Anorax - My introduction

[Anorax]

Real name Colin, currently based in Southampton, UK.
55 year old male about to take redundancy and early retirement as a result of a company takeover. After 32 years with the same company I am looking forward to all the free time my retirement will bring.
Interests include computers, home video production, movies, Sci-Fi, cooking and drinking copious amounts of dry white wine.

Stumbled across your website as a result of "Googling" video podcasts and thought I would take a look.

Have done some video compilations myself using Sony Vegas 7 I can appreciate the amount of work involved in your Thomas Brin productions, particularly the CG stuff. I guess you must be using green screen extensively.

I would be interested to hear of the equipment and software you use.

best wishes,

Colin.

[Anorax]

Have done some video compilations myself using Sony Vegas 7 I can appreciate the amount of work involved in your Thomas Brin productions, particularly the CG stuff. I guess you must be using green screen extensively.

I would be interested to hear of the equipment and software you use.

Have just read the Brin 2.0 page which answered all of my questions.
I currently use a Sony HDR-SR1E which shoots 1080i in AVCHD format. Currently the Mac ( I have a mac-mini ) does not support AVCHD and Sony Vegas 7e has only just added support for this format.
If you need any location footage from the UK, I would be happy to oblige and add to the project, if you feel the equipment is adequate.

[Jeff Sayre]

Anorax, welcome to the CloudCity Community! Should we call you Colin, Anorax, or either one?

Concerning our equipment list, we shoot with a single Sony HVR-Z1U (1080i HDV format), edit in Final Cut studio (just upgraded to the newly released FCP Studio 6.0), use Shake 4.1 for all the greenscreen keying and compositing, and currently rely heavily on Bryce 6.1 for just about all the static background mattes and animations. For Episode 4 we wil be introducing Vue 6 Infinite into our animation workflow. That is about it.

Concerning your offer for location footage, I think that may be very interesting to incorporate some UK scenics into future episodes. Your equipment is fine. Both the HDR-SR1E and Sony Vegas 7e fit right into the production toolkit of vodcast cinema producers. Have you read our page on <a href="http://www.thomasbrin.com/vodcastcinema.html">vodcast cinema</a>?

Concerning the AVCHD format, there are always workarounds. For instance, Vegas 7 can export into QuickTime format. So, editing your AVCHD footage in Vegas then exporting to .mov format would fit into our production workflow.

As you can probably tell, we are just getting started with Brin 2.0. This is new ground for us so we are all interested to see were it goes.

Again, welcome to the community. A big dry white wine toast to you!

[Anorax]

Anorax, welcome to the CloudCity Community! Should we call you Colin, Anorax, or either one?

Sorry, force of habit using an alias. I am a member of a number of forums and indeed run a few of my own and it's a habit to register as Anorax.

Please call me Colin.

I agree, there are a  number of workarounds for the conversion of AVCHD material. If the Mac Mini recognised the camera and format, I too would use the Mac in preference.

A very interesting project though and keep up the good work.

best wishes,

Colin.