All that Glitter gold is!

Congratulations to everyone who worked on The Glitter Emergency - our silent-film comedy about the travails and triumph of Peggy the Peg-leg Ballerina won "Best California Short" at the California Film Awards. Both DP Ben Estabrook and I got double-love from the CFA, which named Austin Forbord's Stage Left: A Story of Theater in San Francisco "Best California Film."

In other Stage Left news, the film will have its official San Francisco premiere at the Geary Theater in conjunction with American Conservatory Theater's production of Lorenzo Pisoni's "Humor Abuse" (from what I gather, it's Mommie Dearest meets The Pickle Family Circus) on Sunday, January 29th, at 6:30 p.m. FREE ADMISSION - reserve tickets here.

Glitter has two premieres coming up - the Canadian premiere at the 13th annual Reelout Queer Film + Video Festival, February 5th, in Kingston, ON; and the southwest premiere at Tucson's Out in the Desert festival, Sunday, February 19, at 12:40 p.m., 127 E. Congress. I'll accompany the film live at both screenings. (Glitter screenings and awards always updated here.)

Save this date in pencil - but it looks like Glitter will have one last San Francisco screening before I decamp for Berlin. On Thursday, March 1, Kunst-Stoff has scheduled an encore of last Friday's sneak preview of my film in progress Tie It Into My Hand, along with Glitter accompanied live and more music and film to be announced.

FCP problem solved: "Unable to locate timecode" error on batch capture

I spent a long time hunting around online for solutions to this problem and found plenty, but none of them had the virtue of actually working. Having found, almost by chance, the solution that worked, I thought I'd share it. 

Importing footage from two separate Canon Vixia HV30 camcorders using FCP 7, I began having increasing problems with batch captures and then even single-clip captures. It got to the point where the camera couldn't find any in-point or out-point under any circumstance. I tried cleaning the heads, trashing preferences, verifying and repairing permissions and disks - nothing made the slightest difference.

It turned out that the problem wasn't with the computer or the camera - it was with the external hard drive. What finally worked was changing my capture scratch disk. I was using a 2TB LaCie, and had about 150GB free on it, and when I switched to a second mostly empty 2TB LaCie, the problem cleared up instantly. So - if your capture scratch disk is getting toward 90 percent full, and you're having this time-shredding, madness-inducing problem, see if Santa will stuff your stocking with some free storage.