Episode 4 of Look Up Tonight!
by Liam Kennedy September 9th 2003

Airing dates/times

Tuesday nights at 11pm on September 9, 16th, 23rd and 30th on COX Channel 31 (30 minutes)

Program contents

Highlights from the August 2003 meeting of the OCA at Chapman University
Highlights of the What's Up by Chris Butler (mostly the excellent information on the Mars opposition and viewing tips)
Highlights of the main presentation by Scott Kardel, the public afairs coordinator of the Palomar Observatory.

Program Notes

The taping of the August meeting went without a hitch with the support of the OCATV SIG members (Jim, Brian Norman, Tom Kucharski and Reg Salcido).

The introductory / narrative segments were taped again in the studios of Pyros Pictures in Costa Mesa. Greg again acted as the Director of Photography and he took charge of the lighting issues although this time the other OCATV SIG members did the initial setup of the lighting as Greg was away from the studio on the setup night.

We setup the studio on Wednesday August 20th and returned the next evening to tape the narrative pieces. This allows us to iron out any bugs with the setup without it impacting or pressuring the time for doing the taping. This time we again used a computer program as the TelePrompTer running on my laptop. We mostly ironed out the bugs we had last month with the use of the teleprompter and the taping went very smoothly. We also spent quite a bit of time making sure the cameras were positioned so as to show me looking directly at the camera in both the close-up and the wide shot (last months episode we accidentally had me looking away from the camera on the wide shot).

Equipment used.

In the taping we again used two cameras. The main one was my new SONY VX2000 and the other was my SONY TRV22 that has just been repaird by SONY (free of charge even though it was out of warranty... thanks SONY!). We really needed the "nightshot" mode this time as the lights did go down completely in in the What's Up Segment. We'll have to watch for this happening in future as even with the special I/R lamp on the TRV22 the video captured in almost complete darkness does not look all that good. For the main presentation we brought up the house lights somewhat so we did not have to run in the nightshot mode.

Program Editing notes.

This was the second time we have created a 30 minute program.. I am still shocked at how much time it takes me to scrub through the video and to pick out the segments to keep and those that will be cut out. By the time we got to the taping of the shows narrative/introduction I had not yet decided on exactly what bits of content would be in the final show. We could have dedicated the show to the Mars close approach or we could have gone with the highlights from both. This "lack of decision" on my part meant that we taped the narration so that I could choose either approach in final editing

The editing process was again severly restricted due to my availability and I did not quite manage to do everything I had planned/wanted to do. With a major computer hardwar issue with my primary editing system I ended up delivering the tape of the show very late to COX.

Tape delivered to COX on August 29th.

Credits for Episode 4

For handling the video taping at the meeting...

Reg Salcido, Jim and Brian Norman, Tom Kucharski

For helping at the studio

Jim and Brian Norman, Reg Salcido, Tom and Kristin Kucharski, Greg Pyros.