It’s Starting To Look Like A Studio

studio 5E

“Take Doppler to piddle, but stop in the garage before you come upstairs.” Helaine wanted me to see what she’d accomplished while I was gone.

Holy crap. It’s a studio!

It took lots of work on her part preparing and painting the wall. The electrician removed an outlet right in the middle. Helaine patched and sanded before applying two coats of Behr Sparkling Apple.

It looks amazing. She’s amazing.

Two backlights are overhead. The key lights are on stands. They’ll be held in place with sandbags. That’s how it’s done in real studios.

There are mounts and power for monitors and a clock hung from a beam.

Cox came and installed service. I’m told I need 6-8 mbps for high quality, low latency, HD video. I’ve got triple that.

Most of the equipment is still enroute. I’d like to set it up next weekend, if possible. I’m itching to get started.

Little things keep popping up. We’re starting from scratch. I ordered a charger, 8 AA NiMh batteries, a few 25 foot HDMI cables and light meter, tonight.

In a few weeks my garage will be a chroma key driven sound stage. It’s for work. It’s a toy. This is a very cool project.

A Captioned World

IMAG1977The TV’s on. So is the captioning. For my dad it’s a godsend. He reads a lot better than he hears.

For me it’s a bit of a distraction. A worthy distraction, but a distraction.

Live captions follow live speech by five seconds or more. It removes the dialog from the action. You watch the touchdown and the replay before you read about it.

When it’s live, words are misspelled or a similarly sounding word is substituted for the correct on. Watching captions isn’t like listening. Context is missing.

The Tender Trap is on TCM at the moment. TCMs captions are great. Nicely formatted. In sync with the on-screen dialog. Out of the way at the very bottom of the screen.

When captions are on it’s hard not to look at them instead of the film. I find myself having to consciously move my eyes back to the actors.

All this is small peanuts. For my dad, for whom hearing is difficult, captions work.