[Craig Seeman]

Some tips on figuring out a price.

See what people are charging locally for similar service.

Find out what you’d need to cover your bills, housing, utilities, food for the family, equipment maintenance and replacement when the time comes, insurance, software upgrades, any marketing expenses such as paying for web page, business cards, advertising of any sort.

Figure an ideal of 20-25 hours of paid work per week. Another 15-20 hours unpaid for marketing – web pages updates, talking to potential clients about jobs, system maintenance, doing paper work, etc.

Take the number of hours of anticipated worked and divide by your above costs. That will give you a good idea what you need to charge per hour. You may find people are charging more or, often less (they’re giving away their serivces and will go out of business, the market is flooded with people doing the same work). Then you need to figure out how to get the price you need to stay in business.

If you need to charge flat rate, you need to figure out how long it will take to do a given job. Sometimes that takes experience. Many folks underestimate the time it takes when starting out.

[Craig Seeman]

You can create WMV HD from HDV out of FCP with Flip4Mac. Render times are slow though. The only thing that concerns me about the work flow is that you’re creating a WMV HD from a file that’s already heavily compressed into MPEG2 in which “fast action” and, I suspect transitions, don’t have the variable bit rate increase to compensate for such.

[Craig Seeman]

DV and HDV are the same data rates. I think you’re confusing Megabits and Megabytes.

[Craig Seeman]

AGC in the PD 150/170 actually is more of a limiter so you don’t get the pumping you get with other AGC circuits. I always set one channel to AGC and the other OFF. This way one channel will be usable. Which one depends on the circumstances. A “hot” mic can overdrive the input even when the meters don’t peak. That’s one reason why you need to listen on headphones and not just look at meters.

[Craig Seeman]

If you’re going to be starting and stopping the camera, you’ll be syncing every start/stop. Tape is cheap. Run the camera continuously and sync only once per tape. Since the sync clocks aren’t lock you may get slight amount of drift to compensate for.

Alternative is if you’re only micing two people than have each wireless go to each channel of the camera separately.

[Craig Seeman]

After inputing your file into Compressor 2 and then either using a preset or making your own, Select the file’s setting in the Batch window and look at the Summary in the Inspector window. It will tell you the estimated file size.

I just input a file of 1:15 minutes DV (about 16G) and selected the 150 minutes Best Encode 4:3 preset and it shows me an estimate of 2.03GB after compression.

[Craig Seeman]

Some people use Twixtor. I tried the demo at one point and was frustrated by the interface though. I have BCC so I may have a go at its time filter.

Strange that Compressor 2 has such great Optical Flow capabilities but the same technology is not yet built into FCP.

[Craig Seeman]

I think Sony has the UWP-C1 for about $499 less than the Sennheiser lav kit but only lav and no hand held transmitter or mic. Anything less then than and you may be buying a problem rather than a solution – high noise levels, interference issues etc. Azden 100LT is $339. I’d scrape together the extra $260 and get the Sennheiser since it’s worth it to me to have the hand held plugin which I can use with my $100 Sure mic.

[Craig Seeman]

Sennheiser Evolution G2 100 series.

$599.95 at B&H. It includes 1 receiver, Lav with wireless transmitter and a plug on transmitter for a hand held mic.

On the other hand if you want to move more “upscale”

Lectrosonic 100 series

about $1000-$1200 at B&H
Includes receiver, Lav and transmitter (no plug on for hand held like above).

[Craig Seeman]

BIG difference.

Use 2 Pass CBR for video instead of 2 Pass VBR. Your server bosses may want to restrict your bit rate depending on how the estimate the number of people viewing the stream at any given moment. You need to get bit rate limits from them (if any). Because CBR doesn’t (by design) vary the bit rate based on content, “high action” elements may not look as good (dissolves, fast motion in the subject or camera movement). Simply put, VBR will increase the bit rate for “high action” elements and reduce it elsewhere to keep to the target bit rate (and/or quality setting), CBR is inflexible so the bit rate may simply not be high enough to maintain the quality when there’s lots of “change” from frame to frame.

I’d love to look at your encode when it hits the site. Would you post the link?