Year: 2008

I finally succumbed, and bought a proper camera. A video camera, none of your stills nonsense, nor yet a stills camera masquerading as a video camera (though that’s, you know, a really nice piece of kit. Ahem). No, anyway, I have a snappily-named Panasonic AG-HMC151E.

Caution: geek post follows.

1. It rocks.
2. Low light performance is quite remarkable. It’s not that the sensors are particularly light-hoovery, more that the gain noise is extremely smooth. Even 12dB looks pretty good.
3. Depending on your international region, it’s an HMC150, HMC151, HMC152, and likely a few others too. Panasonic, this is daft. You can’t google wildcard string matches. Durr.
4. The manual is pretty awful. Most of it’s in a PDF, it’s surprisingly hard to find out what some of the buttons do, and most of the picture tweak settings (matrix, master pedestal, knee, skin tone detail, whothewhatthewherenow?) are barely explained at all. There’s lots to tweak, and it’s hard to know where to start without a test chart and a vision engineer on hand. Blech.
5. The new Final Cut Pro 6.0.5 update pretty much fixes import/ProRes transcode problems for the HMC’s AVCHD format video. But…
6. You still need to disable Perian, or Log & Transfer crashes and takes Final Cut with it. Though, so far, for me, only with 720p50 files. Odd. Also:
7. 720p25 still doesn’t work correctly: I see occasional but bad macroblock glitches in my test footage. Back to 1080p25 for me…
8. I’ve seen reports that dropping the bitrate from the top ‘PH’ mode to ‘HA’ mode (who names this crap?) solves import problems… but then, there are no progressive settings at HA bitrates. Clang!
9. The best place to go for information is the DVXUser forum. Great community.
10. The cheap 16Gb Class 6 SDHC cards I bought from MyMemory.co.uk (in Jersey) seem just fine, so far. I probably needn’t have hedged my bets buying half own-brand, half-Kingston Class 4.
11. High-capacity batteries are still not available from Panasonic UK, though they’ve said ‘first two weeks of December’, and that they’ll contact me when they have news.
12. I think it’s going to fit the Century bars/matte box from my old PD150. Unbelievable. If only I had some filters to use it with…

So far, I’m impressed. Some of the buttons seem a bit more flimsy than I’d expected, and I’ve acres of manual to plough through, but the camera handles very well and the footage I’m seeing looks terrific. Considering it’s, you know, shot in my messy flat, at night.

It’s seeming like a camera that begs to be run in fully-manual modes, which is probably a good thing for me, but may turn out to be something of a design flaw – conceptually, it’s a camera well-suited to run-and-gun filming with untrained camera operators, turning footage around and publishing it to the web extremely quickly. Solid performance in auto may be anathema to ‘proper’ camera operators, but… who’s one of those, these days?

It’ll be interesting to see how it performs in practice; it may well be that the autos are just peachy, and it’s simply that the buttons for manual are bigger and better-placed than they are on the Sony Z1, tempting me to push them.

First proper shoot is next week, I think, then we’ll put it through its paces in a bunch of workshops. Before all that I’ll have to try strapping microphones to it, and it’s going to take me days to work out how to operate the new Kata bag I bought with the thing…

Quoth Wikipedia:

In 1906, Alexandria train station was built by mistake in Dalaman. … In 1905 the then Khedive of Egypt Abbas Hilmi Pasha had acquired a large part of the fertile plain and had decided to set up a plantation in the region. He had ordered the plans and the material for his projected residence here to his architects in France, at the same as the plans and the material for a train station for Alexandria in Egypt. Unfortunately, the two simultaneous shipments were misdirected, the materials for his residence heading towards Egypt, and the Alexandria train station ending up in Dalaman. Since it was going to be too costly to re-ship everything to the right destination, the station was built in Dalaman anyway, with even a few miles of purposeless railway track.

OK, so it’s a ringer, made for/by an advertising agency. I don’t quite understand why that makes it somehow less awesome than if it had been put together by some other bunch of film makers.

Is realising this sort of thing hard? Yes. Is the execution technically impressive and original, creative, etc? Yes. Does some bunch having been paid to do this detract from the film? No.

Passing it off as a fan film, however: that’s plain wrong. There’s simply no need. It’s cool. We like it. End of story.

“For any organisation that needs to store tens of terabytes of video data, MatrixStore is the appropriate solution,” says the (incorrectly-deinterlaced, badly-dubbed, content-repeating ahem) marketing video. For their system, you need three (count ’em) RAID storage clusters, and the cost is ~$1,000 per terabyte of stored data. MatrixStore seems to be one of the cheaper and, thus, more exciting long-term video archival platforms, and it’s built to work with Final Cut Server.

Well, OK. Let me count up the bits that are spinning away on my desk right now:

• 1Tb media RAIDs: 3 off.
• 500Gb backup/archive drives: 3 off
• 500Gb Time Machine drive: 1 off
• Other drives: 320, 250, 160Gb: 2 off, each.

Rrrright. So… in two years, I’ve spawned about five gig of data, roughly-roughly. And I’m about to go high-def, shooting a fully-digital workflow (so, no tape backups).

I’m about a year, perhaps eighteen months, away from wanting to archive ‘tens of terabytes’ of video data. But there’s no way I’m in the market for an archival system that’s in the £20,000 bracket. Not a hope that I could pass that cost on to my clients: it might work for broadcast, but that’s not the world I’m in any more.

Yet my only real alternative, currently, looks like a Drobo, which tops out around 2.8Gb. As far as I’m aware you can’t span across multiple Drobos. One might tide me over for a while, and even at current prices it’s not far off DV tape costs (well, double, ish – could be worse), but ultimately… yikes.

So my question is: how unusual am I? How rare, really, is a need for expandable, redundant storage in the 10Tb+ bracket?

My guess? ‘More common than you might expect.’ Keep your eyes open for sales figures of AVCHD video cameras, particularly mid/high models like Panasonic’s HMC150. You don’t buy one of those unless you’re planning to use it quite a lot, but currently, there isn’t a really sane long-term storage plan for the things. If the HMC starts to eat marketshare from HDV cameras, there’s the market for ‘low-end’ media archiving in the 10Tb+ range.

Of course, the quick way out of this would be a Drobo with eight drive bays. If I start the rumour, do you think it might happen?

Tonight, I won’t be at the Children’s BAFTA ceremony. It’s a long while since I’ve been, and I never quite managed to struggle to a nomination (harrumph). However, this year’s nomination list provides some indication of the state the industry is in.

Animation: all CBeebies/CBBC shows.
Drama: all CBBC shows.
Entertainment: all CBBC shows.
Factual: the perennial Nick News, plus three CBBC shows.
Presenter: all CBBC/CBeebies.
Writer: all CBBC/CBeebies.

Now, there are some caveats. Several of these nominations are for shows produced by indies (looks like a good night for Tiger Aspect, in particular). Also, other categories produce a stronger showing for Five, particularly, and Nick does well in the Short Film category (though… who else makes short films for kids?). Plus, one can argue that BAFTA nominations have always over-represented BBC shows, historically.

But is this still a picture of the dire state of the children’s television industry? Heck, yes. It’s entirely dependent on BBC money, and from where I’m standing there’s simply no way back from that.

I know I’ve banged on about this here before, but I keep running into people whose reaction to the story behind SciCast is disbelief. On a couple of occasions they’ve been almost belligerent about it.

They’d likely regard such a BBC-dominated nominations list as evidence that their license fee is being well-spent. But the fact is, in most of these categories, the only contest is which BBC shows are nominated. There is no competition.

Thus, there’s no longer a viable career path in this industry. That is why children’s TV is dead. It’ll take five years to really show – maybe ten, if we’re lucky – but it’s now inevitable.

[Update 1st December: Winners now posted on the BAFTA site. Ironically, a good night for the few remaining indies.]

This should be a good way of wasting an afternoon: Auditorium.

Interactive Video Object Manipulation from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that the processing overhead for handling this sort of thing – particularly with high-def footage – is ‘non-trivial.’ Which is to say: cripplingly hard. See also these previous stories, ditto.

Dual-processor laptops are one thing; eight-way desktops with hyperthreading, matched with stream-processing video cards, all coordinated via OpenCL implemented at the system level: well, that’s going to be something else when it comes to heavy-duty video processing.

Personally, I find it more than a little scary. We’re barely used to still photographs being routinely and heavily manipulated; processed video is something we expect of Hollywood, but not home movies. I suspect we’ll adjust less quickly, culturally, than the technology will propagate.

I’ve waited ten years to get a grip on how the various bits of the International Space Station (didn’t it used to be called ‘Freedom’? Ah, OK, no.) fit together. Now, for its tenth birthday, USA Today have made a lovely animation of how it’s grown.

I miss the canteen at Yorkshire Television.

(inspired by this)

Further to the previous post, I think what I’m trying to say is:

“The audience”

how old media projects from old media organisations refer to their most important constituency.

“The audience”

how new media projects from unreconstructed old media organisations refer to their most important constituency.

“Audiences”

how new media projects from old media organisations that ‘get it’ refer to their most important constituency.

“Community”

how new media projects from new media organisations refer to their most important constituency.

“Communities”

how new media projects from new media organisations that are so cutting edge they have no need for this sort of key refer to their most important constituency(/ies).

“Advertisers”

the people who are really the most important constituency for all the above, unless (media organisation) == ‘BBC’.