Timothy J. allen
Forum Replies Created
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If it’s a sit down interview, I also say go with the XL1. I’ve used it plenty of times for broadcast TV with no complaints. I just wouldn’t rely on it for anything that you need to follow focus on.
As the others said, good lighting is the key!
-Tim
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Somehow, I knew that comment was coming. 😉
My personal opinion… (NOT speaking for the agency or any particular contractor) is that you might want to use that example as a warning to your bosses when they want to recycle tapes to save money. Actually the NASA tapes in question weren’t even video, they were telemetry data tapes – that could have been converted to imagery if someone had considered it important enough to fund that effort back in the 1970s.
But I was in pre-school around that time, so I did the best I could with what I knew. 😉 Actually, I have to hand it to the group at Johnson Space Center. The tapes that *were* recovered were from the vaults there. They have the most comprehensive and detailed video archiving system of any NASA Center that I know about, and they still have to fight every year for funding and space.
It could have been much worse. Since they got rid of the film equipment at JSC (about 20 years after broadcast TV stations switched to NTSC videotape for production), there was an effort to get rid of all the “surplus” copies of footage that were on the shelves in the vault at JSC (The argument was that “they were copies” and cutting room floor footage… and that everything with historical value was consistently shipped to the National Archives long ago.) We have an Editor there who fought very hard to find homes for every piece of film that held *any shred* of historical value – even raw footage and a good portion of that also got shipped to cold storage in the National Archives.
Personally, I’m a pack rat. I’ve archive the final versions of every single show I’ve done for NASA since I started there. I estimate that’s right around 300 videos. That said, I couldn’t point you to the Boris RED project file that I used to create the lower 3rd for Neil Armstrong back in the spring of 2000. Well, I know that I saved it to an Exabyte 8mm tape drive and put that tape on my shelf, but the contract for video services changed hands several times since then so I doubt anyone in that department could pull it up – especially since the entire building my edit suite was in was mothballed a few years a due to budget constraints.
Sorry for the rant, but I would like to say that this isn’t the fault of any archivist at NASA; in my opinion, it’s a result of policies that were implemented to make the most of the budgets that NASA has had since the Apollo program ended… and if they weren’t going to spend the money on flying the Saturn V rockets that had already been built, they certainly weren’t going to pour any extra money into what they thought were “redundant” data tapes.
Again… just my own personal opinion.
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DrFunk,
I’m not a salesman – I just asked for some details so we could point you to something that matches your needs better rather than simply naming systems that we personally use or have jsut heard about.I’m curious. Did you find the information that you where looking for?
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Here’s a old thread that you might find useful:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/27/856049#856080 -
In addition to dust, humidity and temperature are your main concerns. You’ve gota good start, if the room is kept cool.
Check out page 18 of this .pdf for some other guidelines:
https://www.amianet.org/resources/guides/fact_sheets.pdfOne of the authors of the paper, Jim Wheeler, has helped NASA with some pretty substantial tape data issues in the past. At any rate, it’s a good reference for tape storage and common problems you might see.
The other thing is to make sure you can quickly find what you are looking for. Do you use a bar-code system with a database to track what is in each box, or do you have another system of organization that would be easy for others to use to track down specific tapes?
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The fact that you list playing guitar in your profile automatically ranks you up a few notches in my book, Mark. 😉
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Have you ever been searching for an answer to a question and find that google points you to a thread on the COW that you yourself answered?
The COW can be a pretty good archive system for your brain sometimes. 😉
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The cost for us to upgrade to HD back in 2004 was pretty substantial – because we had to upgrade the fiber and switches between a few buildings – and because we needed vectorscopes to do it right.
In the past two years, it’s become much more affordable. From 2004 to 2007, about 95% of my productions were shot and edited in HD, but the last two dozen videos I’ve done this year were all SD. Shooting in SD didn’t really save us any money, but it did shave off some time since our interim product was going to folks who are still only set up to work in SD.
Like the others, I still prefer to acquire in HD. That doesn’t meant that I always do.
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I agree with Grinner on this one. They may not even have nefarious motives. I once requested some animation project files from a company we subcontracted with and they handed them over with a smile.
It’s been five years now, and we’ve never even touched the files – we don’t even have the software in house to open them. I knew we didn’t have the software to open it when I asked them for the files.
Meanwhile, we’ve continued to use their services fairly often, for both revisions and other jobs.
So, you may ask, why did we even ask for the files if they were just gonig to sit in a vault? Because, as a prime contractor on a job, we had an obiligation to manage the project and make sure it was wrapped up tight and archived well when it was done. If the other business closes up and we need to go back, we already have the files. Or maybe not… they may have just given us garbled data. 😉 The world may never know.
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As a producer, I’ve asked people for “free” footage plenty of times; part of my job is to keep things within budget and saving in one area helps other areas.
I certainly am not looking to rip people off, but there are two sides of the coin. The key is to offer something *of equal value* in return. That could be credit, or it could be sharing my raw footage in turn when someone needs it. Or it could be paying for footage, or music or actors. It just depends on the value and what each party considers to be fair.
Since I work on behalf of a government agency, my situation may be considered to be a little different. I feel an obligation not to spend (tax-payers) money on things I don’t have to, and everything I produce is then offered up for free (or the price of materials) to any U.S. citizen who wants it. There are still usage restrictions on some things, since I don’t have the right to reassign licenses for images of specific people, or reassign rights to footage we get from other sources, but I try to make things fair for all involved.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind paying for things when it’s reasonable, but I’ll usually ask for things free first, especially if I’m asking an organization that is also paid for with tax dollars, like the military or certain health organizations.
All that said, I think it’s ironic that we have a thread like this, when just a few topics down, there’s a thread asking where to find free music.