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Yikes, I spent a lot of money today! For the longest time, most of our free cash has gone into the houses we’ve owned. Consequently, I’ve had to “scrape by” on consumer-grade junk or borrow gear when it came time to shoot any decent video for hire.

So after cashing out our “old house” last week, Dar and I discussed the prospect of infusing some of the gains from that sale into my video production biz. We decided on a budget of $6k for a new camera, tripod, lighting, sound gear, and miscellany. For the first time in my life, now I’m dealing with pro-level gear… and it looks like I’ll have to keep pinching pennies to buy most of the “miscellany”. It’s truly amazing what $6k won’t buy when you run with the big dawgs.

But, let me say this in no uncertain terms: I have the best wife in the world for letting me pursue my passions. Pro gear or not, $6k is still a lot of money for our family.

But thank goodness our real estate ventures required me to push-off my camera purchase long enough that $4,000 will now buy a darn nice hi-def camera for what it cost a year ago to buy a nice Standard-def. camera.  No kidding. And after lurking for months on the DV/HDV forums, I set my sights on the Canon XH-A1 HDV unit. She has 3 CCDs with a resolution of 1440×1080 each, and can shoot in 60i, 30p, or 24p modes (interlaced frames and progressive). For a reference, compare this to 720×480 pixels of standard-def DV and you’re looking at over four times the resolution!

Okay, okay, so the million $ question: shoot all you want in HD, but who can actually watch your HD footage? Right now, not that many folks (but more people are buying HD displays every day). And the delivery medium/ format (HD DVDs, Blu-Ray, or ???) is still problematic. But, to me, it makes no sense today to spend our hard-earned cash on yesterday’s technology. And even if I have to deliver in SD for awhile (or any resolution in between), I can still shoot in HD now.

And imagine having those extra pixels “in post” on an SD project… think, “little frame on a big picture” and how you can do pans and zooms within the larger HD frame, adding “camera moves” to the scene that were never shot that way. Kewl!

OK, on to the next piece I bought today… Oh, but you do want to see another angle of the beautiful cam, don’t you?!

Next up is the Libec LS-38 tripod. It’s Japanese-made, rock solid, with a very fluid head. No frills… just good support. I almost bought the de-facto standard mid-price tripod, the Bogen/Manfrotto 503 head coupled with one of their basic legs. But a few members on a few different forums were encouraged by this stouter, more fluid combo from a company that almost has no following here in the States (yet!). I then found a reviewer from the UK that sings its praises… so I was convinced.

Throw in a tripod controller, a few filters (one to protect that sweet Canon glass 24/7), and some tapes… and I’ve already spent $4,600 of my budget. And I haven’t even touched light and sound!

So there ‘ya go. Irony of ironies: my new video cam costs about four times what my vehicle is worth! Priorities, man, priorities…

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Wow! OK… so I spent a few hours looking for an application to convert my videos to Flash. Yeah, yeah, I know that you can encode FLVs straight from PPro and AE… but there’s still that little bit about embedding them in a Webpage, streaming, etc. In the end, it looked like I was going to have to spend about fifty bucks to get a program to take AVIs or FLVs and embed them into usable SWF. Are ‘ya dizzy yet with “alphabet soup”??

But first a little video (my first Flash video!) of the lead-in from my current project for my church’s small group ministry. I just animated some Photoshop layers in AE, added a 3D camera and some lights for the logo. Then it goes into the titles where I just got lazy and used an AE text animation preset.

And now the backstory….

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I finally completed the video I made as a gift for a local WWII veteran. I shot it waaayy back in March ‘05, after meeting “my” veteran at a production I was doing for Dar’s Credit Union (he was one of the founding members). The man, Bill Herring, was in the storied Tenth Mountain Division, seeing combat as a rifleman, helping his Division break through the Wehrmacht’s Gothic Line in Italy, 1945.

Mr. Herring was a delight to interview, his memories still tack-sharp, providing vivid details from exactly 60 years prior to the interview. Along with 70 minutes or so of interview captured during one very long night of shooting, he provided me with several mementos from his scrapbook to photograph or scan to include in the piece… snapshots, newspaper clippings, drawings, postcards, even actual shrapnel pieces from German artillery. Regrettably, he never showed me his most-prized possession: a German Luger pistol, although I did scan the requisition papers for it.

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Well, it’s all over the Web now. Adobe is finally porting over the entire Production Studio to the Mac on its next release… said to be mid-July 2007. The big gotcha, if you read their fine print, is the availability of Premiere Pro, Encore DVD, and the brand-new Soundbooth app is only available for Intel-processor Macs. Maybe it’s not a big deal for the typical DV or HDV editor, who would/should have upgraded their hardware to an Intel processor(s) system.

Another gotcha: what about Adobe Audition? This amazing sound editing package shipped with the current version of the Studio… and is apparently being replaced with the dumbed-down Soundbooth app. And there’s been no mention of a Mac-porting for Audition at all (standalone or bundle). Tsk, tsk.

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Here’s a little snow transition I made in After Effects. If you’d like the project file, you can download it here.

It’s basically just the CC Snow effect and a few solids. I rotated the final comp to have the snow come in sideways. I’m using it for some snow images I’ve taken in the last few weeks and turning them into vids. I’ll post some final videos when I get them completed.

Enjoy!