Dust and fingerprints nearly killed me...

SONY EX1-R/AUTOCUE COMBINATION

So I had kind of a bad start yesterday: our soundguy had gallstones and there was no time to replace him. My client rented an autocue (a device that scrolls text before your eyes so you don't have to memorize text) and spent the evening before assembling it and preparing the text. Working with an autocue was new to him -and me, for that matter. We had 12.000 words of presentation to pack in a single day of shooting. And four locations in a beautifully renovated farm to do so. The talent was a Dutch speaker doing commentary in English on philosophical debate. This was no 60 second weather forecast...
I had a lot to consider: a wireless lavalier mic, a wired mic on a stand, directing, lighting and operating the camera. We were shooting with heavy sunlight pouring into dark interiors. The neighbours were screaming at their horses and riding motorcycles. The autocue broke down several times, for no apparent reason.


We started the day at 8 AM and at 3 pm, we were halfway through. I dumped the XDCam footage on my MacBook Pro. When I looked at the footage I was in shock. The autocue, basically a oneway mirror, turned out to have many tiny spots and dust on the glass. The part we shot in the sunlight was riddled with tiny spots, spots I could not see on my LCD screen or viewfinder... but once fullscreen on my laptop became very evident...
To cut a long story short: we had to reshoot 3000 words of presentation. At 10.30 PM we finished, exhausted but spotless.

Moral of the story: check your footage on a big screen when working with new equipment, clean the autocue before you use it, don't shoot in the sun, refuse to work without a sound guy, don't do budget productions, avoid livestock and motorcycles in a 3-mile radius and last but certainly not least: get a nice, boring 9 to 5 job and you will live a lot longer...