[Mark Suszko]

I’ve done it the old way as well, and I do similar work to yours now. Mostly I one-man-band it, or let the clients do the paper edit of what I shot using window dubs on VHS on their own time. Since I am generally also the shooter, I already know as the editor where everything is, and pretty much what I have to work with. That’s a major time saver right there.

If it’s a scripted show, I already have preferred takes marked on my copy of the script from the shoot, so I just mark ins and outs for the specific slated takes, build the batch digitizing list, hit “go” and sit back with a beverage to monitor audio levels.

What I like to do now is to do the “paper edit” as you call it, or the rough cut, at the digitizing/logging stage. When I have the luxury and am not too bored by the material, I find it speeds things up quite a bit to roll and log-in only the best takes, and digitize at full quality right off the bat. For something very linear in style, I can then just lasso the whole bin, drag it to the timeline, and it’s essentially done except for tweaks and transitions. Where this can bite you is if you set yor handles too short and need to go back and grab more of something you didn’t expect you needed so much of at first.

And there is the serendipity effect of looking thru all your footage while searching. Murch talks about this extensively, and I have to agree with him that it can bring new perspectives and superior shot choices to your mind. Many is the time I was shuttling thru tape or scrubbing thru captured files looking for one thing, only to suddenly glimpse something that would be PERFECT somewhere else in the show, and that’s a mental thing that happens on the fly, constantly changeing and constantly refreshed by the shuttling/scrubbing action. I call it the “dictionary effect”, I can’t just look up one needed word in the book, I wind up looking at many things that pop up next to and around it as I’m flipping the pages. It swells my vocabulary considerably;-)

Other times, I just digitize a whole tape end to end without sitting there, then I carve out useless stuff on the timeline. This is more wasteful of drive space, so I don’t prefer it, but does enhance the dictionary effect. It depends very much on the type and quantity and quality of the material, as well as the deadline and available drive space, which way I digitize.

As the shooter/director, I also tend to edit in-camera a lot, particularly if I know the edit is going to be tricky. You edit, in a sense, every time you decide to turn the camera on or off, to roll or not. If you have pre-planned well and know your material, you can save a lot of post time just being picky in the shooting.

Not that I don’t sometimes waste a lot of tape shooting, when I think it’s advantageous to just keep rolling. Tape is cheap, it’s only expensive when it’s blank; as in when you don’t have the footage you need at 8:30 PM with an hour left.

At that point nobody gives a damn that you saved 20 bucks on blank stock.;-)

[Mark Suszko]

Wow, that’s a lot of questions. I can only touch on this briefly.

A booth would be great, obviously, but any place that is acoustically “dead” will work though. You can come up with workable “guerilla” recording spaces if you think outside the carpeted box. A large closet, full of clothes on hangers, will absorb echoes and reverb. Likewise I know of guys with really good, quiet cars, that park the car in the garage and record inside it (facing away from the windshield). Just standing a roll of carpeting on end and unrolling it into a corner can create a boothlike space that might work for a quickie session. Use your imagination to find an expedient space. Music stores often have practice rooms for rent that are heavily soundproofed. Just don’t go when the drummers are there;-) They might be able to set you up with a mic and simple recording setup all in one easy package, for not a lot of money. Whatever you choose for a space, you want to listen out for the things we train our ears to ignore in daily living, but that jump out when we make a recording: air handler noise, motor noise from fans, compressors, office machinery, pipes, traffic, that kind of stuff.

Mic wise, you can use a stick mic or a lav. I would look for a more directional mic, so as to exclude more background/ambience from the recording, so I’d be looking for a stick type cardioid or hypercardioid-pattern mic over a lav, unless the room was really quiet, visit the web catalog for TecNec, Markertek, or the like for notes on mics and their properties. Generally with mics you get what you pay for. If you have a pro video gear rental place or music instrument store near you, you might be able to rent a really nice mic for ten-twenty bucks for the day.

Don’t use an on-camera shotgun mic from a consumer type camera, unless you can disconnect it from the camera and use a cable to distance it from the noise of the camera. Use a proper mic stand, Radio Shack sells them for under ten bucks. My guide to proper mouth to mic distance is to open up and spread out the fingers of your hand, as wide as you can, and put the thumb on your lips and the pinkie on the mic, to get the proper distance.

Set the recording device’s levels close to, but under, the peak. What you absolutely want to avoid is clipping with digital recording, too low a level can be normalized or brought up, but that also brings up the background noise level. Higher levels give a better signal to noise ratio, making a cleaner recording, but again, you risk going over into clipping and distortion. Analog recording is much more forgiving of over-peaks, but at some point you still have to digitize it, so look for levels that get a good saturation but that don’t peak too high. I can’t advise in more detail without knowing what you’re recording with. As a beginner, you might try using automatic level control, but beware this can get you into trouble if the person pauses…Shatner-like…. in their reads or wavers a lot in their output, it will tend to pump up the noise during pauses and breaths, leading to distorted or clipped sound at the beginning of new words and etc.

You should definitely be there when the recordings are made, if at all possible, to have some say in the timing, phrasing, and continuity of takes. Are you cutting the narrations to fit a pre-edited video sequence? Then you’ll need a silent stopwatch or other way to time the takes. Slate each take with a page and paragraph number and take number as you record it. Listen with headphones on. Check each good take off on a copy of the script as you go, drawing a line thru each paragraph as you get a “keeper” take for it. That will speed you up in post.

Also record a minute of “room tone”, the sound of the person just sitting there doing nothing, before they begin reading. This may come in very handy later when tweaking the audio.

Regarding machines and media, use whatever you can, FCP is very flexible on it’s own, and the audio tools budled with it add even more control… Be careful to match up all your sample rates unless you want to chase bad timing/ lipsynch issues later (well, it’s voiceover, so that may not be a real problem this time, but it never hurts to get into good habits early).

Good luck!

[Mark Suszko]

If they (the flawed DvD’s) are not good enough to give to her customers, she has no reason to hold onto them, especially if she didn’t pay for them. If she’s holding them and giving them out to clients, even if they are sub-standard, then they are good enough for her to pay for, maybe not full value, but some amount. This is one of the things an arbitrator could handle, perhaps better than a court. Certainly faster. You will want to ask how many of the ‘defective’ units she has given out. Hopefully she was sloppy as well as greedy and gave out a significant number, even after the quality problem came out. Your position is pretty weak, but that issue could be to your advantage when arbitrating or going to small claims.

Though you have no paper contract, there may be the legal concept of “consideration” working in your favor. I was able to use this concept in winning a small claims case against a client that made extra dubs of our product on the sly but didn’t pay us our agreed per-unit cut for the “secret” dubs. Scumbag claimed our contract wasn’t valid, because he hadn’t really agreed to it, but we were able to show thru paperwork, copies of the checks, etc. that he’d paid us at least a token amount, which made the contract binding and official. I got the tip, not from a lawyer, but an episode of the TV version of “The Paper Chase”. – I know!- But damn if it didn’t prove to be exactly true for our case. Apparently it’s one of the basic measuring standards of if a contract exists or not. And they say TV isn’t educational!;-)

So she gave you some kind of partial “consideration” payment (the uncashed check). She accepted the goods but did not pay the full amount. This is the best bargaining chip I can think of. I would use it to get the bad dub run back so you can salvage the costs of the cases, and to negotiate a differential on the costs for the extra re-done runs. I would charge her full price for each DVD dub of your bad batch that she gave away after the initial problem surfaced, and charge zero for the returned copies (which you are going to re-cycle to get a small amount back). I think you are still going to eat most of the costs of making this thing good, no way around that. I’m sorry.

I think arbitration is the way to go if you can’t wait to get this behind you. Going thru the courts, even small claims, will take many months if not years to sort out. Least it seemingly works that way in the US, I don’t know about Oz. Also, I can smell from here that you and this woman simply do not get along, so it’s better you work thru an intermediary anyhow.

I know you’re down about this, this is a story that always cheers me up after I screw-up:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

New exec, working for a huge corporation, gets a brainwave for a new product. He works up the marketing, everything, gets a green light from the bosses, a budget of a million dollars, and launches the great new idea into the marketplace…
where it sinks like a rock.

That Friday, he gets a message to meet with the CEO first thing Monday. He’s a wreck all weekend, brings empty cardboard boxes with him Monday.

Meeting time. The carpet is strangely compelling in the CEO’s office.

The CEO does not yell, does not curse.

The CEO asks questions. Many, many questions, about every aspect of the idea, and it’s execution. The CEO asks the exec where the mistakes were made, what he could have done differently, how this could be played out better the next time. Then finally, abruptly, the meeting is over, the CEO says “that will be all”.

“I, um, excuse me, but…”

“But WHAT?”

“Aren’t you going to fire me now?”

“FIRE you!?!?!? I just spent a million dollars **TRAINING** you!!!!!!! Get out there and earn it BACK!!!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

(so, you know, whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, at least if we can learn something from it.)

[Mark Suszko]

Hindsight as they say is 20/20.

Probably you should have terminated the original deal when she blew the first deadline(s), and asked for a whole new deal. Or walked away from a losing proposition at that point, knowing it would have led to compromises you shouldn’t have to make.

Having said that, ATV, you probably have that same “gung-ho”, go-to-any-lengths-to-make-an-impossible-deadline-attitude that I do. That probably most of us do. You WANT to be the hero. You want to be “Scotty” from Star trek, the technological miracle worker that always comes thru in the clutch, against impossible odds.

That sets you up for clients that want to make you the patsy. Like this one.

As Tim says, the deadlines are a separate issue, and had that been the only issue, you’d have had maybe some recourse. Likewise if the replicators made some error, again, you might have had some room to negotiate.

When you accepted the late, blown deadlines, took the production shortcut, and you let the 3-frame error creep in, uncaught and uncorrected, that’s where you lost the high ground. Clients can be ignorant of technical limitations, or unreasonable, they can be fools, they can be unobservant at times, third parties can screw things up beyond your control, but that doesn’t excuse you, the expert, from negligence in the parts directly under your responsibility. You can’t pin the 3-frame error on anybody else, that much you admitted.

Stuff happens. I can say that I’ve joined you in that club a time or two. Not proud of it, and I like to think I learned from those unhappy times. Before, if I made a technical error, I’d try to adapt around it, and almost every time I did that, it wound up biting me in the butt because one element compounds problems with another, all the way up the chain. Eventually I’d paint myself into a corner, all because I tried to live with a bad element instead of taking a step back and re-doing it right. Nowadays, if I find I made a screw-up, I don’t try to work around it any more, I get the cursing out of the way, call the wife to tell her not to hold dinner, get some fresh jolt cola and start over again right.

At this point, considering the weakness of your position, I would look to find an arbitrator instead of a lawyer. This client looks like she holds all the advantages, so the best I think you can hope for is a negotiated surrender so you can get this behind you and rebuild. Hopefully arbitration will negotiate down the damages to something you can handle.

If there is a moral to the story, I would suggest it’s this: get stuff in writing up front, get paid in installments as you progress, so if you have to terminate before completion, you at least are not out (lots of) money, and if you set a drop-dead date for getting all the elements you need to complete the job, stick to that, be prepared to abort the whole thing rather than push a bad position. As you have unfortunately discovered, clients don’t have sympathy for you if you try “heroic measures” and fail. The trick is not to get yourself into the position where heroic measures are the only option.

Best of luck to you, let us know what happened when it’s all over.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, since I often can be working 12-plus hours at a stretch in the suite, heck yes I’m going to eat candy or cookies and drink stuff in the room. You wanna make an issue, I could take the mandatory (and longer) union breaks….?

Actual meals, I will usually move to another space like my office desk or if I have to stay near the room to monitor a render or batch job or something, I’ll eat in the back of the room using the couch and client table. I just don’t have practical alternatives. I do make sure breath mints are always plentiful, though I find it’s usually the clients that need them more.

I don’t let clients put their foodstuffs on my console or near the switcher or anything. Me, my drinks are kept in sealed bottles, so there is little danger of spills, and I keep them handy but not next to/over anything critical.

One time we’d worked a 20-hour day, had Chinese food brought in for a working dinner break, finished the job in the dawn hours of a Saturday, and I forgot the cleaning crews only worked week days. Monday, the suite had a not-so-fresh feeling, but Febreeze works wonders. That and switching out the upholstered chairs every now and then;-)

[Mark Suszko]

Peter and Doug have nailed it. You can’t just “buy” quality off the shelf, at least, not in the way your boss is thinking. You can give an inexperienced person all the latest gear, and he won’t make half as good a production as the experienced, trained individual with old or cheap stuff. It’s like jet fighter planes: they all pretty much have everything they need for combat, and generally match each other in performance, but successful missions depend on the quality of the pilot.

I think before you move up to fancier software, you need to concentrate on better lighting and sound, on your own skills and understanding, and on good scripts. Spend some of the money to send yourself to training, some of the Sony and Rockport seminars would probably be good for you, they are fast, full-immersion programs. Or yes, as Peter suggested, hire a pro with the understanding he’s going to let you shadow him and he’s going to explain how and why he does what he does. That has a double benefit, because the production quality will remain high while you’re learning at the same time. Usually product done by auto-didacts looks pretty uneven for the first year or so.

Also, don’t assume buying cameras is a good deal, you have to run the numbers to see if the volume of productions you do is worth the amortization of a camera, or if renting just as needed is a better deal. You can always rent better cameras than you can afford to buy, after all.

[Mark Suszko]

A rookie mistake shooting dark skinned people is to throw more light on them. This just makes things worse. What works better is to use more side light to get specular reflection/highlight to define the contours. A gold or bronze reflector board really brings out the warmth and beauty of the skin tone in these situations as well. Manual iris, definitely. Where it’s a choice between blowing out the background or etc and losing the face, keep the face, work closer-in, tighter. Use diffused light where you can.

[Mark Suszko]

Like being just a ‘little bit’ pregnant, eh?

[Mark Suszko]

The love of a good woman, playing in the yard with the kids, a long soak in a warm tub with some good tunes. A long bike ride at dusk. Sunset on the local beach. Cherry Garcia.;-)

When I’m really low, I put on the headphones and wail away on my old Yamaha DX7 with the faders all the way up. I’m not very good, but good enough to please myself. An hour or so of noodling blues to pop is quite cathartic. They say “a change is as good as a rest”, so go do something, ANYTHING, that’s not like what you’re doing at work. For me one of those things is flying my RC model airplanes, or sailing my RC sailboat in the local pond. Or go grab a sketch pad and pencil sit outside and draw *something* . Or make a meal you’ve never cooked before, a dessert you’ve never tried. The point is to flex creative muscles that are not usually getting flexed.

[Mark Suszko]

I’d tell you, but I’d have to charge you;-) Actually, it was something about pioneers building the roads others walk on. It was the closest thing I could find at that hour, and I didn’t think much of it, but everybody who read it read something personal of their own into it, and it just clicked, who knows why.

Here’s a fun list of quotes that might work better
https://www.benadams.com/humor/quotes.asp