Jump to content

Daniel Smith

Basic Member
  • Posts

    788
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Daniel Smith

  1. Contact a local university/college that has a sound recording studio and/or voice over booth, get a few students involved and in return get free facilities. They learn something and you get a professional environment to record in.
  2. Just got back from seeing it, thought it was fantastic. I wasn't massively keen on the 3D at times, whilst overall it worked very well, there were points where it just got uncomfortable. I thought the acting and scripting was great though. Certainly one of the better films I've seen in the cinema recently. EDIT: Watch the film before judging it. That trailer is pretty awefull.
  3. Some compression, a little distortion and a bandpass filter at around 3.4Khz (telephone bandwidth). If you want send it over, I have an Audio NLE and can edit it and send it back pretty quick.
  4. As an owner of a Cineworld unlimited card I see films in the cinema quite regularly, jumping between two cinemas, o2 (digital projection) and Bexleyheath (35mm projection). Sorry but whilst I appreciate films shot on film, I now can't stand 35mm projections. But then again I don't think the cinema helps this, by taking crap care of the print and/or the way it's projected. The number of times the opening of the film looks like the opening of Star Wars with the yellow text travelling upwards in a trapezium..
  5. Check the cabling, almost every time I've encountered buzz one of the cores in a balanced cable like an XLR or PO jack has been damaged and loses its common mode rejection. If it's not the cables, check inside for any obvious dry joints.
  6. Hi all. Please log on to http://ravensbourne2011.com/live and check out the IPTV feed for Ravensbourne 2011. Or if you live in the Greenwich area (UK) try tuning into channel 800 on freeview as we are broadcasting over DTT. Please leave feedback, bearing in mind this is a completely student run event. Thanks. Daniel Ashley-Smith. Head of Engineering Ravensbourne 2011
  7. Ok so we've now got an SD RF camera, however I've been a bit ignorant about RF licensing. Does anyone here know how much a license will cost for an SD RF camera? I really need to get this sorted as soon as possible, as the events the 28th and 29th however we want to run rehearsals for the 27th. cheers.
  8. Cheers Phil. Have found a solution for graphics however apparently they now want a live Skype conversation with our link show so will use this for that.
  9. Hi guys. So as I keep mentioning.. we're holding an event, during the 28th and 29th of this month involving DTT, IPTV, 3D and all kinds of stuff. Anyone here is welcome, if you go to http://ravensbourne2011.com/ there is a sign up page there. We've managed to borrow most of the kit we need, but we're struggling with graphics. We need to feed HD graphics to a vision mixer via HD-SDI. The best idea we've got right now is to try and blag a DVI to HD-SDI converter and do graphics through Powerpoint as a second monitor. We would however prefer to get a slightly more professional solution in place if possible. Assuming we could get a server with a HD-SDI card in it, what software could we use to output the graphics? My guess is that you can't use something like a HD-SDI card made by blackmagic or AJA as a second monitor? Is there any pro-software specific to graphics out there that has a 30 day trial or something? Any help is appreciated.
  10. Thanks Phil, I've just drafted an e-mail to send a little later today after it's been proof read.
  11. Daniel Smith

    RF Cameras

    Hi, I'm engineering for a broadcasting event this June, and we want to incorporate a few HD RF cameras. We have a link show which will involve a roaming camera that will be moving around the building (all internal) however I was worried about getting a clean signal back and forth. Our building is double layered brick coated with aluminium tiles, it's basically a faraday cage. I was worried that the signal reflections will throw this completely out. What kind of range do these RF cameras have? I've only got experience in racking them (horrible experience might I add). I just need some tips and advice on them, how to do deal with base station positioning etc. If anyone can share any information that would great cheers.
  12. Hi, We are running a large broadcasting event during the summer at my college, and wanted to get hold of some web cams to place all over the building to link up to the web site. (http://ravensbourne2011.com/) We were thinking about IP web cams, but I've never personally used one before so I'm not exactly sure how they work. Do they host a port 80 site, in which we could embed in a frame on our web site? And does anybody here know where you can hire these from, in the UK? Thanks.
  13. If anyone's interested we're holding a conference from about 10am GMT onwards about high definition and what's coming next. The entire conference will be streamed over IPTV. Link to the flash player: http://www.splintergroup.tv/liveflash/index.html And the quicktime player: http://www.splintergroup.tv/live/index.html
  14. From my experience at least, succeeding in this industry is all down to attitude. I've seen some of the least experienced people get the biggest jobs. Sure it's not just 'what you know' it's 'who you know', but it's also how you approach potential employers and contacts, and how you brand yourself. The industry loves emerging technologies and speculation over 'where we will be' in years to come. Young, enthusiastic people with an open mind to the future tend to get noticed and picked up pretty quick. So, if you want to distinguish yourself from all the other thousands of operators out there, I'd start by getting a head start in things like 3D, digital acquisition and workflows, solid state & computer/IP based systems etc. Many people here will advise taking the traditional route - making short films, shooting on cinefilm etc. And whilst I'm not saying it's impossible to get in that way, it's a lot harder and has a lot more to do with being in the right place at the right time. But, this is just my experience of the industry so far.
  15. I can't understand the new colour coding in the UK. I'm sure there's a good reason behind it but, red yellow blue and black for neutral was pretty unmistakable, brown grey black and blue are difficult to see in low light and could be mistaken. Colours degrade over time and especially in dirty studio environments. And getting things wrong with 400a three phase isn't funny or clever.
  16. No it wasn't C-form, it's similar to camlock and powerlock, I've since found this document on it: http://www.stagesafe.co.uk/user_files/Changes.pdf (Type 1 connector) Not that it matters.. I just thought for something that's used in larger studios (all over Shepperton) for power distribution there would be more information on it, no one really seems to know where it comes from, it's just, there.
  17. Hi, Excuse the simplistic question but I can't find this anywhere, what is BAC cable? It's used in various studios, I used it in shepperton where we fed three phase .2 BAC into 63a breakout boxes, but, what is BAC? What does it stand for, who distributes it? Thanks.
  18. Hi, We are preparing on a large broadcasting event at my college and I had a question about connecting multiple vision mixers to a single crate. We have a flyaway but it's mostly SDI, we want to take advantage of the HD infrastructure so that all the live content will be in HD. We have a Snell and Wilcox Kahuna mixer and crate, of which of we have a ton of spare outputs and inputs. The crate appears to have multiple 9-pin controller inputs, but I really don't what protocol it uses. Nor do I want to go plugging in a non-Snell and Wilcox vision mixer and screw the system somehow. Has anyone had experience in this? What protocol do vision mixers use? I'd rather avoid bringing in external flyaway kit and use what we've got, but I don't want to damage or mess up the current system. Thanks.
  19. I thought it had to to be something like that. I don't think it was the best lens either. I wish I'd pushed it to f4 and set the gain to 6db's now, but you live and learn.
  20. Hi, I overheard once that opening the iris to levels like f1.4 and 1.8 (wide open) can soften the image, and I'm not talking about shallow depth of field, I'm talking about an overall image softness. Operators like to stick to around f2.4, 2.8 at least. I was filming a gig last night with a HPX371 and I was slightly disappointed with the sharpness of the image, however I noticed it was slightly sharper in some parts more than others. I don't recall moving the focus around much, however I did alternate between f1.8 and f2.8 every now and again. Perhaps the iris adjustments were making it sharper/softer? I was already on +3db so I had to keep it fairly open. I can't see how it could have been a depth of field issue, I was on a wide shot for most of it and the depth of field should have covered it even at f1.0. Has anyone here experienced this? Thanks.
  21. I think something like an EX1 is definitely the way to go. They are a lot more practical in situations where you might not have exuberant amounts of time to set shots up. DSLR's are great for short films as they produce such shallow depth of field, because of their sensor size.
  22. You might be able to stream the output through firewire onto a laptop, embed the stream in an intranet page and connect the phone via WiFi?
  23. I didn't see the D7000 at the IBC? Then again, shows that big I probably didn't see a lot. What comes out of the HDMI connection though? Televisions don't have H264 decoders to my knowledge so, is it uncompressed full resolution? If so, you could essentially record 3G uncompressed out of a grand's worth of camera. Which is pretty insane.
  24. I too saw something on that, however I think the biggest issue was safety as the generator could essentially take out an entire street if it was modified maliciously.
  25. I'd probably go digital unless I had an insanely large budget. The problem is people keep on comparing cameras like the HVX200 to £50,000+ worth of film kit. Get a decent camera with a large sensor, some prime lenses and a decent crew. And finally get someone who actually knows something about colour grading. Applying an 'S' curve in after effects is not going to make your film look like Harry Potter.
×
×
  • Create New...