Final Prep for Odell

I know the last month has been kind of quiet from me. Mostly I've been quietly doing log and capture, and other behind the scenes details. I've also been settling in here in Santa Monica, and working some SoCal shoots.

Thing are happening though! I've just finally finished making some arrangements with odell. He will be coming down here to edit on October 17th, just under a week away, and we will be working together for a bit less than a month, so we should be on track to have our second cut finished by Thanksgiving.

I'm down to 3 tapes left for log and capture, which I should finish with ease before odell arrives. I made up a couple of preview DVDs for all of the sports stuff and mailed them to odell, Lawrence, and Geno.
After much waiting for some out of stock components, I've finally got my eSata RAID up and running. I got all Sonnet components, the Tempo-X8 and Fusion400, along with 4 500GB Hitachi drives for a total of 1.8 GBs of storage in a RAID 0 stripe. Should be just about enough to handle the film transfer material..

However, the film transfer isn't going at smoothly as I had hoped. First, I was waiting on the RAID. Then, when my 600 feet of test footage arrived, translated into a 130 GB Quicktime file, it repeatedly crashed my computer. After a few hours, I realized that this was caused by the fact I had not installed the "Blackmagic Codec.component" in /Library/Quicktime/. After doing that, the footage was playing, but didn't look quite like what I expected it to. Tim Bono and I are trying to figure out if this is because I don't have a Blackmagic HD video card in my computer. I might have to get one in the next week! Or it could be something else entirely. We'll see. The long and short of it, however, is that the S16 footage from Zambia won't be loaded when odell gets here. As usual, everything turns out to be harder, longer, and more expensive, than expected!

At least the insurance issue is 95% wrapped up. I have a D70s to replace my D70. I got a check to compensate for the Zeiss lens. Amex sided with me so I don't have to pay the excess baggage charges for the bag my items were stolen from. Now, I am just waiting on a couple of stray items that were out of stock for the D70s package. The least of my thoughts at the moment..

I've also sent my request to UNHCR for some footage from their library. Hopefully I'll be getting that soon.

And I'm sure you will be hearing more from me soon!
David