Tuesday, August 09, 2005

FORGE on UNHCR's Website

This is cool: UNHCR wrote an article about FORGE, which was on the front page of their website.
http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/news/opendoc.htm?tbl=NEWS&id=42f75de84

In other news, I am in Santa Monica working towards setting up a new home base here. I can't really do a lot of the work I need to do until my editing suite is up and running again, and odell is working on another project now, so things have been going a bit slower than I would like. However, things are happening.

All of my S16 film footage was developed about 2 weeks ago and is sitting in my vault at Monaco Labs in San Francisco, awaiting video transfer. I have just received a hard drive from Bono Labs in DC with what they call a "test drive" of their HD to Disk telecine service. The service takes the film and transfers it to 1920 x 1080 24P uncompressed 10-bit Quicktime files, which they deliver to you on a hard drive, skipping the tape stage alltogether. I'll be playing with these test files over the next few weeks to determine exactly what settings to have my film transferred with.
For perspective, 1 hour of video at this quality level takes 450 Gigabytes of storage. Compare that to the 10 GBs / hour of the miniDV footage from my video camera, and you can see that there is 45 times as much information to work with coming from the film original. Of course, that information needs to be stored somewhere! Once again, I am in need of more storage for my machine.. and I've been researching that. Looks like an eSata raid is the way to go.

I've also been dealing with all of the insurance and other issues created on my return trip. Looks like that stuff will be coming together over the next few weeks, and reimbursement for the stolen gear will not only make me happy, but allow me to purchase the storage and telecine services I need to continue.

Well, I think that's all for now.
David