May '09 Meeting
On May 12th, we loaded up in the MVCC van and headed down to Industrial Video Corporation's Cincinnati Sales Office for our chapter's annual NAB Review meeting.  Joining us there were several more MCA-I members as well as a number of SBE members (Society of Broadcast Engineers).  After enjoying pizza and some good networking time, IVC Cincinnati manager Mike Sparke gave a presentation that included an overview of the tradeshow and what he considered to be the most interesting new video-related products shown.  In a nutshell, he reported that the show attendance was down considerably from last year (which was down from 2007), and not too many new and exciting products were shown (but, AVID introduced their new logo - whoopee!).

After Mike's presentation and some discussion with the audience, Rich LaRue once again treated us to his famous slide show of pics he took at the NAB tradeshow.  Rich's rapid-fire show was arranged in alphabetical order by company, and gave everyone a good feel for being at the show and some of the interesting products being exhibited.

Many thanks to Industrial Video Corporation for hosting our NAB Review meeting and being our May Sponsor of the Month, and to Mike Sparke for his insightful presentation.  Big thanks also to Rich LaRue from the Miami Valley Communications Council for his (as always) pulse-quickening slide show, and to Carl Suchomel for driving us down in the MVCC van.

April '09 Meeting
For our April meeting at Miami Valley Hospital, we were honored to have a very special guest speaker... Dave Helmly, Adobe's North American Technical Sales Manager.  After enjoying pizza provided by our Sponsor of the Month Tape Central, the large turnout of attendees settled back to listen to Dave talk about many of the exciting new features of CS4 - Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium.  This intensely powerful software bundle contains After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, Sound Booth and several other softwares to give a video producer unparalleled video production capabilities and creative alternatives.  Dave demonstrated several exciting new features of CS4, including Premiere's Speech Search, After Effects' Quick Search, Photoshop's Content-Aware Scaling, and the amazing audio filtering feature of Soundbooth.  For more information on CS4 Production Premium and these new features, please visit Adobe's web site at http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/production/.

Everyone who attended this meeting seemed to really enjoy Dave's presentation and were extremely impressed with the powerful features of CS4.  Many thanks to Dave Helmly from Adobe for his fascinating presentation and demonstration, and special thanks to John Vavroch from WPAFB who helped arrange Dave's attendance at our April MCA-I meeting.  Many thanks also to Doug Magilvy at Miami Valley Hospital for arranging our meeting room, and to our April Sponsor of the Month Tape Central.

March '09 Meeting
Well, it was SUPPOSED to take place on Feb. 15, 2009 - but it's been delayed until June 12th.  It's the big switchover from analog to digital TV broadcasting,  and it's been a political, technical and consumer hot potato since the ATSC digital TV standard was approved by the FCC in December 1996.  At our February meeting at ThinkTV in downtown Dayton (the local PBS station), Assistant Chief Engineer George Hopstetter gave us a good overview of the switchover history and current situation - what's going wrong, what's going right, and what we can expect when the switchover (finally) takes place in June (we hope).  After George's presentation and many questions from the audience (why are there so many problems with audio-video sync?), George took us on a detailed tour of the ThinkTV master control room, equipment room and production suites. 

Although it was well after 8:00 by this time, we all piled into a van (thanks Carl at MVCC!) and cars and headed out to the west side of Dayton for a tour of the Channel 16 transmitter building.  The building is basically divided into several sections - one for the digital transmitter, one for the analog transmitter, one for Dayton Public Radio's FM transmitter, plus storage and a currently unused section.  The digital transmitter is notably smaller than the analog transmitter (which is two separate transmitters for visual and aural) and more power-efficient.  We also went out behind the building to see the huge power transformer/rectifier cabinets and water cooling heat exchangers for both transmitters, and checked out the base of the 1150 foot tower that holds the TV and radio broadcast antennas plus some microwave link dishes.  As George pointed out, the main product generated by the transmitter tubes is heat - the radio waves are a byproduct, which is why an extensive water cooling system is necessary.

We'd like to offer our sincere thanks to George for his presentation and tours of the ThinkTV control rooms and the Channel 16 transmitter building.  Many thanks also to Industrial Video Corporation, our March Sponsor of the Month.

February '09 Meeting
We started off our 2009 meeting year with a very exciting (and extremely well attended) meeting - we saw and learned about the incredible new RED ONE digital cinema camera system.  We met in the studio of MainSail Production Services in Miamisburg, and everyone enjoyed delicious pizza from Ron's Pizza (a Miamisburg institution).  After our social hour, we heard Pat Steele (and his associates Jason and Ann) describe their experience using one of the early RED cameras to shoot his feature film True Nature in Dayton during 2007-08.  Pat talked about what it's like to shoot a high-end movie using a digital camera - it required some rethinking of the procedures he and his crew were used to in shooting on film, but it was also amazingly similar in lighting and set-up.  Since he was using a couple of the first RED cameras (serial numbers 15 and 16), there we a number of issues of "newness" to contend with, but all in all the filming went smoothly and the images look incredible (even on the DVD copy of the trailer Pat brought to show).  We're really looking forward to seeing True Nature when it premiers in theaters this spring.

If that wasn't enough, next up was Cincinnati cinematographer Jeff Barklage, who brought one of his two RED ONE cameras to demonstrate.  The RED has an image sensor chip that's the same size as a 35mm film frame, and can shoot images that are up to 2100 pixels wide (!) in it's highest def mode.  Jeff shoots many commercials, PSAs and corporate films using the RED - and he showed a number of them on his RED demo reel.  One interesting aspect of shooting on digital as opposed to film is that several new crew positions are required.  One of those is the data wrangler - the crew member responsible for downloading the huge amount of data from the camera onto several computers (for safety redundancy) after each shot is "in the can."

Many thanks to Barry O'Brien and John Adkins of MainSail for hosting our February meeting, and special thanks to our February Sponsor of the Month Panasonic.