It was an amazing year being blessed to help lead the volunteer photo/video teams, Ninjagraphers, for Lifest 2011. I was able to work with some pretty incredible shooters and work with a lot of new cameras. We got a bit of a jump start on the week with a Tuesday arrival. It was much nicer setting up without being rush on the first day. We were able to setup the editing systems, networked together with a 5 port gigabit switch. We borrowed a computer from Badger State Wrestling, many thanks to Shane Sparks for the i7 "horse". We ended up with 3 windows 7 computers for editing, my sony vaio laptop, the BSW i7, and my quad core. With a brand new Western Digital 1TB 7200, we shared the drive between the 3 systems over the gigabit connection. We were able to capture HDV over the gigabit connection without dropping any frames, while editing on both the other computers to the same drive. Both my laptop and quad core had CS5.5 and the i7 had Premiere CS4.
The previous years we had our friend Sean Bowers make up the intro animations. This year, I started one on Tuesday before I left, and was able to finish it up on Wednesday morning using After Effects CS5.5. Camera Corner was so nice to let us borrow three of their rental cameras, two Canon XHA1's and a Panasonic HPX500 P2. The canon's we shot in their HDV 1440x1080 res, the Panasonic P2 we shot in full 1920x1080i. We also had a Sony EX1, 7D and 60D. The first day we shot the 7/60D's in 1920x1080, but my quad core w/ nvidea GTX285 struggled with the 1080 quicktime files, so we dropped them to 720 and it handled them fine. The rest of the HD footage was handled just fine.
We had Miriam and Patti going through the raw footage ranking the the clips by moving them higher up on the timeline. When it came time to edit, I was able to just take the good clips and edit them down in about 2 hours. Jeff saved us by having a premade AE project for photos. We took 20 of the best from the day, and put them into the project. I had my laptop render that out while editing on the quad core in Premiere CS5.5. We had great footage to work with from Nate, Andy and Daniel. Even Lem had some shots that made it in them. Lem ended up being our host. He did outstanding, as we attempted to come up with themes for each day.
We just had one encoding issue at the last minute and was someone stressfull, going from Premiere to m2v encore ready file. It was hanging on the After Effects photo outputs, only on the SD timeline that had the HDV timeline dropped into it. I ended up doing a separate reding out of After Effects with the DV preset, and used that in the premiere DV timeline. The export was fine going to mp4 for the youtube 1080 files.
