[Mark Suszko]

I wish there was a toll charge for “unmotivated” crane, slider, and now aerial shots. The money would fund real film school tuition:-)

[Mark Suszko]

We call that “picture in picture”, and you don’t need the green screen for that, just add the asset to a track, mae the track lay above the track with the background. If the effect you want is going to stay the same, but the pictures may change, a handy shortcut would be to create a “drop zone” in your template, adjust the position of that and save it, then later, drag-and-drop any picture or video you want into the drop zone, without having to re-create all the other moves and positioning.

Good luck learning Motion – I found it pretty simple and intuitive, easier than AfterEffects for sure.

[Mark Suszko]

You may want to describe the shot more fully, but, if you have a still image as a scene, and you make a green square in a separate layer, that square can be chroma-keyed, but all that you’d see is the square becomes invisible. To chromakey , say, a PERSON into your scene, they must be photographed already in front of the green screen material. Then you bring that footage into Motion, crop it a bit and apply the greenscreen chromakey to that.

[Mark Suszko]

First off, I would suggest having staff at each nation’s Embassy handle this, and send you the clips, instead of sending a shooter globe-trotting. Or crowd-source this across YouTube or Hit Record to get locals in every country to submit their readings to you, electronically.

Instead of a teleprompter, you could use an iPod or other MP3 player, or digital audio recorder (under $50.00 USD) with a concealable earpiece, the idea here is that each person could simply read the Declaration aloud from a paper, into the audio device, then play that back thru the earpiece and repeat word-for-word what they hear, while addressing the camera. This also avoids the need for memorization. If you don’t erase the audio clips from this “ear prompter”, when you get it back, they will help you match up clean back-up audio with whatever the camera mic grabs for the actual takes.

With the plethora of camera-phones out there, I think you should base your image gathering around their ubiquity. iPhones and Androids now can shoot theatrical quality shots in the right hands. A careful yet simple set of instructions on how to frame up the shot should go out to all the volunteers. You could say something like:

“Shoot this outdoors at nine in the morning or five in the afternoon, with the sunlight pointing at your right shoulder, and have someone with a white card or silver reflector, sized 1 meter square, stand off your left shoulder and three feet ahead of you, reflecting the sunlight on your face. The cameraphone should be on a fixed support like a tripod, or held very steady, in landscape position, with a gap of space above the top of the speaker’s head, and the shot framed from one to two meters away, do not use zoom controls, but physically move the camera closer or father away to frame from top of head to bottom of the elbows.”

[Mark Suszko]

Maybe Chyron Lyric Pro?

[Mark Suszko]

The stair-stepping is called “aliasing”, and was a common issue with standard def video. Are there any artifacts in the overall motion? You want to make sure of the Field Order when capturing.

[Mark Suszko]

One of the current HP workstations should do you fine: the bigger issue for a wedding/events guy is storage, storage, and more storage.

[Mark Suszko]

(smacks forehead) “Of COURSE! Why didn’t it occur to me before? My trouble all along in attracting production clients was because of a lack of signage!”

Mind you, if someone wants to talk about how they serve a market in creating assets for digital animated signage like billboards and the like, I would like to hear from you about how you do that and how it’s distributed.

[Mark Suszko]

I empathize, but I’m not up to date on software CG options. We got a version of Expression, which seemed to have everything one could want, and everybody in the shop hates, hates, hates it. Not because it isn’t capable, but because operating it is too darned complicated. There has to be a simpler alternative out there that runs on contemporary platforms, but I didn’t go to NAB and am not up to date on them.

Knew a guy that swore by SCALA, don’t know if that’s still a thing.

[Mark Suszko]

You’re asking Keynote to be something it wasn’t designed to be: a proper TV Character Generation system. If that’s what you’re limited to using, break out the motion backs, play them off of a non-stopping or seamless looping source that feeds the switcher, and make the Keynote text appear over a custom “superblack” background, then use luminance keying to lay in the keys.