[Mark Suszko]

Another alternative approach would be to put the man in context with his times, so in this case, that could imply mixing in headlines and maybe library stock shots from key years in his life. This however opens up copyright issues, something to be careful about. Way around this might include researching modern history and almanacs and dropping in trivia references comparing things when he was born, when he started school, when he began his practice, and now.

[Mark Suszko]

Get the raw material from RoseBrand in NYC, catalog online, they have terrific prices and specialize in these applications.

[Mark Suszko]

Don’t sweat it. First shoot the b-roll following the guy around his day, as much as you can, because that’s got to be the hardest footage to get. Interviews can be gotten later, anywhere, have the daughter help set those up for you, it will be easier. Explaing that she knows the people and that will tend to put them at ease about participating.

There are numerous ways to combine the interviews and b-roll and stills. Might be fun to create a graphic theme using medical charts, x-rays, and folders as titling devices.

One of the variations on these that have often been very popular, especially for co-worker good-bye parties, is the gag slideshow. This is a completely normal home movie type slide show , the gimmick is the narrations and interviews are completely wrong from what’s expected. When the subject is uncooperative in supplying photos or there’s no time, stock shots or GIS searches can turn up ridiculous images to go with a “straight” naration.
These usually run with the “life story of” theme, or for hipper crowds, a parody of “Behind The Music” or “E” true hollywood Story”.

None of these sound right for the kindly old doctor, though. That one should probably be played straight. It’s no big deal to float some interviewer bits in a window over b-roll of the doc on rounds. Add some needle-drop music and hand out the kleenex.

I did a tribute video for a guy who passed away after about 20 years on the job. It was a nice creative change of pace, I was able to do a pretty good job even though I never knew him. It was interviews mixed between short 1 and 2-minute music stills montages.

The thing the clients liked a LOT was, I added a slow fade to black with a quote. The guy was a highway enginer, so I did a google search for quotes about engineers and engineering. Came up with a Chinese proverb that was kind of open-ended: you could read almost anything into it, but it was the best quote I could find about building roads. Man, the positive reactions that ending got, it was all out of proportion, they said I’d nailed who he was!

Maybe when you interview the friends and family, you could look for quotes of the doc, some aphorism or code he’s always espoused.

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[Mark Suszko]

I did in this same thread in the FCP forum. Communications Specialties Scan-Do Pro or Pro- D (digital). Ours was six grand a few years back. Worth every penny though. Don’t panic over that figure, depending on just how special your needs are, you can get away with buying o ne for under a hundred (Averkey imicro), or you can rent better ones than you can afford to buy.

There are screen capture utilities, I know, like camtasia and that one that’s popular for macs right now… forgot the name for aminute, is it Snapz Pro?… but these are always going to lose you some resolution going to .AVI, typically a scan converter worth, say $300 or more is going to give a better output than the screen grab utility, IMO. Your mileage varies depending on the signal chain from the scan converter on into the rest of your system.

[Mark Suszko]

I do this stuff on a weekly basis. If you have keynote, you can cut-copy-paste individual text and images from the PPT to keynote (or into any other graphics app) and go to town, assuming you have both apps.

As has been said, you can export PPT to a stack of bitmaps or jpegs, then import into FCP and use your FCP effects to re-do the original transitions, only much better of course.

Many times we just play the powerpoint out of a laptop using it’s own video out (if it has one) into a frame synchronizer then to tape or whatever…

or we most commonly hook this to a Communications Specialties Scan-Do Pro, and absolutely AWESOME scan converter with boucoup features. Can’t recommend it highly enough, and great service too. It was six grand, new, blew away the Extrons and Sony’s in a side by side contest we held… That’s a lot of money… You might be able to rent one though.

Don’t panic at the price, while it’s true you generally get the quality you pay for with scan converters, considering your source material is powerpoint, you’re not necessarily going to need a $6k converter to handle it unless it has reeellly tiny lines of tyope and bad graphs and spreadsheets in it. Oh wait, isn’t that like the typical Powerpoint we get?;-).

At that $6k price, you get things like more sohisticated anti-flicker settings, scalability in separate dimensions and multiple format outputs, plus memory settings for multiple pre-sets, so you can skp around to super-tight closeups of various segments, then back out to full-screen, like switching cameras….. that’s why it’s six large. I have one from Averkey that’s under $100, works with either mac or PC. Very simple, decent output. Might be all you need.

In a real pinch, you could always shoot it right off the laptop’s LCD screen with a camera, not elegant, but functional.

[Mark Suszko]

It depends on what they want this for: just to give an overall sense of what’s happening there for stage managing purposes, or do they want to get a true audience experience back in the “green room”? For the latter, nothing will do except a coax feed from the live switcher output.

Good coax, the kind that minimizes losses over long distances, is expensive. Well, it is to ME. There are little breakout boxes available that let you run video over a spool of twisted-pair telephone wire. This can be cheaper than good coax over the same distance, and the wire is often easier to run. For a non-critical use like this, it’s what I’d suggest if a wireless solution is not possible.

You can find wireless video transmitters for rent at the larger broadcast rental outfits, or you can go with amateur stuff like Supercircuits sells. This is a handy system if you want to run multiple monitors, just give each one a good directional antenna.

If you wanted to be super hi-tech, you could feed a stream via wi-fi from a laptop near the cameras to a laptop backstage, then mirror the laptop’s output via it’s video-out to a larger TV monitor. This would only be *near* real-time, it would be out of synch with the stage sound, and the frame rate would likely be stuttery.

Another way to go would be a dedicated camcorder or cheap security type camera on a wide shot, locked down, mounted up in the lighting grid, with a simple composite coax running to backstage. Again, Supercircuits or something of that ilk would be a cost-effective source, if all you’re wanting is a general sense of the stage action.

[Mark Suszko]

I was told this anecdote recently. Travelers (the people that use the red umbrella logo) and Citibank merged. They called in a designer to create a new logo for the merged identities. They met in the offices and talked for a long time, the designer listened to everything, cogitated for two minutes, and created, freehand, on the spot,the red hemispheric slash that is their new logo. Then the designer gives them the bill, and the client is outraged:

“This is a ridiculous amount of money to charge, it took you like two minutes to come up with that logo”.

“No, it took two minutes plus SIXTEEN YEARS”.

I don’t care if the story is accurate, it is, in the most important sense, true. One must figure in all the true costs of a job before naming a rate. I knew a guy who said he wouldn’t turn his computer ON for less than a grand; he wasn’t being an egomaniac, he was being realistic about all his sunken costs and expenses, and the other profit-making opportunities you have to turn down while doing a job, when he figured a rate. It WOULD have profited him more to go network on the phone or go out and meet people to drum up business than work for too low a rate on a lowball job.

[Mark Suszko]

What do you mean by 3-d graphics, do you mean 2-d character generation with an ‘extruded” look to enhance the illusion of depth, or what?

[Mark Suszko]

Our FCP system shipped with a bundle that included a light version of Bias Peak. Check your utility folders to see if you have it. This is a very nice stand-alone audio editor, you can compose the shows in there, and import the music you build from Soundtrack.

[Mark Suszko]

There’s like a million stock footage companies that do this now. Is there something unique about what you’re trying to do?