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MillimeterA Lesson in Freefall Editing
Mar 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer
For skydivers, reliable equipment is all that stands between the carefree aerial ballet of freefall and certain death.
Just ask skydiving videographer Greg Gasson, who's made more than 3,000 jumps as well as several U.S. National and World Champion Freestyle Skydiving teams. His video work has appeared on a Fox network live broadcast and Hard Copy. For Gasson, reliability is key both in the air and on the ground when he's trying to edit video on deadline.
He uses a combination of three single-chip Sony DV cameras — the VX700, TRV900, and VX1000 — to tape aerial exploits. He's found that three-CCD cameras have problems with iris flutter during freefall.
Gasson recently edited seven hours of skydiving videos down to a 30-second trailer using Digital Origin's EditDV. “When I was choosing [an NLE], Final Cut Pro wasn't out, and EditDV was most ahead-of-the-game at the time,” he says.
Gasson says the ability to load an entire tape to the NLE through the FireWire interface and the auto scene detection feature of EditDV facilitate the rapid editing he often needs to perform.
A software engineer by day, he has witnessed the death of “scores” of disk drives, but says the name Seagate rarely appears on the casualty list.
While editing his trailer, Gasson ran out of disk space on his Seagate Barracuda 36GB drive and placed a rush order with his supplier for a new one.
When he found a problem with the new drive, one phone call put the Seagate Customer Call Center's wheels in motion.
Facing no further bureaucracy, Gasson received a new drive in the mail the next day and was able to finish the trailer on time. For skydivers like Greg Gasson, time is always of the essence.
For More Information
Digital Origin
Mountain View, CA
650-404-6300
www.digitalorigin.com
Seagate
Scotts Valley, CA
831-439-2859
www.seagate.com
Sony
Park Ridge, NJ
800-686-SONY
www.sony.com
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