The video was shot documentary style, with zero interruption of baby Ava’s therapy. It also allowed the music that the family creates as part of the therapy to better flow and entertain Ava while she went through her therapy- typically several times a day.The camera moved a lot to cover the action from several locations, as well as shoot cutaway shots of the therapy, the dog, etc, to help cover edit points.

In post, a critical decision was made to not use any accompanying music and rely solely on the music that was par of the therapy. This focuses the attention of the viewer on Ava’s involvement in the music and creates a greater highlight on the music therapy versus the interview that happened after the therapy. Then, by intermingling the two aspects of the video, the viewer can more easily see illustrations of what is discussed. In the end, the video is honed down to what needs to be said, video that highlights Ava’s therapy and how they bring music into the therapy to make it more enjoyable. This drives the message home.

The Dallas Screenwriters Association had gathered more than 12 movies for it’s 2011 Showcase. Add to this some PSA’s and some new media created specifically for this program, and you have the makings for a special challenge. But there’s a way around this potentially tricky multiformat maze that enabled the finished DVD to be delivered in just a couple days- and that includes delays for work on other projects, and the need to create a few new media bits.

Several people advised me to take everything in to Final Cut Pro so I could best manage the clips. The trouble was the disparate media I was handed. The majority of it was compressed for delivery on DVD. But that was actually the answer to the problem. The source DVD’s are obviously already mastered for DVD. These are MPEG-2 files that can be found on any DVD. These .vob files are exactly what a DVD player expects to see and there wasn’t a single reason to convert them to something else to have to compress them back to MPEG-2 for final delivery on a VD, which is what the DSA needed.

So Final Cut Pro was useless because it couldn’t handle the .vob files natively. Even more so, it really demonstrated that an editing program was not of much use at all. All the films and clips were already finished. I just needed a way to arrange them in order on the disk, and to compress only those clips that needed to be compressed. This would leave all the short films completely intact- exactly as the original authors intended them to look. The other two Apple solutions were also useless- iDVD was too simple and wouldn’t work with the .vob files. DVD Studio Pro wouldn’t deal with the .vob files either. This was actually a surprise to me as it is Apple’s “pro” disk authoring tool, I expected it to easily handle media directly from the DVD’s. But it didn’t. I was reluctant to start converting all the finished video to something these programs could handle, so I kept looking.

I turned to my 3rd party solution… Roxio Toast.

I set it up to create a new DVD-video disk and dragged in the various media. It took the .vob files and the .wmv files with ease. There were also two .mov files that dropped in easily. Once everything was lined up, I burned a disk. Reviewing the finished disk, I saw a need for improvement. There needed to be more time between each movie. Instead of the final credits barely being off the screen before the next movie flshed on screen, there needed to be something to let viewers know that one had fully ended and a new work was about to begin. It would also allow time for applause, etc, between movies.

It was then that I went into my video editing program and created a :10 “coda” called BLACK2 that would fade up a simple graphic element and fade it out. This clip was authored once and then dropped into the DVD numerous times. Toas again made this easy as it allowed me to drop it exactly where I wanted it to go, so creating a new clip order with the “black” between each clip took but a few minutes. I was again thankful that I had not used an editing program to make a 2-hour program, compress it to DVD only to have to do it over again.

Lastly, I added a longer section of black to the top of the program to give the DSA time to start playback and then pause it on the first, all black clip. This way they could talk and introduce the evening’s program as long as they wanted with a black screen behind them. Then starting playback would be as simple as clicking play once more.

The little magic that made Toast work where other applications might not have worked as well is Toast’s ability to handle .vob files natively, so only a few clips had to be compressed to MPEG-2 when authoring the DVD. Secondly, Toast offered the ability to start playing the disk automatically, and to play the clips through continuously. So each individual clip called the next one in line. The DVD’s menu never appears unless you specifically call it up.

There’s only one other feature that would have been useful, but in this case it was unneeded. A higher-end DVD authoring app would have made a disc that worked the same way, but it would have let me have only one “coda” clip on the disc, and as the disc played back, it would just keep going back to the same piece of media each time. Toast did not offer this functionality, but as the “coda” clip was only 10 seconds, having multiple copies of BLACK2 on the DVD did not take up considerable room and the entire 2-hour program easily fit on a single layer DVD.

I burned a second master DVD, in case of a disk problem, and delivered the finished product two days ahead of time.

I was able to speak to Teradek about Cube and Bond, very exciting products that fit in the palm of your hand. Multi-homing broadband HD video streaming. That means when one network falters, the others carry the load. And did I mention that it fits in your hand? It does.

Blackmagic Design’s ATEN shatters the price floor for HD video mixers. No longer is professional video mixing a +$10,000 hurdle. How about starting under $1,000. Yes. Professional HUI, yes. Works on a laptop, yes. HDMI / HD-SDI, yes. So many yeses.

Stream Monkey is the nimble young primate able to jump and adapt to the market quickly, and provide a solid streaming service.

Haivision‘s streaming services are deeper and not only deliver, but help companies manage multiple streams, media libraries, live streams and more. This is a deep portfolio of streaming & media management services, hardware & solutions.

Rushworks deliveres volunteer-simple production hardware that enables a single professional to oversee many people who are willing, but lack the depth of experience & skills to run what would be a typical broadcast show. Once it’s set up in the Rushworks system, its as simple as pointing to what you want and it can be handed off after a minimal amount of training.

ZiXi specializes in the highest quality streaming deliverable possible while offering the lowest latency.

Panasonic takes their 400 and 450 video mixers and doesn’t just add on, they re-imagined them. The 410 isn’t just more inputs, more capability, more versatile media handling, it’s also internal still & video playback. Even more amazing is an open API that allows 3rd-party developers to load software into the mixer to control it with something else, or enable the mixer to control other hardware, like decks, lighting systems, stage, whatever you can imagine.

Whether it be the lectures I gave at DVPA meetings, or at the DPA Production Roundup, I welcomed opportunities to help and learn from other professionals.

As for adventures this year… scaling active roofing construction sites to shoot promotional videos for KPOST, to stunning greenscreen work for OGLE Beauty, from hockey games at the American Airlines Center, to multi-camera engineering and directing for the Frisco Chamber of Commerce, from editing another season of Flavors of America for PBS and commercial TV to polishing an Alaska adventure video for direct video sales, even engineering and directing multi-camera awards ceremonies at Cowboys Stadium. It was also a year of achievement getting video rentals onto both YouTube and Amazon, as well as made to order DVD’s on Amazon. We’re still working on Netflix and Apple, but expect those will come this year.

There’s a lot more work in there, to be sure, but I wanted to thank those who chose to use me. I look forward to working with you again in 2011.

We were on site for the event, provided sound setup, and recorded video of the festivities inside and outside the facility. Some of the video will appear in later, more informational-style, videos, but much of it was deliberately shot for the initial splash promotional video.

Sonnet sent me their Qio, a device which does so much that calling it a media reader is actually a disservice. The Qio extends the PCI Express bus outside of you notebook or desktop computer of choice and enables you to use nearly all ExpressCard and PC Card interfaces you need. You can also read media: SDHC, CompactFlash, SxS, P2, etc. and, on top of all this, it has four “port multiplied” eSATA ports that enable you to connect as many as 20 external hard drives– at eSATA speeds –to your desktop, or even better… to your ExpressCard-equipped laptop computer.

I threw everything I had at it, formatted external drives in multiple ways and tested the results. The Qio delivered.

See my captions below each image for details.

F2 as a Mirrored RAID speed test results

F2 in Striped RAID speed test results

8GB P2 throughput is solid throughout the file sizes.

Then I worked with Tim Harry, the Edit Bay Supervisor for the Dallas International Film Festival to really give the Qio a trial by fire. He had to ingest hundreds of MB of video & still files every day, to organize, edit and upload into a recap of each day’s activities by midnight. Flawless performance & speed were crucial features— and the Qio delivered.

The Qio in use at the Dallas International Film Festval

Qio handling two P2, SDHC and CF all at the same time.

Really, the best features of the Sonnet Qio are inerrant in its core design— to extend the PCI Express buss and put it in this small box outside the computer. This enables so much more possibility and capability than a single card reader stuck in the side of your laptop. The entire system is so well thought out that when I went to connect the Sonnet Fusion F2 drive to the Qio, Sonnet had included short “jumper” cables for both SATA and for power so that the cable clutter was kept to an absolute minimum.

Simplified eSATA & Power cable management

In the end, I find that the $999 list price is definitely justified by all the capability the Qio offers. On my facebook page, I called it the best production accessory you could possibly get for your laptop. Add a $199 desktop PCI card, and you can easily move the Qio between computers, maximizing the value of your investment.

It was an exciting ride to see font design, logos that fulfilled design objectives, and artwork that I created that was used for over a decade. Hard to say that for much of anything made today.