Site logo

FRESH COAST Film & Video Production BLOG


Production in the Fresh Coast Region of Wisconsin and Illinois

A “routine” project for a Chicago law firm turns into a technical challenge.

When the law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman (www.kattenlaw.com) asked us to record a live multi-media presentation by UCLA Law Professor Jerry Kang (www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/jerry-kang) at their Chicago offices, it seemed almost too simple. Film the professor speaking, get a copy of his PowerPoint, and then edit in the slides later. The finished video was to be distributed to Katten’s 13 offices in the U.S., London and Shanghai.
Sequence 02.Still001Sequence 02.Still006
Sequence 02.Still005Sequence 02.Still002

But then we learned that Professor Kang’s support visuals were not PowerPoint, Keynote, or anything else we had ever heard of. He was using a touch screen, interactive program called “Mind Manager” which allowed Kang to move through the visuals and link to a variety of different media more or less at will. There was no way we could re-create this presentation in post.

We needed to find a way to capture the Mind Manager visuals live in high definition during the presentation. After assessing Katten’s in-house AV system, we realized we would need to tap into their 5 BNC / VGA system. This would require scaling the image to 1920X1080 using our TV One Universal Scaler (http://www.tvone.com/video-scalers), convert the signal to HDSDI with a Black Magic Design Terranex 2D Broadcast Converter (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/teranex), and then send it to an AJA KiPro hard disk video recorder (https://www.aja.com/en/products/ki-pro).

We ended up hauling in a little more gear than the IT people at Katten had probably expected, but everything worked and the finished video looked great.