AV News

from CameraTalk June/July 2020

by Photographic Society of New Zealand

Editorial

Audio-Visual News:

by Trish McAuslan AV-AAPS FAPS APSNZ EFIAP Coordinator of Audio-Visuals for PSNZ

Tauranga AV Salon

Entries close on 10 June, so there is not a lot of time left to enter an AV. Because of the Covid-19 situation we have decided that judging will be done remotely, with the judges using video conferencing to make their final decisions. Information for this year’s Tauranga Salon is on their website: https:// taurangaphoto.nz/. Look under the heading Audio-Visual Salon.

321 AV Competition

This is a ‘fun’ international competition for short audio-visuals which are less that 3 minutes 21 seconds long. This year there were 82 entries, including four from New Zealand. Other entries came from AV workers in Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Ireland, Australia, France, Colombia, Austria and South Africa. Judging for this competition is unusual, with interested groups requesting the opportunity to judge the AVs. This year there were nine judging teams from Germany, Ireland, Italy, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

We had planned to meet in April to judge but the Covid-19 lockdown meant a change to remote judging, which is what the other judging teams also had to do. The organisers sorted the AVs into 12 packets, each under 2GB for downloading by individuals. In the end 17 members of our group watched and judged all or some of the AVs. We came up with some problems. Not everyone had access to a Windows computer, so three of our members were only able to judge half of the entries; they had been entered as mp4s. Depending on how an AV was saved, and the security settings on some computers, some AVs could not be opened by an individual judge. We overcame these problems by averaging the scores from all the judges. Because so many people were judging, this process of averaging at the end worked well. We have sent our results to the organisers who are in Germany; they will collate the results from the other teams to make the overall placings.

We enjoyed the experience and learnt or confirmed a few things along the way. Of most importance was being able to get your AV’s story across to the viewers. The narrations for some AVs were in a foreign language, and although we had a brief description of what the AV was about, sometimes that wasn’t enough for us to really understand the story. Some authors provided a translation of the script which was written on the slides. By reading the text we understood the story, but we didn’t have time to watch the images so the AV felt incomplete.

Another interesting observation came from the judging results. The judges were asked to score 10 for the AVs that they thought were the best. Twenty-five AVs scored at least one

10, indicating that at least one person thought that AV was good enough to be the winner. What this suggests is that if you like your AV, have confidence to enter it into different competitions - because different judges may judge it differently.

Proshow Gold and ProShow Producer

The makers of these two products, Photodex, closed down at the end of January. If you use either of these applications, you can continue to use them as long as they are supported by your computer software. One alternative is to change to a new company and application called Photopia (https://Photopia.nl) which has been developed by some of the people who formerly worked at Photodex. One advantage is that if you only make occasional AVs you can subscribe for a month or two; otherwise you can pay a yearly subscription to use it. Another option is to change to another AV creation programme called PicturestoExe (PTE) which is used by many AV workers. You can download a free trial at https://www. wnsoft.com. You buy a licence to use PTE by making a one-off payment.

A third option is to use a video editing programme like Premiere Elements, another programme you can purchase.

DaVinci Resolve (https://www. blackmagicdesign.com/products/ davinciresolve/) is very well recommended by video editors and can be used to make audiovisuals as we know them. It requires a lot of processing power, and some people who have tried it have found that their computer couldn’t cope, so check it out first.

Pacific Squid by Kahy Pantling LPSNZ