Tech Related

the tapeless workflow - Videoforum

The tapeless workflow is a term used to describe video production without the use of tapes. That is to say that from the point the material is recorded in camera to the point it is distributed it never changes from being data. In other words television production has become a profession of data managment as some would say. A few production companies came to give demonstrations of their tapeless workflow system, at least in broad terms. Red Bee and Virgin Media showed how they have collaboratively brought the post production process to being a tapeless one. In order to do this good networking capability is needed and so is storage. They had to digitise over 40,000 tapes as well as face many more challenges. Some of these challenges have to do with meta data. Everyone is used to dealing with tapes. you shoot your material, you label it for post production and then store them for later use. When dealing with data though the mentality is different. Some productions have shot straight to P2 cards, backed up the day’s shoots to external P2 hard drives before sending them from China to London for example. Of course when doing this everyhting must be planned ahead. Part of this planning has to do with the compatibility between recording format and editing. If you get this wrong then you either don’t get the quality you were looking for or you slow down the process. That was part of a case study between Panasonic and two of it’s camera’s during a shoot in China. The second example was between Red Bee Media and Virgin Media in relation to the creative Village. The idea is that when the material is ingested by Red Bee media it’s saved to a central server from which it can be accessed by a number of workstations, from transcribing to tapelogging, editing and producer’s work stations. it also has to be available in two buildings. There are a number of advantages to this workflow. The first is that the work is available to the producers when they have the time to check the material rather than when everyone has ten free minutes. As a result the editor can edit a rough cut and a number of producers at up to two hundred workstations may check the edit and say whether they like it. If they don’t then it’s quick to make any changes that are required. It also means that there’s far less mess and expensive equipment is not tied up. When you’re working on post production dubbing to tape used to take a lot of time, real time and with DVD it’s quickly a messy affair. Files in an edit folder are far easier to deal with. I really like the idea o the tapeless workflow and i’m going to work on that for my own work, first with affordable equipment and then work my way towards more fun alternatives. It’s what we expect. No more ingestion time, no more dubbing time, just straight editing, agreement and finally output to a number of formats. Of course that’s not as easy as it sounds but post production companies are working on making this a smoother process.

The London Videoforum - Cameras

From the 30th of January to the 1st of February 2008 the VideoForum event was held at Earl’s Court in London so that Television and video professionals may meet and talk in a number of conferences, seminars and tutorials as well as on stands. During this time I got to see what were the major trends in the video producing environment in London and England as a whole. Cameras Two Red Cameras were on the Showroom floor yesterday, one owned by  Decodeuk and the other I am not sure about. It’s a nice camera in that it can shoot 2 to 4K but the price to rent per day is very high at the moment. It’s a technician’s camera rather than a cameraman’s camera. Other camers that I saw and thought of interest were the Canon XH A1 which is a beautiful camera and all the controls are in the right place. Two drawbacks are that it seems to record in interlace and that it’s only tape based. If it recorded to hard disk i would seriously think of getting it. The second camera was the Panasonic HVX-200 because the controls are directly accessible from the body of the camera rather than sub menues. It’s interesting because it records as well to P2 cards as to tape so there’s the option of both. The PMW EX-1 XDCAM is another really nice camera. I’m fond of Sony cameras and this is one of the nicer ones. With the ability to take two two XDCAM EX flash cards it has a potential of around 32 Gigabytes. The Flash cards are small therefore easier to deal with and carrying spares should be good. What I love about these three cameras as well as others is that they’re small as people move towards towards a new filming mentality. Of course you can go for the Sony F23, the F900 or others but these are small. Most of their size is due to the lens rather than the interior mechanism and they’re hand held rather than shoulder mounted. The VX1-E and subsequent cameras were great for shooting and once more these cameras are being made to create cameras that are very appealing to those that shoot video the same way as I do.

Digitalshadowcaster (TM)

As the rate of creation of content increases so does the challenge of following what was done by whom and that’s where digitalshadowcaster (TM). The idea is interesting to content producers.  Thus, the life cycle of an object may “Cast” a “Digital Shadow” (DS) that captures real time key information events and actions.  A given DS allows for the ordered delivery of proprietary services managed over a predictable and transparent network of Object Based Representations in Object to Object (O2O) relationships derived form Actions and Events performed on the objects by agents with specified Roles. In plain English they’re going to make it so that a central server keeps track of the changes you apply to media files are tracked and easier to deal with. It would track events, rights managment, object search, stats, billing and more. The flow was described as Create, adapt, product, distribute. In other words this technology would be part of every step of the process and here’s an example of it’s implementation. If you’re a content producer and you’re making a documentary your budget isn’t high therefore it would make sense that you want well established people to help you. As a result of a personality liking what you are up to they may give you access to some footage or music. For this project it’s cheap but as your reputation grows so the managment of those rights and the relationship can change, both in billing and in terms of restrictions. It makes the use of media more flexible. With more content appearing so the tracking issues become more complicated, hence the need for a new system of tracking to keep everything in order.

The Digital Media Project - Summary

Two nights ago I got an invite from a friend at Kendra inviting me to come to the Friday session of this event. The event was held at Queen Mary University in London. The first session of the morning was to tell us more about the Digital Media project. The talk was given by Leonardo Chiariglione. What I found interesting about this project and this movement is that it’s looking at the need for DRM as a good thing. It believes that there should be DRM but that media should be free to operate from one platform to another. At the moment we can have itunes, realplayer real and other devices and it’s confusing, even for those who live and breath the media. They want to create a uniform standard that can be played from all platforms on all devices whilst at the same time protecting the rights both of the user and of the media active. He spoke about a standard of theirs which is now at version 3.1. Version 3 was agreed 3 months ago and the meeting was to update the current one. The document is over 600 pages long… I’m not going to read it. At the same time iDRM was mentioned but that’s part of another post. Chillout® was also demonstrated.

SeesmicAIR and mobility

Last night at Four AM I got an alpha release of SeesmicAIR from Critter and I started to play with it. My initial response was good. It’s fast, intuitive and it doesn’t a browser. Today as I had lunch I went mobile with my laptop, relying on battery. Those who follow my blog know that I’m using a macbook pro and those that follow my tweets know that I was happy about something. Usually when i seesmic I go into the user interface and I get told that my battery will last about an hour and a half to an hour as I seesmic. Today though I had almost three hours of battery life whilst being able to keep an eye on seesmic. That’s because SeesmicAIR is running off Adobe and rather than use most of the CPU to work it’s running with far fewer resources. As a result I can lurk on seesmic without killing the battery or running a hot machine. I saw that both Loic Lemeur and Johann are on the Eurostar and I was able to comment on seesmic and keep an eye on reactions. Vinvin answered my question and it’s good. I love the fact that I don’t need to worry about battery life anymore. I’ve had time to prepare lunch, have lunch and then still have an hour and a half of battery life to write this post. I really enjoy having the ability to do this. It means that I can do something in the background. In brief SeesmicAIR is just as useful as I thought it would be.  It’s still a little buggy but that’s normal when dealing with Alpha.

The year the Internet lost the cloak of anonimity.

This has to be the year where I have met the most people online before meeting them in person, which is quite amusing. It’s also the year that warzabidul as a nickname became a person in the physical world to more than two or three people. It’s the year an online person become a nickname for a real person. It’s the year where, at least for early adopters, Twitter and Seesmic both helped create opportunities for people to meet and get to know each other online before taking it back into the physical world. It’s the year I went to a Podcamp, some tweetups and some seesm’up. It’s the year many of us stopped hiding behind avatars and nicknames and moved towards creating a brand or identity, depending on whether your point of view is that of marketing or personal fun. I’ve enjoyed learning about the “social media” and all the new possibilities. I look forward to 2008 when many more such networks and events will be organised. It’s been a fun year to be introduced to the “Social Media” and I’m happy to have met so many people.

The social media Living Room

Yesterday afternoon I dropped by Nik’s house, (Loudmouthman) for what would be the first Social Media Living room event. The idea is simple. Participants of Social Media, whether through Twitter, Seesmic and other networks meet in the physical world to have nice conversations. Quite a few people turned up including Fred2baro, Danacea, Mark Harrison, Jason Jarrett and one or two other individuals. we talked about tech and about life. The point is that to create a podcamp takes too much time and there is a need for more frequent smaller events. This was a perfect opportunity. Among the amusing features of last night was the recording of a seesmic post via three laptops, three accounts and three webcams. We joked about which camera to look into and it was yet another example of taking Social Media friendships into the physical world. No more complaining that spending time online means meeting fewer people. It doesn’t. I’m looking forward to more such events.