You Move Me

I’ve run dollies on rails. Shims, sandbags, apple boxes, the level and track itself makes for a long setup, but of course a dynamic shot. A few years ago at the Rocky Mountain Video Expo I dropped a DVD in my bag at the convention that was the highlight of the show for me. It was the Skater
And how can you go wrong with Denmark engineering? They gave us the simplistic beauty that is a Lego. But closer to home we have a less expensive and more versatile skater type dollies. The first was the Axis Dolly pictured below.


Now Digital Juice has their own Orbit Dolly (pictured below) for a thousand dollars less and that looks remarkably similar to the Axis Dolly and with the Digital Juice marketing machine it is no great mystery what most consumers will choose.



If you’d like to contribute to my Orbit Dolly fund just drop me a line.

Jason Troyer
Denver, CO

No Jet Packs?

I was recently reading an article from TV Technology by Bill Hayes available online at: www.tvtechnology.com/article/101498 . He was struggling with the age old question of man vs. machine and tried to solve the problem with an additional machine, actually it was software, SOA.

Since I’m a master control operator, I of course have a vested interest but my opinion is not without empirical data. We as operators used to (and still do) take the decks out of remote control so that the automation system doesn’t down cut the feed. Most of the time this wasn’t an issue but if we were getting something from a non-network party we were very leery about the start and stop time and with good reason, the trepidation saved our bacon on many occasions.

Management of course always wants to cut costs, but when do the cuts become fatal? My supervisor told me once they were flirting with the idea of going unmanned overnights. Which in theory sounds great because you can cut a $50,000 a year job with little to no downside, right? They wanted a computer to page an engineer at home and he would wake up (if he remembered the pager) drive down to the station and then correct the problem. The biggest problem I pointed out is that they would be counting on a computer to notify you when a computer breaks! They thought better of the plan.

You can never get reliable unmanned master control and you can never get jet packs. Sad but true.

Jason Troyer
Denver, CO

Get Enlightened!

I love new technology and getting the trade mags and seeing the latest and the greatest but it’s easy to forget the basics. I still remember learning basic and advanced lighting technique in a Chicago studio during a day long Bill Holshevnikoff seminar. The lights I learned with 15 years ago are outdated and could blow a fuse when you tried to 3 point light, but even to this day I still see the spectral highlight and whether I use a Lowel starter kit or new Litepanels a shadow is still a shadow and people with glasses still means I have to move the lights. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jason Troyer
Denver, Co

Content is King

When youtube first arrived video professionals scoffed at the quality. How could anyone look at a jittery postage stamp size video and tolerate that quality? It was hard to understand how one person could do it, but it was mind blowing when millions of people did it. Why would you lower yourself to 320x240 flash standards? Simple, content is king. You could find on youtube something you couldn’t find other places. TV stations saw the trend and the value of user generated content and offered “Viral Video of the Day” on the evening news because they intuitively knew people were searching out the content. We in broadcasting lament any wayward pixel but a viewer will watch a b&w security tape that has run through a vcr a thousand times if the clerk wrestles away the gun from the stupid criminal.

Today standards and transfer rates have improved but the lesson is still the same, give the viewer compelling video and he’ll find you on NBC or Vimeo. Good news for creators bad news for broadcasters. But broadcasters shouldn’t power down quite yet because, people are lazy, and they design their house around the 90” plasma HD set.

Jason Troyer

Denver, CO