[Mark Suszko]

I’ve learned some cool things in this thread, but I have to believe there’s a better way to convert the Gotomeeting format than a brute-force real-time screen re-record. That’s effective, but not elegant, and if the webinars were long, this is also a time suck.

So, I would have thought there was another utility out there that can read the gotomeeting stuff directly and make the conversions. Has anybody tried it with VLC for example?

[Mark Suszko]

Any lighting you use inside the car has the potential to be reflected in the windows. One item that may help would be to shoot the couple’s interior shots with a small camera at the center of a ringlight with a lot of diffusion. I’ve seen DIY versions where someone glued a spiral or two of white xmas tree lights onto a reflective foam core board, then cut a lens hole thru the center and used that as the keylight/front light for their fashion shots.

[Mark Suszko]

Another kind of business where the signage is usually awful is the local tattoo parlor. When I want to put something permanent in my skin I’ll have to look at every day of my life, it does not inspire confidence to see shabby signage.

But back to the central point of the thread: this is an ever-evolving game, and to stay with it, we have to evolve as well, leveraging the talent and skills we’ve gathered, while mastering new tools and techniques as they appear. Nobody promised it would be easy. And if that’s too much work, or if you can’t make a good living at it any more, well, it might be time to transition into something else.

Watching the political speeches in coal-mining country, I see both candidates afraid to tell their audiences:
“Hey, have you not been paying attention to the world? Pollution regulations and natural gas/oil fracking has made coal un-economical. It doesn’t matter that you’ve dug coal for three generations: nobody’s buying it any more, mines are closing, and you need to retire or get into a new line of work to survive. That may require you to go back to school, and to do things that are new and unfamiliar. But you’re sitting in a burning building, and you need to get your family out of it. Anybody who promises that in exchange for your votes, your jobs are coming back, is not only lying to you – they’re using your fear and nostalgia to hold you back from moving on, moving AHEAD into some other kind of business that your family can depend on for your futures.” I think this parallels our industry to a point.

[Mark Suszko]

Vehicle in actual motion complicates things a lot. You have options: towing the vehicle, vehicle on a “process trailer”, Vehicle in controlled studio environment with scenery added in post thru greenscreen and rotoscoped composites. This is all common stuff but not *EASY* stuff to do, if this is your first time.

My first recommendation is to storyboard literally every shot of this first, and then extrapolate what the lighting setups can or must be. Which shots can be faked in the studio, which need to happen live in real time, on location.

From the storyboard you will be able to design the lighting needs for each shot and create a budget. You will also discover which shots ar affordable to do and which might have to be dropped for time and budget reasons.

For example, in your script or creative treatment, you might start out with a head-on shot of the rich couple sitting in comfy first class airplane seats… then dissolve to a nearly-identical matching shot in the back seat of the armored SUV. From there, you could go to a shot looking in thru the front window, past the near face of the driver, who himself is checking out the couple in his rear-view mirror, as they give him the high-sign to pull out from where he’s been parked. That perhaps cuts to a wide external shot of the fancy plane near a hangar, and the limo car pulling away. that frames the context of your overall narrative, which is: continuity of comfort and service and safety. Next, inter-cutting between detailed go-pro-shots around the wheels and bumpers of the car in traffic, you see it handle a bump or pothole, as we cut inside to that shot of the couple, not feeling a thing. Then side shots of them showing window views of the Town as they’re heading to wherever. Next, the headlight and bumper pull into XCU, then the camera cuts to wide or pulls out to reveal the couple leaving the SUV and walking into whatever – an embassy, a hotel, what-have-you.

But to light it, you need to first plan out every shot to figure out what kind of gear and what placement, can get the effect.

[Mark Suszko]

I pray to get one every time I go out to lay cables these days, but the cost *is* a little high. You’re paying for convenience, and for the design work that came up with a reliable design configuration and handy features. The people that come up with a working gadget deserve to charge what they feel is right for the effort they made. That said, when Manfrotto charged too much for their “Fig Rig” ring-shaped stabilizer, I made my own out of a used bike rim and five bucks’ worth of parts. If my knees get much worse, I’ll probably cobble together a tape deployment stick out of a painter pole and roller or something.

[Mark Suszko]

Oh GREAT! I just made a huge purchase order for Envelopes and Sack…. and now this is coming out, with zero notice and no input fro the user base… why do they have to jerk their customers around every time? I’m seriously considering switching everything in my shop and home to Boxes. and maybe, Jars.

[Mark Suszko]

Depends on your budget, but there are many possible methods, if you don’t want to hire an artist.

Google Sketch-Up has a free version which is good enough to create overhead plots for the Dircgtor and camera op as well as compose actual frames with camera angles, even animations, with people and key objects in them, and this works very fast.

For more photorealism, there’s DAZ Poser, creates all kinds of people and there’s a large catalog of object, motion filess and environments so you can build your scenes any way you need. Takes a bit more skill and time to work with.

There’s an actual storyboarding app or two out there, the names escape me, but they work from a drag and drop template of people and shot types. I’d looked into them once but considered them pricy versus Google Sketch-up.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve kept this little card on my desk near the phone since the 80’s:

“Facts about Customer Service”

It costs 6 times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one.

A typical dissatisfied customer will tell 8 to 10 people about their problem.

Seven of ten complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favor.

If you resolve the complaint on the spot, 95% will do business again.

Of those customers who quit, 68% do so because of an attitude of indifference by the company or a specific individual.

So to be successful, OWN the problem, apologize, offer a remedy and even if this transaction loses money, you will make it up in repeat business and customer loyalty, while avoiding a lot of bad publicity.

[Mark Suszko]

So you feel you got your money’s worth, I’ll chip in and say this: trying to edit 4K in FCP7 is “doable”, but of course is going to chew up a lot more system resources as well as storage. Whether you cut “native” red files or first down-convert to 2K, to me, rather depends on what the subject matter of the thing is, and if staying in the 4K environment offers enough reasons (like being able to make fake zooms and pans in a 2K master) to make the extra overhead worth it.

Frankly, if I went to the expense of shooting 4k, the extra couple hundred for FCPX seems like a simple decision.

[Mark Suszko]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1zMdleTgFo

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