Digital Video - January 2008 - (Page 11) MY STUDIO DV UPDATE AJA KL BREAKOUT BOX I/O to AJA Kona card for monitor, decks and other outside devices. DAN O’BRIEN FACILITY: HIS HOUSE DELL MONITORS Two 22” E228 WFPs and one E248 WFP 24” client monitor SAMSON RUBICON R5A SPEAKERS 1 2 A commercial editor working with Blissium, a design and editorial facility in Santa Monica, Calif., Obrien’s clients include Spike TV, Dell and Mattel. This studio was built in O’Brien’s home, with the assistance of tech guru Claude Shires, for long-form projects outside of Blissium’s scope. Dan launched his career in feature editing as an assistant on Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School and second editing on Nobel Son (to be released in March). Dan recently completed Bottle Shock, starring Alan Rickman and Bill Pullman, and is finishing up the independent horror film Albino Farm and the documentary CamGirls. dan@blissium.tv 3 7 APC BACK-UPS RS 800 BATTERY BACKUP 6 G-SPEED 4GB FIBRE CHANNEL ARRAY RAID 5 Six 500-gig drives for 2.27TB of storage. POWERMAC TOWER Dual 3GHz quadcore Intel Xeon, 4GB 667MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM RAM, 1.33GHz bus speed, two 750GB drives, Kona LHe card, AJA KL Breakout Box, Final Cut Studio 2. 5 4 WACOM INTUOS 3 TABLET able to tell the difference, and there is no reason they should need to. A great, high-quality picture has value because of its content, not because of the camera that captured it. As valuable as that image may be, however, imagine how much more impact it can have when it is not only seen in print but also displayed as part of a motion-video sequence on that newspaper’s Web site. Photojournalists capturing images for Chicago's largest paper are doing that very thing today, having added a new item to their camera bags: the Canon XH A1 HD camcorder. The reason is today’s leading newspapers are more than print. Nowadays, the Chicago Tribune’s photojournalists not only capture news stills for the print edition, but also motion video for the Tribune’s Web site. “Our site has become a real priority, as the shift of news consumption goes in that direction,” explained Torry Bruno, associate managing editor for photography at the Chicago Tribune. “It’s somewww.dv.com Canon’s XH A1 has proved to be a useful tool for the Tribune news hounds. thing our photo department has dabbled in for many years. The idea of convergence is one that’s been around for a long time. “The first priority for most of our shooters remains still pictures for the newspaper,” Bruno added. “That’s still our bread and butter, still the primary source of the company’s readership. But is there a way to capture great images for the newspaper while also capturing great moving images for its Web site? This has been our challenge. The selection of the camera to answer this need was a major consideration.” Choosing such a camera, one that can capture both high-resolution digital stills as well as HD video, soon led Bruno and colleague Tom Van Dyke, an awardwinning photojournalist for nearly 25 years, to the XH A1. “The Canon camcorders were a natural evolution because our photographers have been using Canon Mark II’s for many years now,” Bruno related. “Also, the Canon XH A1 HD camcorder just felt familiar and comfortable, and it's a nice transition for photographers who are used to the Canon still camera. I think Canon had still-camera photographers in mind when they designed the XH A1.” “When this camera came around and we saw that it would produce a 6MB still, we said ‘Let’s look at it; if it can produce that kind of file, then we’re interested,’” Van Dyke recalled. The XH A1 HD camcorder captures still images in full HD (1920x1080) resolution in either video color space or digital camera color space. These stills are dv january 2008 11 http://www.dv.com
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