The Blueberry Shoes Films Blog

I’ve been quiet over hear at the blog for many weeks. Here’s why: I have a great new position at Special Olympics Inc., the international headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C.

In addition to the privilege of working with a committed team of folks on spreading the news about Special Olympics, I discovered there are other benefits that HR didn’t mention.

Here’s one: The other night, I got to help out with photos at a reception held in honor of Quincy Jones’ birthday. I was in a meeting a couple of days earlier, and the folks in my office who were planning the event were wondering who they’d get to shoot photos. After a few minutes, I mentioned I’ve shot some receptions and that I enjoy shooting them, so I was signed on as the second guy with a camera.

As always, I started getting a little nervous right away and thinking about the lighting circumstances. One thing that caught my eye after a day of consideration was this: Mr. Jones would be honored by speakers standing on a second-floor balcony overlooking a (lovely, by the way) outside patio. The time of day: 8:30, well past sunset.

I was thinking that the speakers and Mr. Jones would be lighted from behind unless there were flood lights shining from the patio toward the house. Since we didn’t know for sure, I took a couple of 750-watt Totalights, which are bright color-balanced incandescent lamps.

The other thing I was thinking about was how good a shot I could plan to get if I was standing on the patio, shooting up at people 10 feet above me. I brought a short stepladder, and thankfully, the hostess, Mrs. Fabry, had a six-footer.

Below, you will see the setup and the resulting shots with a little bit of additional explanation.

This is the balcony. The faces of people
I would want to photography would be
pretty far above me.

Here is the balcony with my lights–and
the Duke Ellington choir–on it. The
one problem here is that those two
sconces on the right and left are really
bright, and…

…they backlit Mr. Jones or…

… presented a distraction to his smiling
face as he listened to a birthday greeting
phoned in by Stevie Wonder.

Here’s a shot from atop the six-foot
ladder that Mrs. Fabry kindly allowed
me to borrow.

So, here’s the lesson in this blog entry: find out as much as you can about the most important photos you’ll be taking, and plan out how to get them. And, if you have to, change your plan!

A friend of mine from across the Atlantic Ocean, Howard at Down Syndrome Educational Trust, asked me about the experience of shooting and editing “Crossing Tahoe” in the relatively new HDV format. Here’s what I told him, plus some more that I thought of later.

Shooting in HDV is fun, but the market is really young for that. I wanted to start getting practice at it, and the Tahoe film was a perfect way to get my feet wet. Er, so to speak.

I am using three cameras: Sony FX1, Sony Z1U and a small AVCHD camera, the HDR-SR1. They’re all good. The SR1 is a brilliant little camera with an amazing array of semi-pro features…and some little nightmares, too.If I could do it again, I would get two Z1U cameras to get the XLR jacks and better LANC compatibility. To use good mikes with the FX1, I clamp on a heavy little BeachTek thingy, which works fine but is not the best for carrying around; with the LANC controller, I cannot get the FX1 to switch between manual and autofocus. The Z1U handles that easily.

Editing with HDV requires little more space than SD because of the compression used for HDV, but AVCHD demands a quad-core for smooth play back. The quad-core helps a lot with rendering, too. That said, I have invested in four RAIDs to make sure that I am covered as well as I can for hard disk failures.

With HDV, I have encountered some really quirky problems with my setup and the most vexing one is one that no one else seems to have encountered, but I have encountered on two different systems with two different installations of Sony Vegas. (The problem is difficult to explain, but basically, the program renders and gets to, oh, 30 percent, 55 percent or even 80 percent and then freezes. The resulting files range from 1 gig to many, many gigs. BUT THEY ARE ALL 4: 42;16 in length. Figure THAT out…)

I invested in a Blu-ray burner and a Blu-ray player solely because I want to be able to distribute “Crossing Tahoe” in a high-def format. Truth be told, it’s a case of the tail wagging the dog. Had I not gone to HDV, I would not need to worry about Blu-ray. And the market for my films would not be diminished since Blu-ray players play SD DVDs.

But–and it is a big but–this Tahoe film looks magnificent in HD on a big screen. Spectacular, in fact. It is worth the effort, mostly. It will be a long time before I invest in mass-production of Blu-ray discs, and till I do, I need to ask each customer what player they use to be certain it will play the BD-R. (Just the setup for a Blu-ray disc, through my replication vendor, is $3000! And that’s before any discs have been stamped. Ouch!)

The “Crossing Tahoe” DVD is in widescreen format, so if you can find an HD TV, it will look great and fill the screen. HD rocks, but Karen’s story is much more magnificent than any niggling concerns about resolution.

Okay, okay, so I am a little giddy…

I was burning perfectly good Blu-ray discs all along. It was my Sharp player that was letting me down.

I checked my short stack of homemade Crossing Tahoe Blu-ray discs this afternoon at a friend’s house, and what a thrill it was to see the opening shot of the film and to hear its whispery wind.

So the Sharp BD player is going to be picked up by UPS and returned to Amazon.com. I fetched myself a new BD player from Best Buy–their last one in the whole store, mind you–and have been gleefully burning more discs this evening.

I am so relieved.

So who wants a Blu-ray of Crossing Tahoe? I’ve got ‘em!

Now, to the technical details: I prepared my video as a 1080i HDV stream in Sony Vegas 8.0b; prepared the audio as a stereo AC3 file, also in Vegas. I did nothing special to the files…just took the defaults.

I created the Blu-ray Disc project in Adobe Encore CS3 (with the recent H.264 update from the Adobe site).
The disc consists of one (rather snappy) menu and one timeline. Everything is in 16:9 proportions. I went with H.264 compression on the video in Adobe. I am going to experiment a bit and see what yields the best image.

I will pass on what I learn here on the blog.

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I expect my first big batch of copies of the Crossing Tahoe: A Swimmer’s Dream film to be in my stockroom/office/editing parlor on Friday or Monday. I have two big batches of orders going out the day they arrive.

I showed the film to Mason’s compadres at his after-school program. I expected a lot more fidgeting and such, but the kids pretty much paid attention. They had terrific questions afterward. Other folks who have seen the film say they really think it’s something special, so I am hopeful that lots more folks do, too.

Now, regarding Blu-ray discs of Crossing Tahoe. Still have had no success, but I am hopeful that trying a different player will do the trick.

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Briefly, I am having a fierce battle with Blu-ray. I suspect it’s the player I got but who knows?
I’ve got a new Blu-ray Disc (BD) burner, brand of Sony, the company that is the biggest champion of Blu-ray, so I must assume for the moment that the burner is OK.
I have a Blu-ray player that plays commercially prepared Blu-ray discs with ease and beauty.
I have tried a variety of software to burn the discs and I am trying yet another this evening.
I really, really, really want to watch “Crossing Tahoe” in high-definition, so I am going to persist in this till it’s solved.