I filmed a fascinating lecture on the differences between men and women's brains and how that affects how we should be teaching our children. Basically, women have a whole lot more going on up there than us guys.

I told my partner (a woman) that's my excuse for why I'm such a Neanderthal at times... my brain is pretty much just idling...

well, until now not many obscure interests, but after googling fellmongering .......

A documentary on llama ranching in Louisiana. Llamas do not like closeups, and I spend much time wiping fist-sized gobs of llama spit off the lens and myself.

A few years ago, I was asked to do a time lapse of a project at work. This was one of those "extra duties as assigned" entries in my performance plan. While looking at methods to accomplish the task, I began looking at examples of time lapse videos here and there. Before then, I never realized how beautiful some of them are. Not mine, usually.

I've thought that when I retire, in 443 days, I might start staying out all night looking up at the stars while the cameras shoot away. The vision of bringing TB of data back to the little box where I edit is fuzzier.

Funny... but educational!

Last year I did a "Covenant Lovers Workshop". It featured three married couples and two therapists. There were some very funny moments and here are some of the outtakes.

/jerry

In a single day a few years past, we shot a ventriloquist clown, a mare giving birth, and an 85 year belly dancer. The last two were not so pleasant! We tell folks that we know "a little bit about a whole lot of stuff"!

Back in my early days in a producer's role, we got a call from a local hospital to film a new microsurgical technique they were pioneering. Only the cameraman would be allowed in the surgical theater (luckily it wasn't me). The staff cameraman was quite squeamish, so we were all looking forward to see how he would respond to filming extreme closeups of surgery.
As he's setting up his camera the chief surgeon tells us it's going to be hemmorhoid surgery. The cameraman doesn't know this. Now we're almost hysterical. Surgery begins and the cameraman keeps his eye planted to the eyepiece for over an hour and we're all amazed. When he comes out we ask him how it was. He says, "Got a focus before they started and closed the eyepiece."

We do mainly event-videography, and over our ten years or so of doing it so far, it's given us opportunity to "drop into" worlds we wouldn't otherwise have experienced... like graduations at elite private schools, religious ceremonies at churches other than our own -- stuff like that.
This past weekend we videorecorded (proBono) the "Thriller" dance performance here in Santa Barbara (a charity event that happens around the world), involving more than 250 dancers in the lawn of our town's beautiful courthouse.

Three three-day seminars -- lecture and clinic -- on the art and science of acupuncture. In French, with simultaneous translation and a live feed to a projector and thirty foot screen during the clinical/treatment sessions.

Enough to make me a believer in the value of acupuncture.

Jack

Last year I did a "Covenant Lovers Workshop". It featured three married couples and two therapists. There were some very funny moments and here are some of the outtakes.

That looked like, um, fun. I couldn't get past the bow tie, which somehow struck me as funny in context. Thanks for sharing.

This is something I recorded and edited back in 1991, when active duty in the US Navy. I used a couple of S-VHS decks and a simple A/B roll machine, no fancy NLE back then. Enjoy.



If anyone can improve upon the video, and is willing to give it a go, you'll see what I mean, please send me an email and I'll send you a link to Drop Box, file is about 300 megs. YouTube makes it worse somehow.

[I]Covenant Lovers Workshop ...[/I]I read that as [I]convent[/I] lovers workshop. That would have been interesting.

As for learning something, since my work has gravitated almost exclusively to media restoration, and since almost every project is unique, I learn a lot on each project. For instance, the following project is similar to the 1991 Desert Storm fighter footage just posted above, because it involved detecting and then removing moving horizontal white bars:



I'm sure you've all seen this kind of artifact on TV and computer monitors that you've photographed. I don't know if anyone else has ever figured out how to fix this in post.

I created a moving B&W mask using algorithms in AVISynth and then applied and tuned it within Vegas. The combat aerial footage has similar horizontal stripes, but they change from dark to light, going from left, so it would require a similar, but ultimately different approach. The general noise can be easily eliminated.

Those bars are caused by someone shooting the pictures off a TV screen using either a video or film camera, and where no attempt has been made to synchronise the camera to the TV source.

bloody outstanding john!

I don't know about interesting, but the most tortuous thing I ever did was 26 straight hours of rotoscoping using an Ultimatte, Ross Switcher, three Sony BHV1100 machines and a CMX340.

The camera was shooting over my left shoulder (leftie) and I was drawing the mattes with coloured pen on a sheet of green paper. It took a lot of coffee to get me through that session.

In 2011/12 I was commissioned to capture an OB of a well loved news forum BBC Radio program. My footage and the audio would be used in a commemorative DVD to celebrate the venue where the BBC OB live broadcast was happening.

In trepidation I setup. I was asked by the technician guy would I like an audio line? Oh yes please!! I plugged in the XLRs and instantly became aware of the sheer quality of the audio signal coming into my Canon. "Ah" I think,"So that's what a proper signal is all about??"

I now use that same signal as a reference to all my audio work: Thank you Auntie BEEB!

Grazie