'The Caregivers' was the first documentary I did in India after all the years of East Africa, especially Kenya.
The reason I mention this is because of the shooting formats. In Kenya, I was working on DV tape, mostly shooting HDV format, as that was the format that delivered the highest quality at the budgets the local market could afford.
'The Caregivers had to be done on 1920 x 1080, 50mbps bit rate. On video-tape this could only be done with the good-old Digi-Beta format, where the cameras are cheap to rent (being old!), but the cost of tapes are high. So I had to look at the non-tape formats of recording.
The easy option was Sony's XDCAM, in its full form not the XDCAM-EX format. This would meet the technical requirements of delivery while recording on S&S cards.
Typically the cards are given along side when you rent the camera. So, my camera rental got us a 64 GB card and a 32 GB one.
My problem was that I was shooting in Meerut and did not know any editing facility here. So with my team we went looking all over town. We found a place that is a rare edit only facility in Meerut- they had seven edit bays, but dealt primarily with wedding and event work. I didn't feel they were up to handling an experimental kind of documentary like 'The Caregivers', but at that point had no options. My chosen plan became to download and back-up the shot material here and then move to either Delhi or to Pune (to be closer to my wife and son).
A few days before shooting by some chance I landed up at Chimmera Animations, liked the guys running it and decided that I'd try and edit here.
It turned out that they had never edited on XDCAM or done broadcast work. So the camera person helped to set up all that for them, on the first day of shooting.
Then we set up a routine- we would shoot in the morning, then have lunch, after lunch land up at Chimmera to download and back-up our shot material, then move to the next location by four o'clock. This was still August, so in North India we got plenty of daylight hours to shoot and got to escape the afternoon heat. Terribly convinient all around.
All material was put on two one terrabyte hard drives, each backing up the other. Ordinary, consumer grade drives. We checked the professional Lacie drives, but they were just too expensive.
Last day of shooting meant we were now all set up for the next phase: the editing.
The reason I mention this is because of the shooting formats. In Kenya, I was working on DV tape, mostly shooting HDV format, as that was the format that delivered the highest quality at the budgets the local market could afford.
'The Caregivers had to be done on 1920 x 1080, 50mbps bit rate. On video-tape this could only be done with the good-old Digi-Beta format, where the cameras are cheap to rent (being old!), but the cost of tapes are high. So I had to look at the non-tape formats of recording.
The easy option was Sony's XDCAM, in its full form not the XDCAM-EX format. This would meet the technical requirements of delivery while recording on S&S cards.
Typically the cards are given along side when you rent the camera. So, my camera rental got us a 64 GB card and a 32 GB one.
My problem was that I was shooting in Meerut and did not know any editing facility here. So with my team we went looking all over town. We found a place that is a rare edit only facility in Meerut- they had seven edit bays, but dealt primarily with wedding and event work. I didn't feel they were up to handling an experimental kind of documentary like 'The Caregivers', but at that point had no options. My chosen plan became to download and back-up the shot material here and then move to either Delhi or to Pune (to be closer to my wife and son).
A few days before shooting by some chance I landed up at Chimmera Animations, liked the guys running it and decided that I'd try and edit here.
It turned out that they had never edited on XDCAM or done broadcast work. So the camera person helped to set up all that for them, on the first day of shooting.
Then we set up a routine- we would shoot in the morning, then have lunch, after lunch land up at Chimmera to download and back-up our shot material, then move to the next location by four o'clock. This was still August, so in North India we got plenty of daylight hours to shoot and got to escape the afternoon heat. Terribly convinient all around.
All material was put on two one terrabyte hard drives, each backing up the other. Ordinary, consumer grade drives. We checked the professional Lacie drives, but they were just too expensive.
Last day of shooting meant we were now all set up for the next phase: the editing.
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