[Mark Suszko]

If that doesn’t fix it, you may have some barrel distortion in the lens on wide shots. It can look like you have keystoning happening.

[Mark Suszko]

It may work if instead of keying, you use a different composite blending mode. When you light something like a wine or beer bottle, it’s a common trick to paste white paper across the back to bounce the light back forward from inside the bottle – I have my lava lamp treated this way and it makes the contents jump out well. With black, I’m imagining you’re doing a luminance key and not chroma.

Think about two different chroma keys: one on the bottle and one for the background, in different colors.

[Mark Suszko]

I have to disagree about dissolves – they remain an essential part of visual “grammar”.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve talked about the difference between additive and subtractive techniques before. It even influences the semantic language editors use.

In Europe, specifically Britain, directors operating a switcher are or were called ” Vision Mixers” and the editors are or were referred to as “joiners”. Their process was obviously in the semantic sense more additive, and for a longer time than ours, partially because I think they tended to shoot a lot more wild sound, with unsynched sound there, depending more on Foley and Looping in post production.

Our American editors were called “cutters” from almost the beginning, and their task was usually described as “cutting away the useless bits and shortening clips that were too long”.

There is absolutely room for both techniques in any project, though it can be argued, the nature of the program may fvor one style rove another. In News production, for example, the deadline is everything, and the process concentrates on reducing away all non-essentials to get to the bare minimum that tells the story in the limited time slot, and to get that done before air time. You typically would lay down a core narrative from the reporter, a sound bite, more narrative, second bite, and a closing shot for voice-over. Those were your “bricks”. next, you’d go back thru your raw material and find the best visuals to lay over the voice track and transition to the “actuality”, (the interview quote). From there on, it would be all subtractive, shaving frames here and there and bumping things forwards and back until it was time to color correct and sweeten sound and ship it.

Documentaries often take the opposite tack and are more additive, though the director and editor generally have a skeleton of the story in their minds already. The “purest” sort of doc, IMO, comes from an organic process of letting the material suggest it’s own threads. The story is “found” in the edit, not pre-determined. Working that way these days is a luxury.

Theatrical and narrative television and film, anything driven by a script, is going to at least start out subtractive, in that you’re collecting the best takes of everything shot for the script. They’re bricks, labeled in the order they were meant to fit. It only becomes Additive when you run into trouble and have to fix something, or to enhance the flow of what was dictated by the shooting script.

All of these statements are relative, not absolute. You are “editing” the moment you pick up the camera and decide to turn it on or off. You are editing when you decide to show up to the scene or not. You edit when you decide what’s getting into your hard drive and what sits on the desk. In FCPX you are really editing as soon as you’re importing shots, by the way you tag them and apply metadata. In a sense, several rough cuts gave happened before you ever pay the first master shot down on the timeline. If it wasn’t shot, it never happened: that’s a conscious choice made about what to show and not to show – that’s an edit.

[Mark Suszko]

New England? Doesn’t every home there by law have an old barn or shed to hold the Hammond B-3 plus an antique car or boat? 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Your post reminds me that i just recently saw The Zombies on tour, with Rod Argent still on the keyboards, and that guy must be in his mid-70’s but you’d never know it, the way he was beating the living stuffing out of those keyboards. I hope I’m a FRACTION that good in another 20 years of noodling around.

Also, he taught the audience that they’ve been singing his most famous song wrong all these years: it’s “Hold your head Up, WO-man, Hold your head up, WOMAN…..”

The rest of the band still sounds amazing after all these years. What little they might have lost in volume and power, they make up for in control and character and expression. It gives me hope that i can still find ways to be relevant and interesting in another 2 decades. And I’m busy learning to play: “I Love You” by the Zombies on my acoustic-electric uke, along with a Dunlop Cry-Baby pedal I’m just beginning to learn to use.

Is this still a metaphor for video editors? Might be. Argent was playing an old Hammond B3 right next to the latest model synthesizers.

[Mark Suszko]

Many less expensive prosumer HD camcorders have a gimmick still effect like this built-in, you could have the camera op trip it, then you just need adaptors to get the HDMI or other connector to match your system.

[Mark Suszko]

Blackmagic’s pocket size form factor cameras run right at $999 each at Beards N Hats. That’s the cheapest *modern* camera I could find on a quick search. You could find a lot of standard def used camcorders, some betacams, P2 panny’s and the like and the like, that would accept those controls.

Another way to go would be adding rods and mechanical-driven geared lenses with twist-whips from Zacuto.

My suggestion would be not to have zoom controls on the student cameras used in production, rather, tech them to dolly in and dolly-out with the lens set and left at a particular opening. This is more like “real” film production technique, and the difference in “look” between a dolly-in and a zoom-in is important to teach. But if they are just doing a daily school newscast, never mind what I’m saying about film style.

There’s a COW member who adapts used B-mount lenses from ENG cameras to work with DSLR backs, and the power zooms and iris for those can be tapped to run with aftermarket LANC controllers.

[Mark Suszko]

In the sample you gave, it would be better to fly text above the heads or along the very bottom. Across the face looks bad.
You could go unconventional, if the material allows, and stack the type up the sides of the frame, vertically

[Mark Suszko]

Why can’t you put it at the bottom of your screen? And can you illustrate the problem with a still or drawing?

One technique that can be used for thirds is to freeze-frame the video, pull it back on the z-axis and push it flush left or right, over a gradient background, and now you have PIP box with the speaker plus next to it, a space to put in text or whatever else you need, then reverse the move, cut straight back to the speech at the place you froze, or dissolve/wipe to it.