Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

Louis Juska, Lead Project DeveloperAre you interested in web development? By that, I don’t mean designing websites, nor even becoming an astounding scripter of the DOM–although there’s fertile territory there too. I mean squeezing network technologies to make them smaller, making applications on the web that run as if they were on your local machine. At minimum, two things are necessary if that’s where you want to go: a fat pipe and web applications that take advantage of it. (more…)

Chris Graybill, Preservation Technician

Well well well, the preservation digital archive is ramping up! We have a new 500gb drive and have started encoding 3 minute clips of each tape from our current archive. In the future there will be a database and this material will live on a SAN just itching to be used for BAVC promotional reels, etc. The archive is full of great material. A lot of good music performances from back in the day at the Kitchen, including The Talking Heads, Beastie Boys, and Sonic Youth. Also recently I encoded some Elvis live in concert from a video piece by William Eggleston.

Onward and Upward to the future of preservation!!!

Mindy Aronoff, Director of Training and Resources

Mike was referring to himself and Abby, both alumni (he scheduled postproduction clients and she was wrote grants), who are now leaving the city together to explore the south east coast of America. There’s something…well…unique about working at BAVC. We often act like nonprofit refugees, wistfully crabbing about more money and about the database we so desperately need and we’re so used to work-arounds that we become ridiculously giddy when the HVAC is fixed. We’re like the mom that lifts the car off her kid under pressure and then looks around to say, I did that?

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Wendy Levy, BAVC Director of Creative Programming

In our new “digital ecology,” it seems we are all producers. Our capacity to create and feed information, content, images, and identities from and to one another is now an experience and extension of the body so ubiquitous that not to do it can leave you feeling hungry and alone. A blank screen is like an empty stomach: no feeds (RSS), no tubes (YOU), no culture.

We live in a world where anyone can be a content provider, and content is constantly “consumed,” millions of bytes of it. I know a little something about consumption; I’ve tended a parallel career in the food business for over twenty years, with more than a decade at the venerable Chez Panisse Restaurant. (I’m a recovering waitress who deeply appreciates the perfect peach, the just-foraged mushroom, and seared wild salmon with micro-arugula.) I learned about “slow food” from Alice Waters herself. The Slow Food Movement was founded on the principle that the industrialization of food was leading to the annihilation of food varieties and flavors. Wider distribution of products (content) to the hungry comes at the steep cost of transforming food into feed. (more…)

Ja Shia, BAVC Media Arts Technician

NAB this year was generally focused on the release of FCP Studio 2, the RED camera, and storage solutions. (There were smaller booths that carried new gadgets; most notably a still camera that took DVD quality video and served as a DVR):

For the most part, the South Hall (Post Production Land) had the majority of people previewing the new Apple products and their affiliates. Apple’s new codec the Prores 422 allows for the compression of DV with the quality of uncompressed 10 HD. They had a booth showcasing a split screen of the same shot: one side had 10 bit UC, and the other side was the 422 codec, and you couldn’t really see the difference. (Although, this really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.) Ideally, this is huge because it brings drive space back to a manageable level if one wanted to edit at online resolutions. When we get the new Studio bundle, we’ll run some tests using the scopes and see if the codec with pass a tech eval (the real test). (more…)

Debra Schaffner, BAVC Senior Postproduction Technician

I worked with BAVC Mediamaker John Lightfoot in the audio suite on the mix for his film “Obituary: A Caustic Tale”. This is an experimental, first-person biography of Hiram Maxim, inventor of the automatic machine gun. While I EQed and compressed, I asked John about the man who changed the way we slaughter our fellow humans. Apparently, Maxim was prompted to invent the gun after meeting a fellow American while in Vienna. The man said, “Maxim, if you really want to make money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others throats with greater ease.” I wondered if Maxim expressed any regrets later in life for his role in modern warfare. According to John, he did not. Nor did his son, Hiram Percy Maxim, who was certainly no Sarah Winchester. He never built rooms or passageways to ward off the souls of dead gun victims. Instead, he invented a well-known gun accessory- the silencer. I guess there is something to be said for knowing your path, or at least for walking a silent one. One last piece of trivia about Obituary. The archival film footage of the elder Maxim seen in the film was actually shot by his son. He used an early 16mm cameras when they first became available to (wealthy) consumers.

Angelo Sacerdote, BAVC Preservation Specialist

Do you have DATs, DV tapes, other digital tape media that are important
to you? In my video preservation work I encounter tapes in various
states of breakdown and I dread the thought of dealing with digital tape
if it starts falling apart. On an analog tape, if you have dropout, it
is just a little blip that goes by. On a digital tape, a dropout can
represent a devastating loss of ones and zeros, a loss of vital audio
and video. So the best plan is to move your data off of these tiny,
fragile digital tape formats as soon as possible, migration instead of
preservation.

I think the future of audio and video archiving is hard drives. Once
your media is digital, all you need is a computer to migrate to a better
hard drive in the future. Hard drives are getting more inexpensive and
increasingly reliable.

You must have redundancy if you are going to move to hard drives. While
they are reliable, they still fail. Your solution can be as simple as
having to hard drives of the same size, kept in different locations for
safe keeping, or you can buy or build a mirrored RAID. Whatever you do,
be organized and keep a list of what is in your archive. (more…)

Sage Mandzik, BAVC Media Arts Program Manager

I sat down with Paul Hoffman, director of the feature documentary WooLife, to talk about what motivated him to make his film.

Sage: What motivated you to make WooLife?
Paul: A friend told me that legendary Chicago Cub fan Ronnie Woo Woo was homeless in the 80’s and I thought that anybody that was that happy in the bleachers of Wrigley Field but had no home could teach us about life and following your bliss.

Sage: What was the most inspirational moment that you experienced during the filmmaking process?
Paul: Filming Ronnie at the dentist getting new teeth put in and watching him look in the mirror for the first time. I heard so much hate directed towards him about his toothless smile during filming and was relieved that he could finally close that chapter of his life. (more…)