[Mark Suszko]

Seven, I no longer miss, but if I could get back DVD Studio Pro from the FCP7 suite I’d be in hog heaven.

[Mark Suszko]

Sounds like you want to make the keys look like they are playing by themselves, like in “The Ghost & Mister Chicken” starring Don Knotts (A halloween favorite)?

I have an idea or two to make the hands disappear. Not sure how well they will work.

The first one is to use a chromakey effect on the hands, selecting their flesh tone as the matte target. You may need to adjust the shading sliders for contrast, brightness, color intensity, etc., and the result is going to look ugly but that’s okay, we just want the hands to key out. Next step is to take that generated matte and use it as a “holdout matte” in a new stack of video tracks. In a sandwich of tracks, the hold-out matte hides the hands and makes a “hole” thru to the next layer. if that next layer is an otherwise identical layer of the piano keys, the hands go invisible… or, more accurately, they go translucent.

But i see a problem if you are trying for the ghostly player piano keys thing, in that the replacement fill-in layer generated by the hold-out matte doesn’t have *depressed* piano keys, so it won’t match perfectly. I think my method would kinda work for you if you’re going for the almost-invisible “Predator” movie invisibility look… but I don’t think it will work 100 percent.

The other idea would have been to use AfterEffects’ new Sensei AI-driven background replacement tool to draw a border around the hands and let the machine replace it with it’s best guess of the keys underneath the hands, based on the surrounding nearby pixels. And maybe this will work on something as uniform as the keyboard… While this works great for fractal type textures like bushes, grass, trees, clouds, etc., I have not had the best luck with man-made objects and backgrounds trying this new tool. It takes a bloody long time to grind thru the computations, so test it on a a very few seconds of footage first, but, has the advantage of not making you sit and keyframe anything, though.

But we may be thinking about this all the wrong way, anyhow. If you want the keys to depress themselves without any fingers, I think you need to keyframe them in stop-motion fashion. Now THAT’s a tedious job! How I might approach that from a practical photography perspective is to first shoot a locked-off “plate” shot of the entire keyboard. Next, I’d use a small, inconspicuous wedge to hold individual keys down, and take screen grabs of all 88 keys, one at a time, this way. The next part would involve layering-in the specific down-keys from moment to moment, keyframed to the waveforms of the music. That’s a kind of “brute force” method, and painstaking. A better way would be to use a 3-D CGI keyboard, inset into the live plate shot to replace the real keyboard of the piano. There are MIDI scripts and clever plug-ins, I’m sure, to drive the piano keys in perfect synch to the score you want to play. I know they must exist because I’ve seen cool CGI animation videos where things like rolling marbles hit piano keys and drum heads in perfect timing. Where you go to get that advanced animation programming, I do NOT know – it’s pretty sophisticated and bespoke stuff.

[Mark Suszko]

They are more similar than different, IMO. The feature script and the corporate script can both face problems with changes thrown in by various stakeholders. The real difference is in the scale of things. See the famous Kevin Smith youtube video , describing his collaboration attempts with Jon Peters on a Superman movie, where Peters wants to add a giant spider to the script and also doesn’t actually know anything about the comic book character of Superman.

The tool I come back to again and again on corporate and government video screenwriting projects is the Creative Treatment and its associated strategy documents. The treatment is not the script, but it is a *blueprint* of the script, laying out all the beats and why they are what they are. When someone in upper management suddenly wants to throw in new material, you can whip these out and show how everything was already signed-off before the final draft was done and production began, what the strategy was, what the target audience is, how the script as described in the treatment meets all the specific goals of the project. Then you don’t have to tell the Suit: “Your idea is stupid and will damage the viability of the product”. Instead, you can point out how this was all pre-approved and signed-off and that while the gal or guy’s idea might be cool, to try and insert it at this stage of the game can’t work. You don’t ever tell him or her that; you show them the work and let them come to the conclusion and say it, thus saving face, and then you agree with them on how cool it might have been, and that it might be revisited in a follow-up project. You tell them you will want their input in the pre-production phase of the next project, and you get back to work.

The really important thing here is to get the Creative treatment approved and signed-off by TGWWTC. That’s “The Guy What Writes The Checks”. This may not be the point person you deal with directly. That’s very common problem; you customize the project to fit the whims of this point person, only to find out they are not the person with the final word; that is TGWWTC, who works in a higher office or some other division. In a movie studio that is the head of the studio. Get that person’s signature on your treatment and scripts, and it is your diplomatic immunity.

[Mark Suszko]

The app I was most impressed by used to be called studio 8. It’s a custom GUI on top of old reliable FileMaker pro. Used by Auntie beeb and Oprah. Another one I looked at was Xytech. That was full featured but expensive, like, Lamborghini show room expensive. Their email marketing was relentless.

[Mark Suszko]

Sounds like a squelch? Are these mics gated at all? Do they have some kind of auto-level-control applied to them? Also, because I’m just grasping at straws, is the power supply to the receivers clean and isolated, or are these power spikes getting thru? How irregular are they?

[Mark Suszko]

Tangerine already showed us the way.

I might be an oddball about cameras, because I really don’t fetishize them. To me, they are just a tool for story-telling, and I’ll use whatever tool I think helps me tell my story, within my means. I’m happy to rent instead of own, long as someone else is paying for that rental (because this is still also a business). iPhones as acquisition devices have to be taken seriously now, at least for a performance niche, and that niche opens up a little more with every iteration of these things. What’s not growing nearly as fast are the skill sets to take advantage of the tool and everything it can do. There’s a funny t-shirt I saw that said: “everybody’s a photographer – until (picture of the DSLR options knob turned to the ‘M’ manual settings mode)”.

We’re at that place now with people using phone cams; they’re depending on automatic settings and not yet confident to open things up and play with manual setting to get better aesthetics.

I think one place the phone as camera is really going to take off is oral history/documentary, done on a non-theatrical scale, but with a lot of the theatrical-scale aesthetics. Youtubers as well, obviously. Battery life and storage are always going to be a problem in this form-factor, so I see a growing market of strap-on memory and battery packs for these. Might as well make it an audio interface dock while you’re at it, so you can integrate mics. Add handles for smoother hand-held. A bigger monitor… And now, we’re looking at something similar to the early DSLR science-fair project-like rigs for shooting video off what was supposed to just be a stills camera.

It wasn’t all that long ago I made a parody photo of an elaborate Zacuto rig of rods, handles, arms lenses, focus whips, monitors, etc., built up to support one of those original palm-sized soccer-mom digital movie cameras that were all the rage for about 2 years. I now have to update that parody image to replace it with a smartphone.

And yet…

This is the likely camera to capture history in the making, just because it will be so ubiquitous. It isn’t yet the most serious challenger to the Red or whatever, but there’s a saying: “quantity has a quality all it’s own”. Getting the camera into more and different hands, and away from a techno-priesthood, can only be good for our culture, because it will expand the various possible points of view and give voice and image to folks heretofore unheard and unseen.

I’m one of the older guys in this forum, and I can recall the same arguments happening over and over, like the Architect Scene in “The Matrix” “…and we’ve become exceedingly good at it”. Umatic replaced 18mm. Betacam replaced Umatic and 35mm. DV came in and blew up the market forever, a sea change. Then HD, then 2k and 4k and SpecialK and how many people shoot on chemistry-soaked acetate any more?… and every time, pundits wagged their heads and wondered if the added democratization of image acquisition tools would be “good” for the industry or not, “good” for story-telling or not.

A lot more crap will be shot. But also, in the middle of that, some real art. More than before. And *different* than before. Embrace this. Accept this. Flow with it and ride it. Because it won’t stop for any of us.

[Mark Suszko]

Here’s my Bruce Impression; something I threw together quickly yesterday on vacation…https://youtu.be/qEmt8LoqMiU

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[Mark Suszko]

Well it might be a crazy idea, but there are several fonts/fontfx built into Motion that create a countdown-type effect by looping the characters. If you substituted an abbreviated font of just the emoticons or dingbats as the source, the emitter would spit out a changing stream of those. How to implement this idea, I have not yet thought thru, sorry.

But you could make very short quicktime movie of a frame or two of all the icons, loop that, and stick it into the emitter’s drop zone?

[Mark Suszko]

Your wish list is a little on the ambitious side, I’m afraid, at least at that price.

Only way to get to something like that at your price is to build it yourself, extracting parts from existing units like pen cams, and have a craftsperson install them into custom frames that are not a dead give-away. And pen cam video quality is, um, modest, let’s say. You have battery concerns, storage media or transmitter concerns. Even with a Micro SD memory card, and no transmitter, the eyeglass earpieces and nose bridge will need to be pretty large, or have the earpieces obscured by lots of hair near the temples. Frankly, for covert work, a 2-part “wire” system, with the lens/sensor hidden in a button, cabled to the rest of the unit under a shirt or something, is a more practical method than glasses.

[Mark Suszko]

If you have not heard from a client in a long time, just go ahead and erase all your project files and media for their old work; I ***guarantee*** you, hours or days later, they will call you wanting the stuff you’ve just erased. It has never failed in my experience.

Now, do they still own that stuff? Yes and no. A court case I love to reference for this is Walmart V. Flagler, or Flagler V. Walmart, (everybody was suing everybody in this story). The TL/DR: Flagler was an outside contractor shooting all of Walmart’s internal media stuff for them, for years, because Walmart was too cheap to own in-house production. The Walmart people treated Flagler like in-house staff (they were Flagler’s only client, after all) and let their guard down around the cameras. One day Walmart gets a notion to cut costs and fires Flagler to save a buck. Also to save a buck, Wally didn’t make a serious offer to buy up the raw footage, or, to be clever, buy it *before* ending the relationship. They told Flagler to erase all the videos. Flagler kept the media. Walmart sued Flagler, asserting it paid Flagler as “Work For Hire” (This is a VERY important legal term for you freelancers) and thus owned everything. A judge said no: Walmart owned the *finished videos*, as the actual work product but because the contract with Flagler left the raw media issue unresolved on paper, Flagler owned the raw footage.

It was a Pyrrhic Victory For Flagler, in that images in the footage were copyrighted by Walmart, they couldn’t sell anything in that collection without Walmart’s Permission, and Wally wasn’t going to ever give permission, but Flagler could keep the raw tapes. Flagler found a loophole in that, while it couldn’t SELL the videos it kept, it could charge a fee for interested people to come ACCESS and view it. Thus, caravans of lawyers suing Walmart for this and that came and paid Flagler to mine his library for incriminating evidence in I don’t know how many lawsuits. And they got it.

I will say this: That clever Walmart executive that fired Flagler without first buying and destroying the footage, when it was cheap, cost Walmart many times more than what was “saved” by shafting and bullying the contractor in the first place. Millions. Flagler I think is out of business permanently; burned with every possible future client. Nobody “wins” this kind of fight. And that’s why it’s a good lesson that, no matter how trivial the job seems, you state up front with any client, what they will own, and what they will not own, *before* the project begins. Bringing it up after the project is underway causes nothing but drama and lost business and bad press. You can fix this with a simple deal memo in plain english, signed at the start of the job, when the initial money changes hands. It need not be in legalese, but spell out who owns what.