Ken Ralston and Dennis Muren interviewed for fxguidetv
What a weekend! fxphd was at the Visual Effects Society Festival of Visual Effects, helping the VES shoot the event for their archives…and gathering other related material we hope to bring to fxphd members sometime in the future. The panels were great, as usual, and I had the chance to sit down and have interviews with names you might recognize — Doug Trumbull, Dennis Muren, Ken Ralston, Ian Hunter, Matthew Gratzner, and more. Sitting down with icons such as Trumbull, Muren, and Ralston was pretty cool I have to say — I’ve so respected their work over the years and its provided great inspiration. All of them were incredibly approachable and nice….which helped because honestly it was a slight bit nerve wracking meeting people you look up to such as that. Clips from the interviews will be shown on fxguidetv — with fuller versions of the interviews available only to fxphd postgrads.
fxphd postgrad Skip helping out on camera two
It was also ton of work, with about 12 sessions over 3 days — and we couldn’t have done it without the fxphd postgrads who helped us out: Elmar, Tim, Skip, Cecilia, Ido, David and Mike. These were long 14+ hour days with travel — thankfully, the panels were great. 🙂 Thanks so much…everyone put in such a hard effort over the days and was so professional.
So what were we doing?
The day is split up into 90 or 120 minute sessions, with about an hour break in-between. We’d record the sessions, of course and then during the break, we’d shoot interviews in our interview room that was set up outside the lobby. We could leave the chairs and lights hanging so all we had to do is bring in the two cameras and shoot the interviews. But this didn’t leave much time for error.
We needed to record the sessions for the VES archives, so we used two HVX200 cameras, each with a Focus Enhancements firestore to enable us to record a LOT of material. One was on a wide shot and the other on closeups of the speakers, which will allow us to multicam edit the recordings. It simply would have been too difficult to use P2 cards — as they currently have 8Gig versions which would each only hold 20 minutes. However, we did use the P2 cards to record the interviews, since they were short.
Doug Trumbull on the fxguidetv interview set
The problem is, each firestore drive holds about 4 hours of 24P Quicktime material — so we had to back up between sessions in order to have disk space to record the day. Because it takes about an hour to copy over 100GB on firewire, and I figured the sessions would run over (leaving less than 45 minutes between sessions), this necessitated doing it after each session. So we set up a Macbook Pro and a G4 in the theater, and each had a 750G external firewire drive. So it worked like this:
1. Record Shrek session with 2x HVX200 and firestores
2. During break, transfer Cam1 firestore to HardDrive1 / Cam2 firestore to HardDrive2
3. While this was happening, we used P2 cards to record the interviews on both cameras
4. After interview, return firestore to cameras without deleting material from firestore
5. Begin recording the Pirates session
During the pirates session:
6. Use the G4 PC Slot to transfer P2 material to HardDrive1 — the G4 powerbooks easily read these cards (as long as you have a driver).
7. Copy HardDrive1 material to HardDrive2 — and vice versa. We now have 2 copies of all media on separate drives.
8. After pirates presentation, transfer Cam1 firestore to HardDrive1 / Cam2 firestore to HardDrive2
9. Do interviews with P2 cards
10. Only now — do we delete the material from the Shrek session (since we have 2 copies). And leave the Pirates session
11. Record the next session, backups, etc…..repeat
It was a tight schedule. The sessions would usually run over about 15 to 20 minutes…it takes 5 to 10 minutes to set up…then we’d wait for the interview subject….and then do the interview…and then set up in the auditorium. We acquired over 900 gigs of DVCPROHD Quicktimes over the weekend — just managing that is difficult because with the backup that adds up to almost 2 terabytes of footage.
Again — we so appreciate the effort of the fxphd postgrads. The conference was certainly a great event to attend and take in, but working at it was hard.