One of the great things about working on the Digital Convergence Podcast (DCP) is we have really talented artists sharing with us all the time… Charley Voorhis is one such guy. Charley shared with us his “2012 Retrospective” thsi week and I wanted to share with you too.
I told Charley one of the things I REALLY dug about this cut was his use of nat sound, or the sound from the shot… the horse hoofs, the motorcycles, the skateboarders grinding. It trasnports you to another place, and in this case, MANY different places.
Well… if you are a regular listener to the Digital Convergence Podcast that I co-host with Carl Olson, or if you just happened to catch Episode 82 last week, you may have heard me mention a solution that I found for a Thunderbolt CF Card Reader. Well, the little bugger came in the mail this weekend and I have the test results.
First off, let me tell you that I don’t recommend this solution so if your time is valuable you can move on, but if you want to know why, you can read the details.
The “reader” is really an after market CF to SATA adapter that comes in a cute little shell, the item can then be slide into a Seagate Go-Flex Thunderbolt cradle and you effectively have built an ad-hoc CF to thunderbolt card reader. (NOTE… i don’t know if I’m using the word “ad-hoc” properly there but I’m nearly 50 years old and eventually I had to use that word in a sentence and today seemed like a good day to give it a go).
There are a few problems with this configuration. 1. its hard to align the adpater into the cradle. 2. the cradle mount is too high so effectively the thing ‘floats’ in mid air, its very light so this isn’t that big of a deal but still… 3. once you put a card into the adapter, there is no release mechanism so, if you don’t have finger nails, good luck getting that little bugger out of there. But the number one reason why I don’t recommend this ‘solution’ is this… SPEED.
This gizmo actually was SLOWER then one of my older SanDisk Firewire 800 card readers. By much, no but it was slower
8GB of data transfer went like this:
Thunderbolt 3:30
Firewire 3:06
I’m not sure why this is the case, but there you have it. I appologize to the listeners that got excited about this “find” but if it makes any difference I was really excited too so now we ALL know how it feels to be disappointed. (PS, there’s no easter bunny either).
In early 2012 Autodesk’s Gabrielle Friedly approached Tencue Productions and Peter Dippery, a producer that I work with all the time, to produce a piece about Marcello Martino, a british designer who uses AutoCAD. Marcello designs sunglasses and made a custom, or as he says, “bespoke”, pair for Prophet, a rapper and one of the front men of 7Lions. When we approached the band for a music video for a brand new song that we could use as b-roll they said they didn’t have one yet. So, since Autodesk does things right, they said, “fine, lets shoot them a music video”.
Although I didn’t get to be a part of the shoot, Paul Koblik, Peter Dippery and Tom Spingola, the DP, along wtih Julien Lasseur the second camera op, went to Hollywood to meet the band and make the video. Paul opted for a blacked out rehearsal space in Hollywood for the shoot and Tom light the room VERY STARK.
The piece was shot with 2 Canon 5DMK2’s and Paul did 10 takes of the song with a performance track blaring in the room. On about the 3rd take, Prophet asked Paul, “Hey, do we need to care about continuity”, to which Paul replied, “No, think of this as a black hole where crazy shit happens.”
FCPX 10.0.3 with the new Multicam tool was released the day before the shoot and I decided to give it a go. To be honest… I don’t know a better tool for a job like this. The 20 angles synced up perfectly and Paul and I actually had a blast cutting the piece. After a few minutes the technology sort of dissolved into the background and we were just picking shots and tricking out the cut.
I then added light leaks and lens flares via standard transfer mode tricks and also a layer of digital dust on some shots. We also paid tribute to JJ Abrams on the bridge using Magic Bullet Looks. The shakey cam look on the chorus when Forrest, the lead singer is singing, was by way of a freebie user generated plugin that I found online in the middle of the night while working.
All in all, its a fun piece, its a jammin’ tune and all of us at SL\CE had a great time working on the project.
3620
The original article I wrote about this project can be read here.
This is a piece I cut for Autodesk and Peter Dippery. The band, 7 Lions, didn’t have a music video yet so we actually produced a video that we could use as B-Roll in the piece. Marcello Martino @MartinoMarcello designs custom glasses using Autocad software and Prophet was one of his customers.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013 at 7:14PM 
