[Voxpops]

Mike,

You will probably need a “carnet” if you’re taking professional equipment into a European country, temporarily. This will expedite customs clearance. It is a document that lists all the equipment, serial numbers, value, weight etc. and confirms that you’ll be taking it out of the country again. You may be able to obtain the form from the website of the U.S. Council of the International Chamber of Commerce, in the section entitled “Special Customs Provisions”.

For added security and safety, whenever travelling on a plane, I always take the camera on as hand baggage. To conform to size requirements, it may be necessary to remove the lens. Given the excess baggage costs, you may want to consider renting some of the peripheral items in your destination country – don’t forget that you’ll be using 220/230v over there.

I used to be concerned about tapestock/rushes getting damaged in the x-ray machines – it’s never happened. But, I have heard rumours of camera pixels getting zapped – whether by x-rays in the airports or by cosmic rays in flight, I’m not sure. However, I’ve no way of confirming this and have never been able to blame my own dead pixels on this with any degree of certainty.

Anyway, hope the shoot goes well.

Richard

[Voxpops]

Hi Randal,

In the UK at least, most TV stations either require or prefer Digibeta masters as the minimum spec. Also, it is not a good idea to use NTSC as the source for a commercial. You will be competing against extremely sophisticated commercials produced on 35mm, HD or Digibeta. All are produced 16:9 these days and even though, for the most part, they are transmitted PAL SD, their high-end source material is very obvious. 525 lines 30fps transferred to 625 lines 25fps is barely adequate at the best of times. If you were to go this route, at the very least you would need to convert using something at the Snell & Wilcox level.

If it were me, I would either suggest to the client shooting/creating the whole thing in PAL for that audience or sub-contracting a London commercials producer to recreate the project to the client’s brief.

I think the “going rate” depends on your costs, time and your profit requirement.

Good luck,

Richard