A new senior, The HD nightmare & lab parties gone wrong

My senior Rich only had one cruise left and his replacement (yet another Canadian videog) Jason was on a cruise early for a handover as he'd been off work for a while to get married and we were in the midst of beginning the transition to HD onboard. Looking back it showed the company had no idea what HD was or how to implement it, but at the time there was a still an emerging format war between HD DVD & Blu-ray with neither established yet. Although we were eager to get to grips with the new technology we couldn't actually produce HD-DVD or Bluray content beecause we didn't have HD replication burners or even the software to master HD DVD's onboard.

I even asked why were we the ship trialling HD when we were on a tough no time to sleep 7 day run? Surely it would make more sense to trial the kit and processes on a longer cruise where they was plenty of sea days and the videogs had more time? No, as apparently because our sales were so low (despite us improving each week) in the grand scheme of things it didn't matter as we were not making enough money!

We had two new HD cameras onboard and no one really knew anything back then, did we shoot in 1080 or 720 are they were both HD? Due to shitty internet we coudn't just google it or post on a forum, at best we could email head office our questions and then they would search the net for us and depending on time differences we could email the other ships but I think at the time we were the first ship to trial the kit.

As I mentioned as we couldn't make HD content to sell or even show onboard at that point which meant anything we shot in HD had to be rendered down to SD 540 from HD 1080, this meant our old and rickety mac pro would be overworked and a 5 minute edit could take upto 2 hours to render if it didn't crash the machine! So time wise it was completely inefficient as we also had no guidance from head office initially on what codecs we used to export the files, this led to some massive 30/40GB files for 5 minute videos and more over heating the computer problems.

Since we'd started the HD trials our Mac had been glitchy at best and the situation deteriorated 2 days before the end of the cruise as our Mac kept overheating and turning itself off. It was the weekend which meant any call or email to head office would go unanswered until Monday and we needed the Mac working the next day at the latest. We had a computer officer onboard so we approached him but 'sorry, I only know PC's' was the response luckily for us one of the photogs from Serbia Mikey had actually applied for a computer officer position. However at the time Princess only hired crew for certain jobs from certain countries meaning you could have a degree and experience in your field from Serbia but the company would offer you a photog role instead, it was shit but Mikey took the job so that he could travel with his girlfriend who worked in the shops onboard.

Thankfully Mikey was a bit of computer genius and managed to install some new fans internally on our Mac, set it to overclock when we needed to handle HD footage and generally did a great job of saving our arses as without the Mac working we would not have been able to produce a DVD to give to the PAX who had pre-ordered. In my previous 2 contracts I had only come close once to not being able to produce a DVD, when I was left by myself in my first few weeks but it was right to the wire to get the DVD's burnt that day. I remember myself, Rich, Jason & Mikey all cramped into the tiny sweatbox video room for almost 40 hours over those two days, worst case scenario was if nothing had worked we would have had to mail the DVD's once we could make them out to guests who had pre-ordered.

After all the stress of that cruise we needed to blow off some steam and that would lead to one of the most awkward lab parties I'd ever been too.

Due to the Spring Break crowd onboard many of our deck privileges had been revoked as the company didn't want any crew fraternising with the PAX, usually this would not be an issue with the average age of the PAX, but the ship was filled with mainly young drunk American girls who thought anyone who wasn't American 'had a cute accent' the company didn't want any 'incidents'. This meant crew were barred from the nightclub throughout the Spring Break period of course that didn't stop many of the photogs sneaking up their, as there was tons of crew only passages which would let you sneak through the ship.

The same cruise it was two of the photogs birthdays Matt & Paulo both first contractors and our manager Laura had planned a surprise party.

Now usually lab parties are a thing on legend onboard and usually some of the most memorable (well, booze addled haze) parties of the contract, but the set up for the surprise maybe went a little to far here. Firstly we had a very inexperienced team of mainly first contractors and many of them did not get on with the manager Laura, I had no issues with her as video sales had actually begun to tick up since I got onboard and she left us videogs alone to get in with it. So when Laura mentions that we were going to have a late meeting in the lab after formal night most of the time were grumbling and pissed off. We were also told that the CSD (customer services director) would be there and not too be late, the rumour had been leaked earlier than one of the photogs had been caught on CCTV leaving a passengers cabin and that the meeting would be to address that.

Now, no-one had owned up to this privately during the day while everyone scrambled to figure out who it was, but we knew a late meeting after a formal night was never going to be a good thing. By the time the backdrops were down and everyone had gotten down to the lab the mood was not pleasent amongst the team. So when the lights came on and we heard 'surprise' there was a collective sigh of relief once we saw the birthday cake and banners. However one of the photogs had managed to work himself into such an anxious state that he kicked off and started going on 'nah, thats not funny' and he left the party soon after. Of course that just meant to the rest of the team that he had been sneaking into PAX cabins as he looked as guilty as sin afterwards.

On the next cruise diaries - I find out I am getting transhipped!