It has been a crazy couple of weeks for me. I have spent some quality time working with one of my favorite clients, Rocker Down Studios. I was contracted to come in and design and build a live production studio for one of their clients. Yes I understand it’s a little convoluted, but this is the life of a freelancer, I am often the subcontractor of a subcontractor. I really enjoy working with the Rocker Down for a couple of reasons 1) I am always stretched 2) they cultivate a great working environment 3) the jobs are pretty cool. So consider this my gratuitous plug for a Rocker Down Studios. This job was no exception, it was a great experience, I had some fun, but more importantly got some new and really interesting perspectives from the people I got to meet.

To start at the beginning I designed a small-medium size flypack, based around a Ross Crossover 16 which is a great little switcher. One of the tougher challenges opportunities I had was integrating the cameras Rocker Down already had (Canon C-100’s) into a live production environment. Now these cameras wouldn’t be my first choice for live production because they have HDMI out and they use photo lens which means no servo-zoom. On the upside they make a great image and the end result looked awesome. To get them inline I passed them through a AJA ROI box so I could get the HDMI to SDI conversion along with genlock, these boxes are great for that, though they are a little pricey.

One of the great phrases I got to hear while working on this project was “it only take 3 days to get to the moon.” I found this convicting and encouraging because while I did feel like we were working a pretty short timeline, building a flypack is way easier then getting to the moon. I really just liked that concept of putting what I was doing in perspective of what could be accomplished in that time frame.

So what can you get done in 3 days?