Many times on this forum, we ask specific questions on how to do some specific effect or solve a particular challenge. However, we often get members who want to do the same spectacle who are just breaking in. While we have many good answers for them, there is a huge learning curve to do what we do. After all, there is no text book for this (I have looked and asked around).
What I'd like to hear is what you wished that you would have known when you first started doing video. All experience levels welcome. It could be a "well, duh" moment or "how should I have known that" kind of thing.
Here are some of my examples:
I was setting up a projector front of house, balcony rail, and had about 150' run to the VCR (going back a ways). I couldn't run s-video that far, so I was going to go over coax. I only had one F-RCA adapter but figured that it didn't matter because it went over the same cable. Yup, "well, duh" it didn't work. There's a difference between the signal. Just because you can physically make the adaptation, doesn't mean that it will work.
Years later, I was doing break-out rooms for a conference and was having to adapt D-sub15 (typical VGA connector) to 5-wire BNC (RGBHV). It was already a large setup and we had to subrent cables and adapters. I started seeing some of the adapters had different colors for the sync lines. How was I supposed to know which sync belonged to which signal? I learned that there was not a color standard for the sync lines. Most of them have the lighter color as the horizontal sync and was almost always the wire closest to the blue wire. That didn't even hold true. After a long time of trouble-shooting the set-ups, I got it all to work, but "how should I have known that?"
Your turn.
What I'd like to hear is what you wished that you would have known when you first started doing video. All experience levels welcome. It could be a "well, duh" moment or "how should I have known that" kind of thing.
Here are some of my examples:
I was setting up a projector front of house, balcony rail, and had about 150' run to the VCR (going back a ways). I couldn't run s-video that far, so I was going to go over coax. I only had one F-RCA adapter but figured that it didn't matter because it went over the same cable. Yup, "well, duh" it didn't work. There's a difference between the signal. Just because you can physically make the adaptation, doesn't mean that it will work.
Years later, I was doing break-out rooms for a conference and was having to adapt D-sub15 (typical VGA connector) to 5-wire BNC (RGBHV). It was already a large setup and we had to subrent cables and adapters. I started seeing some of the adapters had different colors for the sync lines. How was I supposed to know which sync belonged to which signal? I learned that there was not a color standard for the sync lines. Most of them have the lighter color as the horizontal sync and was almost always the wire closest to the blue wire. That didn't even hold true. After a long time of trouble-shooting the set-ups, I got it all to work, but "how should I have known that?"
Your turn.
