Hello from Scotland

[Derek Heeps]

Hi , my name's Derek and I live in North Ayrshire , Scotland .

I work in the Audio Visual Unit of the Fire Service here , job involves mainly photogrpahy with some video production thrown in amongst other duties .

I have worked in AV all my life , started out studying Electrical & Electronic Engineering at Uni in the 1970's , with a part time job in a Hi-Fi shop ; ended up working full time in the Hi-Fi industry for a number of years . Alas the shop closed down after the owner died and I moved on to become a school AV technician where I got into video production in the early days with VHS , Betamax and low band U Matic .

Eventually , I moved on from there , worked for a couple of years for a wedding/commercial photographer taking care of the video side of his business , before branching out on my own and doing mainly wedding work in the summer and working in the conference/presentation industry as a freelancer in the winter ; I did that for about five years until one of my main clients invited me to join their staff , again mainly doing video work , but also helping out with all branches of AV as required .By the time I was working on my own , Sony had launched the Video8 format and , like many others , I used the CCD V100 and EVS-800 edit deck back then ; moving on through the CCD V200 and EVS-1000 Hi8 deck during that time .

By the time I was working in the presentation industry , the DCR-VX1000 had come out and I got one straight away , along with a iMac G3 DV , which I upgraded to a Powermac G4 before long - a lot of my early DV stuff being edited in iMovie before I got an early version of Adobe Premiere .

After about 10 years working in the presentation/conference industry in Edinburgh , I met my current partner - since she was based in the West one of us was going to have to move , so I moved over here and , after a couple of dead-end jobs , I ended up in the Fire Service , where I have now been for coming on 9 years .

I kept the VX1000 for a long time ( still have it , although it 'died' a few months ago and I can't justify putting new heads in it now ) , and upgraded the G4 to a top end G5 about 6 or 7 years ago , now running either iMovie HD or FCP 6 , depending on what I am doing .

I was looking into going HD to replace the VX1000 , undecided as to which format to go for ( looking at HDV and AVCHD camcorders ) and finding that , even with dual 2.5GHz processors and 8Gb RAM the G5 was struggling to cope with full HD material - a new computer was not an additional expense I was budgeting for !

However , just last week , a friend very kindly gifted me two JVC GY-DV500 camcorder bodies which his place of work were throwing out since they have no further use for SD and 4:3 kit ! The two cameras had been used in a studio environment witht the decks seeing very little use ( 29 drum hours on one and 38 on the other ! ) and looked barnd new .

Fortunately , I had one Canon broadcast lens kicking around , and have just bought another identical lens on eBay to get both cameras running ; they also came with chargers and a handful of IDX NP1 Lithium Ion batteries , all but one of which are holding a good charge and giving about 2 hours , I will get round to putting new cells into my old PAG belt as a backup .

Once I have played with these for a while and satisfied myself as to their reliability , I will start looking for some work ( probably getting back into weddings next summer ) . In the meantime , I will look into the best way to crop to 16:9 in FCP , I can shoot using the 16:9 safe area guides in the DV500 viewfinders . I am already familiar enough with the cameras since we have a couple ( with considerably more hours on them ) at work , as well as a GY-DV5000 and a relatively new Sony XDCAM which will see our move to HD .

At work , we do a mixture of training films and incident cover ; the former can be planned for and the latter cannot , since it usually amounts to getting turned out in the middle of the night to photograph or film burning buildings and/or the aftermath of some incident ( being Scotland , it is more often than not cold and wet at the same time ) .

That is a bit of a ramble , but I hope serves to introduce myself and what I do .

[Gary Nattrass]

Welcome to the forum Derek and thank you for your introduction blog.

Quite a few of us brit's here now and you will get good advice and help if needed.

[Derek Heeps]

Thanks for making me feel welcome !

I will no doubt have questions to ask - that's why I registered in the first place !

I have also tried to post some helpful comments on other threads .

[Colin McDonald]

Belated welcome, Derek. I've been on holiday so I missed your posts until today. I usually try to keep up with the Brits on here and at one point had a list going (should really update it). As Gary said, there's quite a bunch of us here now.

[James Strange]

Welcome to the board.

[John Estcourt]

Hi derek, welcome. Im not far from you in south Ayrshire so please feel free to drop me a line anytime.
Kindest regards
John.

[Derek Heeps]

Thanks all for the kind welcome .