Mark Suszko
12
Apple Final Cut Pro X Coins
7
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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A closer detail shot…
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A clue has emerged: on one of my older iMacs, this effect still exists but I can’t find a way to publish or export the effect out. This is a green grab of part of it; does it help any of you to figure out how it was originally created?
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A link to those samples would be useful.
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One other thing to check is in the Inspector controls, go to the bottom and look for the checkbox: “Spacial Conform” and be sure it’s set to “none”. This little thing used to bite my partner in the butt many times. He’d complain that scaling up the image was losing too much resolution, and what was happening was the inspector defaulted to filling the frame with the shot when doing the automatic spacial conform, instead of leaving it at it’s native size. He’d tell me my footage was “bad” or “low rez” until I unclicked the spacial conform for him.
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It’s definitely a balancing act to juggle between sponsored content, and the revenue it brings in, and non-sponsored content that’s not there to sell you anything, but just to add knowledge and solve a problem and create a community. I think the two can co-exist. But then you will be stretched for revenue unless you get aggressive with the ads. In space navigation they call that a “three-body problem”, I think, and the centroid of where those three things overlap is constantly moving around.
The Cow Youtube channel has some great training on it but most of what training I saw wasn’t all that recent. I’m sure that’s partly pandemic-related. Curating a YT channel is a very demanding, full-time job, to make it as responsive as it needs to be. That means posting something at least daily. Actually more than one “something”, daily. That’s hard.
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I’m a bit peeved that the original content I created for this site (“Save This Script!” with Mark Suszko and John Morley) was purged without any notice to me. That’s happened to other long time COW hands I’ve heard from, who also put up content from way back, lots of it… and found it was all purged, no notice. They’re irked about it.
But that’s not why I haven’t been around as much. I still like the site and I’m still full of opinions and very happy to help wherever I can with whatever I know or have experienced… It’s just that many of the forums I spend the most time in around here haven’t shown me much, if any, new traffic for weeks or months, so I check in less and less often.
I think it’s a case of a paradigm shift away from “sticky content” to a fast-food self-service model that YouTube is delivering to people better than the COW, by simple dint of the weight of numbers. YT may or may not have superior -quality- answers to a quick question, it doesn’t even attempt to directly answer your question, but it has so very much more content overall, that’s *related* to your question, refreshed, not just daily, but hourly, in quantities that no other site can match it, that you’re likely to find your answer in two clicks. maybe not a complete answer, but close enough to figure out the rest.
More than that, once you ask YT your question, its algorithm will keep pushing more and more of that related content at you every day, like a firehose, until you tell it to stop. Whereas, the COW sits there and waits for you to come to it. And though your answers will come from live people, and be exactly related to your specific issue, they may not answer immediately. If you’re on deadline, that wait may be too long.
Basically the same thing is happening to the COW as what happened to brick and mortar mom and pop bookstores when Amazon changed the game.
If I was in a position to give advice, I’d say the only option for survival and continued relevance for the COW is not trying to beat YouTube at their own game. Because nobody can.
I’d say, look at the brick bookstores that still survived after Amazon, and you see they are niche places that curate to serve a smaller select crowd, and that suggests to me the answer is to go back to making a “sticky” web site of branded sources, known leaders in their fields, and timely, factual content that has enough quality and quantity to attract, engage, and hold new people and make them want to come back again and again to learn more. To become their online school. And since the content creators on the COW are not paid, (at least, I wasn’t) you’re asking for industry-leading volunteers to take time from making a living to make that content for free; people who see it as a calling, a mission, a legacy. Basically, and ironically, the very people who’s stuff was abandoned in the server changeover to save a buck. That’s a big ask.
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Getting everything at the same color temp will make life easier. Sometimes we want a particular aesthetic, like the rainy day or day for night scenes, where we want it bluer on purpose… or to make certain items in a scene “pop” and so sometimes a lighting director or DOP deliberately doesn’t correct one or more sources, or tricks the balance with a shader card… but that’s more advanced kind of lighting design; you might want to work up to that later.
The other important thing for you right now besides color temp is to balance contrast ratios – the relative brightness of things in the scene – to direct the eye where you want it. Everything at the same average brightness level is boring. You use cutters, barn doors, negative fill boards or curtains, bounce cards/reflectors, and layers of diffusion to shape the light you have on the scene. You might make the light a little stronger and harder on one side of a face, the key light side to help give its shape more definition. Then you add some softer light on the opposite “fill” side, to moderate it. Your back light or rim light acts to help cut the talent apart from the background and give a more 3-d feel to a scene. Lowell lighting used to have an interactive demo studio online to show you how the scene changes with placement and intensity of lights. Here’s a link to a non-interactive grab from it, if you can find the actual interactive site, post the link here as well, please.
https://tiffen.reamaze.com/kb/lowel-guides/components-of-interview-lighting
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Maybe what you really need is kinetic typography, which adds animation effects to type and mixes it with objects and images. Done well, it’s very effective. There are tons of examples out there, and most of the work can be done with your existing editing and image apps… here’s a random sample https://www.webdew.com/blog/kinetic-typography
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Smartphones are simple and ubiquitous but they aren’t all of equal quality. Even among the same cameraphone models, the cameras on the back are often superior to the ones on the selfie screen side, which your users are going to utilize. If I was going to do, say, a “real” documentary with correspondents all over the map, using their phones, I would mail them a tripod, wired lav, and a goof-proof soft lighting package, and include a prepaid shipping box to send it on to the next correspondent.
Assuming everyone is putting the phone on a desk or kitchen table and sitting at arm’s length from it, lighting becomes the biggest quality-affecting issue. Making a lighting setup that a completely unskilled “civilian” can deploy successfully, on a budget, is just the kind of challenge I like. In the past I’ve recommended a Miniature “V-Flat” made of two sheets of white foamboard, optionally with crinkled aluminum foil contact-glued to the talent-facing side, as a passive bounce-lighting system. This leverages the lighting already in the room and makes it softer and flattering. You can even attach a bracket to the v-flat to hold the phone instead of needing a tripod. Go one step cheaper and cut a horizontal hole across the joint of the v-flat, and the phone fits into that hole snugly, eliminating the need for the bracket. You can get fancier and add a glued-on strip of LED lights to the far left and right sides of the v-flat; such strips are available at discount places like Five Below as well as Walmart and Big Lots, for five bucks, running on USB or a AAA battery pack. Mount them with a layer or two of diffusion made of clear frosted scotch tape. 10 to 12-foot-long USB extension cables are a common find at gas stations near me. Adding a USB wall wart is another twelve dollars. The cheap ones *might* introduce flicker at anything but their brightest setting, ergo, the layers of frosted scotch tape to soften and attenuate. You could also punch white Christmas tree bulbs thru the foam to get a pleasant softlight effect, but that’s extra.
The V-flat could in theory be built using sturdy, folded cardboard sheets, clad on the inside with foil that’s been balled-up, smoothed back out, and glued-on with contact cement. <font face=”inherit”> In a way, that lets it be its own shipping package; just by inserting the separate third bounce card between the two hinged ones, taping-up the side opposite the hinge of the “V”. Slap the shipping label right on the outside. True, it would be oversize. But not heavy at all. Might be cheap enough, depending on your budget, to mail out one to every participant instead of having each participant forward it to the next one. They’re basically disposable. Or send them the instructions to build the V-flat locally and only mail them the lav mic, if you’re choosing to lav them. Then you could just have the participants mail the wired lav mic to each other, with prepaid mailing envelopes from </font>Fedex<font face=”inherit”>, DHL, or etc.
Audio-wise, kitchens aren’t generally the best places to record good sound because of refrigerator noise, and it’s a burden to ask people to unplug the fridge just to record. So a dining room table would be my first choice: it gets the camera and subject up close to each other in the room most folks take some trouble to make look good. Lighting will generally be from right above, or a side window, but by guiding their seating based on a still shot of the room, you could get the on-site practical lighting as good as possible, and you can lay a separate bounce card on the actual table to add a fill-in up-light under their jawline. It’s important that this v-flat setup doesn’t count on any additional lighting, though of course you can add some table lamps left and right of it, just out of frame, to help.
Here’s a quick and dirty visualization attached. The center hole for the phone can be a single rectangular hole, or two vertical slots that can accommodate any width. The whole thing folds up flat, with the tape hinge on the back, the loose bottom bounce card in between the outer panels. Tape the edges closed with a colored tape and instruct recipient to cut the colored tape to open (not the black gaffer tape hinge). Insert the phone to lock it all together.
To use the better-quality rear camera sensors, the interviewee or a friend can operate the camera control start/stop from behind the unit, then sit the person down and start the testimonials… let me know if any of you folks try this out for a shoot. This is the same rig I suggest to my beginning ukulele video-making friends because it’s so easy and cheap to make with local materials from the dollar store. The cheapest it costs to make is about $5. Less, if you have Reynolds wrap foil, tape, and large used amazon cardboard boxes at home already.
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Yeah, “animated” is too broad a way to describe what you want, even in 2-d. Are we talking stop motion cut-up paper, inked cel type animation, or flash-like vector graphic animation, and at what levels of detail and realism: Hanna Barbera did Flintstones- level detail and realism vs. Jonny Quest level detail and realism. One takes longer to draw than the other. How articulated must the characters be? A static drawing with just an animated head and mouth and eyes? Does it have to move across the screen and do things? Are there moving backdrops, props or effects like laser beams? Is there lipsynch to voices, is there music and sound effects synched to anything? $1500 a minute might be lowball or overcharging, depending on your answers but we have no way to know from what you’ve given us here. The more detailed you define the need, the more accurate the time and cost estimate can be.
(Some Quest trivia for you: the dog, “Bandit” was drawn by a Flintstones artist because the artist that art directed the Jonny Quest show hated the dog, which had been forced onto the show by marketing types, and that’s why it never quite fits the art style of the rest of the show. Both shows were Hanna-Barbera productions, different budgets and timelines.)
