Thanks to Rod Allen for scanning and emailing his copy of the UK magazine.

I cross the park in Soho Square, go up to a black shiny door at number two and press the buzzer. It’s 1964 and I’ve just arrived from Australia.

Eventually the lock on the door clicks open and I walk down the hall to a small sliding window. I am inside the all-powerful ACTT union headquarters.

“Hello, my name is Stefan Sargent. I wrote to you from Sydney. I’d like to join the union.” The lady behind the window smiles. She tells me that the only way to join is to have a job – “but, of course, you can’t get a job without a union card.” The window slides closed.

A week later, I have an interview with the Chief Executive of ITN, Geoffrey Cox. He’s a New Zealander, I’m Australian. It helps. We watch a short film of mine. “Terrific! I’ll take you on. Make friends and you’ll get into the union. No worries.”

COLOUR ME BLACK

My first day at ITN, I’m in the cameraman’s room. “Who are you?” “I’m the new cameraman.” “Not bloody likely!”

He goes to the door and stops anyone else from entering. Bemused, I get up to go and talk to him. Now it’s his, and the other cameramen’s, turn to enter the room. I walk from the door back inside, they all get up and walk out.

I am declared black. No one will work with me. They won’t even talk to me. Until one day, sitting in the secretaries’ office, an ITN cameraman walks in.

DON’T GO DOWN IN THE TUBE TODAY

“Would you like to go on a shoot with us?” I gratefully accept. We go down into the depths of the work-in-progress Victoria line. It’s an underground building site with workers drilling into the rock. We walk into a new deserted tunnel. My colleagues have torches. Then without saying a word, they suddenly vanish. I’m alone in the dark. It’s pitch black. I grope my way back along the rough walls. I know it’s time to quit.

The ITN management makes some phone calls and a week later I’m employed at BBC Ealing Studios. I seek out the ACTT rep., “I’d like to join the union.” “Great, we need more members. There’s a meeting this weekend. Please join us.”

I’m in. No longer black, I am a card-carrying member of the ACTT.

MOLINARE SOUND STUDIOS

Now it’s 1975, I have four successful sound studios in Broadwick Street, Soho, called Molinare. We have a great staff and I’m free to continue as a filmmaker.

One of my clients is Redifon Flight Simulation. The pilot in the simulator cockpit sees the outside world from a television camera moving over a large model landscape. I decide the best way to capture it is to put blue card on the cockpit windows, give the pilot a small monitor and shoot on video. I need an OB truck and book Trilion. In their Soho machine room, we chromakey it all together. The video scene in the simulator windows is sharp and clear. My client is delighted. I’m now an expert in video production.

Redifon invests in Evans & Sutherland, a high tech computer graphics company in Salt Lake City, Utah. Following my Trilion example, E & S book an OB truck from Burbank based, Compact Video. The shoot is a disaster. Compact’s cameras cannot record the projected picture.

As the reigning expert, I am flown to Utah. I ask the simulator pilot to take half an hour to land the plane and run my modified Éclair film camera at 4 frames a second. My hope is that the six times longer exposure will capture the faint projected images.

While the 16mm film is being processed in New York, I visit Compact in Burbank.

SMALL AND PERFECTLY FORMED

Compact Video is a revelation.

While Trilion in London is using giant, three lens cameras, Compact has lightweight shoulder mounted Norelco PCP-90s – not much heavier than my own 16mm Éclair.

While Trilion has tank sized 2” quad recorders in their OB truck, Compact has small battery powered Ampex VR-3000s.

And while Trilion’s editing facility is just two engineers in a machine room, Compact’s edit suite is Californian redwood walls, Eames chairs, and plush leather seating. The sliding doors on the left conceal the noise of their 2” quad machines. The sliding doors on the right, lead to a restaurant kitchen.

I return to London determined to build a Compact Video look-alike in Soho and immediately start looking for premises.

My wife, Tricia, tells me she’s found an empty building in Foubert’s Place that would make an ideal audio video complex. There’s no FOR SALE sign but we track down the Peachey Property Company. Peachey quotes £2 a sq. ft. for the school building but says if we take the adjacent building as well, they’ll drop the rent to £1 and lock into that rate in for five years. We take it all at just £1 a sq. ft..

SETEMBER 21, 1976

By chance, in Upper Regent Street, I see a sign, INTERNATIONAL BROADCASTING CONVENTION. I go down the stairs. The first exhibit is Ampex. On display is their new video recorder, the 1” VPR-1A.

It’s a friendly 1” tape recorder that is totally unlike the big 2” machines. Stop the tape – there’s a freeze frame – hand-turn the reel – watch one frame after the other. It’s just like editing film. I spend an hour playing. I’m in love. On impulse, I order three £40,000 machines from salesman, Ron Atkinson.

That afternoon, I’m back at Molinare, 43 Broadwick Street. “Where’s Tricia?”

Late that night our daughter is born.

THE TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION

At a stroke, Compact Video is out of date.  So are Trilion, The Moving Picture Company, TVi, Goldcrest, Keith Ewart and ITN Facilities. Their 2” quad recorders all obsolete;  1” helical tape is the way to go.

I phone Ron at Ampex. “What’s happening?” “Sorry, I don’t recognize your name. Stefan Sargent? Molinare? Oh yes, now, I remember …I thought you were joking. Three machines! You’re really serious!”

At the time, I have no idea that mine is Ampex’s only VPR-1A order.

Our builder, Alan Stewart, agrees to work on a “pay me when you can” basis. Little by little, we move our sound studios out of Broadwick Street to Foubert’s Place. I hire video engineers and video editors and, with great excitement, drive to Ampex in Reading to collect my machines.

BLACK IS BLACK

One day, an engineer from Trilion comes to see me. “Bad news, last night there was a meeting of shop stewards from the union approved facilities companies and Molinare has been declared black. The main reason is you are using new technology that hasn’t been approved by the ACTT.” He gives me the minutes of the meeting. ITV stations have been told not to play out any tape from Molinare. I’m shocked.

I contact Roy Lockett at ACTT HQ. “Sorry Stefan, you’ve lucked out. Your 1” technology is black. Make what you like, the ITV stations won’t play it.”

Tricia, had graduated from Sydney university with barrister Geoffrey Robertson. Geoffrey made a name for himself in the 1971 Oz obscenity trial. He thinks we should have a left wing solicitor to represent us and suggests David Offenbach. It is a good choice. David is sympathetic to trade unions and knows labour laws.

I show David the letter to ITV stations declaring Molinare black. He feels we have a legitimate case of restrictive trade practices and we both go off to see Alan Sapper, General Secretary of the ACTT.

RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM

So here we are again at 2 Soho Square’s black shiny door, except it’s 13 years later. The meeting is cordial with Sapper telling me that I should have consulted the union before daring to buy “new technology”. I explain that if can’t use my video facilities, Molinare will probably go bust and that I have no option but to sue the union.

The mood turns icy. “Nobody but nobody sues a union, especially this one. If you do this Stefan – I promise you that you’ll never work in this industry again.” “Are you threatening my client?” says David. “No, Mr. Offenbach – it’s a promise.”

NOW IT’S WAR

In a way, Alan Sapper is right. No one can sue a union. The Wilson/ Callaghan government has seen to that. David says they are acting like feudal barons and we can sue the ACTT executives. He asks for names and addresses and is told to get lost.

David obtains a court order forcing the ACTT to send us the names and home addresses of their executives. Someone at 2 Soho Square mistakenly thinks the court order is requesting a full document disclosure. The next day, delivered by courier to David’s Bond Street office, there arrives a large file with all ACTT/ Molinare correspondence. It’s a gold mine.

LETTERS FROM SOHO SQUARE

The gem is a letter from the union to the management of competitive facilities companies asking them if Molinare were permitted to use 1” tape and new technology, would they lose business? There are replies from my competitors saying keep Molinare black.

David Offenbach, a sincere, idealistic socialist, is horrified. “Trade unions are there to protect worker’s rights – and here they are writing to top management. It’s like the Mafia consulting the Feds.”

Geoffrey Robertson agrees; the ACTT has blown it.

Outside the Royal Courts of Justice on The Strand, Sapper comes up to me. “Are you sure you want to do this? There’s still time to back out.”

SHOWTIME

Inside the Law Courts, the barristers stand and make their cases. Then a surprise, the ACTT’s barrister is called over by Sapper. He returns and tells the judge that the ACTT will meet all Molinare demands. The new technology is approved for use at Molinare. All Moli staff can join the union – remember this is in the days of the closed shop, there will be no backlash, no reprisals; in short – a walkover victory.

Outside, braving the traffic noise, Alan Sapper greets me like an old friend. “We never thought you’d have the nerve to go all the way. We’re good losers. No hard feelings …” I force a smile and shake hands. “So I can still work in the business?”

A PICNIC IN THE PARK

Tricia makes a picnic and we eat in the park, on the grass, outside 2 Soho Square. We toast the shiny black door. Bliss …

Returning to Molinare, our receptionist hands me a box. Inside is a large chocolate cake with a handwritten note: “From Kerry, Jane, Max and the folks at LWT. Congratulations. Well done.”

No longer a niche camera for blond, blue-eyed surfers and mud-splattered sporting enthusiasts, GoPro HERO2 is now an incredible tool for ALL filmmakers.

The lens is twice as sharp, the processor twice as fast, the chip twice as big. There’s auto white balance, a mike input, HDMI out. The list goes on and on…

So it doesn’t have manual exposure, so the optional viewfinder is widgey, and the video is a low 15 mbits/s – the fact is, the images I’m getting match those of HD cameras costing twenty times more.

GOPRO GOES CORPORATE

When Flip was zapped by Cisco, I bought a GoPro. I took it with me while I was shooting a 30 sec. TV spot. And guess what? 50% of the shots in the commercial are from that day-one GoPro.

Angel Island 30 sec. TV spot shot on a GoPr0

Since then, I regularly use GoPro as a third, behind the speaker, camera. No one notices it and it gives me the important, reverse angle coverage I need.

GoPro records in 4 GB chunks. That means, every 30 minutes I lose sync with the other cams in the set-up. Used to be a drag in editing but now with FCP updated to 10.0.3, I can sync. up automatically.  Check “Use Audio for Synchronization.” Bingo – instant sync..

HOW WIDE CAN YOU GO?

If I have one gripe with GoPro, it’s the lens, it’s just too wide.

The new HERO2 now has three 1080p fields of views – 170º, 127º and wonder of wonders (‘cause it’s nowhere in the printed user manual) a 90º FOV called “narrow”. Narrow? 90º is narrow? In my 16mm filmmaking days, I had an Angenieux, 5.9 mm and I loved it – my favorite lens, it gave me a wide, wide, 90º at F1.8. Now the bad news…

GoPro’s 90º “narrow” is a big disappointment. The GoPro folk say it’s not digital zoom; you lose no quality – hmmm… Outdoors, it’s OK but inside: a flop – with a ton of video noise. Big disappointment, but there IS a solution – read on…

ENTER THE AFTERMARKET

GoPro’s aftermarket has a collection of alternative lenses. Bang goes you GoPro warranty – a sacrifice I am prepared to make.

I buy a $99.99 4mm lens – it’s 90º – from the curiously named, RageCams.com. To my surprise, it’s shaper and better than HERO2’s narrow view and there’s no video noise. It’s like having my old Angenieux 5.9 mm back again.  Come to daddy…

Inspired by the 4mm – I invest in a 2.8 mm to 12 mm varifocal lens. It goes from a wide 135º to a tight 28º. Not a zoom, as you need to carefully re-focus each time you change the field of view. To focus, I use an Ikan VX9e HD monitor looking at Hero’s HDMI output. If you can live with twitchy, pernickety focus, I recommend the varifocal.

RageCam and others have many more screw-in lenses for GoPro. They say the 50mm lens (7.8º ) is “ideal for capturing licenses plate numbers at 100 away.” Now why would you want to do that?

We all know that GoPro comes in a waterproof case – great for surfers, skiers and dirt trackers. But use it underwater and the picture goes soft and fuzzy. GoPro specialist, EyeOfMine.com solves that with a $99 flat lens housing. The Discovery Channel used it, riding on the fin of a shark.

BUT WHY USE A GOPRO?

I’m glad I asked that question. Here are just three answers:

SMALL AND INCONSPICUOUS

I’m in Washington shooting Peter Meyers delivering his “High Performance” lectures. One of my Sony HDVs is locked off on a wide shot. I’m operating my second Sony – the close-up one – and little GoPro is filming its little heart out siting there on the mantle piece. It’s so small you really don’t notice it.

CHEAP

So you spent $6,000+ on a “real” camera, well for less than $3,000 you can buy ten GoPros. Crazy – no? Can you imagine a wedding shot with ten cameras? Top shots, reverse angles, friends and relations, close-ups at the altar. These days multi-cam is a cinch to edit. You have the tools. Do it!

Think ten is OTT? Think again: here’s a video shot by GoPro themselves using 12 cameras – maybe many more, as it was shot in 3D.

LIGHTWEIGHT

Heavy cameras need heavy tripods. The GoPro is so light, you can hang it from a party helium balloon. I fix mine to 12 ft. 5/8^th aluminum tubing for top shots.

My big thrill is a new Steadicam Smoothee (who thinks of these awful names?). I bought mine from Amazon.com for $149.88.

In past life, I owned a Steadicam Jr. for my Sony PD150. It just didn’t work. Perhaps the camera was too heavy – I don’t know. I practiced for days and got nowhere. When I moved to the States, it didn’t.

The GoPro/Smoothee package is a different experience. Adjust with two simple balance controls, an hour of practice and you’ll be making Hollywood-style Steadicam shots.

Picture your next wedding shoot – ten cameras in the church and you with a HERO2 on a Steadicam Smoothee (if I have to type Smoothee again, I’ll throw up).

THE COOLEST OF THEM ALL

I’ve saved the OMG aftermarket gadget ‘til last. Drop everything, run to shapeways.com and buy the 3-axis camera gimbal mount. They sell the four piece fabricated cage – then buy three MKS470 servos from hobbyking.com. See the GoPro gimbal video on YouTube and be blown away. With this gismo you can pan, tilt and roll remotely. Eyeofmine.com has wireless transmitters and remote stop/start devices. Go crazy…

ARE WE THERE YET?

Soon children, soon; GoPro’s WiFi BacPac and WiFi Remote are just around the corner. It’s been a fun trip. Enjoy the ride.

GoPro, étonne-moi.

Many moons ago, three Italian producers made Mondo Cane (A Dog’s Life). If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s instant view on Netflix.

No time for Netflix? It starts with a would-be Rudolf Valentino having his clothes ripped off by a bunch of crazy NY female shoppers, then cuts to bare breasted native girls chasing islanders wearing Dolce & Gabbana underwear (but not for long), cut to Aussie girl lifesavers giving the “kiss of life.”The Kiss of Life – worth drowning for…

But Mondo Cane isn’t all about sex – we see births, deaths (a group of Chinese volunteers with only minutes to live but just time to sign the release form) and a Buddhist monk has petrol poured over him and then self-destructs. Did I mention the killing of a man by a bull (cut by the censor), the scenes of flagellation, body piercing, vivisection, lynchings… everything that makes life worth living.

And so it is with this year’s NAB.

BODY PIERCING
Take this year’s RED booth – after an absence of two years, here they are demonstrating their cameras with a willing young girl stripped to the hip, being tattooed. Not just any kind of tattoo but the Red logo design.Mondo Cane 1962Mondo NAB 2011

Inside the booth’s theater, the tattoo theme is continued with a dramatic short, called (you guessed it) Tattoo. I kid you not… “String him up.” Here comes the flagellation scene. Whack! Whack! “Undress him.” Could be Mondo Cane all over again. OMG, he has THE tattoo! Fade to black.

RITUAL SACRIFICE
Suddenly it’s raining add-on recorder boxes – Fast Forward Video has SideKick HD | Atomos with The Ninja| Cinedeckwith, er, Cinedeck | Sound Devices’ new baby PIX | AJA , of course, has Ki-Pro Mini | Convergence Design.

Now along comes BlackMagic with HyperDeck Shuttle. Just $345 and at a stroke corners the market. So it hasn’t got a monitor, it’s not ProRes and gobbles up disk space – I’m buying one and there’s a long queue of other cheapskates behind me. I’ll need a $250 solid state drive; no matter, BlackMagic will throw in a free copy of DaVinci Resolve.

I get change from $600 vs. $2,500+ for a competitive box– ever seen a product manager cry?

John Abt, CEO of AJA, doubts that they’ll find SSDs that will reliably support uncompressed data rates. Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?

PUBLIC SUICIDE
I can never figure out why somebody didn’t stop that monk from burning himself alive. If he were on a window ledge about to jump, there would have been a team of negotiators saying, “Don’t do it!”

Grisly self-immolation from Mondo Cane

Well he’s gone and so has the Flip camera – incinerated alive by Cisco. Alive? Yes, it’s the #1 best selling camcorder on Amazon – and they killed it.

Cisco bought Flip for $590 million and on day two of NAB – lit its funeral pyre. Their only serious competitor, GoPro, has a huge exhibition stand with a new 3D case and editing software.R.I.P Flip – gone but not forgotten

David Pogue in his NY Times obit says that the Flip guys were just about to release FlipLive:

That is, when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the entire world can see what you’re filming. You can post a link to Twitter or Facebook, or send an e-mail link to friends. Anyone who clicks the link can see what you’re seeing, in real time—thousands of people at once. Think how amazing that would be.
Why time the announcement to coincide with NAB? Why didn’t somebody stop them? Save the monk, save the Flip! I want FlipLive!

KISS OF LIFE
NAB is full of very worthwhile products that seem to need a sun tanned Aussie blonde to go down on them.

When I met Martine Bianco last year she had a pre-prod. Aaton Penelope Delta – wonderful ergonomics, with picture quality claimed to be better than the Arri.

This year I expected to see a production model. But no… “Later this year…”  Sad.

Martine Bianco, Exec. VP of Aäton with her pre-production Penelope Delta.

And what’s become of RED’s  Scarlet?

She was announced in early 2008. A no show in 2009, nothing in 2010 and here we are in 2011 and still zilch. Assuming design work in 2007, that’s about five years been and gone. The latest blow is the Japanese tsunami delaying RED’s supply chain.

The man in the black hat tattoos the T-shirt design while a pre-prod. Scarlet looks on.

Both Scarlet and Penelope urgently need mouth to mouth resuscitation. Maybe the lads in Thunder from Down Under can help.

HUMAN VIVISECTION
Michael Horton and Dan Bérubé are two of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet. In case you’ve been under a rock, they run SuperMeet, nowadays a collection of Final Cut Pro User Groups from Boston, Beijing and Beyond.

Seen here talking on YouTube – later suffered Apple mutism.

“Hello Everybody, I’m Michael Horton – and I’m Dan Bérubé – It’s our own 10^th birthday – and if you can’t make it, we are going to live stream it – SORRY GUYS, THAT’S OFF – we’re thrilled to have back with us Mark Hamaker (Autodesk Smoke) is going to be talking about  taking your workflow into the third dimension – OH NO HE ISN’T – we’ve got filmmaker Kevin Smith on behalf of Avid NOPE HE’S GONE TOO

There’s How shooting with the Canon 5DmkII made me fall in love with filming again – Philip Bloom” NAH THAT’S CHOPPED – and How Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve can Change Your Color Correction Practice with Alexis Van Hurkman THAT’S OFF – The second half will be all about the world of Final Cut Studio” NO WAY – NEED I GO ON?

Getting the chop, Mondo Cane style1962

GONE, BABY, GONE… all axed by Apple.

Nice guys Horton & Bérubé are sworn to silence. Come the night, they are not even on the opening stage.

The forums are outraged – words like “bully” and “arrogant” and “hijacked” are thrown around. Video facility owner, Greg Huson demands (and gets) a refund. His forum comment: “I think it’s a dick move on the part of Apple.”

Forum wag, Bob Zelin predicts: “Apple is buying Avid and Adobe and will discontinue Media Composer and Premier and FCP and we’ll all be forced to use iMoviePro.”

From Len Feldman’s thoughtful blog: You may ask why Apple didn’t just schedule its own event, which it could have completely controlled. The problem is that Apple isn’t an exhibitor at NAB, and many conferences (most likely including NAB) have contracts with the hotels that house attendees that prohibit them from making space available for events run by non-exhibitors. Since just about every hotel of any size is offering space through NAB’s housing office, that would make them unable to host an Apple event. On the other hand, the SuperMeet organizers are also exhibitors, so they can do whatever they want with their event.

But there’s another reason that Apple did this – it’s very simple: because they can.

WAITING FOR NABOT

Mondo Cane 1962 – Cargo Cult natives waiting, waiting…

Mondo Cane ends with the forlorn “Cargo Cult” New Guinea natives waiting for their gods to land a plane.  Could be the audience at the NAB SuperMeet 2011 waiting for that special guest from Apple.

Mondo NAB 2011 – SuperMeet natives, waiting, waiting…

From Wikipedia: the term “cargo cult” is invoked as an English language idiom to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance.

Isn’t that just like NAB?

LONDON 1975 I get a phone call from my favorite conference client, Herb Kanzell.

“Stefan, got a little job for you. My new client, Redifon, makes flight simulators to train pilots. They need a film. I said you could do something for around £1,000. Give them a call.”

The great thing about Herb is that he only wants to do the conference. I am free to work with his clients directly. At the end of the day, Herb has a film to show instead of a cheesy, twin carousel presentation. It’s win/win.

I drive to visit Redifon just outside of Gatwick airport. These simulators are 5-10 million dollar babies. A £1,000 film? No way…

BUMP UP THE BUDGET I tell Paul Spence, my contact at Redifon, I’ll shoot as much as I can on film but I’ll need an outside broadcast truck to capture their closed circuit television visual system. Paul convinces his management that a more expensive film is needed and the money is found. My very first video production is part film, part video – a hybrid.

FLIGHT SIMULATOR 101 Forgetting all the computers, air conditioning and support systems, a simulator has three elements:

(1) The replica cockpit with all the working instruments

(2) a motion system giving six degrees of DOF, no, not depth of focus, degrees of freedom: heaving, swaying, surging, pitching, yawing and rolling.

(3) the view of the outside world.

Imagine this – a huge model board of the surrounding countryside, an airport and of course, a runway – the scale is 2,000:1. If it were lying flat, you could run model trains around it. But here it is flipped on its side. It’s in a track so that it can move left and right. Looking at the board through a periscope lens is a $40,000 broadcast quality television camera, a Philips LDK33.  The camera can turn, move up and down the board and closer or move away. It’s a miracle of mechanical engineering.

Inside the cockpit, the pilot flying the plane sees the landscape below and lands on the miniature runway. Projectors mounted on the cockpit project the television image onto a rear screen, which is in turn reflected by a collimating mirror.

It works well for the pilots but put a film or video camera in the cockpit and the outside view looks dark and blurry. I sit through a briefing being told, “It can’t be done, just record the camera output.”

I come up with the crazy concept of keying the projected scene into the cockpit windows. “I’ll paint them blue.” Horror. You’ve got to remember; this is 1975, over 35 years ago. Chromakey, what’s chromakey? Paul, just trust me.

TRILION I find a television facilities company, Trilion. They have an outside broadcast truck used for concerts and sporting events (and later that same year, to shoot Bohemian Rhapsody for Queen). And yes, they can bring along an Ultimatte chromakey “black” box. They will record both the camera signal and the composite key onto huge Ampex 2” quad recorders.

Redifon aren’t happy about my painting their simulator windows blue (I wonder why), so Tricia cuts up cardboard. We buy a gallon of Rosco Chromakey Blue paint, enough for 300 sq. ft. When she’s finished with the cards, she paints our kitchen, bathroom and furniture… chromakey blue. My that’s a purrty color.

On the big day, she tapes the blue cards onto the glass and I give the pilot a small TV monitor. It’s on his lap; so he has to look down to see the outside world. Poor man, I’m behind him shouting, “Look up, pretend to look through the windows.”

We do take-offs and landings and an AWACsi in-flight  re-fueling sequence.  The pilot has to fly under a refueling plane and maneuver the boom into the nose of his aircraft; the plane and boom are articulated models.  There’s audio intercom between our pilot and the technician flying the refueling model, “25 feet, stable, forward 10, slow down, forward 5, go down, stay right there, contact!” Hard to believe this isn’t the real thing.

Shoot over, I go to Trilion’s Soho offices to edit out the best takes and have them transferred to 16mm film. It’s a nightmare. There’s no computer editing, not even control track editing – well if there is, it doesn’t work. We’re not really editing, just dubbing good takes, tape to tape.

“Barry, on the count of 10. We’ll roll on 7. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 CUT. Got it?” “Nope, they didn’t lock up.” “Try again, roll on 7.” “10-9-8-7 …” So this is video editing. I don’t want to know. Lemme outa here.

NOVOVIEW Redifon has bought into a Utah computer graphics company, Evans & Sutherland. I’m sent to Salt Lake City to shoot their revolutionary NOVOVIEW visual system. Dutch airline KLM has bought the first. No model board, no flying camera – it’s all in a computer memory. It’s now possible to create facsimile airports without building a physical model. La Guardia is the first.

E&S is in abandoned military barracks within the university campus. Not the expected setting for a state-of-the-art computer graphics company – the company that would supply the graphic systems for the first Tron movie in 1982. Their simulation division is run by Rod Rougelot and Bob Schumacker. I spend three days with them. I’m told that an LA video company, Compact Video, has tried to shoot NOVOVIEW; a failure.

So what’s different? First – it isn’t raster scan television. It’s not even television. It’s a computer randomly firing off a stream of electrons to a beam penetration cathode ray tube. The tube has layers of colored phosphors. Fast electrons light up green, slower ones light up red, in between is orange and yellow. Don’t ask me how they create grey – but they do. The picture is nighttime only, with 6,000 pin-sharp light points.

But it’s really dark, especially the runway markings. Compact Video didn’t have a chance.

MY SECRET SHOOT Fortunately I have modified my 16mm Éclair ACL camera to run at speeds from 4 to 50 frames a second. I make friends with a pilot and explain that I’m going to be shooting film at 4 frames a second – that’s means the plane has to fly six times slower to look normal when projected at 24 fps. A routine landing is going to take half an hour to shoot. I want a real landing with some movement on the wings and repositioning. It’s tricky to fly in slow motion. Harry, my pilot is great.

We spend all night doing take offs and landings. Harry promises never to tell my 4 fps secret. There was nothing on my exposure meter. I have no idea if it’s going to work.

I’m shooting reversal Ektachrome film, 7242 rated at125. At 4 fps I have three more exposure stops, effectively, 1,000 ASA. I fly to New York and get the film forced processed another stop = 2,000 ASA.  My worry is that I have over exposed. No, I’m in luck, it’s perfect. I fly back to Salt Lake City and show my film to rounds of applause. You’d think I’d just made Jaws.

REPEAT VISITS I forget how many times Paul sends me to Salt Lake City. E&S is now creating 3D landscapes using conventional raster television. The computer can feed different angles of the 3D view to different projectors – three projectors give a 180 degree wrap around view. 

Sometimes, I go from SLC to LAX and spend a day at Compact Video. There I meet the founder, Bob Seidenglanz. Then off to Pacific Video for lunch with Randy Blim, who went onto develop  24p HD technology and win an Emmy. Finally I spend time with Fred and Linda Rheinstein at the Post Group. Bob, Randy and Fred inspire me, they’re my role models. I’m all pumped up and ready to get into video.

Compact Video in Burbank is my favorite. The clients are in a redwood paneled room, there’s a sliding door to the machine room. Big sofas, coffee table and huge chairs for the editor and director – plus a 24 hour kitchen. The editing is computer controlled; it looks great and it works. I want one!

I’M BACK HOME IN LONDON Yep, there’s no computer editing here, just technicians in a noisy machine room calling out numbers. 10-9-8-7 roll… Unbelievable!

In September 1976, I take a deep breath, and buy three Ampex VPR1 machines for Molinare, my audio studio. Our showreel is a rip-off of Compact Video’s, almost word for word.

Molinare has the first 1″ VTRs and the only CMX editing in London. In ’79 we take delivery of a four-channel  digital effects unit, SqueeZoom.

Now, it isn’t a Trilion truck shooting at Redifon, I am there with my own OB van, an Ikegami HL79 and an Ampex VPR2B. We call it, the MoliMobile.

The company grows and grows and in come investment bankers, non-exec. directors, management consultants and accountants, Arthur Andersen. The day I buy a $200,000 Ampex ADO – is the day they throw me out.

I’m at home again. No more 100+ employees, just the two of us. I have still have my own personal 16mm cameras. The phone rings. It’s my favorite conference client, Herb Kanzell.

“Stefan, I’ve got a little job for you, a film for Dulux Paints. I said you could do something for around £10,000.”

“£10,000…. a film, not a video! Thanks Herb.”

I’m singing:  get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged!

WATCH MY FLIGHT SIMULATOR VIDEO All the early flight simulation shots in this E&S video are mine, both film and video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qScxfDcF53w

What you see is just the tip of the iceberg. The Grass Valley 300 vision switcher with Mark II DVE at the far end is really just a remote control panel. The rack of electronics is elsewhere in air conditioned luxury. Ditto the CMX340 editing electronics — plus VTRs of all shapes and sizes, in another room on another floor.

Here’s a shot in the same room taken from behind the vision switcher. Same edit suite but with dressed with people. I’m there at the back sitting crossed legged on the expensive Roche Bobois sofa wondering if it will ever pay for itself.

Center frame is editor, Phil Stone, programming the GVG switcher, which is fired off by the CMX 340 editor – its panel is the small keyboard on far left, near the pretend client. Out of sight are 20 VTRs of all shapes and sizes, all route-able to this or any other edit suite.

Making the whole thing work are racks and racks of electronics on the next floor up plus a collection of VTRs, tape ops. and engineers. All on the scrap heap now, the hardware – not the people.

But let’s go back to the color photo. Look at the top left hand corner. See the lights in the ceiling? Here’s a blow up – I’m sorry the print is old and scratched. The suite’s lighting was designed and built by my own precision engineer, Bill Curtis,

Two 5000°K daylight fluorescent Curtis fittings are fixed to the lighting track.

Bill made at least 20 of these light fittings for our editing suites, telecine rooms and outside broadcast trucks. The shaft of light is the correct daylight color temperature, doesn’t hit the monitors or shine in people’s eyes. Besides the chairs, the coffee flask and mugs, this light the only item in the color photo that’s still any use today.

My 1980 Molinare video on YouTube has several Curtis lights in it.

RIG OF THE DAY
Every morning, I go to my favorite Web pages. Now, this may seem like a diversion, but, trust me, it’s not.

I always wind up at Final Cutters and go to “Rig of The Day.” A rig is what we used to call an edit suite. Good, “rig” is much better. Edit “suite” always sounded pretentious.

Rig of the Day is an inspired idea from Martin Baker, the “brains” behind the site and their head company, Digital Heaven. According to Martin, the term “rig” is all Mark Raudonis’s fault. Wordsmith Mark has a day job at Bunim-Murray Productions, which makes reality shows.

EDITING LIBERATED
I love Rig of The Day. Thank you Martin. It’s living proof you don’t need to spend big bucks to edit video. Here’s my 2008 submission, as published here.

I’m in Sydney, Australia, editing in HD ProRes for my wine film. To the right of the photo is an OWC box with 2 x 1 TB drives connected to a MacBook Pro via a Sonnet SATA card thingy.

Compare my 2008 HiDef rig with my million dollar 1982 Standard Def rig. It’s a joke isn’t it? On the 2008 MacBook I can do digital effects and color grading. I could never do that way back then.

So I lurk on Rig of the Day to see what other filmmakers are doing. Everyone has a different way of working, there’s some crazy stuff going on.

Editing with a table lamp shining in your eyes? Come on. Can anyone work like that?

A Home Depot clamp light shining right onto the screens with, once again, the wrong color temperature. The monitors are blue. Why? Read on…

It looks cozy but just ain’t right. Look at those lights. See how the three screens are blue. That’s telling you that the room is lit with household tungsten light. Those all important monitors are daylight color temperature not artificial. Your overhead rig light should be daylight to match. The camera does not lie. You want colorless grey screens, not blue.

NEED LIGHT, NEED BILL
Now it’s time to build my own edit suite in a spare room. I need a Bill Curtis type light. Tough. He’s retired and lives the UK. I am here in the States.

I fool around and make one myself. Here’s how. It won’t look the same as Bill’s, he’d never dream of using Velcro; we had some left over from my pole camera jib project.

Fluorescent tube (center photo): Philips F15T8/NATURAL SUNLIGHT 18″ (46 cm) 15-watt 5000°K T8. I bought mine at Home Depot @ $7.97

Light Fixture (in photo – far right): GE Fluorescent Light Fixture 18″ Basic standard plastic T8 (comes with an unwanted warm white tube) Home Depot @ $9.77

Egg crate plastic diffuser: white louver Home Depot 2′ x 4′ @ $11.87

Side panels (sprayed black – left in photo): two aluminum sheets 6″x 24″, .025″ thickness mill finish by Steelworks Boltmaster – mine cost $9.47 each from Jackson’s, a local hardware shop — but easy to find on-line.

Velcro Sticky-Back tape Industrial Strength. Buy from Joann Fabric either in store or on-line @ $3.29

Black Spray Paint @ $5.96

CONSTRUCTION INSTRUCTIONS
Starting with the GE light fitting: open it up and pull out the rocker switch. You will need to cut the switch wires. I drilled two holes at the top and fed in new power wires on either side. Join it all up and check out.

Spray the aluminum sheets black, both sides. Too easy. So here’s the hard bit.

Cut a 2′ by 3 squares deep strip from the sheet of white plastic egg crate. Tricia used her garden secateurs… snip, snip, snip. She took the rough nibs off with her Dremel.

Cut strips from your Velcro rolls.

Put the strips on to both sides of the GE light fitting. Stick one side down. Attach the matching strip, sticky side up. Tear off the backing ready for the aluminum plate.

Velcro strips on the grid. Ease the final plate down. Yeah! All done. Hang it up.

UP AND WORKING

I hate flash photography but with natural ambient room lighting you can’t see the fitting. My ceiling is draped with Auralex acoustic foam from Markertek. It really cuts down reverb. and lets me record studio quality voice overs. We hung the foam with strong twine. To add the rig light, we slid in a black wood batten with two cup hooks under the twine.

No camera flash, just my homemade rig light plus a little daylight from a window on the right. See how my edit bench is lit but the light misses the monitors. Want it brighter? Just drop the rig light lower.

My FinalCut Pro monitors are grey, not blue. My room lighting is perfect. Gloat.

Besides the overhead task light and natural daylight from the window on the right, I have OttLight High Definition Clip-On lamps (model 8298291). List price is $79.99, but Joann regularly has 40% off, making them $47.99 each. Ottlights are the same color temperature as your new rig light. Lash out and get two. I did.

This is a Tungsten-Free Zone. It’s all 100% full-spectrum daylight.

Looks so good, I’d better get back to work.

“Stefan, we’re getting a Sony PMW-350 – you can use it anytime. No charge.”

“Thanks, George, that’s really generous [as the 350 is a whopping $22K] but I have my own new camera: The Flip UltraHD. It was $150 from Amazon.”

While the rest of the world is drooling over the latest fare from RED, Sony, Panasonic, the new HD-capable DSLRs, I’m in love my $150 widescreen HD gizmo. I call her Flipa.

The good thing is I’m using her professionally; I’ll get my return of investment back on day one, which just happens to be yesterday.

I can’t wait to try out my Flipa. I buy her a collection of clamps from Steve Cardellini, who lives down the road in Corte Madera, and some lengths of 5/8” aluminum tubing from the local hardware store. From B&H Photo, I mail order a Bogen Manfrotto Mini Ball Head type 494 at $55.00.

Finally, in this mad batch of spending, a Kenko magnetic 0.45X wide-angle lens, costing all of $24.99. The little Kenko comes with a separate ring, which has a peel off adhesive backing. You stick the ring on to the Flip around its lens and hey, presto, magnetism holds the attachment in place. Magic!

With the wide-angle on, there’s some vignetting at the edges. A 7% enlargement in post will fix. Besides doubling your shooting angle, the wide angle takes away a lot of the camera vibration. If there’s one thing wrong with the Flip, it’s the camera shake you get when hand holding.

I’m curious to see if the magnetic wide-angle lens will stay put. I clamp the camera on to our Ford utility’s front grill, pop on the WA lens and drive from the Presidio across the Golden Gate Bridge (at 45mph), up through the Rainbow Tunnel (60mph), past Sausalito and pull over at the Strawberry shopping center, that’s eight bumpy miles and a lot of wind on the bridge.

I get out expecting to see my Flipa without her WA lens. Surprise! It’s still there and the camera is happily shooting away. In fact there’s 1 hour 48 minutes left in her internal 8 GB memory. The results.
AFTERNOON DELIGHT
How about low light?

The next weekend, my younger son Felix, takes me to lunch at Rancho Nicasio. It’s a terrific restaurant-bar tucked away in the Marin hills – not far from Skywalker Ranch. Naturally, I take my new baby, Flipa. After a very late lunch, just as we’re leaving, a band arrives and starts setting up. I didn’t know they were coming. We’ll stay.

“Hey I’ve got a new camera. Can I shoot something?”

“Sure, I’m Lorin, send me a copy.”

“No problem, I’ll email it to you tonight. Give me a business card.”

I have the WA on shooting Lorin. “Looks too wide,” I think – so, right in the middle of the shot, I simply pull the Kenko wide angle off. Zap! I’m in close. Pop the lens in my pocket.

The Bueno Brothers – 0.45 wide angle above, normal lens below.

You can see the results here. The lens change is about a minute in.

The FlipShare software is brilliant. I click the email icon, drag in the clips, add Lorin’s address, click “SHARE.” Up goes the movie to some FlipShare server in the sky. After a few minutes both Lorin and I get a URL link to a “private” movie. It’s fast and free. He’s thrilled and shares the link with other band members.

BACK TO BUSINESS
This month’s job is for the SFGHF – The San Francisco General Hospital Foundation. Try making a lower third out of that. They’re a non-profit that raises money for the hospital. If you have a motorcycle, bike or car accident in San Francisco, chances are the ambulance will take you to SF General Hospital because it has the only Level 1 Trauma Center in the city.

We interview SFGH former patients. A biker: “They saved my life.” A cyclist: “I would have died.” Now we need to show a stylized accident before each interview. My direct client is John Catchings.

“John, I want to shoot the B roll with a Flip UltraHD camera.”

I do a demo. Within minutes he’s on the Internet buying one for himself. And so did the goofy lady down the road who came over for a cuppa tea. And so does Burton, aged 83. And so does my musician friend, Stephen – I’d better stop… but wait there’s more – add to the list, our own David Williams, esteemed editor of this very Web site, he’s got a Flip too.

TIME TO FLIP!
I volunteer my son, William. The first accident happened on Clipper Street. We drive there. Yikes! It’s a roller coaster ride straight down. I clamp the Flip to his handle bars, add the wide angle and press THE BIG RED BUTTON.

“Be careful, William!” Too late; he’s halfway down the hill.

He walks back pushing the bike. Puff, puff, puff. Now a shot looking at the wheel. “Bye William!”

Next the pedals… press da button. He’s off again:

He’s walking very slowly up the hill, perspiration dripping from his forehead. Sitting on the sidewalk, “I’m OK, Dad. I need the exercise.”

Time for the tricky shot from behind the bike. “Last one, William. I promise.” I fit an outrigger bar and hang the Flip upside down:

Easy to make it right side up in post:

Puff, puff, puff. He’s back again. We both sit down and check out the shots.

Hmmm… I lied. Maybe just one more, this time with the Sony V1 on telephoto looking up the slope. I find a good spot way down and wave like mad. He can’t see me; I’m too far away. I knew I should have brought my cell. Eventually he sees me and pushes off. Down, down, down. Terrific! It’s Bullitt with Steve McQueen on a bike. Where’s that pesky Volkswagen?

GET YOUR MOTOR RUNNIN’
Next, to shoot a motorcycle. None of my sons or friends ride. John emails me the address of a bike shop in San Francisco. I’m about to phone them. I imagine the call: “Hello, I’m making a video for SF General Hospital. We’ve just interviewed a rider who hit a stationary car on the freeway. I want to re-act the accident. I wonder if you could ….” CLICK!

Nope. I’ll go in myself. A salesman comes over. I make my speech. “Hi, I’m making …” Before I finish, the salesman says, “I’ll do that!” his name is Will, same as my son.

Out of nowhere, the manager appears.

“No, I’m not happy about Will helping you. We don’t want people to think that motorbikes are unsafe.”

“I don’t blame you. If I were manager here, I’d say the same. But consider this: you and your clients all ride bikes. If, God forbid, there were an accident, where would they take you?”

“SF General, it has the only Level 1 Trauma Center in San Francisco.”

“You said it and you’re right. This video is to raise money for that very same Trauma Center. In fact, they are building a new one (now I’m quoting from John’s script) with six trauma rooms and two CAT scanners right next to … this is your way of helping the hospital.”

I made the sale – Will can do the shoot!

YEAH DARLIN’ GO MAKE IT HAPPEN
Will’s only free day is Monday and it’s raining. In fact it’s rained every day this month. He’s unhappy. Me too. I don’t want my camera to get wet. The rain stops. “OK, let’s try one where I follow you with the camera clamped to the front of my car.” Off we go, driving towards the GG Bridge. And then on cue, the rain starts. We don’t cross the bridge but turn right into Crissy Fields, part of the Presidio. The camera is wet but still working. The lens is covered with water; the shot is useless.

We are about to call it a day – and guess what? The rain stops. This time I mount the Flip on the bike. “Will, are you sure it’s safe?” “It’s fine. I’m good to go.”

Will does the approach to the bridge — where the real accident happened — and circles back to meet me. It looks great. But oh dear, the wide angle has fallen off. Bang goes $25.

I’ve bought a Fotopro Action Mount to fit the Flip on top of his helmet. That’s what it says in the ad. Attaches easily to bike and skateboarding helmets. All you do is push the Velcro straps through the slots in the helmet. No way. A motorcycle helmet has no slots!

What to do? I know I’ll tie the Velcro straps around Will’s neck.

“Ouch. It tickles.”

He’s back again. I untie the still running camera. Wow, even upside down, it’s terrific and in HD1280 x 720 at 30p. We’re both excited.

One more. Let’s re-do the shot that was spoiled by rain. I re-fix the camera to my Ford Pickup. We do the circuit again. Without the wide angle, I’m closer. I can see the Flip viewfinder from my driver’s seat. Got to drive carefully. Will is changing lanes. I can’t let anyone cut in between us. The car behind doesn’t understand and toots me. I hate it when that happens. “Can’t you see I’m shooting a high def. film?”

We got the shot. You can rain now. And it does. We just made it.

A FLIP IS NOT A TOY, NO, MY BOY, NOT A TOY
Back at base, using FlipShare software, I transfer the movies to hard disc. The camera’s USB connector “flips” out but you’d be crazy to plug it directly into your precious computer. Use a USB female to male extender cable, they cost practically nothing and will save that awful moment when the Flip camera levers the computer’s USB slot wide open.

If you have a Mac, the first that happens is that iPhoto opens. (Use me, use me!) No way. Copy the FlipShare software from the camera to the computer and wait a while. Eventually the tardy FlipShare program will open. It’s nowhere near as user friendly as iPhoto but for Flip video it’s miles better. But, it needs a better user interface.

There are important messages in WIDGY UNREADABLE 4 POINT way down bottom left. See them? No you don’t. Dead easy to miss.

My boffin friend Adam Wilt tells me that:
“the Flip data rate is 8.9 Mbps, or ~1.1 MB/sec in MPEG-4 AVC while 720p HDV is 19 Mbps or 2.4 MB/sec. The codecs are very different. MPEG-4 AVC is roughly twice as efficient as MPEG-2 (which is what HDV uses), so a 1.1 MB 720p Flip image is roughly what you might expect compared to the 2.4 MB/sec 720p HDV image.”

In other words, it looks pretty damn good. To prove it, I connect the Flip using a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable to my professional Sony HD monitor and examine the quality of a rock steady, tripoded shot. Looks great! BTW, Flip only plays back through its mini-HDMI slot, don’t expect to use that output during record.

With your precious files on your hard disc and you’d think you could import them to Final Cut Pro and start editing. I wish! No; they’re MPEG-4 files. Great for viewing but impossible to edit. I use Square 5’s MPEG Streamclip to make DV files. Find your files in FlipShare Data and knock them off in Streamclip, one by one. Yawn. Not the fastest but it works. You can do other things (like sleep) while it makes FCP compatible files.

Churlish to complain about my darling Flipa, but here goes:
• The lens has no protection, gets finger prints all over
• The rolling shutter makes wobbly, Jell-O shots on movement (check out my GG Bridge movie on YouTube, see the bridge wobble)
• The battery charge indicator is a fake, it goes back to square one even after the battery is fully charged.
• And, finally, for the next model, please add an amazing image-stabilization system. Hand holding a Flip is a ^@>+$!%&*) thing to do!

One of my favorites is from a Russian film, The Cranes Are Flying. It’s a handheld shot that starts inside a bus, goes outside into the crowd, then flies sky-high, looking down on a convoy of tanks (the cameraman went from walking to riding a crane).

The Cranes Are Flying, 1957 — inside bus, leave bus, push through crowd, fly over tanks — all one shot.

In the world of documentaries, Thomas Riedelsheimer’s Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time makes good use of a lightweight crane. I can’t remember seeing a documentary with such great up-and-over crane shots. I leave the cinema saying, “Got to have a crane, got to have a crane.”

Rivers and Tides, 2001 — camera starts low, the camera goes up high — looking straight down.

I see the “making-of” and lo … there’s some footage of his crane. It’s a German-built unit from ABC Products. Made out of titanium aluminum alloy with a maximum lift of 14′, weight 13 lb., breaks down to 5.4′ lengths. No one sells them in the U.S. I e-mail ABC. They don’t answer.

So, what’s available locally?

Commercially Available Cranes
I search the ads for off-the-shelf cranes. The Losmandy Porta-Jib? Nope — weighs 45 lb. The Kessler Crane is cheaper and lighter. For $964.95 you get a 12′ reach. Want to pan and tilt with joysticks? Add $1,000. Weight is 30 lb., more than twice the weight of the 2′-longer German model.

I can hardly take out the garbage cans on Sunday night. How could I manage a 30 lb. crane?

I e-mail Germany again. Zilch.

Cambo V40 crane on location. The cameraman has a safety rope around his belt in case it all falls over

A little lighter is the Dutch-made Cambo V40, available from U.S. agent Calumet. With motorized pan and tilt, it’s $15,000.

What’s On The Web?
I turn to Google. Type in “homemade cranes.” Yikes, there are pages and pages of home-built rigs. Everyone’s doing it.

Here's one of the best sites for do-it-yourself cranes:

http://homebuiltstabilizers.com/greyjibsncranes.htm

Almost every DIY crane is made from long lengths of chunky aluminum. Fine for tossing into the back of the pickup, but imagine the scene at the Oakland International Airport.
For me, it’s got to be under 5 lb. and no longer than 3′ collapsed.

Is That A Camera On Your Pole? (Or Are You Just Pleased To See Me?)
I’m surfing the Web and I see the amazing video at http://www.polecam.com/in-action/showreel.html

Arctic Polecam: Steffan Hewitt, designer of the Polecam, shoots a walrus colony for National Geographic's Arctic Tale.

That settles it. I want a Polecam. They’re made in the U.K. Price, £15,000. I’d buy one if I had $30,000 spare, I really would.

What to do? Looks simple enough to build something similar. Back to Google — type in “carbon fiber tubing.”

I e-mail Carbon Fiber Tube Shop: “Hi, I want to buy 20′ of tubing.”

“Sure, we can fabricate that for you.”

“You mean you’ve got make it up specially?”

“Tell me the outer dimension, the inner dimension and how you will connect them together.”

Finally we settle on eight 30″ tubes with a 2.120″ outer diameter and a 2″ inner diameter. Plus a length of 1.995″ OD tubing to chop up into 7″ pieces and use as an inner ferrule connector.

Three weeks later, UPS delivers. I lift out eight 33.5″ lengths of CF tubing. Get out the Alveston kitchen scales: 20′ weighs just 4 lb.!

20 ft. of carbon fiber tubes in my 3 ft. Kata bag.

E-mail to supplier: “Any suggestions for connecting the tubes?”

“Drill holes for pins and a run a cable down the center of the assembly fixed at both ends with a tensioning device.”

Huh? He wants me to drill holes through his beautiful tubes? There must be a better way.

I wake up at 3 a.m. Velcro! I’ll use Velcro strips.

Next day, we order 1″ and 2″ rolls from www.joann.com, a simple and elegant solution.

Tube connection with Velcro.

Test Shoot
The Velcro joint is perfect. Now to try it out. We drive to a vineyard in Petaluma. I’ve no way to fix the pole to the tripod. Gaffer’s tape to the rescue. I screw my camera to a short rod. Push the rod down the tube and jam it with a kitchen paper towel. The camera is upside down. Easy to correct in post.

I try to do what the Polecam people do. They have the monitor and the joystick mounted on the tube. But here in sunny California it’s almost impossible to see the monitor. Not only that, when I swing the pole, I can’t help moving the joysticks. A better solution seems to be for one person to be boom swinger, while the other controls the camera’s pan and tilt. I take the joysticks into the shade of the Ford’s cabin.

We take turns. Tricia’s pole dances are better than mine. I stay inside with the joysticks and monitor, directing, “Go high, drop it down, slowly, stop, keep it steady.” She puts up with a lot.

Our first shoot. No pan and tilt. Gaffer's tape connects tube to tripod, paper towel secures camera to pole.

The test video looks terrific. More than a test, it’s useable.

Now to stage two: adding a servo-controlled pan-and-tilt head.

ServoCity
Here’s the problem: I can either buy an assembled pan-and-tilt unit from www.servocity.com or buy individual gears and servos and muddle through. I’m busy shooting a kidney transplant video for the UCSF Medical Center. I buy the expensive ServoCity head.

ServoCity's pan and tilt head arrives. Get out the kitchen scales. Tips the scales at less than 4 lb

Oh dear, lift your fingers off the joystick — Zap! — it bounces back to the center position, taking the pan head and camera with it. Tricia takes the springs out of both joysticks. But even now, the slightest touch jerks the servos.

I e-mail tech@servocity.com for a lower gear ratio. No reply. Phone: “Office hours are 9 to 4 Monday to Thursday.” Curse. It’s Friday. Can I leave a message? Of course not. E-mail again. No reply.

Next week, I phone again. Success. I speak to Tom. He’s great, except he sends me the wrong gear. Phone again. Speak to Kyle. He says I have the wrong gear. As if I didn’t know. Speak to Tom. He’s sorry. New gear on the way free of charge. No, they charge me. Oh dear, phone Tom. Damn, it’s Friday. Whaaaa!

First, Find Ron
If you’re going to build your own boom, you’d better find a precision engineer named Ron.

Ron installs the new gear. He’s also going to make an aluminum fitting to mount the tube onto my tripod and a gizmo to hang the pan-and-tilt unit. Ron’s so good (he also makes gadgets for Pixar) that he has very little time. I drive there once a week. “Hi Ron. How’s it going?” A month passes. Two months. It’s tough, I’m suffering severe pole withdrawal.

“Sorry, Ron, I’ll have to take the job away.”

“I don’t blame you, but leave it here, come back next Friday. It will be finished. I promise.”

And it was.

Moment Of Truth
I scurry home. It’s been three months since the tubes arrived. Tripod up. Ron’s new tripod connector clicks a tube into place. Add poles and secure with Velcro. Slide on the pan-and-tilt head.

Ron's connector.

To balance, Tricia adds sandbag counter-weights. Manfrotto Super Clamps stop them from sliding off. Run the six servo wires inside the CF tubing. Plug connectors into the ServoCity joystick. The tension mounts. This is it. SWITCH ON!

The pan head does three fast rotates — swish, swish, swish! All six wires snap. Sheeeet!!!

Leap into the car and see my friend Mars, who works in the Marin RC Model Shop. I dump the lifeless metal on the counter. “Look, Mars, all six wires are broken.”

“Not a problem, you already have Hitec servos, all you need is a Hitec transmitter and a couple of receivers. $220 for the transmitter — plus two receivers at $36 and a couple of rechargeable NiMH batteries at $25. Not a big deal.”

It isn’t. Mars wires it up. Martian magic! The radio control works!

Roman: Receivers and batteries mounted on the frame. Left balancing weights on left arm. Video out to transmitter.

Now to transmit the camera signal back to my monitor. Supercircuits.com has a 2.4 GHz wireless video link for just $88.99. Nah, at that price, it can’t be any good. Why, the Lectrosonics SM audio-only wireless system is over $3,000.

Surprise! The SuperCircuits video link is not only cheap, it delivers a clean, razor-sharp image.

Hitec joysticks and monitor inside Ford cab: Red light, yep, we're recording. 131 minutes left on the 16GB video card. Video link receiver is behind joysticks.

Red light, yep, we’re recording, with 131 minutes left on the 16GB card. Video link receiver is behind joysticks.

It’s a standard-def picture in the monitor, but the camera is shooting true HD. The link shows me that the camera is up and running and how much time is left in both SDHC card and battery.

Look ma, no wires!

Fine-Tuning
Today I discover that I can’t pan a camera that’s fixed to a 60-degree pole. Do it and I get a crazy angle. Ron says I need to hang the camera from a ball-leveling thingy.

B&H Photo has a Bogen double-ball mount. Only $35, plus Ron’s time to mount it. A B&H special order … it takes six e-mails and over a month to arrive. I’m beginning to think $30,000 for a real Polecam might be a bargain.

The head needs balancing. I’m back with Ron making sure that the center of gravity is spot on. I’ve placed spirit levels on both sides and fine-tuned the balance with stick-on lead weights.

Ford utility and pole above netting: Tricia's in charge of Roman. I pan and tilt Susie. She loves her Raynox DCR-FE180PRO wide-angle lens.

Frame grab from camera. Here's the shot. Running out the bird netting at the vineyard

Out And About
Once erected, a tripod with a 20′ pole is almost impossible to reposition. The solution is to fix the tripod to a wooden platform in our pickup. The legs go into metal rings screwed to the wood. Five bungees hold the tripod down and laterally. Not for freeway driving but just the trick once on location. We keep the counterweight end long and operate the pole from terra firma.

Meet Roman
Roman, now with full radio control and wireless monitoring, our pride and joy. Named in honor of Roman Pole-anski. Maximum lift (on tripod, in truck) 25′; weight with RC head, 8 lb.; breaks down to 33.5″ lengths.

Pole jibs are for lightweight cameras, that’s a given.

At just 1 lb., my little Susie (a Samsung SC-HMX20C) is the perfect mate for Roman. Don’t let her $661 (Amazon) price fool you. Stunning HD quality that intercuts with my Sony V1U. Roman also accepts the Sony, but it’s four times heavier. Heavy camera equals more counterweight or less reach.

The Acid Test: Our First Paying Job
It’s a decent-sized-budget video about sulfate of potash (SOP in the business). Here we are in Chico, California, where the almond trees are fertilized with … guess what? While I’m shooting interviews, Tricia sets up Roman and Susie in 10 minutes flat. I come back, switch on the servos, power up the video link and roll camera.

Almond farmers: My own up-and-over shot — inside almond tree, up and over, jib across the dirt track and farmers. Go Roman.

Hey, it’s all working. Tricia’s behind the tripod, controlling pole movements. I’m inside the cab, fingers on the joysticks. “Camera up. Slowly. That’s the height. Swing right. Cue the farmers. Keep going. Slowly. Keep moving right. Cut. We got it!”

The shot’s spectacular. My client is delirious.

The Payoff
Excluding the tripod and camera, Roman, complete with full RC, Mars’ wiring and Ron’s engineering, cost under $3K: a tenth of what I might have paid for the real McCoy.

Roman and Susie, my two new babies, make a great team. We now take them on every shoot and charge extra.

A MacBook running iChat sits on boxes in front of the victim, so she sees Burton, who is 2,000 miles away, and Burton can see her.

Flying tonight to Edmonton, Canada. Will shoot a laboratory and do the interviews greenscreen-Burton not coming. Will use iChat for the interviews. Who’s Burton?

Good question.

I met Burton through a neighbor who designed hotel rooms for Burton 35 years ago. After World War II, Burton Goldberg was a real estate developer who bought huge amounts of property and turned it into hotel rooms and members-only nightclubs in the Miami area. When Burton left the hotel business, he became interested in alternative medicine. With a ton of enthusiasm, but no medical qualifications, he published 18 books on alternative medicine and started the popular Alternative Medicine magazine, which he sold in 2004. At 78, he turned to producing movies.

I created a Web site for him in-it must have been mid-2003. Put a few short “Hi, I’m Burton Goldberg” Flash 7 videos on it (www.burtongoldberg.com). Then, just before Thanksgiving 2004, he phoned. “I want you to go to Germany with me tomorrow,” he said.

“Huh? Tomorrow?”

Apparently Burton had lined up “a girl” to shoot this video about conquering cancer, but she had pulled out at the last moment (the day before) because the camera he bought for her didn’t turn up. “She’s a flake–I don’t work with flakes!” explained Burton. I was cast as the last-minute replacement.

I couldn’t do “tomorrow,” but a week and a bit worked. In my suitcase I packed clothes plus three lights (a Rifa 500-watt soft light, a 12 V Dedolight, and a mini Kino Flo), a couple of lightweight tripods, my Sachtler dolly wheels, and about 35 used DV tapes–all in one case. My carry-on bag had two Micron radio mics, a Sony PD150 (hey, this was 2004) and a PDX10, some more tapes, and batteries.

On the flight to Germany, Burton told me we were making a 10-minute DVD, so I decided to shoot 16:9 using the PDX10, which does–or did–a much better widescreen than my aging PD150.

We arrived at the cancer clinic just south of Munich and while we waited for the doctor grupen fuhrer, Burton started chatting to a lady from New York who had been given months to live by her American oncologist and was now almost cancer-free. “You’ve got to film her,” Burton insisted. So I set up the PDX10 and a couple of radio mics and shot the two of them talking for 30 minutes. Afterwards I said, “We must do the reverse-angle questions.”

It was just Burton and me–no assistant. We couldn’t remember the questions he’d asked just minutes before. Burton did a few easy “How are you feeling?” questions to a no-longer-there subject and the usual noddies and smiles. I knew it wasn’t going to work.

The next day I decided to shoot with two cameras: one on the subject (who I’ll call “the victim”) and the other on Burton. The first shoot was in a small doctor’s room barely big enough for one camera–impossible with two.

At the next shoot I had a good background (BG) behind the victim, but the BG behind Burton was just awful. I only had enough light for one person, so Burton was lit by ambient and spill. That was it. I gave up. Concentrated on just shooting all the interviews with one camera. Shot 35 hours of interviews in 5 days. Not a tape left.

What I thought was going to be a 10-minute corporate project turned out to be a 2-hour DVD. Just as well that I packed all those old, used DV tapes.

The edit
Back from Germany and in San Francisco for the edit at my place, I needed Burton’s reverse-angle questions. Making corporate films and videos is not so much an artistic endeavor as it is a search for elegant solutions. The answer to this one was to shoot Burton asking questions against a greenscreen. I found backgrounds from the B-roll I shot in Germany. You need only a single frame for a BG.

Shooting greenscreen also gave me a chance to rewrite Burton’s questions, improving on his original, rambling live versions. I used a Lastolite greenscreen and Ultimatte AdvantEdge software in Final Cut Pro 5. Despite all the rubbish on Web forums about how you can’t get good keys from DV, the results were pretty good.

During 2005 I made a couple of other DVDs with Burton, including Curing Depression, and the technique of inserting his questions in post using greenscreen worked so well it became our standard practice. Burton was so pleased with greenscreen that he decided our next video, which was about stem cells, would be shot the same way for both the interviewees and later the reverse angles. It speeds up production if you can shoot anywhere. Just give me a room that’s 12-feet long. Camera to victim: 6 feet. Victim to greenscreen: 6 feet. I use backgrounds I’ve shot myself or pay a buck a photo to download from iStockphoto.com.

Tool kit
By 2006 I’d sold the PD150 and the PDX10 was lost, stolen, or strayed. To replace them, I bought two Sony HDV cameras: an HVR-Z1 and an A1. Don’t believe the “experts” who say the Z1U looks awful in 720 x 480 standard-def DV down-converted from 1080i. The widescreen DV images are much sharper than those of the PDX10, and PD150 footage looks very sad by comparison. So I shoot 1080i but edit in DV.

The irrepressible Burton has now decided to make a big movie for THE SILVER SCREEN. He talked to a Los Angeles-based feature film director who told him the HDV format wasn’t good enough for blowup to 35mm and that it was totally impossible to get a good chroma key for the big screen. Yet another expert in my life.

So I shot an HDV test of my daughter, Cissy, in front of the greenscreen and dropped in a background using Ultimatte AdvantEdge’s default settings. I did nothing except eye-dropper the green.

Burton had been told by an expert that it was impossible to get a key from HDV.

The next day my daughter Cissy was visiting us and I put up the green-screen on our deck and shot a quick test using only sunlight.

I removed the screen and shot our view, and then composited the two using Ultimatte AdvantEdge. Note: Although the shoot was HDV, the ultimate product was not HD, so Sargent edited in NTSC DV. All stills are from DV 4:1:1 timelines.

Other chroma-key software works, but try this with dvGarage’s dvMatte Pro, Primatte, or Keylight. There’s a lot of fiddling to be done before the key works in DV. The downside of AdvantEdge is its price of $1,500 versus dvMatte Pro’s $199, while Primatte and Keylight come free with Shake. At present, AdvantEdge won’t work at all in the new Intel-based Macs.

The feature film director is now history and we are making the BIG MOVIE 100-percent HDV greenscreen. Burton, who just turned 80 last month, likes to do the interviews on iChat from his home in Tiburon, CA. All my fault–I told Burton about documentary maker Errol Morris, who invented the Interrotron so his subjects looked directly at him and the lens. Burton took the idea and ran with it.

The victim sees and hears Burton via iChat. Burton sees and hears the victim. The victim looks straight at the lens. Burton stays at home. I fly to Canada.

Burton Goldberg asking subjects questions. I tried to find a background for Burton that matched the location of the subject. All these shots of Burton were taken in my living room and were lit with a Rifa for key light and Dedo for back light.

Travel log
So here I am still stuck in the San Francisco airport waiting for my plane. Why don’t planes fly on time? I’ve been here 3 hours! I told you about my carry-on. Did I mention that if the checked luggage goes to Hawaii, I can still shoot from my carry-on? I’ve got carry-on cameras, mics, tapes, and batteries. Missing would be the lights and tripod, but I’ve made entire 1-hour TV documentaries without those. Phone directories on a table are a good camera support for an interview–use a table lamp for key light. It’s fast and easy.

The airline I’m taking restricts you to two items of checked luggage–each as heavy as 50 pounds. My greenscreen is one item. And that leaves me just one suitcase for everything else. I don’t like paying for valet parking if I can park across the road. Likewise, I don’t like paying for excess baggage. Many years ago I arrived at a rural airport in Italy. It was in the middle of nowhere, but another crew shooting Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World was waiting there. I was traveling light–just a few small camera bags, a tripod in a soft bag, and some personal luggage. The pros had lots of big metal flight cases. Guess who got on the small plane to Rome and who got left behind.

Tonight it’s just me traveling. I don’t want lots of big, heavy cases. That 50 pounds is a good limit for both the airline and me.

Over the years, I’ve bought every pro camera and lighting bag made, but they don’t work for one-man shooting. The beautifully made Petrol case for the Sony Z1 won’t fit in the overheads of the smaller jets. I know this for a fact, and you never want to part with your camera. I use a smaller camera bag and keep my babies close to me.

The $400 Petrol four-light case (they call it a bag!) weighs 30 pounds-that leaves just 20 pounds for the lights, light stands, tripods, monopod, dollies, and extension cords. Impossible.

So I use a lightweight Skyway 26-inch case–costs about $65 online and takes my 500-watt Rifa light, two dimmable 150-watt Dedos, two tripods, one monopod, three light stands, reflector, iChat speaker, Ethernet and power cables, and tonight I’ve packed wheels for the tripod. Plus a change of clothes, toothbrush, shaving cream, and so on. The secret is that it’s all packed tight. You don’t need all those fancy dividers. They just take up space. The Dedos have their own padded bag. All of this weighs 50 pounds exactly.

Tamisha and her son who was blind before receiving an umbilical stem cell injection in Tiajuana.

Tamisha's $1 iStockphoto.com background.

Time to board. Off to Canada. I’m starving but there’s no food–not even crackers. Crazy. This is a $650 ticket. I could fly to London and back for less. Why can’t they feed me? The airline needs profits. I need food.

October 2006, Edmonton. What is it about Canada? The first shoot I did here umpteen years ago, we arrived at midnight with a proper, expensive ATA Carnet. “What’s this?” asked the Canadian customs agent, who promptly put all our equipment into lockup for the night. The next day we had to pay a storage fee. One day of shooting down the drain. Welcome to Canada.

Location, location, location
So once again I arrive in Canada after midnight. “I’m here for one day, making a corporate video,” I tell the official.

“That door over there marked IMMIGRATION.”

“I don’t think you understand. I’m making a little video and will only be here for a day. Just one day,” I say.

“Tell the immigration officer over there.”

Fortunately IMMIGRATION was empty, apart from the two lady officials.

“Tell us about this video you’re shooting.”

“It’s for a video about hospital errors in the U.S.A.” (I thought that would please them.)

“Who do you work for?”

“Technically, I work for myself, but I have been commissioned by Burton Goldberg to do this shoot.”

“Do you have a camera?”

I show them the camera bag.

“Tell us about Burton Goldberg.”

Dear Reader, this is as close to verbatim as I can get. Eventually they let me go.

Catch a shuttle bus at 12:30 a.m. “Downtown Holiday Inn Express, please.” I arrived at the airport Holiday Inn Express 15 minutes later. “I said downtown.” “You said Holiday Inn.” “I said downtown!”

I arrive at the correct hotel at 2 a.m. Burton made the right decision to stay at home.

The next morning, I tour the location. I’m glad I brought my tripod wheels. Decide to do a tracking shot around the lab. They give me the boardroom to shoot the interview in. I put all the chairs into the corridor. Carry out most of the tables, too. Oh, the glamour of making videos. Put the MacBook on a table in front of the camera. Set the greenscreen against the far wall.

For the lights, I set up my Rifa 500-watt to the right of the camera. Put a Dedo at the rear wall for back light. Put a second Dedo down low near the victim’s chair facing the greenscreen. And turn off the house fluorescents.

Generally, I try to place my greenscreen 6 to 8 feet away from the subject. Ditto camera. It all depends on the room size. With smaller rooms, use the diagonal.

My formula for no-brainer lighting: Light-interviewer-camera, or interviewer-camera-light. The side of the face facing the camera goes darker than the other side. Generally, back light should be on the opposite side as the key light. Daylight back light with tungsten front light works well–just keep them on opposite sides.

With good daylight coming into the room, say on the right, put the interviewer to the right of the camera. Turn the chair to get the best balance, but never have the daylight strike your subject straight on. Camera-interviewer-daylight from window. Add back light to suit. That’s why the dimmable Dedos work well. Just slide up the brightness. The shots of Katia shown were lit with daylight and a Dedo back light.

Katia lit by daylight and a 150-watt Dedo backlight. Greenscreen lit with daylight.

Katia composited against another iStockphoto.com background.

I continue preparing for the shot in the boardroom in Edmonton. Lights up. Camera ready. Lens at eye height. Chair in place for the victim. Here comes the hard part. I put the MacBook on phone directories until it’s just under the camera lens. Connect an Ethernet cable through the room’s Ethernet wall connector. Run the MacBook headphone out to a mini speaker on the table. The victim will be able to see and hear Burton via iChat. To do that, I set the camera input to DV in iChat’s preferences and set the microphone to line in.

This interview was shot against a Reflecmedia screen. I prefer a simple greenscreen. They're lighter to carry and don't suffer the seam seen here. I had to fix her green sweater in AdvantEdge. Her earrings were very close to the green-screen's color.

With an Internet connection up and running, this next bit is trickier. I shoot in 1080i HD but down-convert inside the camera to DV. Don’t use the Squeeze setting. Opt for Letter Box. I feed this via FireWire to the MacBook so Burton can see the victim. I use a double headphone adapter on the camera with one output feeding headphones and the second output connecting to the mic input on the MacBook.

In Tijuana, Dr. Ramirez has had great results getting paraplegics to walk. However, the good doctor's real office is cluttered and not photogenic.

Dr. Ramierz shot against the background in the image above this one. The keylight is from my trusty Rifa 500, which fits nicely into my 26-inch Skyway suitcase. The back light is natural daylight.

Phone Burton 2,000 miles away. “Hi Burton. Time to log on to iChat. Just accept my invitation for a video chat. Great to see you. Is that Belinda in the kitchen?”

“We’ve got a good connection but his face looks a bit dark to me.”

“No Burton, it’s just your monitor.”

“I can’t see one side of his face. It’s dark.”

“Must be the iChat connection adding contrast. Looks good here. Ready when you are.”

“Hi, I’m Burton. Thank you for doing this interview. Remember, when you answer my questions, look into the lens. Keep your eyes there. Don’t look at me. You’re on a big silver screen. Are you running, Stefan?”

“Yes Burton. I’m running. Start whenever you like.”