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Posted by Mark on 10/05/47 11:39
nobody special wrote:
> Sorry to be late to the party, funny joke about them gray rats.
>
> You can make a suitable temporary softlight by shining work lights thru
> some white diffusing cloth like tulle or organza., or (if you're
> careful) plastic shower curtains. Good tip from martin aboutt he
> polarizing filter: you can get one at a local camera store: take your
> camcorder to the store to make sure it will fit before you buy it. It
> sits in a rotating housing and you twist it until the objectionable
> reflection is minimized.
>
Thanks for all the advice. We have shot the video. Lighting did turn out
to be the biggest problem, simply as the rats were used to working with
the door closed and dim light, rather less bright light shining on them.
We only had a single day to organize, shoot and edit, so we thought the
results were as good as could be expected.
> Listen to the pros, and don't shoo this with the PAL camera unless you
> feel like repeating the whole thing later with a proper NTSC camera.
> UCLA is home to one of the biggest film making schools in the USA, you
> can throw a gobo arm in any direction and hit three film makers easy.
> If you can't find help just outside your door, you are NOT trying.
>
> As far as the media, I think you probably have rules about checking in
> with the university officials first anyway, they are funny about things
> like that. Their Public information department will already have all
> the answers about where to send out tapes and in what format the
> stations want it. Unless it's a bloody murder or soemthing liek the
> zapruder film, DV mini tapes do not cut it with TV stations. They will
> want NTSC betacamSP, DVCpro, DVcam, or digital betacam. This means you
> will have to at some point interface with a media department person to
> get your master tape converted to the proper distribution format. Why
> you seem to be fighting this so hard, I don't know. you got good
> advice, you should follow it.
>
Don't know where you get the "fighting this so hard" from. Given the
extremely urgent nature, I wanted to know if it would be acceptable to
use a PAL camera - given that I already had it, knew it worked well, and
could download/edit from it quickly. However, I was concerned about the
quality, which is why I originally asked "Does software conversion do
[PAL conversion] okay?" and "Does that do [PAL converion] with good
results?". Given the negative feedback, I made sure that we did get a
NTSC camera. In fact, given the comments regarding tv stations not
converting from one to the other, we have in fact submitted both PAL and
NTSC versions.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my original post, but the footage was
requested by a journal (you can probably narrow down the possibilities
to two). The probability it will be used by the media is around 1%. Even
then, we are talking about 5 seconds of footage that will be shown with
a voiceover. Hence, it would be silly to spend weeks preparing the
footage. Instead, we wanted to spend less than a day on it, but still
wanted to make the results as good as possible given the limited time -
hence the original post.
Don't get the joke about a videographer wanted to do a rat study. If I
had put a post up saying "I want to produce a film that people will sit
in a cinema for 2 hours to watch and I also want it to be nominated for
an academy award. I want to know how to film it so it looks professional
but don't want to read up about lighting, camera direction, etc."
However, we were simply providing some footage that was asked for by the
journal, but wanted to make the result as reasonable as possible given
the extermely tight deadline we were given. I don't see what is wrong
with admitting ignorance and asking experts for their advice.
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