[Brendan Coots]

There are three (probably more) ways:

1. Run a firewire cable to a DV camera, as you mentioned, with component/composite outs running to the TV from the camera

2. Use a device like the Canopus ADVC110, which converts your firewire to composite outputs similar to the camera method above

3. Best option – buy the baseline Blackmagic PCI card ($299) and run its component outs to a broadcast monitor. These cards are very nice – they’re Mac/PC compatible and work with virtually any quicktime-enabled software.

[Brendan Coots]

You can go as far back as v6.0 without missing out on too much, at least in terms of learning the software. v7.0 introduced a totally new interface and rearranged the menus somewhat, but nothing you won’t get used to later on.

Try finding a copy of v6.0, but make absolutely certain that it is a new/unopened copy that you can register with Adobe in your name. This way, should you decide to move up to the new version you can buy an upgrade version for only $299 rather than paying the full price of $999. There are a lot of scammers on Ebay so be very careful and read the posts very, very carefully should you decide to go that route.

[Brendan Coots]

The best (or perhaps ONLY) way to minimize keying flaws is to employ excellent lighting, like Ron said. This is true whether you are using a webcam or 70mm film, but with the prosumer formats like DV and HDV it can (and will) completely make or break your ability to key. This will probably involve using a lot more lights (and higher wattages) than some people are used to. Many people who work with DV are under the false-impression that DV allows you to work with little to no lights, or that cheap lighting instruments are okay. Not true. If you expect professional results, and especially while using an inferior format like HDV, be prepared to buy or rent a full set of professional lights. Anyone doing green screen or other pro-level videography should have:

– 2 or more 250w fresnel lights
– 2 or more 500w fresnel lights
– 1 or more 1k fresnel lights
– 1 or more four-bank kino-flo flourescent lights (or 1k soft-box fresnel equivalents).
– barn doors for ALL lights
– 2+ white cards for bouncing light
– Assorted flags, dots etc. for “sculpting” the light

As a general starting point for lighting greenscreens, I usually use two 4-bank kino-flos (or equiv.) on the greenscreen itself, one covering the left side of the screen and the other covering the right. Then I might bounce a 1k arriflex off of a white card to fill the middle of the screen. Having even illumination is very important, so it’s worth the time to really tweak your setup until the backdrop is as smoothly lit as possible.

It’s also very important not to over or under expose your backdrop. Overexposure will cause the greenscreen to lose saturation and shift toward the yellow, while underexposure will cause the screen to get grainy and shift toward the blue. Since the keyer will be comparing color values, it is crucial that the screen be as close to pure green as possible. One trick I have used in the past is to buy a pure green photographic filter. Hold a white sheet of paper up next to the greenscreen and put the green filter to your eye. A perfectly lit greenscreen will look similar to the white paper through the lens.

[Brendan Coots]

Here’s my input:

1. Don’t focus on price competition. This is a race to the bottom, I assure you, and it also limits your future options. Once you find the need to raise your rates, all the customers you roped in with your “cheaper guy” value proposition will no longer be interested. It CAN be valuable to point out that your prices are affordable, but think long and hard about how to phrase this without making it the core of your VP.

2. Spending $500/month on SEO (purchasing inbound links, directory listings, paying someone to tweak your site text etc.) is a good start to getting your web site out of the shadows, but it takes time to reap the rewards. In my experience, an equally important step is to set up an account with Google Adwords. While it doesn’t improve SEO, it will bring you a lot of potential customers while you wait for your SEO efforts to pay off. You can choose how much to pay for each lead, tell Adwords to only show your ads in the cities you want, and you can use exclusion words to ensure the “wrong” people don’t see your ads (such as students or people looking for freebie animated GIFs). You could easily spend $500/month on Adwords alone, depending on how stiff the competition is in your local market. As such, you may want to tweak your budget to allow some $$ for this.

3. You are wise to allocate some funds to your web site. I visited the site, and while the design is clean it doesn’t really tell your eye where it should go, so it clearly needs a facelift. It also needs some serious redesign for it to ever come out of the shadows and show up in the search engines. $6k should get you a comprehensive redesign, just make sure that the person you hire knows and understands SEO so that they employ those principals in the design so that you don’t have to hire a separate SEO expert.

[Brendan Coots]

I agree, Ron. I hate to sound so cynical, but most of those magazines seem to buy into the theory that articles are just the stuff between advertisements, rather than the other way around. In fact, they take it to the extreme by making 90% of the articles about the same products being sold in the ads.

Most of our industry’s trade magazines really seem focused on promoting this gear or that software, with little to no focus on the Big Picture. I would imagine this would make them appeal more to freelancers, which is odd given that, more often than not, it’s established businesses who buy those $20,000 cameras and overpriced Avid suites.

[Brendan Coots]

What terms do your model releases stipulate? Any and all uses free of royalties? Most model releases are fairly generic and cover only the production at hand, which doesn’t give you infinite right to resell that person’s interviews without compensation.

As for selling price, there probably isn’t a “standard” price, given that it completely depends on who was interviewed, how in demand they are etc. You are going to just have to negotiate.

[Brendan Coots]

I agree with baclontz, Vista is a bloated resource hog. Upon opening Vista (no apps running) people report it using 700-900MB RAM, just to run! That is nuts, and is 3 times more than my XP machine uses.

Also, I have heard many stories of Vista issues with graphics apps, compatibility problems etc. While some people have no problems at all, others can barely get things working because they happen to have a particular piece of hardware or the “wrong” software installed so Vista completely flips out.

As baclontz commented, you are better off getting the 64-bit version regardless of which OS you decide on.

[Brendan Coots]

Here’s a tip for keying HDV – Don’t.

Seriously, it’s the same bitrate as MiniDV, and not well suited for keying. If you want to get better results, try doing some searches here for keying DV, the same techniques apply.

[Brendan Coots]

Space bar previews are NOT the same thing as a true RAM preview. With a space bar preview AE is simply forced to chug through the timeline, frame by frame, as best it can based on the speed of your processor etc. There is absolutely no value in doing a spacebar preview, so you should use the zero-key preview or the RAM preview button in the time controls palette.

[Brendan Coots]

At the risk of starting an argument over rates (almost as bad as the whole Mac vs. PC debate), in the L.A. area doing entry level roto type work I would say around $20-$30/hr.

In my experience roto work doesn’t pay THAT great, especially compared to higher level visual effects and motion graphic design.