Corona Virus cancellations

[Peter Riding]

I'm in the same position as the other posters business wise including a wedding that was due for tomorrow - 30th March. The couple tried to bring it forward to 23rd March and the venue agreed but the registrars could not do so. Then shortly after the whole thing was killed off by the Govt. Some have rebooked to July and August and others to next summer. One groom was fired already because of his employers situation.
Its been not unpleasant so far for me in a nice house in a nice countryside area, what with decorating and gardening beckoning me, the weather fine, and the local shops mostly plentiful but the obvious nagging worries will build.
I suspect that quite soon there will be a big popular reaction by the public to what many consider to be a gross over-reaction. There is virtually no balanced discussion on SKY or the BBC and the other media are constantly out-bidding each other with horror stories. But some alternative views have popped up e,g,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics...pses/#comments

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...-crippled.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...wn-criticised/

And the UK Police have not helped themselves by targeting by drone dog walkers in remote areas etc.

This is not intended to be a political post (I am in age and health higher risk categories BTW), rather a suggestion that we may get back to work a lot sooner than might appear at the moment all be it with serious health consequences for a lot of us. If you are ex-military you no doubt accept degrees of risk and balance between risk/reward anyway.

Meanwhile I am updating software techniques and studying up on lots of hardware I've either forgotten about or never got around to e.g. I have a slider and I have a gimbal but I'd never tried out putting the gimbal on the slider. Wow.

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Peter Riding

I'm in the same position as the other posters business wise including a wedding that was due for tomorrow - 30th March. The couple tried to bring it forward to 23rd March and the venue agreed but the registrars could not do so. Then shortly after the whole thing was killed off by the Govt. Some have rebooked to July and August and others to next summer. One groom was fired already because of his employers situation.
Its been not unpleasant so far for me in a nice house in a nice countryside area, what with decorating and gardening beckoning me, the weather fine, and the local shops mostly plentiful but the obvious nagging worries will build.
I suspect that quite soon there will be a big popular reaction by the public to what many consider to be a gross over-reaction. There is virtually no balanced discussion on SKY or the BBC and the other media are constantly out-bidding each other with horror stories. But some alternative views have popped up e,g,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics...pses/#comments

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...-crippled.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...wn-criticised/

And the UK Police have not helped themselves by targeting by drone dog walkers in remote areas etc.

This is not intended to be a political post (I am in age and health higher risk categories BTW), rather a suggestion that we may get back to work a lot sooner than might appear at the moment all be it with serious health consequences for a lot of us. If you are ex-military you no doubt accept degrees of risk and balance between risk/reward anyway.

Meanwhile I am updating software techniques and studying up on lots of hardware I've either forgotten about or never got around to e.g. I have a slider and I have a gimbal but I'd never tried out putting the gimbal on the slider. Wow.

The major issue is not necessarily the disease itself although 1% of 65 million ie 650K is a lot of people dying but to put it in perspective there are 600K deaths in the UK every year. About 80-85% of people who get infected will have mild, moderate or no symptoms. Maybe 15-20% of those infected will require hospital admission & of those 1 in 5 will require ventilation on ICU. Half of those admitted to ICU will not survive. At the start of this crisis the UK had 4K ICU beds. They are talking about scaling this up to 30K which incidentally is the number that the State of New York says they require for a population under one third that of the UK.

The issue is that all these thousands & thousands of very sick people will overwhelm the NHS & there will be no capacity to treat any other patients. People will still have heart attacks, broken hips, asthmatic attacks, diabetic coma etc etc Cancers will go untreated & uncured because the hospitals are overflowing with people very sick with COVID-19.

It's a new disease & there is no immunity. Until there is a vaccine all we can do is slow down the rate of spread so the number of sick people arriving at hospital each day is manageable.

[David Barnett]

I don't think its an overreaction, but I do think there's a 2+ week lag in cases vs effects. So the massive shutdowns, in the US at least, will begin to show signs of a decrease or plateau hopefully starting next week. I've had almost no interaction with people (telecommuting from office job which I never did before) except for the supermarket food shopping.



All that aside tho, for me, it might be time to exit out of weddings. I'd been awaiting the Sony A7siii for about 2 years, and was hoping this spring was it. It won't be. Seems fall at the earliest, and more likely imho early next year. I use a Sony X70 & very old at this point VG900 but with good glass. I dunno, I just feel I should been rockin & rolling with the a7s3 for 2 years now, and maybe 2 more final years before calling it a day. I did have one 2 Saturdays ago, and it was kinda gross for me. The state ordered a shutdown the following Monday, people were dancing & sweating, and I was there till 11pm. I felt bad for the servers, DJ, & photog, as we just breathed that air in for hours. Lookiing back now, I bet it spread to some of us. I was very nervous the following week. The groom, seemed a bit of a denier, in a 'Nothings gonna stop my wedding' kinda way. Even (seemingly) purposefully shook my hand when I arrived. I was kinda thinking "Uhmm, no" and washed them at first chance.

Anyway, I might just go for the A73 or A74, not the S version, as its cheaper and more multipurpose (photography) and take a little while off from weddings. We'll see. Definitely won't look for any next winter.

[Pete Cofrancesco]

The A7iii was my dream camera too until I discovered it had terrible banding issues filming a wedding reception with led lighting. I’ve read the A9 doesn’t have theses issues but it’s a lot more expensive. But now isn’t the time for purchasing expensive gear.

[Steve Burkett]

Triple whammy for me with this Virus. Like others, most of my work till July have been postponed or cancelled. A few have held on, but I'm not optimistic. Whether I can salvage this year from August or if that suffers too, I am waiting to see.

I am also in the middle of moving, to live permantly with my Fiancée, and this is proving more difficult due to restrictions. I have my own place till 23rd April, so fingers cross I can move everything out by then, especially as it's quite expensive to live there.

Finally, I was due to get married myself in May. So I am in the position to not only having Weddings postponed I was due to film, but my own as well. This year marks 10 years since I started my Wedding Video Business and getting married now would have been a nice way to celebrate. How annoying that after a decade filming Weddings, I choose this year of all years to get married.

On the plus side, I have some savings and my fiancée still has her job, though working from home. Once I am moved in, I should be able to tick along till the Government grant and then hope things improve in the latter part of the year.

I've got no plans to upgrade my gear, and once I've got the move over and done with, I shall focus on editing some personal videos I have, updating my software and websites, and doing some maintenance on my Business, marketing and social media. So I should be able to keep busy in May and maybe June. Troubling times, and I wonder what the future holds. Hopefully 2021 will be a better year and make up for a dismal one this year.

[David Barnett]

Originally Posted by Steve Burkett

updating my software and websites, and doing some maintenance on my Business, marketing and social media. So I should be able to keep busy in May and maybe June. Troubling times, and I wonder what the future holds. Hopefully 2021 will be a better year and make up for a dismal one this year.

That's actually a smart idea, improving the business side of things.

Pete, thats a bit disappointing about the A7iii, but I suppose sometimes our gear can have its faults. and from what I read its a good hybrid camera, for both video & photo so I suppose it has its limitations. I love the run & gun abilities of video cameras, but I can admit the X70 struggles during dance floor time, which is when I switch to the VG900. I'd like to make the switch to more DSLR shooting, but maybe I'll just do things the way I do them.

[Paul R Johnson]

One of my video friends heard that the Government were underwriting interest free business loans for small businesses having cash flow issues. He applied to one of our big banks. They asked for a BUSINESS PLAN!! He said, I don't have any business that's why I need the loan. They asked his anticipated income over the next three months, He said zero. They turned him down!

[Steven Digges]

You wedding guys are not alone. All of my corporate work is gone too....everything I had on the books. Interviews, CME, promos, conventions....everything.

Some of my work has always been filming corporate conventions. That work is not only gone but it will not rebound quickly. It takes time to plan and execute big meetings with hundreds of employees. And once the world is safe to do that again corporations are not going to rush back into filling up airplanes and resorts. My friends that are employed by AV companies are all out of work indefinitely.

Steve

[Steven Digges]

LED lights are a problem for lots of digital sensors. Some are more prone to issues than others. I absolutely love my A7III. I bought it primarily to have a good still camera even though stills are rarely part of my work. I never imagined how much I would end up using it as a B camera along with my Sony FS5. I have not used it around a lot of LEDs so I cant say if it is more problematic then other cams or not.

LED tip: Several years ago I was shooting a band performing in a large club with HD cameras that hated the pure blue LEDs and would destroy the video with the "blue smear" look. I knew the lighting director and let him know every time the lights cycled blue I lost my shots. To my surprise he said "I can fix that". He mixed 15 to 20% green in with everything that had been blue only. Twenty percent green will still let them look blue but it worked! It was enough to get me out of the blue death zone. I have tried it twice since then with good results once and so so results the third time. YMMV. It might be worth asking a DJ to try it if you need to.

I know that the blue monster look is not the banding Pete is referring to. LED lights are evil for us video shooters. Once upon a time it was all things bright red. But most of you wont remember that ;-)

Steve

[Josh Bass]

I've noticed a lot of blue lights (at corporate events) or things lit by blue end up purple on cam, even when everything else looks right. Weird.

[Paul R Johnson]

Sony and to a degree Panasonic just cannot do the magentas - everything comes out plus/minus magenta - so you see live a bluer purple colour, but the cameras don't. It happens on one of my Pentax DSLRs too. The older one produces very much what it looks like to the eye. The newer one has the same problems as many video cameras - the mix of red and blue LEDs just equals a magenta colour and there's no variation. Solid blue is fine, but as soon as the red LEDs creep in it becomes magenta, where it stays until the blue is almost totally absent then goes red quite quickly. Strange!

[Josh Bass]

I guess thats what I meant. blue becomes purple or vice versa...I dont shoot these often enough to remember which direction it goes. Makes me wonder why the lighting person would choose that color knowing that there would be cameras at the show. Especially as they often project the camera’s feed to imag.

[Paul R Johnson]

Because to the audience it looks stunning. I do exactly this. For every music event we do I ask the client who is the primary audience? The 1400 who paid to see the show, or the video crew - who invariably for my sort of events arrive late in the day AFTER the lighting is plotted and programmed. If the client says the audience, then the video people take what their poorly designed equipment captures. If the client says the video is important then I provide the lighting guy a monitor and ask the video people for a feed WHEN HE IS PROGRAMMING - it's too late to change colours 30 mins before showtime.

Sometimes we will do lights, sound and video and we plan the audio feeds, make sure colours are Sony friendly and the right contrast and the cameras are in the best places. When they want somebody else to do video it's fine with us. We make sure it's in the advance docs we send that we NEED the video people on site from say 2pm. We then work with them. Most make excuses, then complain it's too blue.

The truth is that LED is not new, and the saturated mono-frequency colour spikes look wonderful, but the camera manafacturers have done little to make cameras work with them. They're not going away. LED gives the lighting designer a palette full of saturated colours - like the deep blue. With tungsten lamps, Congo blue has less than 5% of every 1000W coming out of the other side of the gel - so bright blue stages were impossible without MegaWatts of lighting. With 16 million colours (OK that's not 16 million you could see with the naked eye) the lighting people can do amazing things. It's scandalous the manufacturers of VERY expensive cameras cannot make them able to resolve them properly after all these years. I've stuck with JVC for video because the colour rendition closely matches my eyes.

I send what they give me to projectors or LED screens. I take an SDI and plug it in. Not my department if they haven't bothered to be on the team. We have video monitors in our lighting control position. Very often when video come in demanding the audio feeds they also forgot, I hand them a cable and ask them to squirt some video down it for the lighting op. Often then look at it and ask why does he want that? Can't he see? Then during the show somebody comes and asks for the blue to be turned down, or the red made more pink. We smile ........ and say we'll try, which usually doesn't happen because changing colours mid show just isn't going to happen.

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Paul I don't think anyone is blaming you. Just more events are going to led and the color ones are very popular. Often we are called in to film an event and we don't know there's a problem until the event starts. Even if we knew ahead of time it's often not feasible to change the light setup. Most events are not the made for tv type and it makes sense the audience should come first. But it still doesn't make our lives any easier.

[Danny O'Neill]

Why has covid suddenly become a chat about LED lights? Did something get merged?