New Video Warrior
I'm a new member. Recenty I gave up programming Daytona Registries (see WinNT
tools topic) for BillG and have since been travelling about the Land Downunder
collecting audio/video (Canon UCS5), images (Ricoh 500F, an old bomb proof 35mm
fully manua range-finder with dynamite lens, bought in Brisbane) and trading
thoughts via email with friends back home (Toshiba T3400). It was beyond
fortuity that I found someone with a car to travel with, because I'd planned to
carry all this gear on my back for the whole 5 months. Instead, I only lugged
it around the Australian bush for a couple.
BTW: Compuserve, or rather FALNET, needs more than 6 nodes in all Australia, a
land mass larger than the continental US.
Anyway, I've now got 38 hours of Hi-8 MetalE tape from the Sydney Opera House,
to Kangaroos and Wallabies, to Uluru (Ayer's Rock), to several thousand
kilometers of Australian bush. I've got a busker playing didjerido, scenes
from a far-western Queensland sheep station and crocodiles fighting over a 25
lb barramundi. When the camcorder batteries were dead in the antipodean heat,
I shot 12 rolls of 36 exp. Fuji Velvia, all ready to digitize. I printed out
the email journal I'd posted and ended up with 80 pages. Now I'm trying to
figure out if I can make a living from all this, or even just some of it.
Fresh out of mothballs, after 5 months in an attic, is the 486DX66 running
Matrox Personal Producer driving VITC Panasonic AG-7750, AG-7650 with 422.
Just one of the 7 slots on the computer is available. VL-Bus: SVGA, IDE,
Adaptec SCSI. ISA-Bus: Pro AudioSpectrum 16, 422 Com, Matrox Illuminator-16.
It took one year, two motherboards and a replacement IDE but, finally,
everything seems to work together. We'll see. In addition to the existing
multisession CDROM, two floppies and 350MB IDE drive, I'm about to purchase a
1GB drive for the SCSI bus and a 250MB tape drive for the IDE floppy
controller.
Judging from a cursory glance through the contents of this forum, I'm beginning
to wish I went with FAST. Actually, I began wondering about this earlier when
I started getting a good look at the results of 16-bit dithering generated by
Matrox. <sigh> I can't believe I spent $14K Canadian on 2 VTRs and only $3K
on my editing system. Ah well, it's a good learning tool. Such is life, and
I'm heading back to Oz, SE Asia and Japan in January '95 so any upgrade I make
now will be obsolete by the time I get back midyear anyway.
Perhaps by then I'll have more precise goals. Right now the rather broad title
of Info Warrior seems to best fit. I think the most promising aspect of DTV is
its capacity to put the means of content production in the hands of nearly
anyone. Moving images coupled with sound are the most powerful form of
communication we have and it's high time in our so-called democracy that
everyone had as much opportunity to create information as to consume it. Now
if only we can wrestle control of content distribution from the Big Guys…
In the meantime, if anyone out there is interested in stock images of
Australia, I've probably got something you can use.
Patrick.