Episode 9 is out!

[Paolo Ciccone]

Hi all.

After much laboring, Episode 9, "Fisher Lights at South Bay Studios" is available for your viewing pleasure.
This is a really special occasion for "2nd Unit TV" because we had the privilege to shoot in one of the best sound stages availble in the industry. South Bay is just crazy big. 12 soundstages, many of them just HUGE, most of the with cycloramas and rigged with one or more Fisher Lights. The Fisher Light is a computer controlled rig that measure 10'x40'. Yes, I'm talking about feet, the light is just massive. Firsher lights generate from 40,000 to 100,000 watts of perfectly diffused, liquid light. They are the industray standard for car commercials.
Episode 9 covers both the technlogy and application of the Fisher lights, with an interview with the inventor himself, Ken Fisher, and their use in the South Bay Studios, courtesy of the Vice president of the facility, Ron Katsumi.
The shot has been very challenging for all of us. Shooting cars and handling spaces of that size is something that requires specific skills and we had quite a few moment when we struggled a bit. Editing this episode painfully revived some of those memories :) The heat was excruciating, and even with a couple of industrial fans runnign non-stop, we were literally soaked in sweat. I woke up the day after with a heat rash all over my (bald) head, even though I barely saw the light of day for all that time. 40,000 watts will cook ya to a crisp!

Anyway, I hope youll enjoy Episode 9, take care.

[Greg Watts]

Good stuff! I'm surprised you didn't spontaneously combust sitting under 40,000 watts of lighting.

Geeze, that's gotta be seriously scorchingly hot. At any rate, episode 9 is the kinda stuff I love seeing since we rarely get the indepth behind the scenes stuff elsewhere short of American Cinematographer or other print mags.

Keep up the great work.

Cheers!

[Joe Bowey]

Just saw the episode and love the intro. The sound needs work. Music was great but voices were too low and had to crank up speakers to hear.
Also, a few more cutaways would been nice and made it a tighter look. focused too much on the guy talking when some cutaway shots or graphics would break up the shot.
Its great to see each episode getting better and better.

P.S. I tried to watch episode 6 and it booted me of the website.

[Jonathan Ames]

I have the same comments, Joe and you'll find no excuses here. It was NOT one of our better efforts despite the fact that the circumstances were extremely, extremely challenging; so much so that we're doing another episode on shooting cars which we've been asked for by people in two other forums and via 16 separate e-mails. The sound was an issue because the wireless units we were using were not narrow enough to exclude bleed over in frequencies. There are places, like South Bay Studios, where 12 active stages pack the air with busy frequencies necessitating the use of very high-quality wireless transmitters and receivers that exclude frequencies other than the ones in use by our units. We had only Sennheisers in the truck which are good units but very broad accepting all frequencies and selecting the one it will use after acquisition instead of the Lectros which start off by excluding all the frequencies before accepting the one it's going to use. And the difference is substantial. So, bear with us knowing that everyone who reads this site learns from our efforts and your comments...good or bad. We do appreciate your observations and comments. I'm concerned, though that none of our systems or others are having issues downloading and playing or streaming the other episodes.

PS- I just tried it again here on my daughter's computer and it works fine here too so I don't know. I'll ask Paolo his impressions.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Ames

PS- I just tried it again here on my daughter's computer and it works fine here too so I don't know. I'll ask Paolo his impressions.

Nothing really to say here. Remember that TCP/IP, the protocol that defines the Internet, was designed as a *unreliable* protocoll. I get a kick out of this, every time I say it :)
People ask me "what do you mean? The Internet cannot be *designed* to be unreliable". Well, it is. The net is about 35 years old. Many people think that it was invented in 1995, the year the Web became popular, but the protocols defining the Internet date back to the original effort of the DoD. Computers back then were not even comparable to my laptop :)
The Internet does its best at being precise but sometimes packets of data simply get lost. Add to this the incredible mix of plug-ins, browsers, different OS revisions and, if you are on Windows, viruses and you see how sometimes things just go wrong for no apparent reason.
Joe, try again and it it still happens let me know exactly what you get. "booted me of the website" doesn't give me any hints on exactly what happened :). Thanks.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Joe.

Thanks for the suggestions. The sound issue has being addressed by Jonathan. I did try to level the two voices, something laborious because the difference between Jaime and Ken was around 8db. Took a lot of tweaking and at the end I just run out of time. Also, because of the added noise caused by the fans and the other issues mentioned by Jonathan, if I add too much gain we bring the whole level noise up. It's a delicate balance.
Regarding the cut-aways, believe me I would rather cut aways very time I can but the material we had, both as quality and connection with what was said, has been used completely. There was nothing else left :) As we mentioned, the shot has been very challenging and the ratio hours/footage was not that great.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Greg.

Thanks for the feedback, glad you liked it.

[Chris Forbes]

Great job on the edit Paolo. Liked the ending sequence.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Thanks Chris.

[John Kang]

Originally Posted by Paolo Ciccone

People ask me "what do you mean? The Internet cannot be *designed* to be unreliable". Well, it is. The net is about 35 years old. Many people think that it was invented in 1995, the year the Web became popular, but the protocols defining the Internet date back to the original effort of the DoD. Computers back then were not even comparable to my laptop :)

Wait a minute. You mean to say Al Gore didn't invent the internet! ;)

I don't have any issues dl streams to view.

Possible issues with the streams are missing codecs? Your viewers might not have the most current codecs used for streaming.

Of course, the next worst/best thing are firewalls. Some firewalls will disable viewing of streams. You might have to check your settings.

[Joe Bowey]

Hey guys, I finally got the page to work. It seems sometimes when I click in the quicktime button to download episode 5, the screen would freeze up before quicktime launched. It just happened a few minues ago but when I tried again it worked.
I'll keep you in touch if I noticed it again. maybe it's me.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Joe Bowey

Hey guys, I finally got the page to work.

Hi Joe. Glad to hear that it works now. When you have problems about playback please let us know the following:

- What OS
- What browser
- What version of QT you have

This will hep us not only understand what happens but also find a solution for you.

Take care.

[George David]

Paolo and company, great job as usual.

I LOVE the table-top dolly! Or should I say the ladder dolly. I was just thinking about making one similar to that today. Where can I get something like that?

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by George David

I LOVE the table-top dolly! Or should I say the ladder dolly.

Hi George.

Thanks. The dolly we used is called the "CamTram" and it's a very flexible system. It can be easily adapted to work on a multitude of "tracks" including the alluminum ladder that you can find at any hardware store (and it's cheap!)
AbelCine (http://www.abelcine.com) distributes the CamTram system.

[Paolo Ciccone]

George.
I forgot to mention to tell you to mention "2nd Unit" when you rent/order stuff with AbelCine. If you decide to rent the CamTram tell them that you saw it on "2nd Unit" and they will arrange the best deal for you.