Green Screen, P2 Cards, and Wireless Monitors, Oh my!

So the the last couple weeks for me have been getting into the groove of regular business of what the go to team does. Yes, there are a lot of really cool shoots to go on but many are at different scales of production.

I happened to be the media manager for a video that talked about the results for some type of pharmaceutical drug trial. We were to film a doctor in front of a green screen who was reading off of a teleprompter about the results of a certain drug testing. We set up a 20X10ft green screen in a conference room at the Marriott in Charleston, SC.

It was basically an all day shoot in this conference room, the doctor was reading off a teleprompter for about 5min to 30 min at time. The first time he started talking I though ok, this could be interesting, but after a few sentences, I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. It was english, but in a vocabulary that was way, way off of what I know.

The camera we were using recorded the video onto P2 data cards, not tape. Those P2 cards held about 64 GB and lasted about an hour. When one would fill up, it was given to me, and my job was to take the video that was recorded on that card and transfer it off to a hard drive.

I used a little device made by Nexto, which dumped the video off the card and onto it’s own internal hard drive. IT was neat because once the video was on the Nexto, you could view it on a little screen to make sure it transferred correctly and then erase the P2 card and give it back to the Camera guy to keep on recording. Transferring that video does take a while, like maybe 1/2hr or something, but then the client needs that data. So you have to transfer it from the Nexto drive to a external hard drive or something that the client can use.

The client gave me a little portable hared drive and I would transfer the video footage to. At the end of the day we pack up and the client gets the hard drive with all the video on it. Seems neat and easy, but to be honest it’s a bit unnerving erasing over original footage and the video only lived on the hard drive. We still like shooting on tape because you know its there, its proven. And once you have filled up a tape you can just give it to the client right then and there, to transferring time required. I guess if you don't have a media manager on set, you would have spend hours after the shoot is done just transferring the media over, or if you shot on tape, give them the tape and be done. I guess it just depends on what the client has set up in the editing room. They may not have a deck to play back the tape, but they still would probably have to convert the video on that hard drive into something their editing program can use.

 

The Quarterback Kid

The next shoot I went on was to do a small piece on the High School Senior Quarterback who as a freshman severely hurt his knee and tore his ACL. Years later he is playing football as a senior and is doing so well that he might even get to play in college.

This was a fun shoot in that we got to do a little more creative stuff. We interviewed The kid and his father first, then went out onto the football field to get shots of them throwing the football together and stuff like that.

 

I was really happy with the audio on this one, That’s my department now I was able to successfully hide the mic on both interview subjects and it sounded great. Nick did a pretty awesome job on the lighting and we got a chance to talk about certain looks and things like that. Once we were done with the interviews, it was time to get some extra shots of the Kid. No audio was needed as this point so I acted as a grip for Nick. At one point I went over to move the monitor, which was on a stand, and I couldn’t find the cable connecting it to the camera, but there still was a picture on the monitor!  I was dumbfounded for a second until Nick told me that there was a wireless system that sent the video from the camera to the monitor for the client to see. Pretty Cool!! It made getting the shots on the football field easier to approve from the client, because she could stand on the sidelines, while nick was on the field.