Saturday, June 9, 2007

48 Hours Competition - "Dancing with the Pollies"

This year in the "48 Hours Furious Film-making" competition we decided to go with modelling clay animation - that's like the "Wallace and Grommit" movies. We drew the "Romance" genre which led us to parodying "Dancing with the Stars". Follow the link to the iafilm home website for the full "making of" article with photos and video clips. All is revealed on how we got modelling clay characters to talk.

http://island.manukau.ac.nz/iafilm/shell.aspx?tint=2&mainDir=Content&areaDir=Public&subdir=1.%20Current%20and%20Recent%20Projects&file=48%20Hours%202007.htm

Sunday, June 3, 2007

Crash Recovery Success

I was shooting to memory card with a Canon MVX25i, which is the PAL version of the Optura 40. I had a "low battery" warning but I kept going in the hope of completing a shot. The battery died on me. I assumed that the camera would do a graceful shutdown in that event but I discovered that is not the case!
I now had 34 minutes of event filming as a file of length "0". The file recovery was long and difficult. I have written it up as an article in the hope that if this happens to anyone else the information may be useful. I regard myself as an I.T. expert but this would have to be one of the most difficult problem-solving challenges I have faced in a long time. Moral of the story, if you see that battery warning then STOP. It is also a good idea when using Memory Card to stop and restart often so you do not build up a large at-risk file.

The article:
http://island.manukau.ac.nz/iafilm/shell.aspx?tint=3&mainDir=Content&areaDir=Public&subdir=2.%20Articles&file=AVI_Recovery.htm

The rescued movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtCqySVKcT0