chyron Scribe Jr., a sony GVS-3100? switcher and a For-A dve. We had a tube camera and a 3ccd chip camera for eng shoots. Guess which one everyone wanted? 🙂

I was jealous of the other news crews cause they had the Beta SP cameras that you put this “tiny” tape in the side of the camera. Although, I became pretty good at physically cutting a portion of tape that was eaten and unusable, and scotch taping it back together and “saving the day” with just a couple of minutes or even seconds lost of tape.

As far as editing, it was deck to deck for news and for commercials we’d put the chyron through the dve to twirl it around and like one of the previous posts we’d do a/b roll by rolling to decks at the same time, mark our edit to match the last frame that was needed by eyeballing it either by the way someone’s mouth was positioned or when thier hand passed there face and hoped the transition would not be seen. 50% of the time it was seen (usually only by us) but that was down and dirty editing for us and it needed to get done.

I also remember having to clean the heads every night and if the deck went down, there was no screen with a message that popped up showing you exactly what part was not working. We either had an engineer from a nearby station come in and fix it a la carte, or we had a friend in NYC where he drove 2 hrs, or we drove 2 hrs one way and then waited, praying that it would be an easy fix. We also bought a lot of used decks and ran them into the ground until the buttons fell off or the letters on the decks were totally wiped away. And it was also a bummer to have all this file video on 3/4 so when you needed to find video from 2 yrs previous, you first had to find which tape it was on by looking through papers at first, then on the computer later, then you had to find the tape, hope the video was still on the tape, rewind or fast forward FOREVER to find your spot, then finally, have to lose another generation of video becuase the original footage that was edited on there had and interview in the middle and now you only need the b-roll.

Then along came DVCPRO. WOW!! It was like a godsend. To be able to use only a camera on your shoulder, no deck to lug around, no extra 5 0r 6 long rectangular batteries needed to carry with you cause our camera took one and the deck took 2. No more big tapes to lug around and take up space on your walls, on the floor, in the car, in crates, in the garbage, everywhere!!! And those red record tabs were never in the tape you needed it to be in, so when you would crash to record it would only play and you’d shake your head and try to hit play and record again but nothing would happen, so you’d curse the machine for a while until you took the tape out to see that it was you who had the I-D-10-T error.

Another unique part about us is that we are basically the only ones on the channel besides KYW-Philly from 11-12am. So we created a lot of shows to runs during our times and we also have TV classifieds too. So of course you need to playback those shows by putting the vhs tape or 3/4 tape in hitting play and switching the show over. Well, sometimes the people we hired to do that job would forget to change it at the right time or a problem with the deck would occur, which made for an eventful night.

I was amazed at the picture quality first and the way you could still the video and have no pause line in the middle of the video so you could play it wherever you wanted, no pre-roll needed. And when you would edit your raw footage onto a master, you could hardly see any generation loss.

Before we got our Postbox, we had our first computer based editing machine called the Casablanca by Draco. It was a weird UI but it made our spots look a whole lot better.

Of course since we didn’t have the money to go totally over to DVCPRO, we started with one dvcpro camera and one dvcpro deck. So that meant if it was used for eng, it would have to be dumped to 3/4 to be edited which took a bunch of time.

After the Casablanca used up it welcome (which by the way I still have sitting in one of my editing rooms waiting for the chance to fire it up to use one of it’s weird filters on a project) we purchased the Postbox.

At this time, the Postbox was a great up and comer. Thinkng back I don’t know really why. I mean, yes it had a video line, a key line, a title line and 4 audio tracks, a varitey of transitions that were real time, even some 3d effects that were real time. But it had no open architecture. No CD drive until 2000, so you had to sit there and upgrade your software using about 5 or 6 floppy’s, the zip drive I attahced was a paralell port, and forget about usb’s or ps2’s.

Although, to be honest, I still have it in my editing room and it is still being used at least 3 times a week for smaller budget spots and we’ll use it until a major meltdown occurs. (which will probably be tomorrow since I just brought it up) So we have definitely made our money back on that baby and still continue to do so.

Right now, we are 3 yrs. into using the ill-fated Media 100’s 844x. A great system with no place to go. I’m learning After Effects slowly, but have found that the 844x does alot of the AE stuff.

We are still using DVCPRO but now have 4 cameras that work, 2 that are sitting around waiting to be used for parts cause they are too expensive to fix, we have 8 active decks used for digitizing, tape to tape editing, recording… and a beta sp deck to make dubs for others and to play from others, 2 vhs decks for client dubs and a dvd recorder for show files and client dubs.

We have a 1 yr old switcher from synergy and a 1 yhr old CG from Compix Media that are awesome.

We have been running our shows via computer for the past 4-5 yrs. using Leightronix and our TV classifieds have gotten a makeover from just being colored text and colored blocked backgrounds. with SCALA, we can import graphics now or full screen layout from Photoshop.

And this past month we’ve been experimenting with streaming all of our shows on our website 24/7. So whatever is running on our local channel, you can see on our site.

check it out by going to http://www.ssptv.com/live and check us out too at http://www.ssptv.com

Wow, what a post! sorry if it was too long, I got carried away but they were some good times, and some bad times.

Peace.

Sam Lesante Jr.
V.P. / Prod. Mngr.
SSPTV
A Sam-Son Production
Hazleton, PA

“Some people dream of worthy accomplishments while others stay awake and do them.”

[Sam Lesante jr.]

I don’t think it’s green screen cause I’ve seen shots where the camera shot is in motion and the graphic on the screen is pristine.

I’ve also seen on Dateline where Stone is standing in front of a huge screen behind him that looks great

I uploaded two pics to my server to give you an example;

https://www.ssptv.com/videovault/dateline.jpg

https://www.ssptv.com/videovault/set.jpg

hope this helps

Sam

[Sam Lesante jr.]

Are these units standalone or are they something you have to install into a computer?

Sam Jr.