High Resolution Revolution

When this is all through, I will post a lesson in how to correctly expose video images. There is definitely a difference in exposing a 4:4:4 color space as compared to a 4:2:2. HDV doesn't hold up when the forground is correctly exposed and the background is blown out, this makes shooting in high contrast tricky. More news about traveling Europe and shooting a dramatic travel-documentary using the Sony Z1U. L.A. has been eye-opening so far.

Here is the itinerary:

Begin in LA for a few days to establish the 3 characters. Head to Spain for the Tomato festival. Drive up the French Riviera heading for Venice, Italy. Fly to Croatia, for the beaches. Fly to Munich for Oktoberfest. Take the train heading for Paris. Take the Chunnel to London. Fly to Reykjavik Icleand before heading home.

I'm really excited about this.

12:00am - Wednesday - Finishing up project to be burned to DVD the next morning. The product of 2 months of work.

9:00am - Wednesday - Plug in drive to begin working on Project DVD, get an instant message hear a click and an electro-static noise. Get an error message saying, "improper device removal."

9:30am - Panic sets in as I realize all 11 hours of footage has gone offline. Panic more when the power button on the 500gig Lacie drive that I have borrowed does not work.

10:00am - Try to stay calm, try to find our IT guys.

11:00am - Open up the project backup and try to relink the footage that I have backed up to another drive. Panic again as I realize that I only backed up 4 hours out of 11 hours of footage.

12:00pm through 7:00pm - Everything I touch is falling apart in my hands, footage is not relinking. Pay $65 to rent an HDV camera, footage will not redigitize correctly. Learn that the hardrive is dead. Go to the Apple store and spend $370 to replace the drive that just died, because it didn't belong to me.

8:00pm through 10:30pm - Hang out with friends try to remain calm. Drink a Carlsberg and talk about the Bible.

10:30pm - Come back to the office, delete the 6 hours of recovery work from that afternoon and start fresh, create a new project backup using Final Cuts "Media Management feature" in which a new project is created using only the selections in your timeline, begin to recapture new offline clips.

12:31pm - Thursday - Official last day at work. Read and try to stay awake as I feed tapes into the HDV camera.

To sum up, I spent about $470 today and lost a large amount of the work that I having been consumed by for 2 months. It could be worse though. If I hadn't backed up the Final Cut project file before I left last night, much more could have been lost.

*Moral Of The Story - Back up your projects constantly, and never ever trust hardrives, especially Lacie hardrives.

The 500 gig Lacie drive that I had all of my footage, voice-overs, graphics and music on just crashed. It has been shutting off and then coming back on each morning when I turned it on for the first time and I knew there was a problem. This time it didn't turn back on, and won't turn back on no matter what I do. Most of what I had on it was backed up, thank goodness, however, the drive doesn't belong to me and it's overdue which is going to strain my relationship with the friend I borrowed it from (I will of course buy him a new one). Some data will no doubt be missing and irreplaceable, this is a major setback under the time constraints I am in.

Oh, and also, my sister's wedding video that I was cutting was on the hardrive that crashed and that wasn't backed up at all, which means it's gone for good. - "Deep exhale."

*It turns out that I didn't have everything backed up like I thought I did. I have to recapture my footage and I don't have a deck to do it with. This is not good.

With the cut now complete, the real work begins... Next step, finishing, then authoring, then packaging, then distributing. I would venture to say that this video took 200 hours to complete. This is the first long-format mission-doc that I have created. The first time is always a learning process, and usually painful, but I'm already looking forward to the next one.