[Mark Suszko]

One of my all-time favorite books, which I guess might now be in pre-production as a movie, is Haldeman’s “The Forever War”, a sci-fi story of one soldier fighting an interstellar war for Earth, who, thanks to relativity and time-dilation in interstellar travel, gets to re-visit Earth every hundred years or so, though for him it’s just 2 or 3 years. He remains mostly the same, but he becomes more and more alienated from the world of his birth as time progresses normally back home.

During one of the earlier visits, the soldier, Major Mandala, is interviewed on a chat show, and he makes the mistake of saying what he actually thinks in response to the questions from the jingoistic host of the program. They wanted something to promote the war, not critique it, so they ask the major to sit and answer a few more random questions for about ten minutes. Mandala goes to his hotel room and later that night watches himself on the show he just attended. The technology employed is exactly like what we see in Adobe Voco and the new morph cut. Mandala’s every word has been changed into a rousing, pro-war, pro-government motivational speaking miracle. And it’s seamless, to the point Mandala wonders if he actually said anything.

This is really off-topic for the COW, but I’ll bite. As to Universal Income, it’s just another word for welfare or disability assistance. There will always be people in this world who can’t cut it in the 9-to-5, for various reasons, either temporarily or for what’s left of their life. They are never going to be competition for Zelin or Garchow. Or anybody. To leave them alone, scrabbling for survival is cruel. And counter-productive to an enlightened society and order, because it invites crime. It shouldn’t be left just to charities to help these folks out. We can and should have a system that can help anybody, at whatever level. If we don’t create it ourselves, market and social forces will evolve something similar, but it will be longer and more painful and less efficient in coming. Swinging back to on-topic: if someone on the lowest level of public assistance, working on second-hand gear, is talented enough to challenge one of you guys at your business, and actually take it away from you, it means what you do isn’t all that special. But let’s be clear: the public isn’t going to allow any special universal wage level to be high enough to let somebody undercut your business. A UW wage will probably afford you bare survival minimums: a single-room apartment, a bare minimum of food, clean water, medicine, some clothes, a bus card, and probably free web access for education, communication, and entertainment. Nothing much else. That’s not the profile of someone who is going to run any of us out of business.

[Mark Suszko]

Alix, the delay in such a system seems short on paper, but acoustically, it’s going to be horrible for the live audience, and also give you fits in the video switching and editing due to lip-synch delay, not to mention feedback issues.

Wireless mics are cheap at pawn shops and on Ebay.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m strongly in favor of renting and passing the costs on to the client for this stuff. Do you think most Hollywood DP’s own all the cameras they use on movies? They might own their own PRIMES, but the cameras are generally rented or leased. Renting lets you customize the gear to the task, instead of having to accommodate your ideas to what you have on hand.
It’s not right for everyone, or in all cases, to be sure, and it can be handy to own *some* camera gear for rapid-response, spur-of-the-moment things, or in a case where the duration of usage makes owning cheaper than renting. If you’re positive you’re gonna use it at least ten times in one year, own it. If you don’t know the next time you’re gonna need it, rent. And pass the cost along, plus a small mark-up, which you put in the future equipment ownership fund.

if you’re not billing enough to cover rentals plus a profit, plus a margin put away for savings and growth, you’re doing it wrong and will not last in the long run.

If you can’t get clients to hire you on that rate, you either have the wrong clients, or you need better marketing/ salemanship, or the jobs you’re looking at are not the kind that are sustainable for you, aim higher. This is all easier to type than to implement, I know. But if you can’t stick by a rate that makes you a profit, you’re not in business, you’re in a hobby.

[Mark Suszko]

Even in rare cases where you retain the rights to what you shot as work for hire, it does not necessarily follow that you can yourself sell or profit by that raw footage without the original commissioning party’s agreement, so it’s a stand-off in many cases, but you people up there keep your milk in plastic bags instead of cartons, so there’s no telling how different your copyrights are in comparison to the US. You really need to ask a lawyer conversant in Canadian copyright law.

It’s also super-bad form to go around the guy you sub-contracted for, to try and work directly with the client. Careers are killed over this type of thing. Doesn’t matter if the guy you’re working for directly is a slow-paying knob.

[Mark Suszko]

You already have the best advice, twice.

The time suck that would be involved, even if you had a customized station set up where all you do is drive the car onto some markings and the rest is mostly automated… I have a hard time seeing a profit after the expenses and time. The local “shopper” car magazines typically offer a profile shot and maybe one interior shot, for free. At the rate dealerships move cars on and off the lot, can you even keep pace shooting, processing/editing, and outputting 25 videos a day? This sounds more like a Quicktime VR photo gig to me than a classic “video”.

What I *could* imagine is, a video where you ride along with one of the salesmen/women in a “pick of the week” car, shooting with go-pros inside and a second camera car shooting outside, and you cut together 90 seconds of the salesperson driving the car and talking about it’s best points. Put that on the car dealership’s facebook, once a week. It could be a female salesperson demonstrating a good “college student car”, talking about it’s safety, good mileage, and reliability. Another could demo an SUV and drive it over to a park, or the marina, talking about the engine power, maximum towing weight, off-road handling, etc. A commuter car handling downtown parking, a family van driving to a garage sale or bike shop, etc. You’d use the best local locations to get a message across about how the car best fits a target lifestyle. No script, just a few rehearsed bullet points ad-libbed as the driver makes conversation with the cameras. Your outside camera car takes turns running in front of, behind, and on either side of the operating demo car, also with go-pros, or whatever, along with a bumper or wheel-well-mounted shot, maybe, for the sportier cars. And you shoot it in 30-40 minutes, from prepping the car interior cameras to parking it back at the dealership, post it by the next morning. Think of Seinfeld’s “Driving in Cars With Coffee” as the model. Whether it sells the particular car or not, it becomes a way for the salespeople to meet and greet their target market, show the variety of product they sell, and create a Brand.

[Mark Suszko]

Location work, where you can’t count on a clear floor.

Assume the floors are not free enough for floor track and full size suitcase dollies. The kind of shot I’m imagining is someone doing dishes in the kitchen sink, where the kitchen is an L-shaped island, and the shot comes around from profile to behind them as they turn around. I’m assuming tripods and /or light stands to hold up some tubing or extruded metal, maybe a flexible blade of metal which I can bow with wire and turnbuckles to achieve various curvatures… camera car rides the blade with wheels on three sides, one set motor-driven.

Was playing around with the idea of flexible G-scale model railroad track section and a speed-controlled battery-powered car using rubber friction wheels on the rails.

The other shot I’m thinking of is a person writing or handling papers at a desk and we orbit a half-circle around the person and desk at a distance, then I fake the zooms and framing in post. i want it wide enough for a two-shot, one person standing over the seated person.

[Mark Suszko]

I overstated… half of that would be fine. Guess a 10-foot radius. I’m imagining one or two people together, or a person and a piece of furniture like a countertop, desk, or chair.

[Mark Suszko]

Todd, if you were in my shoes (off-brand sneakers with well-worn soles), and you wanted to create an inexpensive but reliable circular slider track for a go-pro or consumer-sized camcorder, what kind of components and makers would you suggest?

Ideally, this would be a half-circle with a 20-foot radius, mounted to spare camera tripods or heavy duty light stands, and a platform for the camera with an adjustable, manual speed control. Camera would weigh less than a pound.
Sliders are not something I’ve had experience with, but we have a hankering to up our game in the production values area this year. Only, there’s no budget for rentals nor a straight-up purchase, so I’m looking at what I can cobble together in my Tony Stark Cave at home, out-of-pocket. I’ve got RC gear and I know how to wire and re-wire servos to make them continuous. But the other hardware is alien to me.

Not looking to control the camera, just leaving it fixed on the center of the circle, and controlling the speed of the horizontal move.

[Mark Suszko]

Dragon has always been pretty good, IF you take the step of “re-speaking” the audio into it with just one voice. I’d probably go ahead and buy it, along with a headset mic for the re-speaking part. But you can also use Youtube to do this job for free. Set up an account and make it “unlisted”. Upload your video or in your case, audio with bars, and the Youtube A.I. will do a fair job on it if the sound was clear and the speech was distinct. I’d grade it at 80 to 90 percent, using good raw material. Then you can enter an “edit mode” on the closed captions to read through and correct the mistakes. You can then download a text file or one of several formats for making captions, then delete the source video on the Youtube site. It’s a kludge, but it’s free.

[Mark Suszko]

Try rendering to the hard drive first, then burning a disk image.