Software and Equipment You Use

[Alan Lloyd]

Lots to talk about here.

First off, there are people who do very good work with Vegas, as well as Avid, Final Cut, and Premiere Pro. What you are seeing is the output of someone who is still not quite an editor, and it has more to do with storytelling and pacing than the particular tool used for the job.

After Effects is just that – effects. I would not like to try and cut a show in it, though it’s incredibly useful for specific parts of shows.

The Premiere Pro you’d get with a full CS5 purchase is a very powerful and capable editing program – as much as anything in the market today. It also integrates very well with After Effects, Photoshop, and Encore – much better, in fact, than anything else out there will.

I think you’d find On Location useful with a bit of experience. You get your recording right there, as a file, without having to capture, plus having the monitoring and test instrumentation is a very strong positive – you can see if your signal and image are what you want them to be, and it also has good file management capabilities for sorting good and bad takes.

You mentioned nothing of lighting. It’s critical, without it you’re making radio. I’d look at getting a good number of smaller instruments, for this reason: If you’re doing training video on various pieces of equipment, it’s rare that you’d be showing the entire thing at once, other than for an intro and close. You’ll be concentrating on specific parts, and highlighting them/achieving separation/visual definition is what you’ll be looking for. It’s amazing how useful small, easily mounted heads can be in those situations. Also look into a variety of different clamps and mounts for this purpose.

A greenscreen can be nice, if you have a lot of need to put someone into an environment you can’t get them into in practical terms. The inside of a machine, perhaps? Here is where On Location will really help, as you will be able to see very clearly if your greenscreen is lit evenly and the exposure is correct. I would not make it a priority, though. Lighting, editing (both craft – first – and software), and audio for any narration would take precedence.

And do feel free to keep asking questions. If we don’t ask questions, how will any of us ever find anything out?

[Mark Suszko]

There was no need to Diss Vegas: it is a very capable and format-agile tool in the hand of a skilled user.

I’m bothered a tad, Carla, that you’re all over the map regarding which editing software to use, when you already seem to have at least two NLE’s available. I’ll say this about that: every NLE system out there can do a cut, a dissolve, a fade, layer some graphics. And that there is 99 percent of most video. You learn any one of them, you can transition to another one with little fuss. The technical pushing of the buttons to make cuts or dissolves is secondary to learning when and how *aesthetically* to make the cuts, to best tell the story. Nobody in an audience looks at a video or movie and says: “Oh, I can tell that was cut specifically on an AVID, because it was good”. Doesn’t work like that.

So what to pick?

What matters in choosing an NLE most, is to choose the one you feel most comfortable using, the one that seems most intuitive to you, the user. Because you will be spending a LOT of time using this package, you should use one that’s fun and easy for your way of working. And the more you like it, the more time you spend with it, and thus the time leads to learning and experimenting and then to mastery and the more sophisticated skills. TIME is what makes you a better editor, not the specific tool. You are jumping around from Vegas to Adobe’s complete suite to Avid and that doesn’t make a lot of sense, practically or financially. Waste too much money for your boss, your ROI looks bad and the department can wind up outsourced.
The smarter play is to first analyze what kind of work you’ll do most, predict what else will need to be done in the coming 2 years, then see which system supports those kinds of work best, while being comfortable for you to use.

You need to prove that it is cheaper to keep you in house, and you do that by improving the quality and turn-around time and solving their communications need, while keeping the costs low. The metrics for costs are easy to follow, as is turn-around time. The metric for proving you’re doing it *better* is harder to define. You can do that with surveys and quizzess before and after the viewing, or by measuring some aspect of the work that should improve after the video is shown. For example, if you make a training video for call center operators that shows tricks of reducing the length of call sessions, you should be able to measure those sessions before and after and hopefully point to improved productivity after your video has been seen. Stuff like that, gets you raises and promotions or at least, survival.

You are going to need lav mics at some point, at least one hardwired lav should be on the wish list for purchases. If you train people to use software, a screen recording app like snapzpro or camtasia or similar, should be on the wish list. If you will be shooting people lecturing the audience, a prompter might be a good investment, though this may also be something you can rent a few times first to reduce costs.

Greenscreen is a handy tool to have, can get you out of a jam sometimes, but don’t look for excuses to use it when you don’t specifically need it. Remember ROI and the fact that green screen work adds time and expense to make it good, and you don’t want to do anything that’s not good.

What’s in your Lowel light kit now? Got a Rifa softbox? I love those things, quick and easy to make interviews look good anywhere.

The other thing you brought up that caught my attention was the fatalistic description of what products you have to make. We can discuss wish lists of tech gear all day here, but really, the number one thing you can do to improve corporate media projects is to improve the WRITING of the scripts, the structure of the programming. A crappy script, shot in high def, is still not worth watching. And it is at the scripting stage that the most improvements can be made at the lowest cost in time and thus money. This is where I shill for my friend John Morley’s book on corporate scriptwriting. If you can get some control over the process of shaping the project and scripting it better, everything else falls into place from that point forward, and your results will be outstanding.

Let the unskilled keep stumbling on making bad, boring scripts, and their frustration with you will slowly build. TV is magic, you know; you just press a button or invoke some menu, and it’s all instantly complete as well as entertaining and good quality. That’s how civilians think about it… if they think about it at all.

When their badly-structured messages go thru your tech process and still come out weak, even though that’s not your fault, you and your department will be the easy scapegoat, not them. Sieze more control over the pre-production aspects of the work, and you will get better control over your own destiny in the department. This is not easy, it takes a lot of diplomacy and incremental improvements, so as to not insult the clients while at the same time educating them and selling them on the idea that your two cents really matter to achieving their goal. They are the content experts, but that doesn’t automatically equate to them being expert in how to best present their information. That’s what they pay you for. Be their consultant, their resource, their intermediary; try to offer help early in the process, help guide the formation of the creative treatment. That’s the overall key. Solving the communications problem effectively. Everything else is just a means to that end. And you will also get more personal fulfillment out of the job if you do it this way.

[Noah Kadner]

Carla- Creative Cow is a public board that Google indexes daily. In the future you might want be a little less candid about your job and co-workers. Just a suggestion…

Noah

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[Grinner Hester]

MC5 has some nice features. It’d be worth venturing into. You’ll need After Effects. Every Avid editor leans on After Effects as Avid has not updated their DVE since the first MC 5 was realesed more than 15 years ago. I know they have Avid FX but it’s hardly worth messing with, especially since you’ll be getting After Effects.
You can throw some cool plgins on After Effects too, giving you 3D capabilities without having to buy a 3D app. You’ll always be extruding, bevelling and lighting logos. You’ll dig being able to do this in After Effects. I recomend Sapphire effects for your Avid. Lots of bang for the buck.
And speaking of bang for the buck, step back and rething going the mac route with FCP and Motion. good stuff.

[Mark Suszko]

It’s less about the hardware, Grinner, than it is about the wetware.
The driver’s the biggest difference between any two race cars on any given day of racing, I think you’d agree.

[Alan Lloyd]

Mark said:

Nobody in an audience looks at a video or movie and says: “Oh, I can tell that was cut specifically on an AVID, because it was good”. Doesn’t work like that.

Sad but true: I was in (correspondence) discussions on something a few years ago and the “other folks” were mentioning, in the midst of their endless, semi-grinder-y circumlocution, that they wanted HD.

Iffy project going in, but what the hey…

(Me): OK, fine, what are you looking for? P2? HDV? Something else?

(Other dude): “Well, we’re using Final Cut Pro, so HDV won’t do.”

(Me): Says nothing further, discontinues discussion with sanity intact.

They are out there.

[Mark Suszko]

I would be rich if I got paid for every time I had to explain to someone that 16 by 9 letterboxing an SD video does not make it HD.

[Carla Cardello]

Yea I know After Effects is effects. I figured I could use it for text and maybe even masks and lighting. I have a lot left to learn with it, but I do know the basics with keyframes and such.

Hmm I thought I mentioned lighting? Whoops. I have two lighting kits. One old one and one brand new one. I have found an array of random clips throughout the office, and your idea is a good one. I was actually thinking of playing around with the lighting in the editing process. For example, if there is a control panel, maybe highlight what the narrator is talking about.

[Carla Cardello]

Yes, I know I’m all over the map, which is why I was posting for advice. There is so much available, so why do people use what they use? Obviously preference, but didn’t know if so-and-so couldn’t do this with software x but could in software y. Just doing some research.

I didn’t go into detail about the products and scripting because that wasn’t what I was asking about, but here’s more info. I was hired to do training and safety videos. Not sure how much control over scripting I’ll have. What I mean by that is yes I’ll have control over what goes with which shots, how long something should be, what order I want things, etc. But especially with safety videos, legal gets involved. A lot. You can’t simply just “climb” into a machine. It’s something like “enter the machine using the three-point contact method.” Then there are certain paragraphs that must be at the beginning of every video. Then as far as content, I will be told what needs to be in the video in order to properly train someone. I may have some leeway in wording, but it all goes back to legal. I’ll fight for as much control in scripting as I can, but I also have to make legal happy. I do know I will be writing the scripts myself. I just have to get it approved. A lot.

[Alan Lloyd]

My error – you mentioned a Lowel kit kind of in passing.

Highlighting you can do in post, but there’s nothing like a streak or splash of light to turn a flat slab of painted metal into something nicely textured, and you don’t have to roto around someone’s hand pointing at something.

It also offers very nice separation between planes in an image, creating depth where it may not be apparent.

I have become a real fan of the little Lowel “L-lights” – they have doors and can take a standard screw base, so you can use the 100 watt MR-16 screw base lamps they’re designed for, or a regular 20-100 watt bulb, or (because they have ceramic sockets) a 300W photoflood in a China ball for soft, flattering daylight. They’re very small, and will go just about anywhere. I have three in my basic kit, along with two 300W Arri Fresnels, an Arri 150, a 650W open-face with both doors and a Chimera ring, and a Tota with a ring. I use them as accents in interviews, and for small splashes on a web-based adult-oriented vampire puppet show I work on as a “labor of love” project. One of those on a Cardellini will go almost anywhere.