It's 4 days to the one-month mark of our internship. It's been great so far, as I've always said in all of my previous posts.
This week has been much less uneventful compared to the last, having spent most of the week in the studio editing "Thankfullness", spelling 'fullness' which is due end of this week, and the Christmas-due ChristmaSing video clips.
I've been working on a news title opening sequence, a short but complicated clip which is part of the ChristmaSing performance. A lot of back-and-forth has been going on between me and the director, and so there are many different renders of different versions of the clips. What's left to do now are to work on the corner bumps after the feedback returns.
Anyways, I'd like to use this post to cover some things that I have left out of previous posts by accident. I'm usually worn out by the time we return to our apartment, so... it is inevitable that some details slip my mind.
Each Sunday, all of us are assigned to a different station on a multi-cam production for Sunday Service. It's simple, but good practice. It's been 4 weeks, and so we've been rotated 4 times.
I forgot to cover all of my rotations throughout the different weeks, and so I'll cover them now.
Having experience in the area of vision-mixing, the first station I got assigned to was the Tricaster system. As mentioned before, I think I'm pretty familiar with the system now. It is a serious machine, with the cpu in a separate room filled with wires and constant cooling whenever it is on.
On the second week I was rotated to cover audio. On this very cool 48-track mixer.
I've been using audio mixers since my secondary school days and occasionally in church, but the only functions I knew were adjusting the levels, gain, treble, mid and bass level adjustments. This mixer here showed me that there are mixers out there far more advanced and far more capable.
I also learned about some audio terms along the way, such as compression, which basically controls how high the audio levels can go in order to control peaking, and the equalizer, which I never understood. The function has been around in mobile phones in a simpler form for ages now, and I never got to understand what each button meant, until now. By controlling each section of the spectrum, you are able to tweak if a person's voice, or sound, or music has more bass, treble, echoey, hollow, thick, and the like.
These audio concepts can apply to post-production as well, with audio effects having the same exact functions. This helps me a great deal, as I believe that I am able to better mix audio tracks now. Definitely able to make a better edit in my FYP for the Gradshow in terms of audio now.
The following week saw me placed in remote camera control. This is a first in terms of experience. You see, in previous times when we were involved in multicamera productions at concerts, the cameramen have to worry about the exposure, white balance, etc on top of taking care of their framing and focus.
With this remote camera system, the cameramen are given the freedom to focus on their framing and image focus. This still takes careful coordination though.
Speaking of remote camera systems, three of the cameras in the multicam production are run remotely. Yes, even the camera movements. Everything from camera movement to white balance, to focus, zoom, colour are all done by one person in a room, and that person controls three such cameras at the same time. It's pretty fun to operate these cameras, it's kind of like controlling an underwater probe like we see on discovery channel.
My other friends have gone ahead of me to operate the cameras though, not sure if I'll have to do it on my own the coming week X.X
Alright, with that, I'll end this week's posting.
Signing off.
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