Babbling Banshee Blog

“Did I ever tell ya of the time I saw a banshee in my DV camera?”

Wait, that’s not quite right.  It could be true though, Tape 14 was a banshee in and of itself; the other 27 tapes behaved properly.  Yes, you read that right, there are 28 mini DV tapes in total for this project.  It took me several evenings to get them all captured and logged, but we’re done now!

The Babbling Banshee was shot over a period of several months with a Canon XL2 camera set to 24p mode.  Since DV really is 29.97 at heart, that’s how we captured things.  If we had the luxury of more time, I would have captured each scene as a clip, resulting in several clips per tape.  As it stands, I ended up capturing a whole tape (except for that forsaken Tape 14) at a time to speed the process along.  Log notes included the capture settings and codec used, DVCPRO.

Special note to any and all camera operators; unless you have a good reason, don’t screw with the timecodes.  Please learn how to properly setup and use the timecode functions of your camera.  Decide on a timecode procedure with the DP during pre-production meetings and stick to it.  Consistency is really your best friend.  Most of our tapes had good timecode throughout as the camera was set to Record Run.

We had two or three tapes where the timecode was reset to zeros between scenes.  This means that after the tape has been captured you will have repeat timecodes for different scenes from the same tape.  Not helpful for logging notes and communications between the Director and Editor.

In this project our Director is using a Windows computer and our Editor, Ben McGill, is using OS X.  I looked for a solution for sharing large files between them both and came down to using the NTFS filesystem on our project drives.  For this Ben needed to install NTFS-3G software (http://ntfs-3g.org/) to allow him to both read from and write to the filesystem.  We have a pair of 1TB USB2 drives that the Banshee clips have been copied to, one is with Russ and one is with Ben.  I also have copies of the clips on my home computer, add in the tapes themselves and we have quadruple redundancy of data; very handy if one of the drives were to fail.  We went with NTFS as a filesystem for several reasons, among them are: NTFS is a very robust filesystem, it can handle individual files greater than 4GB in size (FAT-32 cannot), Russ is going to work on this as much as Ben, if not more due to some of the scenes so I favored his chosen platform, NTFS-3G is an open source project and I like FOSS projects.

As a side note, since I have all the clips on my computer as well, I think I’ll take a crack at creating teasers and the trailer after I get some info from Russ regarding what he’d like to see released.