Not Quite the Same as it Ever Was
dealing with the rapid changes
in content creation technology
by Kent Meloy, manager PTSG
Change is good, so I’ve heard. When I started my career in video back in the '80s things were pretty easy to understand. Like film, it was all about light, exposure, composition, movement, pacing… all techniques that have been around more or less unchanged since movies were first invented. If you were pro, you shot to 1” or ¾” video tape, eventually professional-quality Beta, and that was pretty much it. You’d edit from tape, to TAPE, and when you were done, you took your final tape out of the machine and that was that. Hand it to your producer and ride off into the sunset. Cue the music. Miller time.
But then technology happened, as it does. First it hit the pro recording industry, and suddenly for just a few thousand dollars you could give a high end studio a pretty good run for the money out of your basement or den. The word “digital” changed the playing field dramatically, and it has done it again to video.
The versatility of this change is astonishing. In less than a year there will be a $3,000 digital video camera available that far surpasses the very best $80,000 analog counterpart from a decade ago.
Of course with these kinds of changes, as anything, one constantly finds oneself having to relearn, reevaluate, rethink, rinse, repeat.
But the advantages of doing so are exhilarating, and have opened opportunities that once would have lived somewhere between cost-prohibitive and impossible. For example, this year at Spring Commencement, Tom Hadley from Student Affairs came to us and asked how we could arrange to have a ‘Family Friendly Zone’ – a place for folks who wanted to be at graduation, but due to the gnat-sized attention span of three year olds, or physical limitations of grandparents, were less than enthusiastic about navigating a three hour event at 5/3rd Arena. Tom wanted to know if we could project the ceremony on a big screen in the room. This zone was to be in Alumni Center. Not terribly far from the arena, but farther than we could reliably run cables without renting quite a bit of gear to make it happen.
Since our mandate is streaming media, we souped up our video encoding system and sent out two streams – one being our normal Windows Media stream that goes out to the public, the other being a high-resolution Flash video stream we accessed over at Alumni Center. Instead of scads of expensive video relay gear, we did it with an inexpensive codec, a laptop, 40’ of Ethernet and audio cable, and a video projector. It was a huge success.
Of course, this led us to rethink how we handle our live streams. UCVision is a rather unfriendly place to access streaming video for the public. It’s a little hard to find things, there are no search functions, and it could be better designed graphically – but it’s sufficient. It also only handles Windows Media files, which requires Mac users to jump through a couple of hoops to view videos. So now that we can handle Flash video - and QuickTime as well, though not as a live stream just yet - which is not platform-specific, and the folks over in Web Communications were working on creating a Flash-based ‘UC YouTube’-type application for disseminating news and student videos, we teamed up and are now well into the next generation of video distribution here at UC. Users will be able to choose between Windows Media, QuickTime, or Flash streams, as well as a http://www.uc.edu/video and browse around.
The next phase will involve an automated uploading and transcoding system that will allow much greater flexibility in getting your video off your camera and into the ether. Stay tuned to this bat-channel for details…
Another of our big changes is the looming specter of HD. Trying to figure out the best way to “go HD” is kind of like trying to figure out the similarities between apples and bricks - doable, but confusing. We’ve made our first foray into that world of promise just recently. We are in the final few days of editing ‘The Cardiac Dance’ – a modern dance created to illustrate a revolutionary new heart surgery technique. We shot the dance back in March using three ultra-high-end HD cameras, a 40’ camera crane, a cast and crew of over around 30 people, and four days in Patricia Corbett Theater. It was a collaboration between ourselves, E-Media, and the Dance Department and theater tech folks in CCM. We essentially treated it as a live event, but shot it multiple times from multiple angles, capturing it all to tape. As Dr. Gerald Buckberg, who co-invented the technique, said: “It’s a beautiful marriage of art and technology.” But more than that, it’s the first full HD shoot of a theatric event at UC, and one that crossed departments and disciplines: very exciting. You can view a small piece of the dance HERE.
On our end, we’ve had to come to grips with several changes in how we do things (mainly in post production) for the Cardiac Dance. The kind of cameras we shot with record gorgeous pictures, but have a rather rigid set of abilities compared to the mid-range gear we use. For example, the cameras themselves don’t have the proper output connections to get the footage into our digital editing system to create the offline (or approval) edit. We had to rent a specific HD tape deck, and discovered that the deck also expected a higher level of interface than we had. In the end it was a two-step process of making exact copies the master tapes on to tapes we could ingest, and using those duplicate tapes to perform our offline. In the end, we will have to take our approval edit, save out the edit points in a list, and recreate the final master HD edit using the original tapes.
All of this will come into play as we continue working on a few departmental promo and recruiting videos and research documentaries that are already in production. Our projects have taken on an elastic quality – evolving to keep up with the technology even as they are being created.
Some of the above may seem confusing and maybe even cryptic, but the point is still the same: It isn’t a simple matter of simply shooting and editing anymore. The number of ways you can acquire your video, the kind of camera, the format, the editing system, the final output, the intended audience… all are changing on what seems to be a monthly schedule. The options are daunting – but the possibilities are endless.
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