JULY 2012
Vol 182
Smoke & Mirrors at DVT Hey, Stuart chose the title for the launch of Smoke 2013 at DVT in Auckland, not me! If you’re not familiar with the term, it comes from the way magicians trick their audiences into believing something that’s not real, by the use of a smoke screen or mirrors hiding a rabbit which will miraculously appear out of thin air. To see if there was any likelihood of prestidigitational subterfuge causing spontaneous release of cash at this event, I questioned two of the audience members before the spectacular began. Firstly, Nick Zieltjes from New Plymouth. Ed: Nick, you’re in the oil industry are you? Nick: No, we’re not, but we are into training and corporate resource development. A lot of the work that we do is high level training resources – not only video, but interactive web based learning, things like that. Ed: What products are you using at the moment in this sort of area – Adobe? Nick: We’re a fairly big Adobe shop, we’ve got instructional graphic designers, we’ve got editors, we’ve got compositors, postproduction Pro Tools, working in those areas and we’re looking at what we’re doing down the animation routes at the moment. Currently we’re using After Effects but we’re looking at what the options are from there; looking at the animation as supplementary to the video aspects, to go where the video can’t go; a lot of high level animation showing how mechanical things and suchlike work and actually incorporating it into an animation design. There’s so much on the market and there’s so much change in the industry, it’s about trying to make informed decisions, because the old dollar is harder and harder to get back these days. That’s why we’re here. Ed: The dollar return is important because you can spend a lot of money on animations and the customer says “oh that looks nice”? Nick: That’s right – I was just laughing with Stuart earlier on because, when I first started in television, lens flare was something that we didn’t want, and now we have to put it in in post as part of a spangley effect.
Ed: So you come along to these shows to see what’s new … have you ever been to an Autodesk show before? Nick: No, not Autodesk. Admittedly, my background is more on the camera/postproduction side, probably more to the camera side to be honest, but being a facilities manager and part of the decision making process, I’ve got to go back to our principal directors of the company with informed decisions about where technology in the industry is going. It’s their money I’m asking to spend, so I need to ensure that I’m actually giving them return for their investment. I know that here we all have that problem and work on that problem … Ed:
Even if it’s our own money?
Nick: Even if it’s our own money – even worse so if it’s our own money! It’s about keeping up with where things are going and I’ve worked with Stuart and the team at DVT for quite a while, I’ve got a lot of my gear through them, and when I actually talked to Chris the other week about setting up a Maya system, he said look this is
Anurag Jauhari and Nick Zieltjes.
NZVN on the web. Go to <https://sites.google.com/site/nzvideonews> for more news. P16 Secure Data Holograms P20 Lectrosonics underwater P22 Avid at the High End P32 Portabrace at NAB
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