Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Yesterday evening, Lisa brought in the Pelican case with the newly-cut foam we bought yesterday for the medium Panasonic camera. (Note that despite the user icon, this is not the large Panasonic camera. The medium camera, as you'll see in the photos, is much smaller and easier to pack.)

( Encased for Transport )

I've seen the comments about Awful Things that will surely happen if I check this, and I understand the risks. If United will let me carry it onboard with me (it's within the size allowance), I will take it that way, but it would mean I'll have two carry-on bags (including my computer backpack, which I do also need), so it will be up to United Airlines to tell me whether I have to check it or not. If it has to be checked, it's as protected as it is going to be be.

Besides the large Panasonic camera, Lisa also has a much smaller unit (an AG-HMR10) that she used in Dublin because it is much smaller and can be packed in her luggage. It consists of a recorder unit connected to a separate camera lens by a 3m long cable. (There is an optional 10m extension cable as well, which could be useful if you were flying the lens around on a boom or something like that.) Lisa has always wanted to make this into a usable handheld video camera. Today, she rolled out the conversion kit.

( Custom Camera Work )

There's still some details on which Lisa is working, but overall she is very pleased with this rig, and will take it with her on our upcoming travel. While she prefers to use the big Panasonic for fixed recording like the Business Meeting, this unit will make doing handheld work easier, and less of a pain in the shoulder.

Lisa points out, before someone asks why we didn't just buy some new DSLR camera: This is a professional grade camera with a number of extra features that she wants that you are unlikely to find on most consumer cameras. It can be easily swapped to ground power if needed, and can record continuously for as long as there is memory on the camera. Contrast this with most consumer units, which tend to overheat after a while. A typical consumer-grade camera, for example, could not be used to record a 3-hour WSFS Business Meeting, because the camera would likely overheat. I have noticed that some of the videos I've watched on YouTube have had the people doing them complain that they've lost footage because their camera overheated. That's not likely to happen here. Besides, not only will this camera outperform most of the DSLR units we've looked at, but it cost less (even counting the $30 in hardware we got for her to build the bracket), and we already had it!

I left Lisa to sleep in this morning because we had no commitments early today, having dealt with the Westercon Business Meeting in the Ross Island Room yesterday morning. After breakfast, I retrieved my Charlie Stross books that I bought yesterday from Cargo Cult from the room and went downstairs to get ready for Charlie's Noon signing.

Just before Noon, Lisa appeared, in a lather. She found that the black Pelican case in which the accessories for the Panasonic P2 camera are stored did not make it back to the hotel room from the Business Meeting yesterday.

( Casing the Joint )

While all of the pieces are eventually replaceable, it would cost us more than $1000 (including the case itself) to replace them all, and we need to have all of it in hand before we leave for Kansas City six weeks from now.

Lisa checked with the hotel front desk (lost and found), the convention's lost and found (both of them; there's confusion about the actual location), and with Big Tech in the ballroom (in case it can been mistaken for their kit). No luck. We submitted an item to the newsletter and I Tweeted a notice to be on the lookout for it.

At 12:55, the heavily-attended panel in the Ross Island Room let out, and as the room cleared, Lisa went inside to check for the box. A few minutes later, she emerged triumphantly carrying the case over her head. It wasn't where she'd left it (under the seats in the back row) but had been moved up to a chair at the head table.

We then went around and canceled all of the alerts and showed off the recovered box and returned it to the hotel room. What a relief!

At billroper's suggestion, I bought a copy of The WonderShare video editor. It's relatively inexpensive and has some, but not all, of the features I would like to have. For example, while it has the timeline (MovieMaker got rid of it to "simplify" the program), it doesn't allow you to tell a clip to fade out either in video or audio. The titling is also terrible IMO. It's flashy, but there's on way to tell it to center the titles or otherwise align them. Everything is by eyeball. I expect it was written by someone who never does anything with a keyboard, only with a mouse. However, it does read MXF files without garbling or degrading them, as long as you change the video file extensions to MPG and the audio files to MP3.

The Business Meeting Orientation video for which we shot video at Westercon is nearly done. All that needs doing is to record the narration for a section for which we shot video but no audio. Once that's done, I'll upload the video to YouTube and let people have a look.

My current plan is to have us show this video at 10 AM at the start of the Preliminary and First Main Business Meetings. We've typically let people have about ten minutes to wander in late anyway, so if we start the video at 10 sharp, we should be ready to start the meeting itself by 10:10. We have a lot of agenda and Programming really wants us to stay within the lines they've drawn for us (finish by 12:45 PM on Thursday-Saturday and 5:30 PM Sunday), so I'm feeling the time pressure. However, I also am thinking we're going to have a lot more first-time attendees this year, so I hope that eight minutes of basic instruction on the forms we follow (getting recognized, how voting works, the most common motions) will help them.

There were two rounds of Fannish Inquisitions at Westercon today, and we were there recording them all. The first, shorter round were for Westercon: the seated Westercon (Portland) for next year, and the sole announced bids for the 2017 and 2018 Westercons (Tempe and Denver, respectively). Lisa recorded them with the new camera and the old as a backup. The sound didn't work well at all, and unless the old camera picked up the sound better than the new, we won't have video that's usable for those inquisitions.

After a one hour break, it was time for the Worldcon Inquisitions. The tech team here at Westercon 68 were, on virtually no notice when I asked, able to find a way to bridge an unbalanced connection from the amp on the room's sound board to the balanced XLR connection on Lisa's camera. (We had the cable, but they had to do things very quickly to make it so she could plug her cable into their equipment.) The initial results of this look and sound amazingly good, and if we get what we've asked for at Spokane, we should have superb sound quality. OTOH, it does mean that anything not spoken into one of the microphones is unlikely to make it onto the video. (If you're one of the people who were there, this is why we kept saying, "Repeat the questions into the microphones!")

Lisa is also not happy with the quality of the MP4 files coming out of the proxy card. She thinks it's something in her settings, and continues to experiment. I am therefore converting MXF files (the camera's actual native output) and will merge the audio and video files (remember, the camera separates them) into files I can upload when I get a chance. The conversions take quite a while, so I don't know when I'll get them posted, but if I'm lucky it will be before the end of Westercon.

We were very grateful to receive a grant from Detcon 1 (Detroit NASFiC) to cover a bit more than half the cost of a "proxy card" that allows the new camera* to simultaneously shoot a lower-resolution version (relatively speaking, given that the main copies are professional broadcast quality) MP4 simultaneously with the main higher-resolution MXF versions of the recordings. With that grant, Lisa told me to go ahead and tap her savings for the rest, rather than run a crowd-funding campaign for the remaining $300 it cost us out of pocket.

Lisa suggests that people who want to thank her in the future buy us dinner, rather than donate money directly. She was very uneasy with taking direct contributions. It made her feel like the people donating would "own" her stuff, and that makes it hard for her to concentrate and to have fun doing these projects for the good of Worldcon, Westercon, and fandom in general.

( In the Cards )

We'll be taking the camera to Spokane with us when we leave (late tomorrow afternoon, as we're taking two nights to make the drive) so that Lisa can (assuming we can get access) shoot footage in the actual room in which we're scheduled to hold the WSFS Business Meeting during Sasquan.

---

*Recap: The new camera, a professional-grade Panasonic P2 series camera, shoots in a format called MXF, and keeps the audio and video files separately. While there are plenty of MXF conversion programs out there, none of them except the very expensive Adobe Premier Pro can spot the separate A/V files and simultaneously convert and combine them, then produce an MP4 suitable for uploading to YouTube. Before you offer your opinion on this, please read all of the posts I've already made on this subject and make sure you're not just repeating something someone said back there. Hint: a simple search for "MXF conversion" will not give you the answer we're looking for. I know this sounds snarky, but otherwise well-meaning people are telling us lots of things we've already tried.

This afternoon Lisa worked on making sure the lens on the Panasonic camera was properly adjusted. travelswithkuma earned his fish as Assistant Videographer by holding the focus card while I read the instructions for adjusting the lens flange back. Once that was done, Lisa set up to do a test shot. Amtrak #6, running almost two hours late, came along at a convenient time. I went across the street to wave as it went past. As you will be able to hear in the video over the wind that came up just before the train arrived, they were sounding the horn multiple times as they approached. Even over the wind, the microphone picked up the sound of the horn at least 1 km away.

As the train approached, I could see the train was slowing. Also, there was something hanging off the forward locomotive's fuel tank. You'll see me watching the train head east. What you can't see is that it looks like the train stopped down at the east end of Fernley. Lisa and I quickly put the gear away and drove down to see what was going on, but by the time we got there, the train had left. We assume that the engineer got off the train, removed whatever was fouling the fuel tank, determined that no harm had been done, and got going again before we could get there.

Another interesting bit about today's version of the California Zephyr was that there were two coaches from the Capitol Corridor service trailing behind the train. We're not sure why that is. Maybe the cars need work at Amtrak's Beech Grove shops.

( Amtrak Slows at Fernley )

This evening, I pulled the video off the P2 card, converted the MXF files in TEncoder, then merged one of the two audio tracks (I can't see how to add both of them) in MovieMaker, and saved the result as a MP4 with YouTube recommended settings. That's what you see here. The video was shot in SD. Lisa does intend to do some shooting in HD because she's concerned that she still doesn't have the lens focus adjusted correctly and she wants to compare the two.

Lisa is aware that this is not the fanciest video, but remember that our aim is to get serviceable video with sound where you can hear everyone. There won't be wind blowing around us because we'll be in a ballroom section, and in the best-case scenario we will get a tap from the room's sound system so that we're getting what's going to the room microphones.

If anyone wants to see why it's a challenge to get the video out of the new camera unless you have Adobe Premiere Pro (which apparently has written into it the workaround for the way Panasonic arranges files in the P2 camera), I have put a 15-second clip we shot on the camera in its raw form in a Zip file on Google Docs. Warning: this file is 54MB compressed! It looks like there's a minimum clip size on the camera, so the size doesn't directly scale with the length of the recording.

( Technical Neepery )

Fortunately, several people including pcornelius have said they have a handle on programs that may be able to do this, but I'm putting this challenge out there so that anyone reading this who can help can try the solution you propose yourself and see if it works.