Showing Off My Studio

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I enjoy showing off my studio. Yesterday, Shaunt Kouyomdjian came by to take a look. Shaunt shoots, edits and manages productions at UC Irvine extension. We’ve worked together on some projects in the past.

He liked the chroma key. Shaunt shoots a lot against green backgrounds, always with a slightly different setup. Chroma key is really difficult to set up properly. I can only imagine his headaches.

Here everything’s tweaked. The studio was built specifically for chroma key.

I showed him a Chinese security camera I bought on a hunch. It’s my $80 “Crazy Fire HZ-100 P/SDI” studio camera.

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Pro studios have really expensive cameras. That’s a given. But, in 2015 when cell phone video looks pretty good, is that overkill?

The $80 camera’s attraction was its small size, zoom lens, SDI video out plus the price. My thought was state-of-the-art has progressed to the point where even bad is pretty good. Plus, it will be used under the best conditions to get a good picture: Well lit, from a fixed position with little motion.

Holy crap — it works really well and it’s truly a piece of crap. The lens feels like it’s going to come off when I touch it. Its HD video is excellent! Don’t tell.

This becomes my ‘flash camera,’ allowing me to go live from the control room using my just acquired video encoder.

This is so much fun.

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