A happy little box I had so desperately been anticipating…

My brand-new, very own, G-SPEED eS from G-Tech.

As a video producer working with HD content, I can appreciate the benefit of a little extra hard drive space. And with this guy, you get a LOT of hard drive space (up to 4TB in fact), a 1 Gigabit connection speed and a rock solid package.

That connection speed is nearly triple an average firewire 400 connection for those of you keeping track, and about 1.5 times faster then a firewire 800.

There was once a time when I was tied to multiple drives each and every day. It was routine that I would have three or four different external devices running and hooked up to my machine at the same time.

With the G-SPEED eS, I have all of my content in one permanent place and I have the option to turn the G-SPEED into a RAID if/when I see fit (it supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 & JBOD).

THE PROS:
The drive is small and compact. Its included drives are hot-swappable, and it comes with its very own PCIe x4 RAID controller card.

I find it to be fast, efficient and very reliable.

I also like the fact that it has built in web-browser control functions to help you set up and maintain your drive.

THE CONS:
It’s an eSATA drive, which means it’s basically tethered to your machine indefinitely (unless you have multiple machines with PCIe cards - this is where the “permanent” stress came from earlier).
It also has its own separate power source, which means it constantly has to be plugged in. In my testing I accidentally unplugged the thing and subsequently went momentarily deaf as the alarm went off in my ear (the positive side of that though is that the G-SPEED makes it abundantly clear when there is any sort of problem with the unit).

Overall I would say that the G-SPEED eS is the one of the best, most reliable units I’ve worked with. It has become the home for all my important data and materials and has the unique distinction of being the only drive in the office to never have crashed, failed or randomly decided to stop working.
And if you’ve read some of our other horror stories, that’s saying something.

Related Post

It’s a rainy Tuesday morning and I’m in the office today to meet about an upcoming project.

Jason: I got something for you.

Paul: Cool, what is it?

Jason: I need you to fix this rough cut

Paul: All right, let’s take a look…

Meet David S. Rose, entrepreneur, investor & pitch coach.

Paul: Uh-oh… (looking at the footage)

Great guy, and an engaging speaker, but there are talking heads left and right, a clean but unremarkable tape from a keynote speech at NYU and a weekend in which to make it all happen before I go away on vacation.

Meet FX Factory Pro - filters, transitions, inspiration and all around goodness.

First off, this package works in both Final Cut Pro as well as Motion, which is key if you’re like me and have to create your own GFX on a regular basis. Installation is cake. It’s also got a cool back-end app which allows you to manage your Noise Industries products & DL new plug-ins direct from NI. Perhaps most important for us working stiffs is the quite reasonable asking price of $399.

OK, watch the video now if you haven’t already.

The first thing I looked at were the transitions, and FXFP’s got that well covered. I hate it when filters and transitions scream out and draw the viewer’s attention to the effect. These transitions are complimentary and most important, they aren’t clunky. NI’s Core Melt & Volumetrix add-on plug-ins are impressive as well. (I’d love to review them next- hint, hint Noise Industries!)

I used, in order of appearance: barcode wipe, video conference 1.0, volumetrix wipe 1 (zoom), blow out crossfade and copy machine.

Sometimes you need an anchor idea to really pull a piece together. FXFP’s artist sketch and pencil sketch filters helped me to create a pair of dynamic and aesthetically pleasing background plates for my full-screen GFX. I think these two effects, placed where they are within the promo, really help to tie it all together.

Some highlights for me:

I’m into the Videoconference 1.0 transition/really love the mirrored image under the panes. Also notice how crisp the video itself looks within the transition.

What can I say about the artist sketch and pencil sketch filters? These are pretty sharp. There are loads of sliders to play with and the “mix” control is a really convenient way to smoothly keyframe this effect on over time.

To sum up, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality, adaptability and ease of use of FX Factory Pro at a price point that won’t have you bringing pb&j sandwiches for lunch for the next three months.

Paul

Related Post

So, in putting together a mobile photo/video kit, I eyed the Joby Gorillapod SLR-ZOOM suspiciously. I liked the bendy action, the small footprint and the idea that I could attach my SLR to trees, poles, chairs and the like. The same went for lights and flashes, increasing the range for interesting fills and bounce patterns.

What really got me excited though was the prospect of pairing our Panasonic AG-HSC1U mini-HD camera with the Gorillapod. The mini-HD (or “lil’ buddy” to me) seemed light enough and the Gorillapod SLR-ZOOM rigid enough for the combo to work. I went out and bought a Manfrotto 486RC2, threw it on top of the G’pod and lo, a nifty little package was born.

I took the kit to the AIA’s Center for Architecture yesterday to capture the Buckmister Fuller Challenge conferring ceremony and, as if by prophecy, it saved my shot. The ceremony was held downstairs in a packed room with cameras eking out space here and there. I spotted an upstairs balcony and knew it was time to break out the Joby. I plugged our Sennheiser SKP 100 G2 into the board for sound, wired up the lil’ buddy with the ew 100 G2 receiver and took my spot on the glass balcony. Witness the majesty:

In the end, the Joby garnered a solid shot and a ton of curious questions from architects, Bucky fans and other design-oriented admirers. I looked around at these affluent, aesthetically-concerned people nervously handholding their mini-cams, iPhones and, yes, Flips and thought one thing: Joby gets a PASS in a sea of epic FAIL.

Related Post

In looking back at what I saw (through a haze of overindulgence on more than one occasion) I can absolutely say, the game has changed. Or more appropriately, it continues to evolve at breakneck speeds.

NAB Videos

Video interviews and educational sessions from NAB 2008 can be found here.

About NAB Coverage

ScribeMedia’s NAB coverage is made possible through the kind support of Atempo, the digital asset backup and recovery, archiving and security solutions company.

Two years ago, 4K was the next big thing.

Last year, Red debuted their first product offering to audience amazement — with no less than a short film whipped up by Peter Jackson in what can only be called his own personal filmmakers Shangri-La. They started delivering the cameras late last year, and — to my utter delight — managed to fill every non-Sony and Panasonic nook and cranny of the show floor with RED One camera bodies doing funky things. They were everywhere hosting modifications and accessories. Kind of like Arriflex was two years ago. Draw your own parallels…

This year, I went on the hunt for “what’s next in Post production” — workflow, whizz-bang apps and their cohorts — the ever expanding library of plugins and things that make stuff go boom in digital space.

Of note were Eyeon Digital Fusion and The Foundry’s NUKE 5. Both sport stereoscopic compositing — and in case you live under a rock or have a desk in a major Hollywood production house — you have heard of 3D for indies coming down the pipeline.

Scribe did a story on U23D - so if you need a quick primer on how cool this technology is and the immersive feeling one can give a film with it go here.

Back to compositing — the Nuke 3D projection mapping features are truly a thing to love — as is the speed (it’s just so damn fast: 32 bit processing all the time for everything). This just feels like a professionals app from the moment you start slinging frames around and finessing scenes into submission.

The only real thing missing is… the plugins! Noticeably absent from Nuke 5’s lineup was Genarts’ “Sapphire” support and a few of the other higher end plugins, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they are rapidly forthcoming.

As for Eyeon, well, they have been around for 20 years and basically invented nodal compositing as we know it. It just doesn’t run on my Mac. Which sucks for me, but hey, maybe that will force me to do that Linux install after all.

Then there was Editshare. We first ran into Editshare at HD World here in NYC, and got to have a good long chat with their President and founder, Andy Liebman. If you have workflow issues with editing and file management in your post facility, stop what you are doing and check them out.

Andy worked as a producer for many years before getting fed up with the problems of post workflow and disparate file systems making a mess of things for him and his projects, so he started Editshare a few years ago and now they are taking over the planet, one post facility at a time. Great for reality TV traveling crews too as they have a portable solution.

Then there was the production equipment. Yumm. Redrock Micro has a nice as homemade pie matte box for what seems to be a giveaway price. They spent some serious time working out the design before dropping this thing on the market, but it is a ready-for-prime-time fully functional wicked piece of image improving hardware. Go buy one now.

There was also the best grip gear around from Matthews and we got a close up look at their wonder rig: the Roundy-Round dolly. The president of Matthews reminds me of guys that I knew that repaired boats for a living in Hawaii and surfed in the mornings — someone that figured out the key to good living and is keeping it a secret from the rest of us.

My overall impression of NAB was that the content pavilion was a flop by all accounts — not really impressing an audience that doesn’t really give a squat about content that has already been done, but more about the content they are going to make with the new stuff at the show.

That said, the educational sessions were well attended and extremely informative, and included quite a few tracts for career development for independent producers, editors, directors, and camera operators.

Almost everywhere you went there was also something being said about small screen venues (iPhone, iPod, iMac, etc.) and viral web video. There was refreshingly little being blathered about marketing and advertising, audience metrics, Nielson ratings, and the poison of the air of previous NAB shows. All in all, it was a refreshing thing… especially the RED booth.

Did I mention that I now have a reservation for one coming in December?

#4216 baby!

Feel the redliness oozing from my pictures!

And don’t forget to watch interviews and educational sessions here.

Related Post

The Firestore by Focus Enhancements is one such product. After first reading about the Firestore I said something along the lines of, “My God, this solves so many problems.”

A quick run down of the features and benefits that got me hot and bothered in the first place:

• external 100GB hard drive that connects to a Panasonic HVX via firewire
• you can shoot to the Firestore in real time and store in multiple formats (.mov, .avi, p2n)
• instead of having to pull miniDV tapes in real time to your desktop, with the Firestore, as soon as you’re done shooting, you just pull the digital files to your desktop and you’re ready to edit…literally a few minutes after connecting the drive to the computer.

That’s the promise.

The reality is that using the Firestore is like playing a game of Russian Roulette. The odds that it actually works as promised are as good as the odds that something goes disastrously wrong. That would be 50/50 odds…great odds if we’re measuring the percentage of girls who say yes to a date or other such questions a guy may pose to a girl, bad for a device you need to rely on.

After having experienced disaster after disaster, I can now put Firestore disasters into into two categories.

Category one I experienced pretty much from day one. When you hit record and the status icon goes from the square stop to the two vertical dashes record/pause to the circle record BUT the counter that tells you how much record time is left doesn’t start counting, then something is wrong. Assuming that the universal record circle means it’s recording is, well, a wrong assumption.

At least by now, after multiple experiences, I always look for the counter to start in addition to the icon changing to the circle. I am a trained Firestore operator. So as much as it sucks that it doesn’t work, at least I know BEFORE shooting that I should record to tape and call it a day. Of course, that is after a few restarts of the Firestore and camera to see if I can get it to work.

But recently I was confronted with a new kind of disaster. Let’s call it a category two disaster.

This category two disaster happened not on one Firestore, but two - the FS-100 and the newer 160GB version we bought last month.

The counter started going so I thought it was recording. After a full day of shooting I connected the Firestore to my computer to pull the footage to my desktop and begin editing. When the drive mounted, I could even see all the files. But when I tried to open one of the .mov files I was confronted with a “sorry, file not recognized” type of message.

So there are about 60 - 70GB of files that are absolutely useless to me. And 7 tapes staring me in the face, taunting me, “ha ha…you have to pull each and every one of us, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, tape by tape…all in real time, while the paint dries.”

Unfortunately, when we called Focus Enhancements tech support, they chalked our problems up to our own retardation. Apologies to anyone who is retarded for the non-PC word choice.

I even shot an email to Focus Enhancements PR person, who I met at NAB, and asked if she could connect me with someone so I could talk to them instead of sending an email to “support” and getting lost in the shuffle.

Her response:

Hi Peter,

It’s good to hear from you. I hope the show went well for you. In regards to your query, my suggestion would be for you to call the support line at: 763-398-1658.

Kindest regards,

~Lisa

>hi lisa,

we met @ NAB. you’re going to send us the new field recorder to review when it is ready. can you connect me to someone in the tech department @ Focus? we have 2 firestores. in general, they hold all the promise in the world but constantly frustrate us when we most need them to work. we have an issue on 2 firestores that i wanted to talk to
someone about.

thanks,
peter
ScribeMedia.org

Well that’s helpful. I’ll remember that when writing my article.

Firestore disasters can follow the hurricane system. I guess a category 3 disaster would be if I was recording HD and only counted on the Firestore instead of having some sort of back-up recording option (like tape or a P2 card). No way to salvage my shoot whatsoever.

Given our Firestore experience, I asked the ScribeMedia team to each write their most memorable Firestore disaster moment, and to put it into a hurricane disaster category (one, two or three). In the spirit of user generated content, feel free to chime in with your own Firestore war stories.

Hopefully, Focus Enhancements will respond to me this time and offer more than the non-toll-free phone number to call.

My challenge to Focus Enhancements is to not become the next Diamond Rio. Remember them? The first company to come out with an mp3 player, only to rest on their laurels and be lapped by the likes of Apple with the iPod. Or will Focus Enhancements step up and continue to innovate on the great idea they tried to create a solution for?

Currently, the Firestore is the only real choice in the market for external field video recording devices. But knowing the market opportunity, others will step up. In fact, in the next month or two, both Focus Enhancements and Roland will send us new field recording devices to review that will hopefully deliver on the promise. We met with both companies at NAB.

In the words of Elvis, hopefully this time around I’ll get “A little less conversation, a little more action.”

Related Post

Why can’t we all just get along? From Final Cut Pro to Avid to Smoke to Premiere Pro to Nuke to Combustion to Photoshop to GIMP to 3DStudio Max to Maya to Flame to PFtrack to… well, you get the idea. Apparently Editshare got the idea too — only they got it about 5 years ago and have emerged as a major player in the post production world because they allow just that. Ingest once, use everywhere. Yeah, I know — why hasn’t everybody else figured out how to do this? Well, Editshare seems to be the first to really pull it off — and judging by the size of the booth at NAB and the amount of orange paint they must have used, one can only guess that they have hit the sweet spot in storage and collaboration.

For a production house like ours, this is just the thing to fix a few annoying and not so trivial workflow problems. Oh, and it runs over gigabit ethernet. Yes, that is correct — that is 1 gigabit. They even have a portable system as well, though I wouldn’t want to have to lug it through JFK airport without a luggage cart — and I’m sure the fine security professionals at the TSA would have fun with me and this hunk of burning data love trying to mosey through the security check in.

Related Post

Dan Ochiva reports from the JVC booth at the Band Pro HD event in LA.

Related Post

ScribeMedia complete coverage of the BandPro HD World event. Dan Ochiva gets the dirt!

Related Post

Dan Ochiva checks in with the Pelican team at BandPro.

Related Post

Dan Ochiva surveys Litepanels growing lineup of on-camera and set lighting equipment at BandPro’s “One World on HD” in LA.

Litepanels lightweight and portable lineup of LED lights produce soft flattering light while using much lower power consumption than conventional Tungsten based lamps of the same relative output. With almost no heat, and a low profile, these lights make a great addition to an on set gaffers box kit. All lights feature low color shift dimmer packs, are flicker free, and light weight.

We frequently gripe at the general cost of lighting equipment, given that the technology and manufacturing process of lighting is not rocket science and the materials science pales in comparison to say, that of a top of the line MEADE Telescope, or a Playstation 3. This pricing strategy seems to work as yet another barrier to entry for independent filmmakers trying to make a quality feature on a limited budget. The fact remains that a good looking picture is in no small part the result of having the necessary lighting materials and the skill to use them effectively.

To this end, Lightpanels has been forging ahead for five years now trying to bring moderately priced full featured lighting tools to the production market. They have had some success in the pricing arena, but their real success seems to be in innovation and marrying already established techniques with a new breed product. The technology is simple, but the application of the lighting tools is somewhat revolutionary as the LED seems to be a great tool for getting consistent results with a robust design.

These units will not replace the 12K HMI, the 2k fresnsel, Kino Flos, or a whole host of other industry tools we use, but it WILL add yet another (very pretty) dynamic tool to the gaffer’s repertoire of useful gadgets that get that “look” a cinematographer is hunting for. You could use these lights to great effect to give that soft sexy look in intimate settings that seem to evade the ability of other tools - without melting your actors or ice cream “hero”.

Related Post