[Mark Suszko]

“… and that’s the way it is.”

[Mark Suszko]

To be a little bit fair, if the clients had sufficient imagination, they wouldn’t need us in the first place. ?

I’m reminded of a a story I’ve told before: of an ad agency in Chicago that created an “animatic” storyboard to show the client ( I believe it was a grocery or food company) what the proposed spot could look like in advance. Spot was your tyical mom talking to fellow moms about how to feed her growing kids right and save money and time, blah blah blah… This was black and white ink pen drawn line art, of a mom and her kids, interspersed with product shots, using actual voice-overs for all the parts, with music and sound effects, and only crudely given basic motion by the use of camera moves into and across the art cards. Simple stuff. Basically an illustrated radio commercial.

Somehow, it captured the client’s fancy, and they considered the animatic demo to be the finished spot, and it ran for several weeks in the local market. The ad agency guys were horrified and made the butt of jokes by their peers, but the checks cashed just the same.

[Mark Suszko]

Are you saving it to the hard drive, then burning it using Compressor, or burning straight to BD-ROM? I have a devil of a time making my BD-Rom dubs, seems like mine poop out at around the 60 percent mark as well. I have to take steps to make sure there is enough free space in the imac and the RAID to contain the image, pre-burn, and that the imac doesn’t change the targeted burner or drive. Even when it works, it can take all day to make two dubs this way.

[Mark Suszko]

These interface experiments remind me of when I brought in my Thrustmaster A-10 Warthog flight sim HOTAS throttle and stick and ran the wiring alongside the editing controller to see what my brother editors would say. They were disappointed that it wasn’t real.

The gaming keyboard with hotkeys looks like an interesting add-on… and you can do Starcraft with it on your break time:-)

One of the things I liked about the magic mouse was that it enabled me to swish the timeline left and right with my thumb, even as I used the rest of the mouse to click and drag/ enable edits. For me, touch interfaces are good for broad tasks like timeline manipulation, as well as for fine control of sliders/knobs. While the Microsoft Surface computer stunned for a lot of reasons, the multi-knob that was offered as an accessory is what caught the most of my attention.

[Mark Suszko]

If you put it in a you tube channel and set the permissions to “Unlisted”, only people you give the URL to can find it, and Youtube doesn’t seem to bother about the music copyrights until you make it “Public”.

You could put the thing on a flash drive for her, as an MPEG4 file, and she can share that directly with her peers as she chooses.

[Mark Suszko]

How were the cards formatted in the first place? It almost sounds like you’re running up against a partition.

[Mark Suszko]

First thing to try is to feed the monitor a “known good” set of color bars and turn on the monitor’s “monochrome” or “blue” switch. Fiddle with contrast, brightness and the other controls until you get the proper PLUGE response on the screen.

https://www.productionapprentice.com/tutorials/general/using-color-bars-to-set-up-your-equipment/

[Mark Suszko]

Real Steadicam operators come with the rig, and are charging lower prices these days in light of all the competition, and I think this is what you want if the camera indeed is that large and heavy. Or get a DJI Osmo and attach it and all your streaming gear to a Manfrotto FigRig. or, backpack all the gear and just run a cable to the Osmo.

[Mark Suszko]

I was out most of the evening, so I missed the live feed… any links to a “best of”?

[Mark Suszko]

You have nothing yet to cancel. You should consider billing for the meeting times after a certain point though.

But when a shoot is firmly booked, my policy would be a full refund only if notified more than 24 hours in advance of the shoot day. If less than 24 hours, only the portion I didn’t commit to rentals or hiring people would be returned tot he client, because a lot of people committed expensive time to be on location at the set time, and probably turned down other money-making opportunities to do so. And if I didn’t pay those people off for their time and for gear rentals, my reputation int he local area would be ruined.