Finished editing the trailer for “From The Crew” with producer Doug Murray. Hope to get the series on the air this decade!!!

What followed was quite a busy fall and some exciting baseball!

Early September, back at Moscone Center for Oracle Open World,  San Francisco’s largest convention - produced by InVision Communications.

Video Crew on Citrix Berlin

End of September into October was the Citrix Summit & Synergy shows in Berlin. Did a similar show in SF last May (as mentioned in an earlier blog ). Video crew came from the UK and were a pleasure to work with (pictured on left).

The Giants clinched the division angainst San Diego – but as the game was on at 2:30AM Berlin time, I got the news at breakfast the next morning.

Had one day to tour downtown Berlin – a city of almost 4 million people.  Did the tourist thing on a bus and saw most of the usual sites (Bundestag, Brandenburg Gates, Berlin Tower & The Wall (or what’s left of it – quite a bit, actually).

Always amazed at how easy it is to get around on the train in Europe.  Going to cost billions now to upgrade rail service in California – Hi Speed Rail and SMART (in Marin County) have an uphill battle.

Back in the USA the following week on a Google Sales meeting for Group X - Confidentiality agreement in place – can’t say a thing! In between sessions the crew huddled backstage to watch the Giants take the Atlanta Braves in the divisional playoffs!

I started shooting a video series for American Health Care in the middle of October.  The ongoing  web videos will serve to help their  patients control their diabetes while living their lives to their fullest.

Schwab Town Hall, Chicago

It’s still October and I’m off to Chicago for a Schwab Town Hall Meeting:  Bumpy Road Ahead; Please Invest Carefully, produced by TenCue. Live webcast took place in the original flagship of the Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue. If you want to watch some insightful conversation, click the photo on the left to watch the webcast.

Not too many Giants fans in the Chicago hotel bar as I watched San Francisco beat up on the Phillies!  Got home in time to see them win the Pennant!  Maybe I’ll get to watch the World Series at home…

Wait, no, there’s a PayPal show in San Francisco for Creative Technology. I can recall watching many playoff games over the years while working backstage – obviously the shows are booked way before anyone knows whos going to be in the game.  Fortuitously, the PayPal show ended the day the World Series started!

After a great weekend of Baseball, it’s down to Silicon Valley for the Google Global Sales Conference, once again with Group X.  One thing I will say about the show is that Google puts great effort into it’s search engine to make it work as seamlessly as it does. Try misspelling a word when you do a search – you’ll most likely see the “did you mean this?” suggestion. Lot’s of amazing coding goes into getting you the results you are looking for.

Yeah Giants!

Of course the World Series is in full swing and once again I’m backstage in a small room, rehearsing and watching base ball on my laptop during breaks. Rehearsal ends, I’m driving to my hotel, it’s the 8th inning of game 6 and  I’m looking for any bar or restaurant that has the game on.  I’m somewhere in downtown Mountain View and spy a plasma in a restaurant with the game on. Make it for the bottom of the 8th and watch something I’ve been waiting for all my life with a group of people I’ve never met before. I’ll remember that night the rest of my life!

My wife and daughter went to the Parade a couple of days later – while I watched backstage on my laptop.

Camera ops Anne Lakota and Paul Peralta review video with me on PayPal

November continued with some very creative productions: VISA show at the tony Inn at Spanish Bay for Harris Creative;  Audio Visual Technics‘ production for  Novartis at their spectacular office building in Emeryville and the  Safeway Foundation’s annual Gala and Fundraiser with Huey Lewis and the News, produced by DaVinci Fusion.  Ended work for the month at one of my favorite hotels: The Arizona Biltmore. Known as the “Jewell of the West”, its design is influenced by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Ironically the weather was about the same as in San Francisco as we collaborated on the InVison produced show for Cisco.

Thanksgiving is over and 2010 is approaching it’s end.  December starts with technically challenging and beautifully designed shows: InVision for Oracle and Group X for Google.  Seems like the theme for a lot of the shows in 2010 was cram as much equipment as you can in a small backstage and try and stay out of the way of the projection image.

The year finally came to an end with Stage II’s production of the Adobe Global Sales conference held at the Aria hotel at City Center in Las Vegas. This hotel had the most hi-tech bells and whistles of any hotel in which I’ve ever stayed. Touch screen displays at your bedside to open drapes, turn on lights, AC, TV or set an alarm. My favorite button is the “goodnight” icon.

Lights out, TV off, drapes close, goodnight.  And Happy New Year!

Working for GoVision out of Texas, I set up an Elvis system at a San Jose State football game. EVS (hence Elvis) is the manufacturer of the instant replay system used on most sports broadcasts. 3 cameras were interfaced with the Elvis which then fed an HD switcher in the GoVision truck. Graphics and video rolls were the other sources that were fed to the mobile LED video board GoVision brought in. From the audience perspective, the 18 x 32 video screen looked like it was part of the stadium.

3 ½ hours, 54 acts and no commercial breaks. That was the 60th anniversary special for CCTV (Chinese Network Television) at the Cow Palace. Technical directing in the Magnetic Image truck for producer Van Jarvis, we had a wild time – Chinese producers yelling instructions to a Chinese director who called the 6 cameras in English. Wish I had some video to show you!

The GPU is here – in 3D!  Directing for Carlstrom Productions at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, I saw some amazing new CGI demos and live 3D presentations by NVIDIA President & Co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang (Right). Click photo to watch the video (on the NVIDIA website, the links to the videos are a little ways down the page). It’s some of the best quality Flash streaming I’ve seen yet!  You won’t get the 3D effect but when you start with HD, the quality of the end video can be pretty impressive.  Schizophrenic directing! In a first for me (as well as I can remember), I directed two shows at once. During breakouts, the main room was dived by an air-wall. I had camera 1 in one room, camera 2 in a second room. Using two busses of the switcher, I mixed each camera and the speaker support graphics of two different presenters at the same time.

Talking With Chuck. Directing for TenCue Productions on a Talk with Chuck event, there was a live audience in the new conference center at the downtown offices of Charles Schwab as well as several thousand watching the webcast. The conference center is outfitted with four, Hi-Def robo-cams, touch-screen lighting control, wireless audio, projection and a 103” plasma monitor. The control room video switcher was a Panasonic AV-HS Hi-Def series. We added two Panasonic AJ-HDX-900 DVCPRO HD cameras from Magnetic Image Video; recording on tape as well as Firestore hard drives. Carl Quintanilla, Co-Anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk Box” moderated the event that covered changes in the economy and the market’s likely response. View Webcast: http://tinyurl.com/yccjydh