Fall Productions: GoVision, CCTV, NVIDIA, Schwab & Oracle
Jim
Many projects this fall, starting with a couple of fun and challenging technical jobs:
Working for GoVision out of Texas, I set up an Elvis system at a San Jose State football game. EVS (hence Elvis) is the manufacturer of the instant replay system used on most sports broadcasts. 3 cameras were interfaced with the Elvis which then fed an HD switcher in the GoVision truck. Graphics and video rolls were the other sources that were fed to the mobile LED video board GoVision brought in. From the audience perspective, the 18 x 32 video screen looked like it was part of the stadium.
3 ½ hours, 54 acts and no commercial breaks. That was the 60th anniversary special for CCTV (Chinese Network Television) at the Cow Palace. Technical directing in the Magnetic Image truck for producer Van Jarvis, we had a wild time - Chinese producers yelling instructions to a Chinese director who called the 6 cameras in English. Wish I had some video to show you!
The GPU is here – in 3D! Directing for Carlstrom Productions at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, I saw some amazing new CGI demos and live 3D presentations by NVIDIA President & Co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang (Right). Click photo to watch the video (on the NVIDIA website, the links to the videos are a little ways down the page). It’s some of the best quality Flash streaming I’ve seen yet! You won’t get the 3D effect but when you start with HD, the quality of the end video can be pretty impressive. Schizophrenic directing! In a first for me (as well as I can remember), I directed two shows at once. During breakouts, the main room was dived by an air-wall. I had camera 1 in one room, camera 2 in a second room. Using two busses of the switcher, I mixed each camera and the speaker support graphics of two different presenters at the same time.
Talking With Chuck. Directing for TenCue Productions on a Talk with Chuck event, there was a live audience in the new conference center at the downtown offices of Charles Schwab as well as several thousand watching the webcast. The conference center is outfitted with four, Hi-Def robo-cams, touch-screen lighting control, wireless audio, projection and a 103” plasma monitor. The control room video switcher was a Panasonic AV-HS Hi-Def series. We added two Panasonic AJ-HDX-900 DVCPRO HD cameras from Magnetic Image Video; recording on tape as well as Firestore hard drives. Carl Quintanilla, Co-Anchor of CNBC’s "Squawk Box" moderated the event that covered changes in the economy and the market’s likely response. View Webcast: http://tinyurl.com/yccjydh
210 feet of screen at the Oracle Open World Conference. This show is all about the content. Directing for InVision Communications, all of the sources that hit the screens were in Hi-Def. The video package provided by Video Applications included 3 Sony Hi-Def cameras, HD media hub for video playback and a Ross HD switcher. The video elements I directed were: 1) Program record/webcast with all the sources, 2) Clean feed that had no graphics (which is used for VOD-video on demand) and 3) IMAG feed for the screens. The stunning graphic elements had the outrageous resolution of 5760 x 1080 (three 1920 x 1080 images butted together). Of course that resolution won't fit in a 16 x 9 video window so I used individual screen elements and had my camera ops shoot wide shots of the screen occasionally to give the video audience the feel of the room.