Digital Video - July 2008 - (Page 8) DV UPDATE along a lot faster than we imagined, and we really didn’t need 28 episodes.” “It wasn’t like we were locked into any kind of television schedule,” notes Tozzi. “This is the Internet, we can do what we want — and we found that 16 episodes was really where the story wanted to go.” Tozzi directed and edited all of the episodes and acted as his own cinematographer. “That was a first for me, and I was really quite nervous about it, but it turned out okay.” The Dirty Bomb Diaries was shot on the Panasonic AGDVX100B at 24psf at a 4:3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio. Tozzi had a small grip and electric package at his disposal including a 1.2K HMI for daylight scenes, a two Arri 150W and a 300W tungsten Fresnels. “Primarily, 80 percent of the series takes place in one location — Misty’s apartment — and we really wanted to mix up the looks to show bright daylight and overcast day and night time with various looks for when the lights are on or when the power is out and, amazingly, we were able to achieve all that with a very small package,” Tozzi explains. The series was edited in Final Cut Pro, and he utilized Apple’s Compressor to master the episodes for the Internet. “It became a game of trial and error,” he recalls. “I worked to get the best trade-off between file size and image quality. We decided to put it out at 320x240 pixels and used H.264 in QuickTime .mov files at about 600-650kb/s. I played a bit with MPEG-4 files, but they weren’t anywhere near as good as H.264.” The duo decided to not re-invent the wheel as far as distribution on the Internet and started with YouTube.com as their primary launch platform. As the episodes started rolling out, they expanded to a number of other online video content Web sites. “We kind of thought YouTube was the only option,” recalls Tozzi. “But we started looking around and found a whole batch of these sites out there and started uploading the show to pretty much all of them — just blasting it out there.” The blasting included revver.com, dailymotion.com, bright cove.tv, metacafe.com, veoh.com, sharkle.com and more. “Revver really became our main hub for a number of reasons,” explains Tozzi. “Although they were the only site that had a revenue-sharing plan, that had little to do with revver becoming the main site for DBD. The quality of the playback on revver is really outstanding; it looks just like the files I made from compressor. Even more, when we started uploading the site, the revver director of programming contacted us and asked if they could feature our video on their main page. We certainly had no problem with that, and they really got behind the show. Every time we uploaded a new episode, it would be their Editor’s Pick of the day on the front page, and we got to watch the audience grow exponentially. After that, we started getting contacted by a few of the other sites like veoh.com that also made the show their featured videos.” The entire first season of The Dirty Bomb Diaries was completed for a sum total of $600, split between the two creators. “This was really down-and-dirty guerrilla filmmaking,” confesses Tozzi. 8 dv july 2008 PEST-CONTROL ESSENTIAL E very day, across the nation, there is a war being waged: Man vs. Pests, says Joseph Boyle, producer for Burbank, California-based Original Productions’ 10-part series Verminators, which recently aired on the Discovery Channel “On the front lines of this war are the soldiers of ISOTECH. These guys are the ‘Special Forces’ of pest control. We follow Mike Masterson, and his hand-selected team of pest control experts, as they use proprietary techniques and technology to do battle with pest infestations that the normal exterminator won’t, or can’t, handle. “To add a visual layer to the shows and give the audience some perspectives that they have never seen before, to take them ‘behind the wall,’ we chose the Innovision Optics DV Probe. Shooting with the Sony Z1U series camera and this lens system, we are able to bring the audience up close and personal, to get never-been-seen-before shots of the pests that our exterminators are fighting. The compactness, versatility and sturdiness of the Probe is exactly what we needed.” The award-winning DV Probe — which made its public debut at NAB this year — features a unique periscope attachment and long lens barrel with a small diameter of just 1.4", which let cinematographer Dylan O’Brien shoot from an ultra-low perspective and get to those difficult-toreach locations. The high-resolution glass elements and relay optics — designed in conjunction with Schneider Optics — produced edge-to-edge sharpness, flat field, and extreme depth-of-field on the tiniest of soon-to-be exterminated creatures. www.dv.com http://YouTube.com http://www.dailymotion.com http://www.brightcove.tv http://www.revver.com http://sharkle.com http://veoh.com http://www.brightcove.tv http://www.metacafe.com http://veoh.com http://www.dv.com
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