Production BLOG: Day 3


After diagnosing a few problems with our scheduling and on set work flow we were ready to tackle day 3...

Due to the resolution of the camera we are able to crop into each shot which has the effect of getting multiple angles from a single master. We were able to take this master and crop out Willey and the counter, leaving a two shot of Brad and Mikey. the upside of shooting weekends also allows for editing time and gives us the opportunity to better define pick-ups.

On day 3 we had our first technical glitches. The first one was a revealed itself as static on one of the sound channels. After losing 45 minutes diagnosing audio cables, rebooting the camera fixed the problem. (In editing it seems the problem was larger as we have a series of clips that have dropped frames). The second problem was the speed at which the memory cards are offloaded to our laptop and external drives. In the beginning of the day it is very fast, taking about 15 minutes to offload to the laptop's internal disk. As the internal disk fills this process slows dramatically, to the point where we are have three cards queued up and nothing to shoot on. We will change the internal drive's file system from ext3 to XFS to see if can improve performance.

At the end of the day we left about 70 minutes of scheduled work unfinished, but that equates to the 70 minutes of down time caused by the sound and offloading problems.