Final Cut Video

08/08/2021

Save money - Book a flight on Sundays. A study by the Airlines Reporting Corp last Nov showed that this was the day to get the lowest fares. Expedia showed the best days to fly cheaply were Thursday and Fridays.
- see the complete list at AARP.org/bulletin

AARP Bulletin Today features the latest daily news information and articles on Health, Social Security, Medicare, Politics, Scam Alerts and more. Bulletin RSS feed.

03/01/2021

Driving on the tarmac. How often do you get to drive in front of huge UPS jets loading up (including the latest vaccine from J&J)? News takes you to interesting places, doesn't it?

12/12/2020

Webcasting - Do you realize what you're doing? When I am with a network crew and we're preparing for our correspondent to go live, we all know it's a critical moment that has to go right - Live TV. That's what you're doing. When you webcast, you are doing live TV, too. I can only hope you will continue to focus on what will improve your live TV moment - we are critical of our camera placement, the background, how the picture is composed with our correspondent. We add lights to improve the light on our correspondent in relationship to the background (is the background too bright?).
We are careful with the microphones we use, especially if we are fighting background sounds/noise.
We prepare one or two hours before the first live event, aka live hit.
I just hope you can take some of these same steps in your "live TV", your webcasting, at home or at the office. Maybe look at each of these to see if one can be improved?

10/11/2020

Can your old videotape be transferred?

Why do some shops say there may be problems with transferring your old videotape? I'll use the professional format, 3/4 U-matic as an example, but it applies to VHS as well.

* The oxide falls off. The oxide, the metallic coating that contains the magnetic signal, usually loses some of the material, and so, loses some of the signal.
That's on top of the fact that the earlier formats were, of course, lower resolution in the first place (noisy looking). So today, they tend to look worse and are worse because of the loss of material. In other words, over time, you will lose more and more of the image quality.

* The cassette may not play or might "freeze" or seize up. The hubs sit on silicon pads to make the rotation smooth or slippery enough to rotate freely. Heat, cold, bad storage, bad cases, and the tape hubs, that hold the tape, can hit rough spots, rotate poorly or not rotate at all. When that happens, the tape can play poorly or just break while trying to play in the deck. Also, we have seen the splice, the adhesive tape holding the leader and the videotape together, just pop off. Then the tape will no longer play in this cassette.

* Bad tape. Some tape has little folds from being damaged years ago. Some tape has ripples from bad storage, that cause ripples during a "bad" playback. Too much moisture in a basement storage spot? You could have mold on the tape, the inside of the housing. This won't let the little video head play the video without getting clogged or stop the signal all together.

So when a facility says your cassette may or may not "play", they need to look at all these factors and decide if transporting your moldy videotape will cause damage to their video machine as well. Remember, the repair people trained on these old machines are retiring and getting more difficult to find. So are the parts for the decks - so are the machines themselves.

Later we'll talk about ways to store your precious movies and videos to keep them for a very long time - safely.

citing sources-
Admin. (January 23, 2013). 6 Bad Things that Can Happen to Your VHS Tape
http://playitagainvideo.com/1398/6-bad-things-that-can-happen-to-your-vhs-tape/

Tkacik, C (2017, September). 'We're running out of time:' One woman's quest to save Baltimore television history. The Baltimore Sun,
https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-saving-baltimore-archives-20170919-story.html

07/31/2020

Concerts. Remember those? And remember scalpers who buy up front rows and charge local people hundreds of dollars more to get a ticket? Eric Church and his team were doing something about it. They had the "pit" close to Eric only sold via their fan site - they had to already know you. And their ticket coordinator had a computer algorithm to decide if you were a scalper, say buying 20 tickets from New Jersey instead of Indianapolis. Church's team said they seemed to be suppressing national scalpers off the on line ticket sales. Soooo, why doesn't that happen with the other large on line ticket sales? This is Eric Church being interviewed by our team; CBS (I was running audio) back in 2017 - haha, when we used to have safe, live concerts. BTW, they let us go on stage and shoot some B-roll during the concert!

07/30/2020

Older equipment - it's fun to see, right? This was a documentary about "Some Like It Hot", with Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, director/writer Billy Wilder. Look at that "wind sock" for the boom microphone at the beach scene! A canvas bag of sorts! Wow.

07/22/2020

Cool photographer - highlighted in B&H newsletter dated July 20th.

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05/19/2020

Recall - Harbor Freight Tools is recalling 1.1 million Gordon folding knives - the locking mechanism can fail and collapse on a finger. I know a lot of crew have folding knives so I wanted to share that recall with everyone.

05/13/2020

Hensen honored. The NAB is not meeting in person, but they are honoring Jim Hensen who first started broadcasting in Washington DC with his puppets. I know, because I lived outside in Falls Church and I watched those early renditions of his show on B&W television. I liked it so much, my mother bought me a rubber puppet, available locally, of one of the blobby, muppet characters (not Kermit) that one wore over your hand. If only I still owned that item from his first few years! I remember it making your hand sweat, since it was non-breathing rubber!
Here is the notice from NAB Express:

Kermit the Frog Guest Appearance
In honor of Jim Henson, the artist, innovator and visionary creator of the Muppets, receiving NAB’s Distinguished Service Award, Kermit the Frog will join Henson’s children Brian Henson and Lisa Henson to celebrate significant and lasting contributions Henson made to the broadcast industry.

Tune in Wednesday, May 13 at 12 p.m. ET.
You must register to view at nabshowexpress.com

05/11/2020

This makes sense, right?
‘What Day Is It?’: Comcast Sees New TV Watching Behaviors During Pandemic

Days are blurring together for viewers, causing a shift in normal viewing habits.

--from TV Technology newsletter May 11, 202

BTW, on this day: In 1997, computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess.

05/09/2020

Industry changes: Among 15 activities the Center for the Digital Future asked people if they missed while sheltering in place, going to the movies ranked next to last. “Streaming has filled the gap,” Cole says. “There will always be movies we want to see in the theater, but for most of us that's three to five movies a year. The whole future of film and its distribution is now up for play. But what's unquestionable is that theaters are only going to decline."
--by Andy Markowitz, AARP, May 4, 2020

05/03/2020

Encourage better treatment with your wallet - I read in Alignable, a small business, networking site: Decades-long relationships with JP Morgan Chase didn't seem to matter. Some digging by our Co-Founder Eric Groves uncovered how the bank showered big businesses with CARES loans, while leaving its loyal small business clients out in the cold.
I know we have a bank account with PNC and they said they could not fill out an application and were busy with other applicants! Ouch.
It may be necessary to re-consider where we bank, where we do various business, if loans are to be made to very small businesses, and "encourage" banks to not always cater to their large corporations. It's sad, but we all realized it, and it really hurts us when we are hurting the most. We just weren't "big enough" clients - unless, perhaps, if we take action together.