The best-laid plans …

I spent most of today doing research for Handshake Magazine (the MNO capstone project) on the federal seizure of seven–no, six–no, nine–websites accused of illegally streaming first-run Hollywood movies and other copyrighted content. I had three Firefox and two Safari windows open, with about 30 tabs each–don’t ask why I used two different browsers at once, I don’t know–tracking down warrants, domain registrations, news items, blog posts and all manner of public record. We called the U.S. Attorney for Southern New York, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, VeriSign and the owner of a new site cloned from one of the sites that got confiscated.

The end result? About 400 words.

My colleague, and fellow “breaking news powerhouse*,” Ana Yanni has all the sordid details over at Adventures of a News Duck.

*Credit for the “breaking news powerhouse” title goes to Matt Doxstad, editor of Handshake.

I made one big mistake in preparing for my Sierra Leone trip last year: I assumed $1 was $1.

Wait, what?

I assumed the exchange rates were based on the value of the dollar, and not the bill itself. I was wrong. A $100 bill in Freetown was worth about 370,000 Leones. However, if I wanted to exchange five $20 bills, they’d give me around 350,000 Leones, depending on how much haggling I wanted to do.

Before I left, I made the assumption that smaller bills would be more useful, since prices for goods would be lower. I carried most of my personal funds in $20 or smaller bills. I ended up getting burned on the exchange rates over the course of two weeks.

That kind of thing is impossible to predict, so best talk to a local before you leave. If you don’t have that option, research as much as possible on the web, with every query you can think of, even the outlandish ones.

If you’re traveling for a commercial or non-profit client, that’s a little easier, as they probably have staff wherever they’re sending you. I was lucky enough to be working for a major NGO, so I had good support on the ground. The agency paid my expenses directly, so they wired funds before I arrived, and I had a healthy amount of cash for most of the trip.

Nevertheless, things never go according to plan. On my last day, I was about $100 short of what I needed to settle my expenses. There are plenty of banks in Freetown, so it was just a matter of making a withdrawal, right? Uh, no.

I have credit and debit cards from several banks, but they’re all MasterCard or American Express. Unfortunately for me, Sierra Leoneans vastly prefer Visa. After visiting six banks, we finally found one with a sign on the door for most every major credit card company in the world. Problem solved, right? No.

Turns out you have to go to the main branch to actually pull a withdrawal from a card. Three hours later, I had the rest of the money I needed.

The moral of that story is two-fold. One, estimate high for your expenses, then add a few hundred more. Two, carry Visa and MasterCard at the very least (caveat: Visa and MC may not rescue you the way AmEx rescued me).

Pay your credit card bills before you leave, so you’ve got as much credit available as possible. Try to keep enough money in your checking account that you won’t need to move any money around while you’re away. However, balance that consideration with the possibility of fraud. Fraud is big business in the developing world, and checking accounts typically don’t offer $0 liability the way credit cards do. Check with your bank to be sure.

Cash is king. The cards probably won’t do you a lot of good on the ground, but if you need to make additional travel arrangements or change existing flights, you’ll need plastic. Also, try to find out if there are limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to bring (in or out) through customs. There’s nothing worse than stuffing $100 bills into your underpants in the bathroom at Harere Airport.

For the workshop we settled on Apple Intermediate as an editing codec. We were bringing in footage from a wide variety of cameras, mostly Canon and Nikon SLRs, but a handful of dedicated video cameras too. We wanted everyone to be on the same page.

For the Canon and AVCHD folks it was easy, we just set up the plugins for Apple Intermediate, then did a standard Log and Transfer. For the Nikon shooters, it was a little bit more complicated. There isn’t a Nikon plugin, so they had to use Compressor (or MPEG Streamclip) to transcode from Motion JPEG to Apple Intermediate.

So … why not ProRes 422?

The most obvious reason is storage. We had people using a wide variety of hard drives. Some were USB, some FireWire. Some were big, some were small. Apple Intermediate gave us good quality at reasonable file sizes. The main drive of the workshop was creating content for the web, which means it’s going to get compressed down quite a bit anyway. We weren’t going to be doing heavy color work, and we didn’t need alpha channels. So there you have it, Apple Intermediate. We could’ve very easily landed on ProRes LT (which has a similar data rate), but there were a handful of people using Final Cut Express, which uses Intermediate exclusively.

Like I said earlier, a lot of it comes down to storage and use. For HD video, ProRes 422 averages around 66GB per hour. The same footage encoded using Apple Intermediate comes in around 49GB per hour, and the quality is still excellent. When Apple released Final Cut 7, they also introduced several new ProRes flavors, including ProRes LT, which comes in at 46GB per hour. Intermediate and LT are also much nicer to laptops.

I haven’t done much experimenting with it, but I may start using LT for future projects. Apple designed the ProRes family with multicore Intel systems in mind, so you can go longer between renders, and footage renders faster. The advantage of LT over Apple Intermediate is the extra color information (4:2:2 vs. 4:2:0). The big caveat here is that Final Cut 6 can’t handle the new codecs, so you’re better off using Intermediate (or normal 422) if you’ve got to go back and forth.

For web use, ProRes 422 is generally overkill, especially if you’re not doing color work. If you need an alpha channel, however, then 422 it is.

If you’re mastering Blu-ray, then by all means, use 422, otherwise, save some drive space for your next project.

For more info about ProRes and other codecs, check out Larry Jordan’s site and Apple’s ProRes page.

Then the hail started from Jamie De Pould on Vimeo.

First, export the videos using the File>Export>QuickTime Movie command. Create a folder on the desktop called “flv_convert” (or something like that), and export there. Make sure you check the box that says “Make Movie Self-Contained.”

Once that’s done, you can quit Final Cut.

Launch Adobe Media Encoder.


Click the Add button on the right side of the Adobe Media Encoder window.

Navigate to your flv_convert folder, select the .mov files, and click Open. The clips should show up in the queue.

Select the first clip and click Settings, this should bring up the export settings menu.

Use the following settings:

Format
Format: FLV

Video
Resize to 512×288**
Frame rate: select the frame rate to match your footage
Bitrate encoding: VBR
Encoding passes: Two
Bitrate: 900 kbps***
Set keyframe distance: 15 frames (More frequent keyframes give you higher quality, but with increased file size)
Quality: Best

Audio
Defaults should be fine

**NOTE: This is a good size for VuVox, but may not be the best size for other uses. More info about resizing video for flash here.
***NOTE: Larger sizes require higher bit rates, 900 kbps is plenty for this size, but is way too low for HD.

Click the floppy disk icon next to the preset name, this will allow you to save the preset.

Name the preset, and click OK.

Click OK again, and it should bring you back to the main window. Click the drop downs in the preset column, and change your other clips to the VuVox setting.

Once you set all of your clips, click “Start Queue” on the right side of the screen. You should get a yellow progress bar along the bottom, and when it’s finished you’ll have shiny new .flv files in the flv_convert folder ready to upload.

You can also set a custom destination if you want the converted files to go somewhere else. You can also upload directly to an FTP server.

Converting a QuickTime .mov to .flv by Jamie De Pould is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Communication

Your ability to communicate with editors, clients, friends and family depends greatly on where you’re actually going. Many places in the world have good cell reception. Some places even have Internet access.

For my trip to Sierra Leone, I rented a cell phone from Cellular Abroad. The phone worked OK most times, but it was expensive, and didn’t work when I really needed it. Luckily, my driver’s local phone worked just fine.

Since then, I’ve purchased a $50 unlocked GSM phone on eBay, and international prepaid SIM card from OneSimCard. Now, when I travel, I’ve got communication the minute I land, which is very important when your fixer is nowhere to be found at the airport. When I get situated, I’ll buy a local SIM card, and use that to make all my calls. Local cell service is almost always cheaper and more reliable, and GSM is the de facto world standard.

Depending on where you are, you may be able to purchase a cellular USB device to connect to the Web, but don’t count on it. If you’re using a Windows machine, keep it isolated from local computers. Never use a USB drive to transfer files back and forth. While there are plenty of computers in the developing world, many of them are packed to the brim with malicious software. The last thing you need is for your computer to go down in the field.

Before you leave, it’s a good idea to put together a list of emergency contacts to leave with friends, family, or whoever else you may rely on back home. You should have one person designated as your main contact in case of trouble, someone who can coordinate anything you may need. A spouse or immediate relative is the best choice: it’ll be easier for them to get information from governmental and medical organizations. You may also want to consider giving your main contact power of attorney, so they can access your bank accounts in an emergency.

The emergency contact list should be comprehensive, include numbers for your client or employer, other family members, embassies or consulates both the country you’re in, the State Department and the local American presence. You’ll also want to include more mundane things, like the maintenance number for your apartment, your veterinarian or church.

This last part didn’t really occur to me until I watched Jon Stewart’s interview Roxana Saberi last week.

Prearrange “help” signals. If something happens, you need a way to say “I’m in trouble” without saying “I’m in trouble.”

Improvising and hoping the person on the other end can read between the lines is unreliable at best.

It has to be something simple and innocuous, like asking how your non-existent dog or uncle is doing.  Discuss the signal, and what to do when it happens, ahead of time. Hopefully it’s something you’ll never use.

D300, 300mm f/2.8 VR
1/40s, f/8 @ ISO400

This was one of my early attempts, I took the Syracuse v. Villanova game, and decided to shoot the second quarter with all slow speeds. That way I had plenty of time to shoot more typical stuff, but I had a lot of time to experiment as well.

This was manual exposure mode. I metered the scene and chimped on the histogram, then dialed in my shutter speed and aperture to match. It seems like speeds between 1/20 and 1/60 work best, at least for Lacrosse. If you get any faster than 1/60s, then the blur starts to look unintentional, and you get too much background detail. Slower than 1/20s makes it difficult to get a lock on your subject, so everything is just a blurry mess.

I should also note, this was also shot with a monopod. Hand-holding a 300/2.8 is kind of a pain to begin with, let alone when you’re panning.

D700, 300mm f/2.8 VR
1/40s, f/7.1 @ ISO200

Similar arrangement as before, slightly sharper.

Here’s what 1/25s looks like:

D700, 300mm f/2.8 VR
1/25s, f/9 @ ISO200

I also discovered a nice little AE lock trick to lock in an exposure value, while allowing shutter and aperture to move around.

It requires a little menu punching, but it makes this sort of thing a lot quicker.

I don’t trust the meter a whole bunch in this situation. I like to set my exposure manually, and leave it there. The problem is that turning both dials in opposite directions at the same time is hard.

First, set the meter off delay to infinite. Yes, it’ll eat into your battery life, but if you’re like me, your finger is always on the shutter anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

Next, set the AE-L/AF-L button to AE lock hold. This removes the meter from the equation entirely, while giving you single-dial control over both shutter and aperture.

Flip the camera to shutter priority. Set your exposure and hit the AE-L. It’ll stay locked until you press it again to unlock. Now, when you turn the shutter speed dial, the aperture dial will move the same amount in the opposite direction to maintain your locked exposure. For example: your exposure is 1/60s, f/8. If you turn the dial to 1/40s, the aperture will shift to f/10. No meter to get confused, it’ll do that every time until you unlock it.

Now it’s just a matter of finding your shutter speed/panning comfort zone, and trying to anticipate the action. Even with an 8 or 9 fps motor drive, this technique reduces your chances for capturing the exact moment, so you really have to be on top of it.

You may want to set this up as a custom preset, apart from your normal settings. That way you can just flip it on and off with one click, and you won’t be running around with your meter constantly running when you don’t want it to be.

Stupidly, I misplaced the phone number, but at least I remembered the conversation. I pulled out my small business card, and called the international number on the back. The customer service rep connected me to global assist.

“I’m stuck in Sierra Leone,” I said. “I missed my flight out.”

I was in that weird place, somewhere between giddy and crestfallen.

The operator on the other end took all of my information, my itinerary number, and started looking up where exactly I was, and how I could get back to the States. I’ve never be envious of anyone with a cubicle job before, but I just imagined sitting at a desk somewhere in the middle of Iowa. I really wanted to be in Iowa.

Samuel asked me what I wanted to do, and reminded me that there was a man who worked at the hospital and he airport who lived close, if we wanted to stay the night there.

We drove to his house, which was less than a mile away. Somewhere in that mile, I lost most of my cell reception. Samuel’s phone worked fine, but he was almost out of minutes, and we wouldn’t be able to buy more until morning. We settled in, and I tried to sleep.

Eventually morning came. Around 8 or 9, we went to find one of the ubiquitous cell phone vendors on the main road in front of the airport. I bought 1000 units (something like $20 US), and finally got back on with American Express. They didn’t have much new information for me, but they did confirm there was a flight out in about 14 hours, with a few seats open. The bad news was that British Airways wouldn’t speak to anyone except me about the flight.

Eventually, we got on a conference call with the airline, and booked everything through to Chicago. I had to overnight in Chicago, because all the Syracuse flights were booked.

At that point, I would’ve been happy just to get to London.

I felt so much better with a plan, even if I wasn’t going to be home for another two days.

Now it was simply a matter of waiting. We headed back to the house for a little while, listened to the radio, and had some breakfast.

In the time it took us to get back to the house it also started raining. Monsooning, really.

Samuel stayed with me the whole day, until it was time to start boarding. Words really can’t describe my gratitude.

Africa is an interesting place. The man pictured here is Samuel Vamboi, my driver while I was in Sierra Leone. Without Samuel, I really don’t know what I would’ve done.

Lungi International Airport, while ostensibly in Freetown, is on an island roughly nine miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. Travelers can get there by ferry, helicopter or hovercraft (bizarrely). On the day I was supposed to depart, we decided to take the ferry. Flights in and out of Lungi from London Heathrow generally arrive in the evening (7 p.m. or so), and depart again before midnight.

Samuel picked me up around 3 or 4 in the afternoon to begin the sojourn to the airport. Traffic in Freetown is unbelievable–I probably spent as much time sitting in traffic as I did working–but even so, three hours should be enough time to get from the guest house to the ferry terminal, and on to the airport.

We arrived at the ferry shortly after 6 p.m., just in time to see the ferry departing. Normally, a 6 p.m. ferry departing at 6 p.m. wouldn’t be astonishing, but this is Africa. Nothing runs on time. That should’ve been my first clue.

No matter, everyone assured me the 9 p.m. ferry would get me to the airport with time to spare.

We waited around the ferry terminal, killing time, and I tried not to worry about missing my flight.

Naturally, the 9 p.m. ferry did NOT leave on time. Nor did it take 30 minutes to cross, as I was told. No, because the tide was coming in, the ferry took just over an hour. We docked at the ferry terminal–roughly 15 miles from the airport–just after 10. Toward the end of the ferry ride, I was getting increasingly anxious. I had a bad feeling.

Since we were one of the first vehicles onto the ferry, we were at the front. That meant we’d be one of the last vehicles off.

Amazingly, Samuel was able to maneuver our full-size Toyota Hilux pickup truck in front of half the other cars on the ferry. Backwards.

Once we cleared the ferry terminal, it was a race to the airport. We were bombing these third-world, one-and-a-half lane roads at 100 kph or more, with all manner of carts, cars and livestock surrounding us. If you’ve never heard a 2.5 L diesel shrieking at red line … it’s quite a sound.

We arrived at the airport and rushed in. The gormless man at the check-in counter simply said we were too late, that I couldn’t board the plane. There was no changing his mind.

I was crushed.

After anticipating the trip home, and SEEING the plane I was supposed to take, I simply broke down.

The people at the airport were no help, and I realized not only did I miss my flight, I had no idea when I would be able to leave, or if I had enough money on my American Express to pay the fees I’d undoubtedly rack up for changing my flight plans AFTER my flight left.

I called home, and explained (poorly), that I wasn’t on the plane, and didn’t know what I was going to do. I said I would call back when I had more information, but my rented cell phone didn’t have reception later, so I couldn’t call back until roughly 18 hours later. As far as everyone back home was concerned, I was off the grid. Ironically, British Airways told my mother I was on the plane, so they worried less than they probably should’ve.

After hanging up, I tried to compose myself, and turned to find Samuel.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I will stay with you.”

I don’t have words to describe what that felt like. It settled me enough to try to figure out my next move. I didn’t even have a phone number for British Airways.