Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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I take a different approach to Noah – I sell myself on a very narrow focus rather than claiming to do everything, so I mainly work for production companies that don’t have every skill at a high level in house (who therefore need to hire it in when they have a big job), rather than directly for the client.
[Actually, my single biggest source of work over the last couple of years is a major broadcaster so in that case I’m working directly for the client, as it were, but almost everything else I do is for a production company, whether it’s for broadcast or corporate, and I’m known by enough that when any particular production company is having a quiet time, I’m probably getting work from another one.]
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Michael has a very valid point. Sometimes the music can be on a fee per programme or a buy-out, but the “per 30sec” arrangement is still the most common.
I do this task in one of two ways – either I time all the music events on the timeline myself, or I give a DVD/Quicktime and an EDL to someone else to do the timings. I don’t normally rely on just the EDL (plus, sometimes the music timings change in the sound dub, so although the track names are valid the durations on an EDL can be misleading).
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I don’t even attempt to compete with the one man band doing stuff on the cheap. I’ve always enjoyed the teamwork/collaboration aspect of the job and the fact that I’m always learning. I compete on the quality of what I do rather than the price, so although there is an aspect of devising ways to do things more cheaply, any cost savings will be in the way the job is organised, not through lowering my fee.
I had a few quiet months in the first half of 2010 (then it picked up last July and I’ve been reasonably busy since then), but really the only time I got depressed about work was on a job a couple of years ago where there were two co-producers (a USA broadcaster and a UK broadcaster) and a load of internal politics and I wasn’t allowed to really contribute – I basically spent the thick end of two months sitting in an edit suite pressing buttons, doing what I was told to do, and I got frustrated over having some excellent footage sitting there but not being allowed to do anything decent with it!
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The majority of my facebook friends are family (I have uncles/aunts/cousins across several countries), so most of my pages are boringly parochial. I’m quite happy for anyone to have a look, but I’m not sure there’s much that would give you an indication of what I’d be like to work with on there.
There are some forums on the web that I get passionately involved in, so my posts on them display my attitudes/tastes in some areas (science, green issues, politics, art and music), but they’re special interest sites, not facebook.
I don’t think it’s unethical to look at someone’s facebook page, but I’d be wary of drawing too much in the way of conclusions from what you find there. Maybe you can distinguish between people who try to “big” themselves up on facebook (making themselves look more interesting/controversial/fun than they really are) and those who are more privacy orientated (underplaying the things that would make them stand out), but I don’t think I can unless I already know them.
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An edl is basically a text file (but with .edl on the end of the file name), so it can be opened in a word processing program.
So what you need to do is when you make an edl, select only the music track(s) and enable the comments to show the clip names. Then when you look at the edl, for each event the two 8 digit numbers on the right are the in and out timecodes for your timeline (so you can calculate the duration) and the comments line will have the clip name (which ought to be the track name).
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BTW, there’s a way of recording higher bit rates from an EX1r and that is to use a Convergent Design nanoFlash. I saw a test of that (using an EX3) a couple of months ago, it does 50, 100 or 160 Mbps at 4:2:2, making noticeably better quality recordings than the standard cards.
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USB rings big alarm bells, so I’d look there first – have you got plenty of headroom on the drive (they slow down when they get low on space)? Try a new high quality cable (the interface will slow down if the signal down the wire is poor). Try each USB port on the computer (they’re not always the same, one that’s on a shared bus with something else going on may not be working at full speed). I have cut some stuff using a USB drive and it was ok for SD in DV codec (not fast but it did work) but I wouldn’t consider it for anything HD. Any long GOP format (e.g., h264) is a bit of a risk with FCP – it can manage a few cuts but it slows down drastically as soon as you start doing anything clever.
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I haven’t heard of any difference in tech spec for music videos compared to any other programming. (On the other hand, I’d expect a certain amount of flexibility – as you say, things are being broadcast that appear to have been originated in loads of different ways).
If I were you I’d contact a couple of post houses and talk to them about what file specs they’d want for playing to HDCAM. Also, you need to have a Harding test for PSE flashing done (a high end post house will do that for you) otherwise you risk having your material rejected or mucked about with.
[For a brief period I used to package the videos for CD:UK and it was shocking how frequently videos, often from high profile bands, didn’t pass the Harding test and therefore couldn’t be broadcast without being modified because of the Ofcom rules.]
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I’d recommend the 17″ screen version in order to have the ExpressCard/34 slot and use an eSata adapter to connect to an external drive for media storage. Thunderbolt may make eSata irrelevant, but there’s not much available yet for it (there are some hard drives, but they’re expensive atm). Also, I find that the 17″ screen is big enough to edit on and would want a second screen to go with a smaller one. [I have a second screen at home, but I take my MBP to one of my client’s offices at times and can work there without using the second screen on the 17″ model.]
Don’t worry too much about the internal hard drive spec as you’re not going to use that for media. Processor speed and memory are basically as much as you can afford (remember, you can add more memory later but you can’t change the processor).
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I got a call a couple of weeks ago to go into a production company to do a few days cutting using their in house kit, which is Avid. OK, fine, I said. So I went in and sat down and the kit in front of me was Express Pro HD, and guess what? It was fine, perfectly good for doing the job, even though that version of the software was discontinued three years ago…