[Mark Suszko]

I think Hitfilm gets little love here because the perception of it is that it’s consumer or pro-sumer-ware. That may or may not be fair. I know there are folks that swear by it.

[Mark Suszko]

Here’s an idea if you’re still in love with seven; do this stuff in Apple Motion, fifty bucks, one time and you own it. Or, try the free version of DaVinci Resolve, which will also be able to do things to your footage seven can’t. I don’t think Seven had optical flow, for example. If it did, it was primitive.

What shutter are you using on your DSLR footage? What frame rate? The best slowmo is IMO obtained by first shooting at the highest frame rate you can manage. This gives the NLE more frames to do the interpolation on. I seem to recall you also want to pick a speed that’s a whole number.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, Apple Motion would be my first choice rather than AE… but you know, the text generator in FCPX has its own drop shadow options, have you played with that?

Another way to go would be to duplicate the text and create a flat 2-d version of it to use as a drop shadow, animating it completely separate.

[Mark Suszko]

Feel free to call this a crazy idea. But until we have a reliable treatment/vaccine, I think the only practical way to get productions back up and on time is to not just do a closed set, but a closed lot; now everybody gets a trailer, not just the stars.

The entire cast and crew live on the premises for the duration, (including one to two weeks at the beginning to clear everyone coming in) and nobody gets to leave unless they’re not coming back or production is wrapped. Everybody. From the Director to the Craft Services people.

You don’t do location shoots, you shoot those virtual and green screen, or, those are done last, after everything possible is shot “in the bubble”. Of course, this is hella inconvenient. And expensive. OTOH, your production is… producing. You have new product to sell. And it might actually in some ways go faster than the minimalist start-stop methods, if the union and studio get creative on the hours.

[Mark Suszko]

If you’re prompting at arm’s length on a laptop, you should reduce the size of the prompter screen output from full-screen to something smaller. This will fix the “eyes travel too far left and right” issue.

Your prompter software doesn’t offer that? Well, besides getting another one, a fallback could be using powerpoint and building the copy into a slideshow, centered at the top of each slide, then you could literally place the iPhone right below the copy, using rubber bands or some ingenuity.

The copy could also be rendered out as as scrolling credits in your NLE and operated in a quicktime or VLC player window on said screen. There are many ways to fix this problem; just takes imagination.

[Mark Suszko]

Easy to say when you’re at the Ape x of your career…

[Mark Suszko]

You never heard of “gorilla film-making” ?

[Mark Suszko]

What’s the “blade all tracks right here” keyboard shortcut?

[Mark Suszko]

I would get the lav you like, without worrying about USB, then use a USB mic adaptor on it. Icicle is one such, but there are more. The plus is, works with any and all mics so, flexible for future use.

[Mark Suszko]

What about gating?