[Dave Johnson]

Personally, I use the building a house analogy most often and think an important distinction to make is building a house, rather than buying a pre-fab house like those sold in the early 1900s.

While the car analogy also makes perfect sense to people like us who already understand the parallels, I avoid it like the plague because I’ve found it allows clients to oversimplify the issues the analogy is intended to clarify … in other words, most people tend to answer that question by simply saying “I don’t need a Lamborghini for ten times the price of a Ford when a Ford will get me from point A to point B just the same … so, how much is the base-model Ford?”. In fact, the answer is often more along the lines of “I’ll take the Lamborghini for the price of the Ford” since the analogy didn’t help them understand the reasons one costs more than the other, which in my opinion the house analogy does much better since most people understand the differences between a mobile home and a two-story, four-bedroom house with a two-car garage and a pool much better than they do the inner workings of car engines and designs.

Circling back to that question so easily circumvents the real issue, which Walter stated very well with “The client thinks they are buying a product, but you are selling a service.” … in my opinion, hiring a video producer is much more similar to hiring a general contractor to build a house or a tailor to make a suit than it is to selecting which pre-made product you want to buy off the shelf.

[Dave Johnson]

They cost more than foam core or poster board, but a set of Warm Cards is handy if you do mush fast shooting under uncontrollable lighting …

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/572332-REG/Vortex_Media_WCSLR_WCSLR_Complete_2_0_WarmCard.html

It’s kind of silly that the product photo doesn’t show this, but each of the colored cards in the set has matte white on the flip side.

As others have pointed out, just about any non-reflective surface that’s placed under the subject lighting will do in most cases.

[Dave Johnson]

There’s no problem with your camera or software … those are interlacing lines (field separation).

I only stumbled upon your post since I’m primarily a Final Cut, Premiere and After Effects guy who only dabbles in Vegas occasionally. So, I can’t tell you exactly where to find the controls you need to check, but in general terms, you just make sure your editing software is interpreting the footage correctly (as either upper or lower field order). Then, depending on your desired delivery medium(s), you can “deinterlace” interlaced video in most any video software, whether that be your editing software or format conversion/compression software.

I’m sure others will chime in with Vegas-specific details, but I figured I’d let you know there’s nothing to worry about until then.

Cheers.

[Dave Johnson]

[Roland R. Kahlenberg] “the Animation CODEC is lossless only if it’s Quality Slider is at or above 87% – so I’ve read.”

[Walter Soyka] “I thought it was only lossless at 100%. I can’t say that I’ve experimented to verify, though.”

I thought it was only lossless at 100% too, but that’s based only on my own assumption since it seems that, if 87% and above meant lossless, they would’ve just adjusted the scale to make the 87% level of compression read 100%. Hmmm… that confused me and I wrote it so, perhaps said a better way, if 87% is lossless, does 87-100% represent “even more lossless” or something? If not, I’ve wasted an awful lot of drive space over the years with that useless extra 13%.

[Dave Johnson]

Personally, my approach to archiving is to have two methods with one being my acquisition medium and the second being a digital file equivalent so there’s both ease of access and redundancy.

So, when I shot Beta or DV, I mastered back to Beta or DV for archiving and also archived 8-bit uncompressed or DV files to hard drives or RAIDs as much as possible (and kept the camera raws too since I never liked the practice of re-using acquisition media). Now that I’m shooting XD-CamHD, I master back to XD-CamHD discs and put digital files on hard drives that are shelved for archiving.

Sure the discs aren’t indestructible and will likely be antiquated at some point (like everything else in this business), but no medium is infallible so it seems logical to use the one we have multiple ways to access. And, rather than re-digitizing when it isn’t necessary, it’s nice to be able to just pull a hard drive off the shelf, but hard drives fail too (some would even argue that they fail faster and more frequently than discs or tapes).

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of using the hot new flavor of the month lossy codec as an archiving solution … in other words, h264 is a great codec, but in the event it becomes a sub-standard, antiquated codec a couple years from now, having all my work only saved down to that format would be pretty useless.

Then again, these kinds of things vary depending on one’s circumstances … I just re-read your question to make sure I answered it and realized it sounds more like you’re asking in terms of personal rather than professional so h264 might be sufficient.

[Dave Johnson]

What Brian Holson described are in fact the correct steps …

“put your comp in the render queue, double click on “output module”, under “video output” is a “channels” drop down and there you can choose alpha or RGB + Alpha, and choose your format as well for export”

For transparency, you want “RGB + Alpha”, but you also have to make sure you’re rendering to a codec that supports alpha channels … I usually use PNG or Animation, but there are others too.

If you do those things you’ll have an alpha channel so it’s then just a matter of whether it’s being interpreted correctly by whatever NLE software you bring the file in to.

[Dave Johnson]

If you’re talking about just file names, rather than meta data or something else, I use a tiny program called Better File Rename … if I recall correctly, its fairly cheap, but not free. I’m sure there are similar free tools out there though.

[Dave Johnson]

First, sorry for my cynical comments, but perhaps they’ll be somewhat helpful in understanding the perspectives of many of the people you’ll deal with since there’s a pretty high chance you’ll come across others in our industry who take the same approach to this subject after having tried repeatedly to be more flexible …

My short answer to “What do you look for on a resume?” is nothing … I’m not hiring a piece of paper.

I’ve found all too often that resumes are now worthless in our business because a very simple rule I only saw broken on very rare occasion throughout the years I was coming up is clearly considered silly by most now … the rule of never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, claim other people’s work as your own … whether in part or in whole.

Similarly, like Mike’s suggestion that “If you put ‘Photoshop’ or ‘Final Cut’ on your resume, make sure you know those inside out.”, I’ve found that most people now interpret that concept to mean that, if they’ve heard of something before, it’s ok to put it on their resume since they can always Google it and figure it out when their bluff gets called (notice I said “when”, not “if”).

The result of those two issues is that the only things that matter to me anymore are:

1] the person’s work (even if just projects from school)
2] concrete proof that “their work” is in fact “their work”
3] what, if anything, of their resume commentary is true

I consider the answer to that last question useful as an indicator of character, but the first two cover everything else, which is why resumes are a distant third consideration to me.

Best of luck in your endeavors!

[Dave Johnson]

[Bob Zelin]
“Many young people today (I see them first hand, so you can’t debate this, or say I am wrong -) have no work, yet they have nice cars, nice cel phones, their own apartments, money to go out with, and yet, they are unemployed, or almost unemployed.”

[Bob Zelin]
“a bunch of lazy spoiled [ED] kids, with their cars and cel phones, and hanging out at a restaurant with no jobs, bitching and complaining”

[Bob Zelin]
“This is what seperates past generations of lazy people, vs. todays ‘Gen Y’. Entitlement.”

I would never debate those facts … of the nearly 4 thousand people at my particular employer’s headquarters, at least 50% are those same exact kids you described, but 10 years after you saw them in that restaurant since Daddy, Mommy and/or Uncle Joe has now given them a job telling people like you and I what to do and how to do it. ;~)

[Dave Johnson]

You’re definitely talking to the wrong people, my friend … even though I probably spend more time overall in Windows Land, I wouldn’t even think of doing pro video work with source files other than QuickTime, regardless of which platform I’m on at a particular moment.

Perhaps that’s partially because I started on Macs and still work on both platforms daily, but I think it’s more because several of the folks I learned from stressed the importance of WindowsLand/MacLand dual-citizenship and it’s hard to accomplish that without good use of QuickTime … plus QT just makes the most sense for pro video.