[Bill Davis]

Chuck,

Your post is a bit hard to understand.

You don’t actually describe the shoot. Are you recording a music performance? A play?

Essentially, you need to place a mic or mics wherever the sound is generated. If you’re trying to get the sound of a band, you need to mic the band. Typically, bands with multiple players are miced with multiple microphones. One or more per player (i.e one mic for the bass player, maybe 4-10 mics for the drummer) If that’s you circumstance you still have a problem. The FOH (front of house) mixer responsible for making it sound good for the crowd won’t be mixing for a video recording. If he or she has a bass heavy amp rig, they might lower the bass level that becomes a part of your recording. Or they might crank up the lows if they want more bottom end for the crowd.

A PA mix for the crowd is generally a poor mix for a video.

As to the isolated camera, what do you want to record with IT? You talk about a wireless rig, but again, what sound are you recording? Are you trying to get the sound of the crowd around that camera? Are you doing interviews with it? Is it just a second view of the band?

If you want specific recommendations, you need to tell us more about what you’re trying to accomplish.

Also – as to adapters, sometimes all that needed are adapters that fit the plug to the socket you want to feed the signal into. In other instances, you might have issues like balanced verses unbalanced audio, phantom power, impedance issues, etc. And the simple ability to plug cable A into socket B might get you into audio trouble. Perhaps even cause some damage to the receiving equipment.

Again, you need to be a lot more specific.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Beyond the other good advice given here, I’d add the following.

Beyond a single device in your audio recording chain – eg mic straight into camcorder – you should do a web search on the term “gain structure” and learn something about how to set the relative levels of components in an audio chain.

It’s knowledge that will really help you when stuff starts getting complicated.

FWIW

[Bill Davis]

Since the 1980s I’ve just used the standard Word Count function in any WP.

The time honored standards for commercial VO paced “wall to wall” reading was 85 words for a :30 spot. 160 words for a :60.

That gives you a generic NOT TO EXCEED baseline. Write more than that and your talent will need to work at “full shout car ad aimed at teenagers” pacing.

Human adult narration should obviously be paced slower.

Scripts where ACTING is involved also may need to be adjusted for stuff like long lingering romantic glances shared by the leads, etc.

Your computer’s calculator does the rest.

FWIW

[Bill Davis]

When I’m grabbing clips out of an edited stream, I’ve just gotten into the habit of using (down arrow) to set the playhead on the first frame of the next clip. (next edit) then Command I to set the clips in-point. Then (down arrow) plus (left arrow) — a simple one-two hard to screw up keystroke — to set the playhead on the LAST frame of the clip prior to the edit. Then export and name the clip to taste.

Next edit ALWAYS puts the playhead at the first frame AFTER the edit. That’s where you want it. But it also means that if you use NEXT EDIT to mark the END of something, it’s ALSO going to be at the first frame after the edit, which is gonna be black if that clip isn’t butted up to the following clip.

Essentially, it’s not a bug – it’s a feature. Allowing you to automatically mark the proper in point at the start of each “next” clip. No way the machine can know that you want NEXT EIDT to mean something at the start of a clip, but something ELSE at the end of the same clip. So just use the back arrow and you’re good to go.

Hope that helps.

[Bill Davis]

The surest way is to work with a company that negotiates these kind of rights professionally.

Try Barbara Zimmerman at BZ Rights and Permissions in NYC.

But yes, expect to pay a LOT of money if you want to properly license a popular song.

[Bill Davis]

Margaret,

Sorry, but no one can really accurately answer this in a casual on-line forum.

Yes, under Title 17 of the US code concerning copyright, the “author” of any creative work owns the rights to that work.

However it’s seldom that simple. From what you describe, you might possibly be dealing with a “work made for hire” where the rights may transfer in part or in whole to the commissioning party. Then there’s the whole issue of others rights to creative work that might be incorporated into your work. For example, if you show the logo of the charity, they might have exclusive rights to the portrayal of that logo and you therfore your rights might be subservient to theirs for those scenes. Same with stuff like background music playing during location shoots, branding elements, architecture, artwork, store signage, even the “likenesses” of the people seen in the videos.

Coopyright is nothing if not complicated.

The only way to get truly dependable advice on this topic is to consult with an attorney who does professional copyright law.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Look, with FCP media doesn’t exactly HAVE to be anywhere. I’ve known guys who insist on capturing to their system drives, which is generally considered silly, because you don’t want the system looking for code and OS resources while the same drive heads are trying to access and play footage. But they do it.

That said, I got a cold chill down my spine when you said your footage was batched by a bunch of different people using multiple scratch discs – some within other folders.

That’s just silly. Any NLE has enough file management stuff going on without making it run down needless electronic cooridors looking for pointers to other pointers that point to the original footage.

Generally speaking, video footage should be kept on INTERNAL buss attached drives in a single Capture scratch folder with one level deep sub folders – clearly named for the divisions you want to break your work into – whether that’s projects, chapters, reels or whatever.

Don’t misunderstand me. FCP will often work FINE with nested folders, drives hung on external firewire busses, etc. Right up until something gets screwed up, and then it’s hell to try to troubleshoot a complex system.

Just last month I had a major hassle when a co-worker batched to a new Firewire 800 drive that happend to hang off a machine with an already attached Firewire 400 drive. One of them didn’t like the presence of the other and until we moved all the clips to the internal drive, we had a lot of trouble.

But once we did that things were instantly OK.

You shouldn’t lose ANY on-line clips unless you remove the drive that they’re on, or choose to un-link them.

My advice is to re-think your clips storage. Put all the clips on their own drive and re-link them to your timeline clips in big batches.

Avid spent a LOT more time building a robust media management world than did FCP. That’s pretty much a reality. But understand that a lot of us have been using it for a full decade now (introduced at NAB 99!) and we would have abandoned it long ago if it wasn’t a dependable and solid editing tool.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Look, over and over again, we get this same kind of story.

The reality is that it’s NEVER going to change. This is because just like US – people in corporations have to multi-task, orient and re-orient themselves to situations.

I’ve had many clients ask me when sitting in on edits, why I watched the same clip over and over and over again. I patiently explain that one time was for proofing audio, once for lighting, once for continuity or set appearance, once for performance, etc, etc, etc. They typically nod and shut up starting to understand some of the skeletal complexity of making a good video.

The point is that I don’t do all of these things at once when I view my work. I concentrate on individual elements of the stream as I deal with them.

It should be no surprise that in this economic climate, our clients are focusing on a particular area of THEIR jobs. Cost control. It’s likely the singular IMPORTANT element of their jobs that their bosses are yapping about every meeting.

Yes, that leads to temporary insanity like thinking the admin assistant can somehow magically also do videography or editing for the company meeting.

But we all know he or she can’t do it competently. It’s just too complex. And sooner or later they’ll realize this.

So we have to sit back, relax, survive, and if we’re smart, commisserate with those we’ve built relationships with to share in the pain of less work and understand that our clients are the poor souls who have to figure out how to cut 30% off the corporate expense sheet without making any change in the fundamental quality of the product BECAUSE their profits are down and they need to do this to survive. Just like US.

It WILL come around again. And when it does, the I personally want to be the guy they remember as friendly, honest, helpful, and willing to make sacrifices to help them survive.

Any thing else is long-term business suicide in my book.

For what it’s worth.

[Bill Davis]

Another possibility is that when you sat down and decided…

“…we seem to invoice a small number of large invoices in year and thought it would be really useful to have a large number of small invoices to back that up.”

You were simply a bit off track by putting what YOU wanted ahead of what the businesses in your area needed?

Perhaps economic circumstances are currently such that the level of customer you wanted to attract has had to cut out discretionary spending on elements like video production and that no matter how much you try to promote this service, it’s a solution looking for a problem that currently doesn’t exist with the decision makers in your area? And believe me, trying to convince people to buy what they’re NOT looking for is a lot harder than to get them interested in what they’re ALREADY looking for.

Take this with a LARGE grain of salt since I could be 180 degrees wrong about this.

But one of the turning points in my career was when I stopped telling my clients what they SHOULD need, and learned to listen to what they actually already believed they needed.

The other advice here about developing an outreach program that explains the specific economic benefits of your work to potential clients is much more important. But whether you add zeros to your bottom line by adding 10% more large job tickets – or 50% more smaller job tickets – isn’t that kinda irrelevant.

I understand that you might be feeling that adding a lot of smaller job tickets might make you more proof against losing a lynchpin client – and that’s a reasonable strategy right up to the point where you can’t properly service a big gun client because your team’s running around trying to adequately service 40 smaller ones who want the same level of service, even tho their projects aren’t generating nearly the return of the big ones.

Just food for thought – and an interesting topic in these times.

[Bill Davis]

OK, I’ll play.

You listed 4 objectives. I’d rate your success as follows.

A, B, A, D.

In my experience, a 30 second spot can’t really do 4 objectives well. One or two, yes, three – maybe – 4 hardly ever.

With that reality in mind, you’ve done an EXCELLENT job. You concentrated on the most important objectives and let the last one go. A good lesson for producers because trying to do too much is a sure path to weakening your overall effectiveness.

I suspect these will be very effective if supported by an adequate media budget. If nothing else, they’ll accomplish a third unstated objective that might be the most important of all for an institution like this – enhancing the institutional BRANDING and it’s top of mind awareness in the community.

Good job.