On the night of July 19th, 2004 I decided I would wake up early and set the project for out the next day. Simple. Wake up at 6, set the cameras up and wire everything outside, start the computers capturing and go inside to watch over the project - I recently set up a second computer to capture both cameras directly to DV-NTSC so I wouldn’t have to capture anything later on, just throw the files on the timeline, sync the 2 raw DV files to each other in Final Cut and save me half the work - one day of the project can take up to 3 weeks or so to completely finalize, most taking at least 4 hours to edit completely. The last day’s edit of the project this year, September 2nd, wasn’t finalized until mid-November. Anyway, I woke up at 5:30, not at all in the mood to do anything. I set the cameras up, half-asleep, put the platform out with some nuts, falling over about 4 or so times on the wires and almost knocking over the cameras twice, went inside and started the computers (after screwing with the connection to one of them for 10 minutes - the cable didn’t work), fixed the audio (it had a real annoying buzz in the signal), etc., etc., etc. and went back to bed. Nothing really amazing happened during the time I tried to get back to sleep (nope, I didn’t get back to sleep…) so I went back to check on the project… I waited awhile for something to happen, but nothing really worthwhile was going on. I stopped capturing on both computers. With the extra time, I started showing someone how the whole double capture process worked. “Take the 2 cameras, sync them up, and export–!”, Final Cut began mixing 2 4-hour long raw DV files to 43 minutes worth of usable video clips to edit. “Nothing’s going to happen now!…” - “…but I should run a VHS backup just in case.” In the 20 minutes Final Cut took processing the files (one feed was slower, because it was on a FireWire drive), a squirrel came to the project and absolutely tore the platform to pieces. I’ve seen it happen before, but never have I seen (at least to this point in the year) a squirrel as determined as this one to get at the nuts still inside… both of us sat and watched the squirrel #$@* trash the platform. Glad I had the backup running, because Final Cut wasn’t able to capture again until it was done… and of course, this had to be my first time testing this 2-computer setup. Seemed to be the theme of the day… NOTE: The High-Quality version is split-channel audio: Channel 1 is the on-cam mic and Channel 2 is a mic I stuck under the platform to pick up better “nats” (natural sound) from the animals near it.

 

 BFP 7-20-04 30 second demo [0:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

 

 BFP 7-20-04 High Quality Version [15:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

 

 BFP 7-20-04 Low Quality Version [15:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup