Video: HD over 1000ft of cable?!

Edit: I made two boneheaded mistakes (missing credit, color grading error) and had to reupload.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYAVrLBKavM

A few months ago I found out that security cameras went to HD formats a long, long time ago, and while security cameras are tremendously boring, it's phenomenally cool that this industry quietly picked up NTSC and ran with it, and completely bizarre that nobody knows. Not a single person I've spoken to had any idea this had happened, and even the people with security system experience didn't know how it worked.

I love this technology and I hope I have a chance to mess with it in the future in some capacity. Maybe I'll stumble across better converters and get to do a video about those!


2022 has been strange so far and this video has weirdly mixed feelings for me. I was really tired or frustrated throughout much of the production for reasons I can't really identify, I had to shoot on two separate days (hate doing that) that both ran gruelingly late, and I couldn't get my hair right.

On top of that, I feel like I somehow undersold it, even though I understand why - it's an invisible product. You see an HD picture on a screen... well, HDMI can do that, displayport can do that, and if you work in broadcasting you know SDI can do that. It's ultimately not an impressive trick unless you can see how far it's going, hence the intro, and even that didn't go as well as I wanted.

I forgot to put the Gopro in 4K mode, framed it wrong (no shade on my camera operator, he'd never used a gopro before) and I shot it at dusk - I would have reshot, but this was the absolute last opportunity I was going to get in the next week to shoot with something like a clear sky, so I just had to go for it, and when I finished it was dark.

I literally did this at the last minute; I looked out my window at 4:45 PM, realized the sky was actually clear despite the sun going down, knew the forecast called for rain and clouds all week, called a friend and said "can you be at the studio within 30 minutes?"

We slammed together the gear as quickly as possible, twisted some wires around battery terminals to make a power cable for the cameras, and carried the cart out onto the street. My original shooting location was a bust for several reasons so I had to relocate to the sidewalk. I'm lucky nobody tripped on the cable.

I'm not too harsh on myself about it - doing an outdoors shoot in the middle of a city properly requires crew and equipment I don't have, so I'm lucky I got anything at all. I imagine most viewers will be perfectly pleased with the results. Still, it's much like everything else with this video: probably okay, but didn't quite go the way I wanted. So it goes. Not every project can be perfect, I'm just surprised at how often I feel better about them. All the same, I think it came out fine.