[Bill Davis]

The Basics:

You can figure out a lot if you learn to look at plugs and sockets and simply COUNT the number of separate circuits as evidenced by a plugs rings and spacers. If you only have TWO conductors on a plug (two metal barrels separated by a non-metalic spacer) – it MUST be unbalanced mono. This is because you just need a ground and a feed circuit for the electrons to flow.

On a plug with THREE sections (two separating spacer rings) you have the ability to achieve three separate circuits. One must always be the common GROUND. So a three-part plug can carry either a STEREO signal (ground, right, left) or a MONO BALANCED line (ground, signal positive, signal negative)

Musical instrument oriented stores are built around a business model where they sell a lot of stuff that only requires Mono signals. An standard electric guitar or bass are a prime examples. So they have a LOT of accessories and stuff that works in MONO and uses two-conductor cords for connection.

In the video world, a major problem is inducted NOISE infecting audio lines. So most professional gear is built using MONO BALANCED 3-wire connections.

On your ZOOM, you have hybrid jacks that have XLR balanced connections but ALSO 1/4″ balanced connections in the center of the same jack. But these are built for 3-conductor plugs. You can easily plug a mono – two connector – 1/4″ plug into this and it won’t hurt anything, but since there are only two conductors on the plug, the circuit will only see ONE signal.

The weak link in your system is the wireless mics. Wireless rigs, particularly CHEAP wireless rigs, are notorious for causing problems in sound recording. They don’t support the BALANCED connections that the ZOOM expects. Cheap wired BALANCED XLR terminated lav mics (even from Radio Shack) would work better and cause FAR less problems for you.

Think of it this way. You give me $100 dollars. In return I can give you a nice mic on 50 cents worth of wire, make a profit and stay in business. OR for the same $100 I can try to provide you with not just the microphone, but ALSO sell you a sophisticated radio transmission and reception system that does the same job as the 50 cents worth of wire? What’s wrong with this picture? Is it possible? With modern electronic production sure. But with cheap wireless rigs, they SQUEEZE every nickle they can out of the cost of the goods they’re selling to make an attractive price point to compete with the wire. And often they squeeze so much they opt for stuff like unbalanced systems because they’re a LOT simpler and cheaper to produce than balanced ones. Oh sure they technically work. But they’re also typically so cheap that they break easily, perform marginally, and typically end up on a shelf when anyone who really loves doing this stuff gets frustrated with the compromises they require in exchange for being affordable.

If there wasn’t an alternative, that would be one thing. But there is. Stick to the 50 cents worth of wire.

It’s a killer deal.

“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]

Personally, I’d hesitate – big time- to be working on anything this substantial with an individual or organization that is so inexperienced that they don’t AT LEAST have proper liability insurance figured out well in advance.

I’d also balk at the program idea itself, largely because producing something as complex and HIGHLY competitive as a cooking show (modern TV is AWASH with them) is one of the most efficient ways to uselessly burn up money that I can imagine. But that’s another topic entirely.

If you want to try to hop in early and get some of someones risk money, have at it. But understand that no matter what written policies or agreements you have in place with the producer or any other parties, if you’re substantially responsible for what happens on the set – you can expect to be named as a party to any lawsuit. And I wouldn’t count on being able to shift that liability to anyone else with just a signed piece of paper.

You can require someone in an agreement to carry their own insurance for THEIR screwups. But I’m doubtful you can effectively shift a liability burden for your actions to another party. But I’m not a insurance pro so this advice is worth exactly what you’re paying for it. But I see it as a little like a gunman trying to shift blame to the person who hired him to shoot someone. Who ends up in jail? Typically everyone involved.

If you have insurance now, consult your agent for real information. If you don’t – understand that you may still be on the hook for this no matter what documents you have signed.

Business liability insurance isn’t particularly expensive. What it is, however, is a sign that someone has a clue about what they’re doing because they’ve done it before and know that nobody serious in business operates without basic economic risk protections – like insurance – in place. And believe me, if you work in this business for long and get better at what you do – at some point you WILL be signing documents that avow that you have this stuff in place.

For what it’s worth.

“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’ll second Mark’s recommendation to read Tufte.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is about as core as you get when you’re trying to get your brain around how to be informative AND honest in displaying information.

I’d also recommend you spend a quick and easy night with Carmine Gallo’s Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs.

But the bad news is that both of them have the same underlying message. There are and will never be any actual shortcuts to true quality work in presenting to any audience.

Tufte preaches that design and construction must NEVER take sway over the accuracy of the data being visualized. (He too LOATHES PowerPoint and actually argued later in his career at Stanford that it may have been a contributing factor in the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion!)

Gallo’s book strips away the myth of Steve Job’s style being “just go up and conversationally talk to the people in the audience” and reveals that his keynotes are actually the result of RELENTLESS preparation and the kind of superb editing where every-single-word, sentence and concept delivered to the audience is as carefully considered as what a good brain surgeon does in the operating room.

The truth about what you’re doing is that building excellent training videosis EXACTLY the same as doing anything else in world class fashion.

It requires building skills over time. Relentless practice. Relentless refinement. Relentless striving. And knowledge that you might gain some initial insights about from reading, listening to or watching others – but in order to turn the theoretical knowledge into functional performance, you need a lot more than a Paradigm – you need real presentation experience.

The New York City cab driver in the famous joke got it right. When the guy walking by on the sidewalk carrying the violin case stops, leans in the cab window and asks him “How do I get to Carnagie Hall?” The cabbie simply responds, “Practice, practice, practice.”

There is no “magic bullet.

Just effort over time combined with a taste for the external and internal feedback that’s typically necessary to move away from personal performance dissatisfaction and toward satisfaction.

“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]

Having had a plumber out to the house within the past week, I can say with some authority that most of them they are NOT cutting their rates. The 1 hour visit with snaking two lines and re-setting a toilet wax ring that had been compromised by an incompetent installer resulted in a $225 bill.

I intellectually understand that in an economy where a smaller bar of soap costs MORE than a bigger one from two years ago – and a basic meal at McDonalds is likely to run $7 a person – prices are increasing and measurements of value are declining everywhere.

But I also believe that if you leave the IMPRESSION that you’re as concerned about value as your clients you leave yourself in a better position than if you just jack up the prices in order to hold your margins.

If that same plumber had indicated when writing out the bill that yes, hourly rates had gone up – but the work was coming with an extra guarantee – that as a “valued existing customer” they would guarantee me priority service the next time or done ANYTHING to build a perception that while they had to charge full rates -they were even trying to provide value in the exchange, I would have been left without the feeling of being quite so ripped off.

Instead, they communicated NOTHING except the large bill.

It’s that FEELING. That IMPRESSION that they didn’t really care about how I felt about the transaction nor want to keep me as a customer badly enough to share my concern that’s going to make me reach for a DIFFERENT number next time.

Maybe that’s the real lesson here. Your rates themselves are hardly ever the issue. It’s the perception of VALUE in the customers brain that makes them comfortable calling you again. Seldom just the price, unless that price is poorly explained.

For what it’s worth.

“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]

In these days of digital post, it seems counter-intuitive to me to apply any image correction at the production stage.

Since you can apply a digital version of any “look” in post, and still preserve the total original quality of your master – any “baked in” effect that you subsequently can’t remove seems like a poor bet in the modern production workflow.

But, as we often say – you mileage may vary.

(remembering the old days of having to stand in a line at the women’s hosiery counter looking VERY closely at various Dioressence hose brands looking for the perfect density and weave… not nearly quite as embarrassing as asking for condoms at the drugstore when I was a teenager, but not so far from it either!)
“Really, maam, I’m buying these for my VIDEO CAMERA…”

“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]

As someone who’s been doing 5d video for more than two years, and editing the results in FCP, I can tell you that you’re likely to have BIG problems trying to do multi-cam editing with 5d footage.

The issue is the inherent size of the video stream produced by the camera.

If you try to shoot either native or even ProResLT, more than two data streams will choke most standard Mac towers unless you have something VERY hot-rodded.

Each 5d stream in ProRes LT is fixed at 100 mbps. So the math is easy. You’ll need 200, 300, or 400 Mbps throughput if you want to do 2-cam, 3-cam, or 4-cam editing – plus substantial overhead room if you don’t want major slugishness every time you try to work with your timeline.

You need to research and consider PROXY editing — where you make much lower rez versions of your original shots and use those for editing, only replacing the proxys with your actual footage once you’ve made all your decisions.

Multi-cam editing of DSLR footage is still reasonably rarified air right now, tho the tools are getting better and better.

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]

Specifically on the CYC thing, I thought I wanted a permanent one too.

But when you have a purpose built CYC, that’s ALL it’s ever going to be. It’s a one trick pony. Nice trick, but a single style baked in place.

For example, if you want to build a set that looks like a client’s office a $40 box of industrial vinyl floor splash moulding in the intersection of wall and floor makes the space read “office”. Substitute wood moulding and a piece of carpet and it reads “home living room” etc.

When I need the illusion of endless space, I use a roll of seamless. (I have roll hangers for small, medium and the new expensive but HD frame friendly 120 inch seamless rolls all around my stage area.

Seamless does a “straight on” cyc look as well as a hard cyc.

The one area where I’d still consider a hard cyc superior is when you want to do endless perspective shots from two camera angles. The geometry of a shot like that means you’ll either need a VERY wide cyc, or more commonly a two wall or three wall full cove. But again, it’s a one trick pony. If you need that trick for the majority of your work, have at it. If you don’t. I suspect you’ll gain very little except making the space you build out that way LESS useful for general shooting.

But it depends almost exclusively on what kinds of work you’ll be doing.

As a last thought, the last few times I’ve been in a broadcast TV facility, even THEY’ve gone from hardscape cycs to flat hung fabric for keying weather maps and the like.

Probably a lesson there.

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]

Another approach is to remember the inverse square principal.

I’d try renting a pair of headworn micro boom mics (Countryman E6 or similar) and put them on the upstage side of the talent positioned less than an inch from their mouths.

This will provide the maximum signal to noise ratio between the locust sounds and the dialog.

You probably can’t get RID of their sound, but if you can push it back far enough and have ample “nat sound” of the beasts recorded wild, you can likely get a usable dialog track and patch over the edits with what is essentially “outdoor room tone.”

My 2 cents anyway.

“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 Mark said.

Barbara Zimmrman at BZ Rights and Permissions in NYC.

But it’s slow, expensive and a pain in the butt.

Licensing is still such a nineteenth century industry.

Hopefully, that will change in the coming years.

“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]

Personally a mix, but it skews heavily to direct client work.

My best perspective into the ad agency industry today is my brother in law who co-owned the largest agency in a top 25 US market for many years. His shop was bought out about 8 years ago by a Canadian firm. In my conversations with him, I’ve learned that the Agency business is following the general US model. The big fish have gobbled up all the small ones and most of the medium sized ones. They did that to “expand” and to add the essential creative talent that built the smaller shops into larger, more attractive ones, only to find that when they were bigger the lousy economy caused them to need to downsize to match a reduced revenue stream. So they did what’s natural and cut the most expensive people – who were the talented and experienced creatives. What’s left in the industry are a whole bunch of talented but “shop-less” displaced creatives who swim like remora around the big-shop WHALES who themselves have gutted their ranks over the past decade in a relentless march toward incremental cost savings.

This is consistent with the dynamics of how large operations are run. They control costs bases on spreadsheets and formulas since it’s essentially impossible to deal with hundreds of thousands of personalities. So they are naturally forced to view human assets through the lens of that assets COST to the organization rather than any unique ability or personal worth.

There are still plenty of talented and capable agency workers out there. But those agencies are businesses just like their clients. And they noticed as their clients relentlessly downsized, they did too.

So part of the landscape change in the creative arts is more and more creatives floating around with fewer and fewer places to go to get support and continue to grow. And the industry that used to support them is just another big business, that values spreadsheet metrics over intangibles like creativity and passion.

Such is life.

“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