talking with romeo

Tonight I had the pleasure of chatting with my DP John Romeo. He called to check in and make sure that I was taking the next right step with my pre-production preparations. It was perfect timing, I was thinking of calling him and he beat me to it. I was going to call him to find out exactly what kind of camera he has. His camera is a Panasonic AG HPX 170 handheld camera. Instead of using Mini DV tapes it records to a P2 card instead. It turns out that there is a job out there called, digital imaging technician. The DIT takes the information out of the camera and into the hard drive. I am all about learning "marketable skills" and that sounds pretty darn marketable, boring, but marketable. What is really great about digital imaging, is that I won't have to re capture the footage, it will already be on my hard drive. 

Speaking of hard drives, I have to buy a hard drive that has around 400 gigs of memory. It also needs a 800 firewire, cause my new mac book pro doesn't have a 400 firewire. 

The P2 has 16 gig's of memory which is about 40 minutes of footage shot at 720p at 24 frames per second.

We also talked about how long the shoot should take. We are estimating 1 hour for set up, 2 hours for the shoot, and 1 hour for take down, and 2 hours of buffer time. It is my intention to stagger everyones in times so that we don't waste anyones time. We shall see how that works out. 

Next Tuesday Romeo and I will go to the location and attend one of Dages' cooking classes to get a feel for our shoot. 

My DP homework is to find out exactly what kinds of lights we have at school. I went to the TV Center today and didn't get very far. All I found out was that I have to be very careful when plugging in all of the lights. They are really strong and the apartments in NYC are very old, which could be a problem. Luckily Romeo knows what he's doing and the loft in Chelsea is renovated so all should be gravy.