Rounding Out Sound
Gasser's video rental manager, Steve Tartakoff and Dan Germano are already getting enough demand for DV support packages that they knew exactly what I needed in the sound department. The complete audio package they delivered included a mike cable attenuator, cables, bag, batteries, shotgun shock mount, high-quality Sony headphones and both workhorse shotgun (Sony ECM-672) mike and a Vega wireless microphone system. Both interfaced with the mini-plug inputs on all three cameras. Although we were forced to depend on the automatic audio level controls, there was a significant difference in the headphone output with the Sharp delivering a stronger monitoring signal.

A Great Set of Legs
I really grew to love Bogen's lightweight, carbon fiber Gitzo G1228 tripod with a Bogen 3160 plastic XL Fluid Head. They also supplied a very cool-looking Gitzo case which gave me the feeling that I was carrying a machine gun through the airports. Fortunately, the airport security guards trusted their x-ray machines to prove that I was not a threat.

I was impressed with the stability of these lightweight legs and gained a deeper appreciation for the skill my camerapeople possess for manipulating a tripod. My only missing component was a leveling bubble.

Also, even though I had a slightly lighter microphone fishpole from Gasser's, I used the Gitzo's G555 microphone fishpole because of its more compact size and easy-to-hold handles.

Bringing It All Back Home
Of course, there's far more to share about this production trip to Africa than I have space and time to share here. The adventure also included ...

shooting a ceremony from the middle of a field in pouring rain at the rural launch of The Hunger Project in Ghana, lighting last-minute interviews with Hunger Project investors in a hotel room with four table lamps, and covering a dancing and drumming celebration in a Senegalese village that was lit by two bare light bulbs strung from a wire that ran from a building to a post. Throughout, all three cameras performed without a hitch. My biggest problem was microphone cables which became intermittent due to rough treatment. Fortunately, I had spares.

The current drawbacks of shooting with DV-cams include the issue of timecode and the fact that there's no "clear-scan" feature to facilitate shooting computer monitors which seem to be ubiquitous back home. For me, the time code issue is the most serious, because given how much footage I've got and the fact that I'm addicted to non-linear editing, I need to digitize first at low-res, make my decisions and then redigitize using timecode to get only the exact sequences that I need. None of the studios that I use have a DV studio deck online yet in order to facilitate this process.

I may well end up bumping selects to BetaSP in order to get the critical timecode control. Which reminds me that Firewire users who are so hot to make DV clone copies to their hard-drives better have plenty of disk space. I'll be writing about the post-production on this project within a month or two. Do you think Panasonic might lend me one of their DV studio decks so I can update you on that interface? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, for myself, and for the work of The Hunger Project, the innovations of DV technology couldn't have come at a better time. Considering the quality of the footage I'm currently screening, I can't imagine any professional producer, at any level, ever shooting with anything less.