Mitch Gross

Check out the website--lots of info.

Just to expand you battery base for your camera, you might look into getting an adapter box so that you can use NP-1 bricks on your V-mount camera. IDX sells them and you can even get them in a double box that holds two NP-1s for greater running time and hot-swapping.

If you want cheap NP-1 LiON batts, check out Switronix. They have 60w batts and a 4-bay simultaneous charger that are simple, reliable and very inexpensive. AlArt Video in Long Island (AlArt.com) sells the batts for only $182 each and the charger for $625. That's around 1/3 the price for comparable Sony or Anton/Bauer LiON products. I know a couple of cameramen who own them and they swear by them--and these are guys who abuse the hell out of them by using obie lights and draining them dead repeatedly.

You pay for that light weight power. Lith-ions generally have half the recharge cycles of NiCad or NiMH. Good news is that you should top them off instead of letting them drain, and this will actually extend their life some. If you think your batt is getting low, just swap it and recharge. Don't drain it down. I'm surprised you've sucked 5 years from it.

Yes, there's going to be a numbr of very interesting toys at NAB this year, slthough I didn't think the Sony would be ready yet. Of course it probably isn't but a mockup or test bed camera will be there. I'm into all the tapeless hard drive cameras that will be there in both SD and HD. No more putting the rig down for a reload when your camera can record for 12 hours straight.

Walter Klassen has posted info on his new lightweight backmount vest and an upgrade to his support arm for the socket block. Anyone test this stuff out yet? I'm curious how different Walter's light vest is from the Action Products backmount design.

Okay, so now the original image you posted came up. Nice shot.

Hmmm. Well, here is a direct link to the image... http://www.geocities.com/steadidave/davestamossteadicam.JPG Oops--link says page not available. Somethin's going on here...

David, the picture in your post doesn't come up on my computer.

Take a look at the agreements you sign whenever you purchase a communication service. You wouldn't believe what's in the fine print. They can track what you watch on your cable box. They can track your Tivo activity (but only to a small degree by the way). They can track where you are on the latest generation of cell phones (Alec J. told me about that one--are your kids really where they say they are?!?). And thanks to all the cookies and other imbedded bits of program they can track where you go on the internet (so stop checking out all that porn!). And guess what? Nielsen doesn't use any of this. Because of the unseemly nature of much of this and because of the uncertainties of what someone might be watching v. recording at any given time, the company has backed away from most of their set-top boxes and instead do telephone serveys and diaries to track viewership. That's right--good old fashioned trust what they tell you. And they have found that in comparing the systems that this is still the most accurate and efficient way to go about it.

Not to get into details, but while I respect Mr. Howard Smith and his MK-V gear, the Alien was in development long before his involvement and many operators on this forum had tested the prototype again before Mr. Smith's involvement. While I'm sure he has engineered a fine integration to his system, when the dust settles and the Alien finally debuts, don't assume that one must have a MK-V in order to be able to use it. The process continues ...

Great, so I'll always have plenty of content to sit and watch at home as I twiddle my thumbs because these productions are happening in other countries and I'm unemployed.

You probably don't know what it is. If you look back in the archives you can find some info, including a link to the original patent application. Think Weaver-Stedman head meets Steadicam. Then keep thinking as it has evolved from this.

As Mr. Wolf Seeberg pointed out to me, it's the transmitter's antenna that can make all the difference. A little rubber duck ant. might be a 1/4 wave of the transmitting frequency. Double the length of the ant. and you effectively double the output strength of the transmitter. Go four times the length to a full wave and the signal is four times as strong. Of course it can be difficult to walk along with a rig with an 18" antenna poking out, but this does do dramatic things to your signal. It can even take a legal transmitter and match the strength of an illegal one--and still remain legal under FCC guidelines.

Well that might be your point but what does it have to do with the topic of runaway production?

Tim, for a number of functions on the board, when I click on it I briefly get a message box saying that I will soon be directed to the information. It asks me to wait a moment for this info to come up and underneath this has a parenthetical phrase stating that I can click on it if I do not wish to wait. So what does clicking on that actually do? Keep me occupied until the info comes up anyway? Redirect me to a faster route (why wouldn't this be used in the first place)? What is the point, unless it is a joke? What will take less time, clicking or not? An AC I know velcros a bright red "Panic" button to every camera just to see who might come along and push it. B) Just curious.

If you click the Members icon at the top of this page you can find info on Fred Davis, who has a business making custom cables and has done so for many of the members of this forum.

That's some guess. Better not tell the French with their thriving film industry. Or the Italians. And whatever you do don't let India know that they've been fooling themselves all these years.

The last three largest Miramax productions and where principle photography took place: Cold Mountain -- Romania Gangs of New York -- Italy Chicago -- Toronto That last one's so absurdist that I'd laugh if I didn't want to cry. I also get a real kick out of the argument for Cold Mountain that said it needed the undisturbed wilderness of Romania to recreate 1860s America. There are vast tracts of the Carolinas that would have worked wonderfully. Perhaps a day of helicopter photography in Romania would have sufficed. And how about Gangs of New York needing to go to Italy to recreate 1860s New York City? While I certainly understand that the location needed to be created from whole cloth, no one can tell me that the vast sets couldn't have been successfully built in North Carolina or any of a dozen possible US locations. I suspect that the vast CineCitta Studios complex offered a major sweetheart deal to Miramax to take over all that space and employ their workers for more than a year. And I'm sure that the Italian government bent over backwards as well. And how does an American production of an American story of Irish immigrants wind up shooting in Italy? I wonder if an Italian-American director could have anything to do with it? Meanwhile American craftspeople go unemployed.

And thereby completely missing the point. This is not a discussion about how the US film industry is bigger and more powerful than the English film industry or the French film industry or whatever. This is a discussion of runaway production, where products that may still benefit a certain global conglomerate company no longer benefit the local workers because the production is outsourced. This is similar to the jobs lost by American workers to cheaper labor in Mexico, the Far East and other places where there are lower standards of living and medical benefits and workers rights are either nonexistent or at least substantially lower than in the US. I'm sorry that the British film industry is a shell of its former self. The output of the UK up into the sixties was both prodigious and of great quality, and I can't claim to know the details of how and why that system shrank so dramatically. But here in the US we're simply trying to stop (or slow) it from happening to us. Why is this so hard to understand? Or are you one of those people who is all for Bangladeshi children laboring 15 hour days to make t-shirts at $.05 a unit as long as it keeps the prices down for you?

Are you really sure you want to do that? There's a few places that offer excellent titanium blocks. Not like it's a critical part or anything, just the entire weight and shearing force force of the full rig comes to this one item which better have exacting tollerances and high tensil and torque strengths. Fear the microfracture!

It's amazing how many arguments are based on conjecture rather than fact. It's especially true of the internet, where partial facts and search engines can propogate plenty of misinformation. It so happens I have friends pretty high up at Miramax. One had to fly to Romania repeated for her work. Of the roughly 350 names listed in the credits, a little over 100 were regular on-set crew (there's a lot of post and office people listed in credits). Of these, more than 60 were Romanian, some were Italian and a few were from England or Australia (DP John Seale for instance). Not listed are the dozens of tradespeople who were temporarilly employed by the production to build sets, cater meals, stitch costumes, and provide scores of other direct services to the production. Indirectly, hundreds of Romanians profited from the production through hotel and restuarant income, travel and living expenditures, an ample tax base fee, and per diem spending by the cast and crew. And then there were the thousands of Romanian extras employed for various scenes. Even with the large above-the-line costs of the production, Miramax spent something on the order of $70 million that stayed in Romania. That's how these things generally work.

As a kid I had a copy of blueprints for the starship Enterprise. Who knew all it took was a trip to the hardware store. Excuse me, which aisle for the dylithium crystals?

And exactly how would flying over all those Americans, putting them up in hotels, feeding them three meals a day and a fat per diem, how would doing all that save money for Miramax? Go on location, hire locally, pay them the local rates. That's how they save money.

Garrett said he spent a small fortune working on the fiber optic tube only to discover that it was horribly disorienting and it really made a lot more sense to have a screen so you could see where the hell you were going. At first the screen was up top so you could look forward towards the scene, but then he decided that down below made a lot of sense so that you could note where you were walking.