[Todd Terry]

Yeah, it sucks.

Yes, as far as I know, Peter Jr. is still doing voiceover work. BUT, I just noticed his website is dark (just parked on a generic GoDaddy page). Peter Jr. lived, I believe in Arizona (or somewhere out west), but I know has been spending a great deal of time in Florida helping care for his dad… he might have even moved there. So, I’m unsure if he is actively at the mic these days.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Thanks Craig… yeah I think the Blackmagic and Magewell ($300) gadgets were the first things I looked at… I was hoping I could find a solution for a fairly small fraction of that price. I don’t mind spending even big money for work things, but this is only a little just-for-fun one-time home thing.

I think the Blackmagic recorder is Thunderbolt only, the last time I even touched an Apple product was when helping someone move an old Mac years ago… all PC here.

I may have found a 10-buck standard-def-only solution… it’s not the HDMI-to-USB thing which would be ideal, but is component video…. still it is more than good enough for what I need (if it works). It’s a cheap gamble, I’ll know when it arrives in a few days.

Thanks!

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

You need both software and hardware… I’ve been looking to do this as well, but for a personal project so I’ve been looking for a real “bargain basement” solution (which there doesn’t seem to be).

You’ll need a device that takes your HDMI signal and converts it to something that your computer will recognize via USB as a webcam. There are several devices out there, one popular one seems to be the Magewell dongle, at about 300 bucks. Blackmagic also makes a device that will work for about half that. There are devices that gamers use with Playstations and the like so they can record game play on their computers which basically does the same thing… those devices are slightly sub-$100, but I really haven’t investigated them yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx2uldWz_K8

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

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[Todd Terry]

[Jeremy Doyle] “Have you talked to your editor yet?”

Well, you’re talking to him. Or, one of them.

No, we only have pro-level stuff here, nothing that would allow an HMDI signal to be ingested into a computer via USB. And nothing that is not permanently installed in one of my suites, which I’m not taking apart… the only I/O devices here are the rack-mounted Matrox MXO2 and AXIO LE hardware in each suite. This is just not something I ever have to do at work.

Just looking for a cheapie at-home solution.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Yeah I think that was the first one I looked at. I’m not trying to be a cheapskate but the Blackmagic device was a lot more expensive than I was willing to spend just to share the video stream with the neighborhood as a freebie… I was hoping there was a bargain-basement way to ingest an HDMI signal as if it was a webcam.

The almost-free Plan B would be to just stick a 10-buck webcam on the porch… but the feed from the security system would be much better… I can do quad screen or isolate any of the cameras at will.

I’m probably wishing for something that doesn’t exist (or rather, doesn’t exist at the price-point I’m willing to do). If so, that’s cool, this is just a miniscule “value added” part of the festivities and I can abandon it without losing a wink of sleep. But it’d be cool if it worked.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Just to show another point of view, and different strokes for different strokes…

A lot of our clients seem to like Dropbox. I personally, however, loathe Dropbox. For a variety of reasons I won’t go into, just don’t like it.

On the other had, we find that Hightail works flawlessly, and have never had one lick of trouble with it.

We have one big client, a huge financial institution, and because of the massive security restrictions their IT people have in place they can get files from virtually none of the filesharing services… except it appears that their IT watchdogs haven’t discovered wetransfer.com yet, so for them (and only them), we have to use that. I have to say, for a free service, it also works well. My one and only complaint with it is that multiple files sent get combined into one .zip file on the recipient’s end, but that’s not a big deal.

I will say, though, what we don’t do is ever depend on Hightail or any of the other services to take care of the delivery and notifications, which is what apparently was causing Ned heartburn.

When I send a Hightail file, I just send it to myself. Then I personally email the client the download link. In fact, I’ll usually truncate it, so I’m sending them a link something like tinyurl.com/download0425 or whatever.

This lets me know they’ve been notified (because I did the notifying), keeps them from getting emails about the same project from multiple addresses, gives them an email they can reply to and it gets back to me, and it just keeps everything lumped together. Sounds like a big deal, but it’s really just a couple of mouse clicks.

In short, whatever works for ya….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Probably the one you’ll most likely find available (rental houses, etc.) would be one of the Vision Research Phantom cameras. I think they are pretty much the go-to high-speed cameras these days (in fact the Panavision high-speed camera is a Phantom with a Panavision nameplate replacing the Vision Research one).

There are lots of Phantoms out there, most big camera houses will either have one or be able to direct you to one… there are some private Phantom owner/operators floating around as well.

I haven’t had any need in a while, but the last time I was looking into Phantom rental I found that many of the rental places also required you to hire their Phantom camera tech along with the rental. I’m not sure if that is true of all of them.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

They do indeed, Rich… that was actually one of the first ones I looked it.

It looks pretty good, my only real bone of contention with them is that they are “revenue split” only… I’d personally prefer a provider that I can just pay a (reasonable) monthly fee to and not split revenues. At least they have one of the lower splits, although I do find their little infographic to be wildly and somewhat amusingly visually misleading….

Their split is actually 90/10, although the graphic at least visually gives the impression of a fair bit less. Some of the places are 70/30 though, and I think I saw one that was even higher.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Just an update in case anyone is interested….

We did pull trigger on getting these, although in sort of a soft way… to test the waters I went ahead and bought just one LitePanels Astra for now.

I haven’t really used it on a shoot yet, but it seems pretty impressive so far.

It is bright bright bright. I haven’t put a meter to it yet, but they say it is four times brighter than the previous generation LitePanel, and I believe that. They also say it’s about the equivalent of a 575w HMI, and I believe that, too.

It took me few days to get in gear because of one unexpected speedbump….

I did not by the LitePanels battery adapter for it. But it’s just an AB goldmount plate, and a powertap connector wired to a right-angle XLR connector. Considering it is pushing $150, I knew I could make my own for just a few bucks and planned to do that…already had all of the parts laying around. Or so I thought. When the unit got in, I quickly discovered they use a three-pin XLR connector, not the four-pin one that I had planned to use. This surprised me, I’ve never seen a three-pin XLR connector used for power (only for mics), they’re always four-pin. So… I had to order a three-pin right angle XLR connector and wait a couple days. after that it was a breeze.

In the end, I didn’t wire it up exactly the way LitePanels does, though… when you stick the powertap into the bottom of the goldmount plate, it’s a bit in the way of turning the knob on the yoke. Since I never plan to remove this (we hardly ever power a light off of AC anymore, almost always battery), I just drilled a hole in the side of my goldmount plate and wired it directly internally. Works great.

The thing I have learned though is that this bad boy is a power hog. At full blast full power it burned through a pancake-sized brick in only about an hour. I did another test at half-power, and it lasted almost three hours, which is a lot more useful. That’s still a lot more light that I’ll usually be needing for interiors though, so I’m hoping that with an even lower level I can stretch that to five or six hours.

I’ll be shooting with it soon. If it performs as well as I’m hoping, we’ll probably get a couple more of them and retire the old LED instruments.

Right now I’m doing some inventing on a better/easier diffuser than what LitePanels currently offers. If anyone is interested I’ll show how that works when I’m done.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Thanks Ned… I appreciate you checking with your friend.

The Scotland trip is over, and by the way the slider sailed through customs both ways without even a second look. Much thanks to fellow COW Tom Sefton for arranging all the other gear rental and crew there.

As for VOD…

I was woefully uneducated about the process when I first asked… I have since done a fair bit of research and self-education about it.

As it turns out, outfits that offer VOD services are fairly plentiful, almost too many to choose from, in fact… and they run the gamut from cheap to expensive, really easy to implement to not-quite-as-easy. Some offer payment gateways to easily take credit cards from viewers, some don’t. Some offer fairly robust DRM, some don’t. Most have options that allow you to control viewers, customers who only want to pay to watch one video, or a subscription that allows you to watch everything… either for a set period of time, or in perpetuity.

I think we have found two or three different vendors that do all of what we need at reasonable cost.

Despite your friend’s suggestion, I’m pretty sure we definitely don’t want to go the DVD route. The idea is to get people on the hook for continuing subscriptions, as it will take a while for us to roll out content. Creating a new lesson once every week or two is doable… creating a couple of years’ worth all at one whack to release on DVDs would be daunting, and take us a long time to get started. Some of the companies offer very robust DRM, but even then some degree of piracy is the part of the price of admission, I think. I guess you just have to hope that it isn’t an unpleasantly high percentage.

I think your wife might be an anomaly with her voluminous how-to DVD purchases. Do people on the consumer level even use DVDs anymore? I’d be interested in hearing opinions on that. Instructional material like this seems, at least to me, to lend itself much more to a streaming audience. I know personally I have three, maybe four, DVD and Blu-ray players at home and I can’t even recall the last time any of them even had a disc in them (at best, they are used as Netflix portals). On the other, I watch how-tos online all the time (I most recently learned how to replace the agitator dogs on my washing machine… a part that I didn’t even know existed but watched a video about thanks to a guy who was amazingly dexterous enough to do with one hand while recording on his phone with the other). I definitely could be wrong about that, though, DVDs might live.

Appreciate you asking….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com