[Bob Cole]

1. It probably comes with a short 1/8″ to XLR cable.
2. Maybe, maybe not. It takes time to rig a wireless, and a wireless lav will record sound that is close to it much more than other sound, so it works best if you are following one person, but not so well if you are in a fluid situation with several people. Unless hidden, the supplied mic will be more visible to the camera than some other brands. Personally, I’d buy a good on-camera hyper-cardioid mic and mic holder first.
3. This requires some research online with your specific location information. You’ll have to choose a frequency range anyway when you select your G3.

Good luck. It’s a nice little system, relatively inexpensive, not the best quality but surprisingly decent imho.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Mark Slocombe] “a freshly formatted disk”

1. Buy HD for new system drive
2. Format it — how? I have USB/FW ports on my computer, so do I put the new HD into an external enclosure that allows USB/FW access?

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Please report back – this is an ongoing problem that I think everyone has to deal with sooner or later.

Does anyone know how the “Get a Mac” ads were filmed? It looks as if everyone’s on a white background, but it is so consistent that I wonder whether this was chromakeyed.

re your shoot: I did something similar, but not as challenging (interviews, not including the floor). I used a waveform monitor to make sure I didn’t clip, but the producer kept insisting it wasn’t “white enough.” I wound up pulling a luma key in post, garbage matting out the center of the subjects’ faces, and replacing the off-white background with barely-legal white.

This sort of depends on your producer and your camera. If you were shooting for MY “make it whiter” producer, and if you were NOT shooting with a Z1, I’d recommend chroma key.

With the framing including the floor, shadows would be an issue too.

John Sharaf is, as usual, absolutely right about the clipping issue. That could kill you and is probably your primary job to deal with.

I’d look at the lighting of the Apple-PC ads and try to imitate that. Light it with as big and soft a source as possible – a big diffusing panel pretty close to the camera? Light the background with exactly the same type of source (i.e. don’t mix tungsten-ish Diva’s and true tungsten) so you don’t have white-balance issues. Lock your iris down too – make sure that if you will need to go in for close-ups, you shoot everything, even the wides, at the max.aperture that your zoom allows.

[Bob Cole]

David,

We were responding to this thread at the same time.

You’ve hit several nails on the head. Scary thoughts, but you’re right – “Dark Start,” hunh?

The off-site storage issue is major, and very difficult given the huge amount of media that video requires. If you need to restore something immediately, and it isn’t onsite, that isn’t good either.

I’m rethinking. Thanks though.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Sounds as if you have put tape to the acid test! Glad it worked out.

I’m a bit envious of your tape autoloader and the automated approach it allows. I have a single LTO3 drive hooked up to the SCSI port on a PC in my network. It’s quite cumbersome. I manually copy over files from the Mac to the hard drive on the PC, then manually copy to the LTO3 tape. The only advantage to all this hands-on work is that I can create separate tape libraries for individual clients, which makes it easier to find files I need to restore.

I second the opinions about tape vs. hard drive. Before the LTO3 I had about 20 hard drives for backups, and one failure was enough to convince me that they are a terrible idea for archiving. Archives should be able to sit on a shelf and work after years of inactivity — exactly what you should NOT try with a hard drive.

I don’t think I’m going to spend the money for the tape autoloader. My next solution: RAID5 or 6 for active media files, Time Machine for project files, and my cumbersome but solid LTO3 system for (1) video from non-tape sources and (2) finished projects that I’m removing from the RAID.

Then there’s the issue of off-site backup in case the whole building goes up in flames…. What do you do about that?

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Aaron Cadieux] “I’ve complained about my job on the Cow many times.”

Just a reminder: this is a public forum, and if anyone Googles your name, they can find this post.

There’s a lot of great advice in this thread. You could, indeed, just “suck it up,” and focus on the craftsmanship side of editing, or work faster, or divide the work so that the management process itself makes it interesting. But if most of your work bores you, it may be a sign. I agree with Scott that there’s no shame in moving on if editing is consistently a boring chore. Even if you’re really talented, if it doesn’t float your boat, move on – it could be the best thing that happens to you.

Only when work regularly draws on all or most of your talents can you be happy in work.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Clint Fleckenstein] “That explains why I haven’t been able to find any capstans or pinch rollers to clean.”

I finally got a tape into an EX3 but it was a tight squeeze.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

a couple reactions:

1. They’ll sell thousands. There are, what, 30-40 million iPhones out there? But some entrepreneur will come along, make something similar for $30 retail, and sell hundreds of thousands.
2. Women, watch out. Wear pants.
3. I thought those men in the video were about to start laughing and say “April Fools,” but I was wrong. (See point 1.)
4. Steven Soderbergh will announce next week that he’s making an entire feature film with the Steadicam version of the Zacuto/iPhone.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Great question. “Turnabout is fair play,” I guess.

When a client cancels late on me, I do not charge a cancellation fee if it’s an “act of God,” or even a human slip-up, in part because of the situation that Dan describes: what if I couldn’t fulfill an obligation due to circumstances beyond my control?

If a client develops a regular habit (due to something other than acts of God) of booking a Wednesday, and not really being ready until Friday, then it’s time for Plan B. Explain to the client the difference between ink and pencil, i.e. a firm booking vs. a tentative one. If Client 1 asks you to “pencil them in,” that means that if Client 2 offers you a job, you can call Client 1, let them know you have a firm offer from another client, and give Client 1 a choice: either release you from the session OR “ink them in,” meaning that they must pay for the day, whether they show up or not. I think that makes it more understandable to the client, that if they reserve the time and deprive you of the opportunity to do another job, you must be compensated for the loss. In time, that tends to make clients more responsible about their bookings.

Plan B is more of an educational tool than a money-maker. In fact, as a revenue-producer, it is a loser. I have raised the CONCEPT of Plan B quite often, giving Client 1 the chance to reschedule or book firmly, but only once have enforced it when Client 1 couldn’t make the date (losing Client 1 in the process). But I got paid, and it was one of the happiest working days of my life.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Todd Kopriva] “Why take it off?”

On the desktop, good point. But with all the programs in the CS3/CS4 suites, it takes up a lot of room on the relatively small boot drive of the laptop.

Bob