Daniel Smith

Television has become somewhat watered down, but I think that's due to the change in society. You can almost bet somebody somewhere will find something to be offended by now. Television is having to accommodate for a much more diverse array of people. But my point is adults don't want to sit down and watch complex television. Be it Only Fools (out of production) or Top Gear (in production), I don't know many people that look forward to going home and watching the 'History Channel' after a hard days work.

I'd have to disagree with this, in that the middle class audiences who work 8 hours a day and pay someone else to finish their garden have plenty of free time to get involved in some intellectual television. However for everyone else television is a relaxing, wind down of the day where people can just switch off after a hard days work. If I've just finished a 12 hour shift the last thing I want to do is go home and watch 'Time Team'. More like some Fawlty Towers or Only Fools.

Seems a bit pointless taking the work experience on in the first place then. There's plenty of work experience out there where all expenses are paid and jobs may be available afterwards.

As you're recording digitally you'll have a huge signal to noise ratio and will have a lot of headroom in post when it comes to levels. I'd suggest trying to borrow a compressor to narrow the gap between the loud and quiet sounds however be careful of compressing things too far and picking up ambient hiss from wind or whatever. Be sure to monitor both through a meter and a good pair of headphones.

I can understand how work experience is causing huge problems within the industry but, the fact is it does get you the jobs further down the line. Friend of mine is now a post production engineer working at BT, she got the job because of the work experience she did there. I'm working with SiS Live over the next three weeks vision engineering and hoping to get paid freelance work later down the line. Or at least get the credit so I can work for other OB companies on a freelance basis. It's a controversial subject but there's no fix. It's a case of defining a healthy balance.

Hey Freya, I'm talking about this one here; http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/h264prorecorder/ According to the specifications it uses USB 2.0, unless there's another box I'm missing? I don't expect it will be any higher than 185Mbps (which is more than ample), but as a portable solution it's pretty neat for its price.

Hi, This little box looks great, 3G/HD/SDI, analogue and HDMI into H.264 via USB. Only question is, what data rate will it go in as? I know USB can theoretically handle 480Mbps, but the box is compressing it down to a specific data rate, which is definitely not 480Mbps. I've looked through product specifications and for manuals but couldn't find anything. Has anyone got experience with this box? Cheers, Dan.

I think some light ND on inside of the shade would work well. Run some tests with a stills camera.

For moonlight I'd suggest 117 Steel Blue. It was used on the video I gaffered here: Bear in mind however this was used on a 3200k tungsten, not a HMI. As for practical lamps, I'd suggest hiring some dimmers (or building your own) and buying a selection of cheap tungsten bulbs (between 50/150watt). You can warm them up by dimming them and control the luminosity to an exact level. Call me lazy but I love working with dimmers, gels are just a pain.

In all fairness I can't say I blame the individuals that are downloading. I know people who download illegally, and aside from their illegal downloading these people are law abiding, honest and hard working people. If something's got "free" written all over it it's only natural for people to take advantage. It just frustrates me how they can bring about the legislation allowing private companies to fine citizens $15k, but they can't work out a way of bringing down the web sites hosting the extreme majority of illegal torrents.

Haha nice to see a win over the piracy world. Interesting point you make about attacking their source of income. Sure, we get voluntary hackers and movie pirates that just like to be naughty for giggles, but unfortunately there are actually careers for movie pirates. Mininova wouldn't bother if they weren't making anything out of it. Makes me wonder how big these organisations are. I'm guessing this isn't just some "dude" in his garage with some rack servers, but a team of professionals running it in office space. Which is what annoys me the most, the fact that organisations can provide a mass outlet for illegal torrents, but go about it the legal way. We need the "highly impartial" Judge Judy to come down on this one... :)

To my knowledge it's about the same here in the UK. I just wish the internet was regulated by some kind of international law. It will never stop illegal downloading, but it will at least help. The main problem I can think of when giving power to governments over the internet is that suddenly what was a public domain becomes yet another biased dictated platform.

I agree that torrent (P2P) technology will never be banned or blocked, as technically speaking it's a very difficult thing to filter and, it's actually an amazing and viable technology that could be amazing if put to the correct use. However, just because we can't block torrents doesn't mean ISP's can't block the huge web sites advertising them. I almost guarantee 99% of torrents are downloaded via these web sites. In television we are regulated by ofcom to ensure what is transmitted abides by the rules, but if someone swears on live television unexpectedly before the watershed it's still the broadcaster that is fined. So, if ofcom can pass the responsibility onto the broadcaster, why can't we pass the responsibility of illegal downloading onto the web sites hosting all these torrents? We don't need a governing body like ofcom, the law (should) have the power to govern. I get the feeling there's something deeply political and the government could quite easily block the majority of illegal downloads but.. doubt we'll ever know what it is.

Sorry but fines like these are being advertised day in day out, but they are barely making any difference. I say they introduce a law that all ISP's MUST filter out the illegal 'torrent' web sites (ie. torrentz.com, mininova.org etc.) as these are the primary sources of torrents. I doubt any ISP wants to make this move voluntarily as customers will just go with the next ISP that doesn't block these sites, and it will decrease the demand for higher bandwidth connections, fewer people will be investing in 50meg broadband as they don't need it. I almost guarantee if there were web sites hosting indecent child photos the server would be shutdown almost instantly. So, why not the biggest platforms providing millions of illegal downloads everyday? I'm not saying this will fix the problem, but it will have a massive impact. There will always be ways of sharing illegal torrents, but we can at least take away the huge web sites that are swarming in them.

Viagra? What are they trying to say... <_<

If you're referring to mine, I'm just showing off the new web site I built with some of my video work on there, not trying to spam the world just spent enough time working on something that I want to show people that's all.

My understanding was that camcorders shot at 0 IRE but the blacks were raised inside the NLE on ingest, and that using the 'broadcast safe' function on a lot of cameras was a big mistake because the NLE would just raise the blacks beyond 7.5 IRE. I just find it a nuisance that theory and practice tend to contradict each other. Whilst 100% bars may show up perfectly on a vector scope and waveform monitor, it all gets changed when applying broadcast colour safe effects. And a lot of web sites tell me that the RGB levels can't go beyond 235, yet, the white RGB value on 100% bars IS 255 RGB. Obtaining the best possible quality without making your video illegal seems to be a bit of a headache, and that's before going into flash pattern analysing...

Hi, I've finally built a new web site over the last week, it's still very much in construction phase but, it always will be. I'll never stop trying to improve upon it. http://djasmedia.com If you have any problems accessing the site please let me know as I will need to fix it asap. Check out the broadcast section as it's got some examples of my work. Best, Dan Ashley-Smith.

Sorry, bit of a mistake, I know you can go below 16 on the RGB scale in PAL, I'm getting confused with NTSC where the IRE levels are set at 7.5 (RGB 16).

Hi, I've been experimenting with legalising video signals, and hit a few stumps on the way that I'm hoping someone here can help me clear up. I imported a 100% colour bars image into 'Premiere Pro' and looked at the YC waveform. As expected the signal used the full .7 volts and the colours corresponded to the correct positions on the vector scope. However, it was my understanding that any value higher than 235 or lower than 16 on the RGB scale was out of bounds for PAL transmission? On inspection, the black bar equalled 0:0:0 and the white bar equalled 255:255:255. So, I edited the bars so that no value could succeed 235 or undermine 16, and re-imported the bars. However, as expected when looking at this on the YC waveform the white levels dropped below .7v and the blacks were raised above 0v. Which, to my understanding is incorrect? And, when looking at the vectorscope the colour points were way off. I tried using the 'colour safe' effect within premiere, this disliked the original 100% bars and compressed the levels. It did however, like the newly edited bars where the RGB values were compressed and didn't touch them whatsoever. However, it was also my understanding 100 IRE is the broadcast peak standard, not premiere's default 110. So when I pushed the IRE levels down to 100, it didn't like the newly edited bars so much and had and pushed the levels down further. My guess is, premiere's scopes are not setup for PAL transmission, and are purely for legalising signals within an RGB scope? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

I feel your pain. I got screwed on a job a while back. Taught me to never send DVD's out without pasting 'Demo copy' or whatever all over the footage.

Hi. At my college we have a live television event every year, and I had this crazy idea of converting one of the rooms into a 3D cinema for this year or the next. I wouldn't be looking to broadcast 3D, just have a 3D showing. I'm not very knowledgable on the subject as of yet, so that's why I've come here to see how feasible an idea this is. I would be looking to produce a polarised 3D viewing, not anaglyph. From looking at a wiki page, I would need the following: 2X aligned DLP projectors Some polarizing filters A silver screen Computer with a dual-head graphics card The page doesn't really go into much more detail than this. So I've got a few questions about this kit. First of all, why DLP projectors? From reading up LCD projectors seem to be doing very well in terms of quality in recent years, so, unless there is a technical issue as opposed to quality I'd rather not limit myself to just DLP projectors. Secondly, the silver screen is used as it reflects more hard light as opposed to a white screen which can diffuse the light ridding the image of polarisation. But, is this really going to be an issue in a smaller room, we're not talking a huge cinema here. Thirdly, the polarizing filters. Is this going to be a simple case of buying some cokin linear polarising filters or do you need something very specific? Any ideas or advice appreciated. Dan.

When I first got into film/tv, I always imagined people who done it got a lot attention from all kinds of people because they worked on stuff that goes out nationally and maybe even internationally. Uhh.. yeh, right. Wanna get the girls don't bother with anything but feature length films starring Daniel Radcliffe. I think the word 'shooter' probably emanated from shootingpeople.com where members are reffered to as shooters.

Slight pattern going on here... the people slating facebook have never used facebook. Don't knock it before you've tried it.

I know of someone who lost their job when bad mouthing the company they worked for through facebook. Although he sued for unfair dismissal later and got offered either money or his job back. He took the money.