IN[FOCUS]

As wedding season chugs on and weekend after weekend you are accumulating more and more video files from the weddings you are shooting, what is your storage solution for all of that data? Do you have a safe and reliable system to store all of that footage? Or are you living on a wing and a prayer that the stack of portable hard drives in your office doesn’t fail? How are you dealing with multiple editors working on multiple projects? Do you have a central space where everything gets stored?

These are the types of questions that can keep wedding cinematographers up at night if you don’t have a solid system in place. We all battle the bulge so to speak of how to store the massive amounts of data that we shoot. Take a look the system that Serendipity Videography has implemented as their storage solution. Whether you are a volume shop or a boutique studio it is a solid option for your studio no matter the amount of weddings you shoot a year.

TarynP

Taryn Bills attended Arizona State University and graduated Cum Laude from the Walter Cronkite School of Broadcast Journalism. She worked in community relations at the Phoenix NBC affiliate, then moved on to an account executive position for Infinity Broadcasting where she discovered her passion for Sales and Marketing. After 3 years she left radio for a 3-year stint in pharmaceutical sales, during which time she and her husband started Serendipity Videography. She has served as the sales and marketing director of award winning Serendipity for 6 years as well as with their baby sister company Simply Cinema. When she is not busy growing her own businesses, she offers marketing and consulting services for various companies who need assistance in growing their brand and increasing their sales.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

G’day, blog followers!

Jet Kaiser here today to share a little time/money saving technique for us event filmmakers.

Those that are using DSLR’s know that it can be a pain to locate clips and stay chronological when editing from multiple cameras. When you transcode your footage, the original date created time is terminated since it is a newly created clip, making it impossible to view the clips chronologically once in FCP. Batch renaming your clips prior to transcoding will ensure that your clips stay together just as they were shot. When you are editing, you will have all you ceremony footage together and the toasts and dances from all angles will be sequentially and chronologically numbered to the precise second.

Batch renaming workflow is as follows-

1. Back up the footage!
2. Place all of the footage from all your cameras into one folder (some might choose not to include prep footage with the batch considering their might be footage from 2 different locations that you might not want to be sequenced together).
3. Using a renaming program, batch rename all the clips together while the files are arranged under “original date created”. Renaming a file does not change the date/time created (shot), only the name.
4. Transcode files as normal (MPEG Streamclip, Compressor)
5. Import in FCP

First and foremost, this workflow has increased our delivery times and has saved us a lot of time searching within our FCP browser to find related clips. Batch renaming clips might not be for everyone, especially those using the EOS plugin within FCP. I have not found a way to log and transfer renamed clips using this plugin.

Download Many Tricks’ Name Mangler

Thoughts? Comments? Am I out of my mind? Let me know (in the nicest way possible) by commenting below.

Bye!
Jet Kaiser
Jet Kaiser Films

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

Dead Pixels are frightening. It’s not if, it’s when. When will your camera, whether it be an older 3-chip camcorder or a brand-spanking new DSLR, lose one of it’s many precious picture elements?

Back in October 2009, I was excited about the release of the Canon EOS 7D and I purchased one right away. It was a perfect new addition to our camera family but after 3 months of using it something dreadful happened. Three white, stuck pixels started to form during an all day wedding shoot. Since the 7D’s LCD screen is only capable of showing about 50% of the 2 million + pixels that make up a full HD image, we didn’t noticed the faults until reviewing the clips in 1080p the next day. The 7D was sent off for repair while we were left with footage that needed repaired as well.

There are many methods on how to repair a dead or stuck pixel, but that’s a post for another time. In this post I am interested in showing you a great solution for repairing dead pixel footage rather than repairing the camera’s sensor.

The solution for Final Cut users is Reincarnation from Digital Heaven. Reincarnation is a plug-in for Final Cut Pro that does what it what is claims by “Bringing dead pixel back to life.” Reincarnation copies the information from the nearby functional pixels to mask the dead/stuck pixel area. I’ve decided not to create a tutorial on using this software because a very worthy tutorial has already been produced by its creators.

It sells for $59 at the Digital Heaven store and is definitely worth looking into whenever one of your camera’s pixels decides to give up the ghost.

I appreciate your comments

Jet Kaiser
Jet Kaiser Films

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts