Gotta love prizes!

Not only did Miller Camera Support and Lowel-Light treat us to free food and beer at the b-roll.net BASH on April 14, 2008, they also topped off the night with some really cool prizes.

Lowel-Light gave a DV Creator 44 Kit to Scott Robinson of Dallas, TX, and Kevin O’Harrow of Washington, DC walked away with a DV Creator 55 Kit.

The “55″ Kit is worth over $1500. It’s a shame I am not eligible to win! Lowel shipped the kit this week - to prevent the winners from having to load them on the plane for the ride home.

I did win a cool and unexpected prize. Willis Hunt of PortaBrace brought me a personalized CAR-1B Cargo Bag complete with a b-roll.net logo and my name on it. No worries that someone in my shop will run off with my bag! Portabrace also gave 2 of the b-roll.net LIMITED EDITION bags to a couple b-rollers in the crowd. Granted their bags don’t have my name on them… lucky for them…

A lot of b-roll.net supporters had cool stuff to give away along with b-roll.net T-shirts and hats. The folks at Shooter Slicker and ATS Communications both gave away some fun gadgets.

After giving away a couple Miller Monopods, the big prizes of the night were matching SOLO DS20 Carbon Fiber Miller Tripod kits valued at $1500 each. These are beautiful tripod kits. And again, I wanted to take one home myself.

But alas, long time b-roll.net BASH attendee, Richard Campbell of Atlanta, GA and Shawn Dennison of San Diego, CA were the winners. Both are living life slightly more steady thanks to new gear from Miller Camera Support.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the BASH. It appears the Harley-Davidson Cafe has room for us to grow, so we look forward to an even larger party next year. See you there!

Back in the fall, I put my learnin’ hat on - you know the pointy one with the word DUNCE spelled out - and went to a P2 Workflow Workshop put on by HD Expo. The moderators were 2 guys from LA named Steve Beres and Suny Behar. Even though “Suny and Steve” sounds like the name of an old 70’s variety show spin-off, the two guys make a great team. They combine vast knowledge of industry technology with humor and curiosity. It is a cool class.

Well, the guys are taking it to the “airwaves” with their latest venture, Tech Media Planet - a semi-regular podcast highlighting the latest in video gadgets. Imagine your favorite radio morning show “zoo” ripping on a Sony camera manual. Very specific audience, but it works.

So far the topics are more camera related with interviews on the RED and Phantom cameras, but I’m sure after NAB, the sky’s the limit with technology.

Definitely give these guys a listen.

Now can I take off this stupid hat now?

Lectrosonics‘ Karl Winkler let us use the new SR - Dual UHF Wireless Camera Slot Receivers on the floor at NAB. Just before we returned it, Karl told us a little about how it works.

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Note: To those of you gullible enough to be confused… this is a joke! (and a bad one at that).


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We roamed the aisles of NAB all day on Monday to see what new toys we could find.

Thanks to Andy “focusthis” Grossman for manning my tiny Canon HG10 (weighed down with great gear from Lectrosonics and zylight). Andy wanted to make it clear that he would have rather had a full size Sony on his shoulder.

Lectrosonics loaned us one of their brand new SR - Dual UHF Wireless Camera Slot Receivers, and zylight let us use a z90.

Sadly, we had to return the loaners at the end of the day…

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A whirl-wind tour of the NABshow floor on Monday - followed by the biggest b-roll.net BASH in history - followed by a red-eye flight back to DC - followed by coverage of the Pope…

Needless to say I’m a little slow with updates.

Amazingly, some of my compatriots worked harder, played harder, but still had great content up before me.

Check out blogs from Stewart “Lenslinger” Pittman, Rick “Turdpolisher” Portier and Chris “TV Photog Blog” Weaver.

Andy “focusthis” Grossman ran ragged with me on the floor shooting video vignettes of some great new products with my little Frankenstein Canon HG10 camera outfitted by Lectrosonics and zylight. Not surprisingly, the accessories were more valuable than the camera itself. Stay tuned for video updates coming soon.

Non-stop Andy and my girlfriend, Clare worked the door as bouncers for the b-roll.net BASH. (Don’t be quick to judge, Clare can toss a troublemaker in a heartbeat!) We had an amazing crowd of over 160 people at the Harley-Davidson Cafe treated to free food and beer from Miller Camera Support and Lowel-Light.

Great prizes were given away at the BASH, but I’ll save that for the next post.

Thanks to everyone who helped out and everyone who came out to the BASH.

Andy and Clare, I couldn’t have done it without you!

(btw, I stole these pictures from the amazing flickr photos of Rick, Chris and Stewart - Thanks guys.)

I don’t have DirectTV, but I”m so glad that jetBlue does!

It was the only thing that kept us sane while waiting for air traffic controllers to let us take off. It seems some bad weather was diverting tons of flights.

After a one hour delay sitting in the plane on the tarmac, the rest of the 5 hour flight was pretty uneventful.

A quick shuttle to the rent-a-car place, and we were on the road to our hotel.

Andy “focusthis” Grossman, made it into town before me, and was able to scout out the Harley-Davidson Cafe location - the home of this year’s b-roll.net BASH. I looks like a much improved room from our days at Gordon-Biersch.

The success of the party registration was much better than we expected, and we have to stop taking RSVPs. We’ll make sure we can accommodate more people next year.

The next two days will be fairly mellow, as we’re conserving our strength for the NAB marathon on Monday. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer.

From: Andrew Finlayson, Vice President and News Director, Fox News Chicago

We are working on a website called www.LiveNewsCameras.com The concept is simple, let people watch news as it happens anywhere in the world… raw, unedited on your computer at work or home.

It started on Super Tuesday with just a couple of feeds focusing on the Republican and Democratic candidates and has grown to 150 streams around the world. We think it will double that soon because we keep hearing from stations that are starting up live streams. We did it as a little newsroom experiment and now we have ABC, CBS and NBC stations involved.

We’ve been streaming the hearings about Iraq this week…nothing unusual about that…but we also stream the presidential candidates live every day…sometimes two or three times each a day as they go around the country. No one else is doing that.

We have been working on providing live video of the Pope’s visit to America from many different television stations. On Monday April 14th from 6-7pm CST we will have an experimental internet broadcast about the Catholic religion. We will look at the issues facing the Church and discuss the importance of this visit. It is a national effort that you can see on www.LiveNewsCameras.com. We of course hope to have raw feeds of the Pope’s travels at every possible opportunity. We are the only website that we know that is devoting this sort of effort to gather all of these live feeds into one location.

Perhaps you would like to link to this content over the next week? At the very least it might be a useful way to keep up with this historic event.

Being an eyewitness to news is very different from consuming prepared news content.

Like to see what you think. Our motto is “Veritas odit moras,” from line 850 of Seneca’s version of Oedipus. It means “Truth hates delay.”

From: Chris Stuard, WVEC-TV 13, Norfolk, VA

One thing that has always annoyed me is when a producer or intrepid reporter would want me to shoot a video off the computer with sound (especially off the laptop in the field… Can we say YouTube?). After repeatedly being frustrated by micing up the (usually tiny) speaker with the stick or even a
lav, I turned to a few items in my bag of tricks I call an old fishing tackle box: A Hi-Z to Lo-Z adapter (mono female 1/4″ to male XLR), a female 1/8″ stereo to male 1/4″ mono adapter, and a stereo computer speaker cable.

Attaching these three items and connecting the hi-Z to lo-Z adapter to
channel 1 or 2 and the computer speaker cable to the headphone port of the
computer, and I’m all set to go with crisp, clean audio, with no worries if
any noises in the background interfered.