July 31st marked the day when Red came forward to announce that CS3 would have native R3D 4k support - two full months have come and gone, a new version of the Creative Suite began to ship and we have still yet to see this in action!  What does this mean?  We have to wait - will it ever happen? Eventually…  Continue Reading ->

After my recent rant on Solid State Media altering the work flows and how we archive our footage from here till eternity I came across a post on Oliver Peters blog.  I’m not going to shamelessly re:blog his very articulate post, but I really recommend that you check it out as it will cause some serious thought!  He points out a few of the caveat’s that we as creators need to be aware of.  He also points out 5 great tips that we should all be aware of as well…

Also, with drive space expanding and prices rapidly decreasing - I went back to John Flowers post on LifeZero.org “Super Fast 4TB RAID for under $2k” and with the new 1.5TB drives available from Seagate I built (on paper for now) a 8x 1.5 TB RAID 5 Array for a cost of $2400 but with a capacity of 10 TB!!!

What does this mean for the average guy - you can now afford more reliable drives in very fast configurations that were unreachable for media pros in the past.  I still have a working JMR Fortra SCSI Raid enclosure that was $10k (7 years ago - but it’s nearly without point as I carry 3 TB in my backpack now!)

One of the precepts that I wanted to build this site upon is the “Democratizing of Film-making”, but what the heck does that phrase really mean - really?!  To me it’s the process of opening the door for others and empowering them to make films as good (or better) than the “Corporate Film Industry.”  

I’ve come across another community of people in an open round table discussion around “The Art of the Edit.”  This open dialogue among three people really is eye opening to the process and methods that editors take to present a visual dialogue.  Hosted by John Flowers ( @lifezero on twitter ) and with guests Paul Del Vecchio ( @pauldv on twitter) and guest Mike J Nichols (@TheEditDoctor on twitter).  This is going to be a show to keep tabs on as it develops, so be sure to subscribe to their mp3 rss feed in your respective application!!! 

Continue Reading ->

Yesterday morning when faced with the reality of forgetting to replace the SD card in my Nikon DSLR (for all of you tech heads who’ve just woke up - it’s just a D40x go back to sleep) I needed to take some photos around the office - but I had left both my 2 GB cards back at the house (an hour away.)  So my lightning quick mind sprung in to action!  I’ll just go and buy another one as I’ve heard that the prices have come down a bit.  Well I guess that I was in the dark as I was not prepared for the wonderful discovery that I made in the isles of WalMart.  

I picked up an 8 GB SD HC (High Capacity) Card for less than $40.  IN WALLMART!!! Now, I never intended this site to be a place where I’d ponder the future of technology - but none-the-less I feel it necessary to at least think out load the explosion of readily available inexpensive memory cards.

Gone are the days of pulling a tape out of the archive library - but I still have Betacam SP tapes that look as good as the day that I printed them off of my timeline.  A guy that I follow on Twitter spoke up this week that he captured from a past Digibeta Tape, and how it was a foreign exercise as he’s been working on P2 and on Red Ones for quite some time.  As for me - I shoot mostly set down interview style work and have the luxury of always having my nice big laptop with me, so Adobe’s OnLocation comes to my rescue on a regular basis - but I always role tape at the same time as doing a slave record on the laptop.  

Also note - that I’m not sure why I still run tape (it’s a safety blanket - I know) but it does help me sleep at night knowing that not only is it footage already captured on the drive - but it’s on tape for archive as well.  Yes, I still archive to tape!!!  

But why all of the hype of tapeless formats and shooting - will I ever get rid of my tapeless anxiety, perhaps in time, and as these cards keep coming down in price I think that I’ll grow more fond of using them. 

Now on to what I really wanted to talk about - “How this changes things in the world of Video Production” If you are not aware, there has been a sort of revolution going on in HD (and higher) resolution shooting - behold the day of the DSLR or DSMC (Digital Still & Motion Camera as Red has named them) after announcing that RED was going to make a DSLR killer - they then pulled the plug to re-think their 3k camera Scarlet.  There has been much speculation and very little detail as to what this camera will do, but I asure you that it’s going to be an Earth shattering release for this company!  

Some have suggested that they had a break through with their new sensor that’s going to allow them to bring a whole lot more to the table!  But could all of this came about with out these memory cards.  The RED One uses a proprietary eSATA and Power cable to send to the Red RAID Drive (their equivalent of a capture medium).  Originally on the Renders that were made available for the Scarlet - you could see two CF slots on the back presently there are 80 GB CF (with 100 GB on the horizon.)  

All of this is going to forever change the way that we all shot - and the way that we archive this footage. The thing about tapeless media is that you want to be able to re-use that card as often as possible, forever gone are the days of “pass me a fresh tape.” You’re going to need a place to off-load the footage, some where to store it, and once your done a proper way of archiving / backing this data up!  (Also note - as with tapes too, having once lost a very important tape to failure - if you only have one copy on a shelf, it’s not a safe back up!)  

So I ask the question to you the community - how has this changed, if at all - the way that you work?  How are you archiving footage once your done with the project?  How do you see this changing the face of production?  

Please post a comment here, or message me on twitter - @big_b_rad

BTW - Brian Potter recently brings up some very interesting concepts on a resent post regarding the age of DSLR too, check out his blog as it’s a really great source of information and creative inspiration too!