The flash-lights and clicking of the camera shoot-buttons are the
prevailing sounds of this retreat! From the start of the day at the
6am chanting till the late evening dharma-preachings, the cameras
are in action till 9pm. They capture almost every important and
significant moment of this retreat.
I always wondered why there were so many photographers around at
Special Buddhist events at temples but scarcely a video camera
person. That was before I actually held up a video camera to record
an event!
I also write on behalf of my fellow multimedia crew. We are not
professional camera-men and women. We all have our own professions
and duties as either a pharmacist, scientist, teacher, student or an
accountant outside temple-life. Yet we all congregate on these
special occasions to bring our mutual hobby to life. That hobby is
to also express our love for Buddhism.
We all want to spread Buddhism to the world in some way. Yet we are
shy individuals who cannot exhibit our voice as the Sanghas do, so
instead, we utilise our passion - behind our camera lens to capture
and share the beautiful aspects of Buddhism with the world.
I would like to briefly share with you how a DVD movie is created in
order to appreciate the production of a DVD the next time you view a
movie or Dharma preaching especially ones with special effects. What
you see for a mere two minutes of an introduction on screen, would
take more than one hour to create! The time taken to record a scene
is just the basics. The camera-person must also be alert and
observant of what is occurring around the scene and not just on
auto-pilot view to the camera screen as this is not Hollywood where
you can re-shoot the scenes.
At Buddhist events, things occur spontaneously, so the camera-person
must be on foot.
The arduous part is the video editing where one’s creative mind also
comes in handy. Depending on how appealing you want your project to
be, editing a Buddhist Event can take more than 5 hours. Once the
editing has been completed, the project must be converted to
readable code known as rendering for exportation to a DVD. This
takes several hours depending on the length of the movie.
For the Opening Ceremony DVD of this Winter Retreat, rendering took
around 6 hours and exporting the project to DVD mode took 12 hours.
In total, this DVD took around a total of 25 hours to create! And
that’s not including the time taken to record and burning all the
DVDs in order to distribute to everyone on the last day!
I now understand why there is a great reluctance for video camera
volunteers for the temples. Not many people are willing to learn
this skill as it just consumes too much time and takes too long to
create and produce a quality DVD.
So why do my fellow crew and I do this for the temples? Purely for
our passion and ultimately the love of Buddhism.
Cut!
DHMT
(next)
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Cập nhật: 01-06-2011
