[Bill Davis]

Personally, when I want to add names to my freelanceers list, I drop by and have a chat with the folks at the local RENTAL houses.

They know who’s renting what. Who’s busy. Who’s coasting. They know who has experience with what level of gear. And who’s steadily employed.

Plus you can decide if you need the guy who’s always renting one Arri kit – or the gal who’s always booking the 5 ton grip truck.

Targeted info if you ask me.

FWIW.

[Bill Davis]

It is SO easy to let email become a burden.

So I believe this is an area where you need radical new thinking.

My strategy is threefold. First I keep my Address book as flawless as possible with regard to current email addys of anyone who I’d actually wish to hear from.

The second is to keep a “trash” email account for all the airline confirmations, trade show registrations, and inescapable crap of modern electronic life. Which is handled by opening it everyday, marking everthing in it to delete. Then quickly uncheck ONLY those couple of items that actually have value. (Like the airline confirmation until the flight)

The final part is tougher. Be okay with WALKING AWAY from your personal email address and ALL it’s data every now and then. Trashing an old account can be as satisfying as cleaning out the kitchen cabinets. But we seem to do it FAR less often. Be okay with the idea that if someone is important to you – you can control keeping up the contact – and if they’re not important enough to track – it’s OK if their e-presence goes away.

Essentially I’m saying that even tho it’s POSSIBLE to keep everyone in your list that you’ve corresponded with over the past 5 years – WHY WOULD YOU?

Really, in a Google saturated world. How hard is it to search out anyone’s contact info? So your address book should be mostly the EXCEPTIONS. The home team. The best of the best. Trash the rest.

I can vouch for this approach. In the last six months, my two year old primary email account has received exactly 8 spam messages. My 15 year old “trash account” gets 8 every 10 minutes.

So every few years, or as needed, just dump your old email life and start fresh. Send the new addy to those you really care about. And get on with life.

My 2 cents anyway.

[Bill Davis]

Ian,

I still don’t think you’re quite understanding the essential elements of setting up a workable key.

If I had to put a single aspect at the top of the list of what makes a good key easy to pull, it would probably be the SHOT GEOMETRY.

Let me explain. You have three key surfaces to deal with. The key screen at the back. The subject in the middle. And the imaging CCD behind the camera lens.

What you’re going to discover is that one HUGE factor in pulling a clean key is how the distance between these three planes interact. Let’s say you have 10 feet of usable room between the CCD and the wall. You’d expect to put the talent and the 5 foot mark for some separation from the key and you’ll be fine. But you won’t. Not ONLY will you likely get spill from the green screen in 5 feet – but since if the talent is at 5 feet from the lens, about the ONLY shot you’ll get without a super wide angle lens adaptor is a medium head and shoulders frame. And if you do that – your idea about turning the camera on it’s side will result in you giving the talent almost NO arm room, so you’ll typically constrict the talent’s ability to gesture.

So you move the camera back to 15 feet. And get yourself 7.5 feet fore and aft the subject. But suddenly the geometry of the shot means that the key screen you thought was large enough at 10 x 10 shrinks down to the point where an arm gesture, once again, will fall OFF the key screen.

Suddenly you start to understand why full length green screens are typically VERY big – and are placed in VERY deep studios where there’s often 30 or 40 feet of depth available.

That’s what makes the geometry of a good green screen studio work well – and also why most of them don’t have a few light fixtures illuminating them, but rather bank after bank of broad, soft color balanced sources.

The geometry of good key shots is relentless. Distance from camera to subject is critical to allow you to get as much of head to toe shot as you need. And further distance from the talent to the screen is important to avoid spill.

And trying to somehow overcome these lighting and shot geometry issues with ideas like gelling lights and turning cameras on their side are looking at solving issues that aren’t the primary ones you really have to solve to pull a good key.

My advice is to FIRST set up your space and your shot as best you can. Learn the LIMITATIONS of your lens verses the geometry of your shot. Accept that all you may be able to do is get a head, or head and shoulders shot with the space you have. Then concentrate on lighting the actual SHOT – rather than wasting too much time on the tricky stuff like double gelling thisaway or turning the camera thataway.

My 2 cents anyway. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

[Bill Davis]

Yep. You’re spending too much time THINKING about green screen and too little time actually doing it.

You likely won’t need the extra green light filters. The green background color should be plenty. Mark is right, the color will be fine, you’re task is lighting it evenly.

That’s NOT going to be easy with scoop shaped insturments. Their parabolic shape will gather all the light and create hot spots. Think about it this way. If the greenscreen was a MIRROR would you be seeing a large even source of light, or bright spots of light? The wider you can spread the actual light sources, the more even your key. This is why using longer light emitting tubes such as long fluorescents are way better than any small array of lamps which is what you have with that fixture. Yes, you can do it with these, but plan on doing quite a bit of masking and garbage matting in your NLE because you WILL have hot spots with this type of lighting.

Also remember to keep as much separation as possible between the screen and the performers so that spill from the screen is kept off them.

Good luck. And let us know how things come out.

[Bill Davis]

Wanna help me build my next studio??

; )

[Bill Davis]

I’d be careful about relying on a general contractor.

When I converted my haybarn into a dedicated studio about 8 years ago, I had all sorts of difficulty getting general contractors to accept and understand the unique aspects of a video studio.

For instance, when I explained that I wanted a control room with none of the walls parallel to any other wall for audio monitoring purposes (supresses the development of standing waves and makes it easier to get accurate audio) , they all looked at me like I was speaking Urdu.

Their industry is based on using plumb bobs and framing squares.

My general contractor took one look at my floorplan and had to pull a 70 year old carpenter out of retirement to do my framing because he was the only cat in the area who could take all the weird angles and using a pencil and a piece of scrap 2×4 instantly figure out not just the cut angles, but how to divvy up the lumber so the whole process wasn’t insanely wasteful. (Amused the heck out of me at the time – but now I realize how lucky I was to have the old guy available!)

A studio is a weird beast. Lots of companies do AC ducting, few don’t get grumpy when you tell them you need 3 extra turns turns in the duct work to supress HVAC air velocity into a room where you’ll have open mics.

If you want accurate cost estimates, find folks to talk to who have actually built VIDEO and AUDIO studios.

My (been there and done that) experience.

[Bill Davis]

I had an interesting conversation with a lighting equipment designer on just this subject a few months ago.

One thing I found interesting was that most lamp source photometrics are measured in a 360 degree sphere around the source. The lamp is expected to output light in every direction reasonably evenly.

As videomakers, we’re usually concerned with putting light out in a controlled direction. Which is why the lamp housing is such a big deal. Reflectors, barn doors, parabolic mirrors, etc all attempt to get the light constrained to a single direction so that it can be cut and controlled.

Both standard tungsten and fluorescent lamps work this way. The lamp is “omni” – and the fixture is the key to control.

However, with LED lighting that changes. A led is actually more like a tiny Leko (elipsoidal spotlight) directing most of it’s photon energy in a single direction. So using them in arrays is like having an array of a lot of spotlights – rather than a single light emitting surface.

That’s been my experience with my ongoing conversion to LEDs as well. Some things work like conventional lights. (color temp, gelling, great power and weight savings, etc.) others are just different. Like using a barn door to cut an LED fixture. It just doesn’t work the same.

All great tools, but if like me you’re interested in the convenience, portability, energy savings, and longevity of LEDs – you’ve got to re-learn a few things.

FWIW.

[Bill Davis]

Start by making a traditional edit of the CONVERSATION only.

Get the audio track to work. In other words, let the laughs finish, then when someone starts talking, cut to that person. It’ll probably be a bit boring, simple “show him when he’s talking – show her when she’s talking editing.

Once you have that edited so the rhythm of the conversation flows. Then go back and look for cutaway shots that will cover the stuff you don’t like.

You can use ANY shot of her listening to him if you want to get her reaction to what he’s saying.

Essentially, I’m saying edit with your EARS first. Then work with visuals that support and amplify what the characters are saying.

It’s a LOT more time consuming than just switching 4 synced cameras. But nobody ever said good editing was easy.

(right telly?)

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Actual “closed captioning” uses text information encoded to the vertical interval of a BROADCAST signal.

It follows FCC rules about the CC signal that all television receivers must be able to decode.

But when a video is displayed on a computer – there’s no equivalent standard for encoding and decoding CC information.

You can OPEN caption it if you like. Which is so say super visible text on the screen somewhere over the video.

But you typically won’t find any controls on a computer video player to hide/display CC info.

If you simply want to send video out to someone on-line to get the captioning done and the resulting captioned video sent back – lots of closed caption services do this. But again, it’s ONLY useful if you’re then going to put that captioned file on a BROADCAST video station.

Hope this helps.

[Bill Davis]

Well, I don’t really camp anymore. But I do shoot in Arizona. And maybe you don’t have Cholla cactus in your area – but we do. And when someone gets careless – something with GOOD needle nose pliers is worth it’s weight in titanium out here.

Plus not having to go looking for scissors to cut gels, a small flat screwdriver (that with a small bit of one-time grinding) will do a “tweeker’s job of setting recessed trim pots and even field strip XLR connectors, PLUS GOOD wire cutters, a phillips head screw driver that lets you field service Arri lights — all in one belt pouch is something that’s EARNED it’s way onto my hip – tho I lend it to my crew guys more than I DIY – but it’s typically a LOT easier than having them run back to the grip truck over and over again for individual tools.

Time is money. Time on a live set is often LOTS of money. Gerber Freehand FTW.

My 2 cents anyway – YMMV.