Productive Saturday!

At first I thought we were sunk when it came to the footage I shot on Friday. Turns out it was just the playback head in the camera but the record head is fine! Whew...! Close one!

Here's the story, I borrowed Beersnob's camera and mic set up for the Diva shoot on Friday afternoon/evening. The mic set up is far superior to mine on my camera as it is cabled and not the cam mic. My subjects can walk around with the mic and talk into it and all of the area noise will not bleed onto the tape. Perfect!

We were walking around, they were doing interviews and I was keeping the frame and a rough time schedule to keep within the two minute clip window my clients wanted for this project. Afterward I went home and took Thing 2 to rehearsal for the special teen show.

Long story short there I just didn't get the footage digitized Friday night but as I had until Monday I wasn't sweating it too much. I knew that I'd have the house to myself on Saturday night and that'd be the perfect time to get this job finished.

Saturday night rolls around and I'm alone in the house so it's working time now. I hook up Beersnob's cam to the pc to digitize the footage and the footage was strewn with pixelated artifacts, making it unwatchable. I panicked almost immediately as a very sick feeling overcame me and my stomach. I want to do the best job I can on projects like this and if something isn't right I do take it personally, it affects me physically, literally.

So I call my client and talk to him a couple of minutes, he reassures me that technical problems happen and if nothing worked right we still had a great practice run for next time.

Instead of just giving up right then and there though I decided if the footage is ruined I'll still edit it for practice anyway. I hook up my camera to the pc and put the tape in. The footage is intact and pristine! As I said earlier the problem isn't with the very important recording head and only the playback portion! I'm thrilled but I'm going to look into getting the head repaired anyway.

I digitized the footage and have six good interviews now and I've got two more to go to finish this project!