It's all about the workflow

Today was all about the workflow.

I have learned recently that to people shooting digital video "workflow" is king. Workflow is the presumably orderly progression of laying down images to tape, copying them from tape to the hard drive of your computer (a process called video capture, or just capture), assembling them in an editing program, and rendering to a final image that can be copied to a DVD. Then of course there's backing up the captured data, and the decision whether to reuse tapes. I won't. I want them in case the hard disks don't survive the trip back home, or if they crash.

Today was my third day of shooting (the movie doesn't begin shooting until tomorrow morning but as Behind The Scenes Guy I'm there for a lot of the preparation, too). At the beginning of the day I had a handful tapes to show for it, an editing program (Sony Vegas 7.0) I only used once, on Easter, and a Canon XH A1 (low-end professional camera) I had never completed the capture process. High time I learned, I figured, before the 9pm cast and crew meet-and-greet.

The truth is, I didn't know how the any of the video turned out. It is known that previewing on the camera's LCD screen isn't necessarily what it will look like after a trip through the rendering process, or even what it will look like on your computer screen. My hotel room has a TV but of course it has no external inputs.

I didn't know if the sound worked on any of the recordings because I still haven't figured out how to get sound when I do a tape check. When I pay back a scene on the tape I don't hear the sound, and I haven't had time to figure out why.

My Canon XH A1 is pretty much state of the art for an independent movie. It is a high-definition (HD) camera that works in widescreen, just like real movies. I came within inches of getting a Panasonic DVX100 camera, which Gorman used for the whole of You Are Alone. It is renowned for its low-light performance. My XH A1 is known for its less-than-stellar low-light sensitivity. So far a lot of my shooting has been in underlit places because, well, it's a behind the scenes, and because up to now it's just been rehearsals. Rehearsals don't need film-quality lighting.

So I didn't know what the tape looked like, and I didn't know if it had sound. Other than that I was ready to begin the actual movie.

From what I can tell the capture process works only using a Firewire port. Firewire is sort of like USB but used mostly in the Macintosh world. My way rad 3 lb. Sony G1 laptop was advertised on the dynamism.com website where I bought it as having a Firewire port. I couldn't find the Firewire port. I even put a post on the DVXUser.com website asking about this, and was pointed to the Dynamism spec sheet. Just to be sure I emailed Dynamism. The port does not in fact exist on my version of the G1. They thanked me for pointing out the error and changed their spec sheet.

Which left me with no way to get data into the camera.

There was another problem. If you do the math as to how much data gets crammed into a miniDV tape, it's scary. The tapes I used are a standard 63 minute length. That's 13 gigabytes of data. Now I'm shooting the behind the scenes. Plan is for me to pretty much be rolling all day, from 7am to whever--typically, if I understand it correctly, 7pm. Let's call it 10 tapes a day. That's 130 gigabytes of data. The shoot is 18 days. 18 tapes times 130 gigabytes per tape is 2.3 terabytes of data. Terabytes, not gigabytes. A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. For that matter I had only brought 20 tapes with me. Last week I ordered 60 more. I've used up five already. Today I got nervous and ordered 100 more. The tapes cost $15 each in Circuit City, but $8 from RecordingStore.com. Who knows--this may be overkill. Maybe I'll only use 5 tapes a day. If it's more than 10, though, I don't want to be stranded in New Haven with a camera hooked to my belt and no tapes.

My laptop had 36 gigabytes free this morning. I barely had enough to run a test.

Now I had sort of anticipated this and had ordered a couple of 250 gig hard drives when I got here five days ago. They hadn't arrived yet. I went to CompUSA and purchased, among other things, a Firewire port built into a card that slips into the laptop, and a couple of 300 GB hard drives.

I got back to the hotel room, plugged in my plug-and-play hard drive... and nothing happened. A quick perusal through the manual mentioned that these drives were set up to work on a Macintosh, then showed how to configure it under Windows, a process I'd never learned before and which did not closely match the hard drive's manual. But it worked after a bit.

Then I got to the heart of the day's work: learning the capture process. The Canon manual is laughably incomplete. It pretty much shows you how to plug the Firewire cable from the camera to the computer, then lists about four reasons why the capture process won't work. Seriously. Not a damn thing about whether, for example, you set the camera to External Control mode, or VCR Mode, or what. I guessed External Control. Wrongly, as it turned out.

But Vegas 7.0 had a terrible time recognizing my camera. I don't know if it's a Windows thing, or a Vegas thing, or what. I followed the directions, looked up the error message on the web ("Microsoft AV/C Tape Subunit Device could not be opened"--makes it totally obvious, right?) to no avail, and finally used the Scientific Method. I rebooted. No luck. I twiddled, fiddled, said unprintable things, and resorted once again to the Scientific Method.

It worked.

The capture process is not like ripping a DVD. You essentially play the tape in real time and it gets copied to the hard disk. I ended up using VCR mode on the XH A1 and it worked, pretty much. Pretty much because something went wrong with the end of the tape. What, I'm not sure, because by this time it was time to leave for the meeting. I can report that sound and video both work on the camera. Low light peformance seems to be excellent.

Digital video experts will observe that I did a no-no. The part most prone to wear on a camcorder is the tape head. The "correct" way to do a capture is through an videotape player called a "deck", or an inexpensive camera. I have a backup camera, the Canon HV20, I intend to use as a deck on this trip. That's putting the cart before the horse at this stage. I just wanted to make sure I could capture at all.

Oh, and it was the first time everyone met

Tonight we met at 9pm in the lobby of the Hotel Duncan. I got there first, and took some establishing shots, then did my best to film people as they straggled in. No one seemed to be bothered, though I'm not sure they were all expecting me. I am getting much better at framing shots, and the gizmo that I use to keep the camera stable, the DVRig Pro, again proved itself to be the best $500 I've spent so far. This was my third day of shooting and the first I started to feel like I knew remotely what I was doing.

Everyone involved is painfully young, Gorman and yours truly excepted. Almost all of them wore black, they all seemed to be cheerful, and as a group they are ridiculously good looking. The makeup people are gorgeous. I must of course, wonder if it's due to genes or makeup...

This was where the full cast and crew all met for the first time. Everyone stepped forward and gave out name, rank, and serial number, then Gorman gave a brief talk about what's expected of cast and crew. It was a good solid talk, in which the chain of command was explained, the way to treat locations was explained (they're people's houses and places of business, so treat them like they're your own), and a lot was said about food. Then the cast was dismissed and we went upstairs to one of the crew's rooms and there was an even longer talk about food, with a few other points tossed in about how to deal with the actors. The whole thing was over by 10 and I felt that not a minute had been wasted. Gorman promised during his speeches that's what he planned for the entire shoot. I think he'll make good on it.

I still haven't seen the rendered test scene, but it's time to go to bed. There is still a possibility the video quality of the stuff I've shot this last week is bad...