Broadcast Expo 2009. I was there too.

The show was fascinating as well as a real boy's toy fest. I met and had a great talk with Bob Monaghan. He's a programmer from California and is writing control software for Vision Research's Phantom camera. You know, the one which does 1000 frames per sec at full HD. Well now there's the V12.1 and it starts at 6242 fps at 1280x800 and Bob takes it to his granny's ranch at weekends and films while shooting things up with his Winchester. Bob is the only programmer I know who claims bullets as a legitimate software testing expense. Apparently he can't wait to be audited.

We got several more interviewees signed up for the regular web delivered TV show we are developing with TV-Bay. Sony, Cirrolite and DivX are amongst those already in the can and we are saving up Hovvercam for the spring when we can combine their interview with an air drop test of kit cases. I am looking forward to the Phantom interview especially since we could get to shoot it on one but only at 25fps. Probably wise. At 1000 fps we'll need many petabytes for the edit and it'll possibly run a bit long.

Rob Porter bought a Sony EX1 for a grand less than anywhere else along with some other bits and pieces; we now like Top-Teks very much. Doing the location editing for the Volvo Race means Rob is now a complete XDCAM head and probably knows more than most about constructing workflow for post.

Phil Rowe is also a member of council of the Guild of Television Cameramen and spent some time on their stall. He's now bought a Letus depth of field adapter to go with Rob's camera.

Sony loved my SDHC card with the E-Films caddy. Well, one of them did. We tried it in the Playstation across the aisle but although it could see there was data it wouldn't play. However we now have a lite diet for Rob's new camera.

We also found a good little RAID from Sonnet Tech. Their Fusion F2 is a portable RAID which runs on a MacBook Pro with no additional power and can provide up to 1Tb and between 2 and 5 concurrent HD streams depending on codec. This is definitely one for us as it furthers our aim of being able to offer mobile online with no more than a 12v battery and a palm tree (OK, an umbrella is probably more realistic).

I have been looking at Matrox's MXO and MXO2 for quite a while now with something akin to covetousness. These two boxes give you a proper monitoring nd output solution and a broadcast quality IO capability respectively. We're aiming to do a report on both for the TV-Bay show later in the year.

I had a meeting with a director of an Indie feature and it looks like we've picked up some post production work. It's a comedy and the script has both Rob and me hooting at odd moments on the tube.

On Friday Rob and I got our annual checkup at Larry Jordan's Final Cut seminar and that's the end of my official one week winter training. It was a great pleasure to meet Alex Gollner, an editor who also writes Final Cut plug-ins and Lucy Newman, a documentary editor from Brighton.

Now it's back to the grindstone.

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