Site produced by:
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A web documentary project is ambitious. For starters, we will be on location in Venezuela. We've decided to produce the content and publish the site on-location, which means everything needs to be portable and digital. We will be publishing in real time, which means while we're producing the project, the subjects will be able to review it. It will be our challenge to write objectively and face daily looks-over-our-shoulders from our subjects.
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Saturday, April 1, 2000 Hallways become edit booths during a break in the shooting in the hallway just ouside the operating rooms on the 4th floor of the hospital. |
The project is interesting from two perspectives: certainly the medical and surgical work is interesting, and so too is the process of telling the story.
Joining me on this project is photojournalist Tom Burton of the Orlando Sentinel. Tom was a still and video shooter with me in Armenia on a documentary project for Operation Rainbow and will be doing double duty again on this trip. For both of us, we are taking time away for our normal "work" to produce this project.
So, is this any way to spend a vacation? To some people, there are saner ways to enjoy a trip to South America. As Tom Burton points out, it "almost sounds like work." But projects like this don't come along every day and no matter how many hours we put in each day, I don't think Tom or I felt it was.
The Gear We're Taking
Still photo work
This will be our first project using the Nikon D1. We're taking film cameras as well as a back up, but not a film scanner. The film back up is for post mission use. Our back up for publishing during the project will be the video cameras set for still capture mode. We'll be using the D1's and the video camera's Firewire connection (IEEE-1394) to get the images into the computer. The Firewire connection is a fast and consistent connection across all the hardware. There are other ways to get images out of the Nikon, including replacing the flash media with an IBM 340 MB Microdrive . As I understand, this is not on Nikon's approved list due to some concerns about possible heat issues during multi-frame shooting.
With backups for the computers, camera, and capture cards, we should be able to publish images on our schedule. If Murphy's law takes out our gear, we can scan the film and add it to the site upon our return.
Audio
Much of the multimedia content for the web site will be audio driven, rather than video. We'll have some high-bandwidth video content, but since dial-up is still the most common connection to the net, our multimedia will be audio to enhance the storytelling of the images. We'll be capturing our audio using the Sennheiser ME66 short shotgun mic as well as Tram lavaliere microphones. I'll also be testing the Samson UM 1 wireless setup. I have heard very different reviews about this product, from "horrible" to "excellent". Look for my review next month. If performance is poor, we can still get quality audio from the shotgun.
Video
Video is a third priority asset for us to acquire on this trip. While it will be nice to be able to have the video from the trip for possible future projects, any video we do use in this project will be delivered via the web, most likely in QuickTime format. For that reason, the Canon XL1 is our first camera of choice for this project.
Let me tell you about our prior experience with the XL1. During the Armenia project, we shot with the Panasonic DVCPRO format AJ-D200 and the Canon DV format XL-1. One of my gear bags holding the battery charger for the Panasonic was delayed getting to Armenia, so the XL-1 did much more of the B-roll shooting than we planned. When I went to edit the material, I was very impressed with how the Panasonic and Canon footage blended together, with no noticeable color differences. My camera of choice for projects to be delivered in video is either the Panasonic DVCPRO or the Sony DVCAM DSR300. Both of which I've reviewed on this site. But here is another point of view.
In Venezuela as in Armenia, we are shooting intimate moments with patients, families, and often working in small operating rooms. While the Panasonic and Sony cameras are small and lightweight compared to other full size cameras, they are both full-size, shoulder-mounted cameras. There were times in Armenia, when it was obvious that the larger, shoulder mounted Panasonic was too large to let the Tom or I blend into the background.
So for this trip, I want to try the smaller GL-1 from Canon. We'll be shooting with the XL-1 and the Canon GL-1. Both cameras support the Firewire protocol out. As a rule, I don't believe in using cameras as source decks for an edit suite (despite the images all over Apple's web site) but, in this case, it works, it makes sense, and it saves lugging an edit source deck with us.
Computers
The computer support needed for a project like this includes the ability to send and receive e-mail, upload web pages, review and edit photos, making them web ready, editing audio and editing video.
To do a project like this a few years ago required a dedicated studio of multimedia computers and the project probably would have been assembled at "home" rather than on-location. Today's reality is this can be done all on location and with a small pack of gear.
Our computer of choice for this project was the Apple PowerBook G3. Apple Computer agreeably donated two G3 PowerBook's to the Operation Rainbow as well as Final Cut Pro software (more later). We've beefed up the standard 64MB of memory to 196MB in each. Additionally, we've added RATOC Firewire card bus cards, giving us Firewire input for the D1 and the XL1 and GL1.
Firewire would also give us access to Firewire based storage drives, but here's something to keep in mind. While the Firewire card is capable of 400 mbits data transfer — the protocol also transfers at 100 mbits and 200 mbits. Just because a drive is Firewire doesn't mean it can handle the speed necessary for smooth DV transfer. So a faster and more stable solution was to buy a media bay (sometimes called an expansion bay) drive. Our is a MCE Xcaret drive, which is a 18GB drive in a slide in mounting that replaced the CD/DVD ROM drive on the right side of the PowerBook.
When it comes to computers, and non-linear editing systems, it continues to be a good idea to do your homework before investing money in any system. While Firewire has a theoretical speed of 400MB/s the actual performance of Firewire drives varies. For a studio configuration, LVD SCSI drives make better sense. And in the PowerBook, a Media bay drive is fastest solution and has no cables!
Software
The third element of the trinity is Final Cut Pro, the non-linear editing software from Apple. This product has matured significantly since I had a chance to preview it pre release when it was still owned by Macromedia. Apple has improved it and brought to market a phenomenal product. The most amazing thing to me is that you can edit video on a laptop. Which means for us, in Venezuela, we can review footage daily, publish video to the web for high bandwidth viewers, and capture and edit audio for our other interactive segments.
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Saturday, April 1, 2000 Tom Burton checks e mail from the small office we've taken over as the "media center" in the basement of the Razetti Hospital. |