AV News 174 - November 2008
The winning sequences from the IAC Geoffrey Round AV Competition were
shown at The British International Amateur Film Festival - BIAFF at the Cairn
Hotel Harrogate on the 19th April 2008. These are some comments from the
audience of film and video makers. Now that the two media are coming closer
together perhaps we need some more events where we can view each
others work.. What do you think? Eds
Impressions of a Newcomer
Geo Meadows
I had never heard of AV until two hours before the presentation, a chance
conversation had steered me in the direction of the AV venue. At the end of
the showings I was a convert.
As it happens I have been doing AV work of a kind for many years and not
realised that it was now a stand-alone genre, accepted by the RPS and with
a significant following. My own work had been done using Flash;
tremendously versatile but hard work, and video overlays with stills using a
video editor. Flash was conceived as a way of producing animations in the
days when internet bandwidth was a big limitation, so quality was often
traded off against file size.
Today, with hard disks at 200GB and internet rates up to 8Mbit/sec there
is the infrastructure to support ultra-high image quality, way above Flash and
most video editors. And there is also the software to pull it all together, the
most popular for AV enthusiasts it seems, being Pictures-to-Exe.
As soon as I returned from Harrogate I bought a copy of this software and
am now putting together a short presentation as a means of discovering what
it can and cannot do. Having now used the software (for all of a few days!) I
can understand a lot more about the content, and the technical aspects of the
presentations.
To get back to first impressions, the over-riding feeling was one of
profession