[Bill Davis]

Any non-lawyer trying to write their own “slick legalease” is a VERY dumb idea.

The whole point of legal language is to be precise and address the possible legal aspects of a situation in advance so that all parties understand what’s being agreed to. As such, these agreements are SPECIFIC to the circumstances you expect in your work and need to be drafted with an understanding of the ACTUAL laws in force where the agreement is likely to be used.

Grabbing language from other documents and pasting them into YOUR contract is a little like grabbing a series of scenes from other movies and pasting them together to make your own movie.

Mash ups are fun, but NOBODY expects the same quality result from a mash-up that you’d achieve from writing purposely created to tell your own unique story.

You can probably get an IP lawyer to do a basic document like this for a few hundred bucks – after he or she LISTENES to what YOU, the client actually wants and needs.

If you don’t want to spend the money -that’s your call. But if it turns out that your cobbled together “agreement” fails to protect you later on, you know who to blame.

Good luck.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Bill Davis]

What makes wind noise is … well … air in motion hitting the mic element. So in order to kill wind noise, you have to decelerate airflow while not blocking the sound waves.

A true pro rig for this starts with a cage type zepplin – which creates a calm space around the mic element. That cage is often further surrounded by a furry cover, since the many hairs break up direction and speed of any wind before it ever reaches the interior zepplin covers airspace.

Foam – on the other hand, must be porous in order to allow sound in – so by itself it’s never going to totally prevent wind pressure from reaching the mics element and causing noise.

You can say you want a foam cover that cuts all wind noise, but unless that foam cover does BOTH these functions – wind deceleration and calm space around the element without blocking all sound, you’re not going to be happy in severe situations.

Simple as that.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Bill Davis]

Philosophically…

AGC is essentially saying – I want everything to be of a consistent loudness. Which is a fine approach if your overall goal is that nothing gets too quiet to be heard clearly. That’s kinda stage ONE of audio recording skills.

The next step is to evolve to understand that a person SHOUTING is, in fact, louder than a person speaking – and if you use processing that makes each of these appear to be at the same level – you’re losing part of what makes the real world such a rich sound experience.

Dynamic range is the technical term for having the soft stuff sound soft, and the loud stuff sound loud.

Beginning moviemakers often sacrifice dynamic range in their quest to make sure they don’t screw up and fail to record things at the proper levels. It’s the functional Spinal Tap equivelent of keeping your amp set at 11 all the time. Usually works well for rock and roll – but sucks for jazz or classical.

Just sayin.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Bill Davis]

Fine.

Here’s my disclosure.

I have NO financial relationships with ANY company or product in place here.

I’m a self-employed video producer who regularly shoots, edits, and delivers content to relatively large corporations primarily in the areas of Pet Products and Services, Swimming Pool Supplies, Health-Care Services (blood banking) and general IT.

I spent a decade as a columnist, general writer, and contributing editor at Videomaker Magazine, but have had no formal business relationship with them for more than 5 years.

I’m writing my personal opinions and nobody’s paying me a penny for them.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Bill Davis]

Doesn’t sound scared.

It sounds perfectly reasonable.

You’re unwilling to look at it through any lens other than your current experience profile.

I get that. It’s rational, understandable, individually defensible, and should generate nothing but understanding from anyone reading your post.

But that does NOT mean you’re particular perspective is any more proper or even informative to others than is mine.

I’ve seen the perspective you espouse over, and over, and over, and over again during the past few days.

I just think it’s useful to ALSO hear voices that try to offer a different perspective. After group dynamics – especially those that are fear-based – are proven to often be unnecessarily destructive to healthy thinking.

Notice I say “healthy” – not “right’ or “wrong.” FCP-X will be a success or a failure on it’s own merits.

I didn’t see your particular post as particularly fearful – but there are a LOT running here where that’s the primary driver under what’s being discussed.

In my youth, Frank Herbert’s Dune impressed me with the powerful liet-motif, “fear is the mind-killer.”

I’ve found that to be nearly scrupulously true over the many decades since.

Simple as that.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Bill Davis]

I agree that Firewire or USB are both pretty fragile at the connector for this.

Most camcorders have a simple composite out via RCA. You could adapt that to BNC cable – which is robust and cheap and works great in long runs – but the challenge is going to be getting both a composite input on the laptop while simultaneously outputting to your display via VGA.

Why not just run the video feed directly into the projector and eliminate the laptop and digital conversion stages all together?.

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Bill Davis]

Nichole,

The mic is NOT critical in this class. Either choice – among many others – will do perfectly well. Recording the human voice is nowhere nearly as complex as recording, for example, a typical musical instrument. So don’t stress about the “ideal” mic. Just get an affordable one from a major manufacturer. Sony, Shure, Audio Technica, AKG, and many others will do fine.

The JuicedLink should do fine.

As to a boom mic – the typical benefit is that they provide a sense of “live space” to a recording. In a movie, where a largely carpeted and softly furnished bedroom should sound acoustically different than a largely hard surfaced kitchen – the boom sound makes sense.

In a sit down interview, the space is extremely unimportant compared to the subjects voice.

A boom only makes sense if you have multiple interviews in a short time since it will save you time in lav rigging.

Outside that, save the boom for making movies.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Bill Davis]

Nichole,

Unless there is a NEED to hide wires – a simple wired lavillier is the BEST method of recording sound for a sit-down interview. The proximity of the mic to the sound source (speaker’s mouth) keeps the signal to noise ratio robust.

The largest issue you’ll be facing is that like most small camcorders, the HV-20 appears to accept unbalanced audio only.

Unbalanced (two-wire) microphones are prone to RF noise pickup – so RF producing fluorescent lamp ballasts and motors such as those found in household refrigerators, aquariums and other common products may create unwanted electrical noise that infects your sound.

Wireless mics are often less noisy – but compromise sound quality themselves in that inexpensive rigs typically don’t produce very good sound and you’re paying more for convenience than you are for performance.

A wired balanced lav mic is likely your best approach coupled with an inexpensive camera mounted transformer to adapt the balanced mic feed to the unbalanced signal your camera wants to see.

Beachtek, Studio One, and other reliable manufacturers have adaptor boxes specifically designed to solve this issue. They connect to the camcorder with a very short, shielded connection, and from them – you run a inexpensive balanced microphone cable to a balanced microphone.

Specifically, I’d start with something like a Sony ECM-44b mic – into a common XLR microphone cable available from any music store on the planet – to the adaptor box mounted between your tripod and your camcorder.

That would be within your budget. Create very good quality recordings. And be simple and easy to set up and operate.

Let us know how things come out.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Bill Davis]

Can’t remember which celebrity chef had a show where he hooked up with someone in a Grocery Store – then went to their house – and created a gourmet meal USING WHATEVER THEY HAD IN THEIR PANTRY.

The point was that if you’re REALLY good at what you do, you think about ingredients and combinations differently than someone who’s stuck at the level of simply following the directions on the back of the brownie box.

I agree that there are some people who use tools like Magic Bullet quite appropriately – and LOTS of others who simply want to load it up, click the preset – and show off how COOL their video work suddenly looks.

That’s not a slam. It’s simple reality. And there’s room for all in this business. I’ll just return to my hoary old analogy that editing system is a lot like playing the piano. You can play a LOT of songs just learning half a dozen chords and how to pick out a melody with your right hand. But that says little about musicianship and NOTHING about artistry.

Same with software, I’m afraid.

Good music is virtually NEVER about the piano – it’s ALL about the piano player.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Bill Davis]

Ces’t la vie.

My wife came back from the local baking supplies super-store to report that lots of the ingredients that once upon a time were hand crafted – stuff like creme filling, glazes, frostings, et al are all now being sold in 20 gallon tubs and a LOT of even the major local bakers have gone from doing everything custom to using these “shortcuts” because in all business – time is money.

Like Scott, I personally feel that knowing the underlying recipe and understanding the step by step process of doing any effect puts you ahead of the pack when things to wrong and you need to analyze how to fix or tweek stuff – bit it’s also inevitable that CAKE MIXS will always be profitable to sell and lots of people will regard the resulting cakes as just fine.

Heck they are “just fine.”

But a Duncan Hines chocolate cake in Phoenix, and one in Detroit is the same experience. Sitting down for a cake based on a quality bakers experience and experimentation is another level – one that I hope never dies out.

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner