[Mark Suszko]

The scan converter we use is By Hall Research, model SC-VGA-2B. When you look for scan converters and scalers having this specific inverting/reversing feature, several identical-looking boxes come up. They are all Hall Research boxes with different branding and a mark-up on the price, so I’d go with the OEM supplier and save a little. The unit is discontinued but available used on eBay for as low as 99 bucks. There may be newer scalers out there that can do the same job but I haven’t shopped for them in a while.

Best of luck, come back when it’s done and let us know how it worked out!

[Mark Suszko]

So I found this and it looks like auto-caption is still there, they just make you go thru a bunch more steps to work with it now… and no longer offers .srt and .vtt file options, meaning more conversion work (sigh) which is why I preferred Classic…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcHIZ9aI9TA

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[Mark Suszko]

Greg, I do this all the time, in fact, we built a custom 40 inch diagonal prompter head to play powerpoints on, that’s big enough to put two studio cameras behind it, one on a wider version of the shot, one tighter, so not only do we have perfect eye contact with the audience the whole time, I can live switch between the two cameras to keep things more interesting and punctuate ideas better. Getting a beamsplitter mirror for that size is tough and expensive: we wound up getting a mylar film to make the glass half-reflective, but even with naked glass, if we crank the maximum brightness from the LED tv set built in to this unit, it works.

So, to feed your laptop to a prompter you might be able to use HDM , SDI, or VGA, depends on the prompter’s monitor section… or you might have to first run a cable out of the laptop into a scan converter, then the scan converter feeds the prompter head. The “gotcha” that can come up is, at some point the video needs to be reversed and inverted, so that after it hits the mirror it reads correctly. Some prompting software does this automatically, but if you’re playing VGA graphics out of a laptop using powerpoint, you will need to flip the video stream coming out of the laptop. There’s a specific scan converter made just for this job, I will post the info on that tomorrow if I remember. That’s how we do it.

In a pinch, while saving up for said scan converter, you can cheat by taking all the PPT slides into photoshop or similar and pre-reversing them. You’re trading time for money here: save three hundred or so bucks by not buying the scan converter, but if you need to change a slide or add one on a moment’s notice, you can’t do it on the fly; you’d have to first pre-process it in photoshop. Or export the stills from PPT as jpegs, then re-import them and use powerpoint’s editing functions to flip them.

You have a good idea; pursue it! We did!

[Mark Suszko]

For a multiscreen music video project, what I’ve been doing is creating a dedicated facebook group, the members upload videos there in a discussion thread, and I can right click and pull those down locally whenever I want… but I’m only handling maybe 30 contributors, not an entire graduating class.

[Mark Suszko]

I hope you’re wrong because I depend on that a lot. I’m still finding I can get to classic via an account I made the Chrome, but in Safari I’m hitting your same problem. I haven’t had to do the captioning for a couple of weeks, so now you have me wondering… I’ll try to test this and report back but it will take some days.

[Mark Suszko]

The snarky answer is: you already know:

“…ask friends, colleagues, and other content creators what they normally charge for licensing? Would you base it off your previous experience creating commercial-like content? Like what would a similar video cost to produce, or how much would you be willing to pay based on what you know about advertising budgets….”

Benchmarking is what you call it when you look around to see what others charge for a similar product. You’ll want to do that research checking sources like Getty, Adobe stock ,etc.

You don’t say how unique your clip is. If it is truly one of a kind, you can ask anything you like, within reason. If not unique, then yes the next question becomes how much would it cost to replicate it, then aim for maybe …20 percent…? less than that.

Another way to go would be to not worry about maximizing the profit, as if this was some kind of blood sport contest, and just picking a number that represents the value of the time and trouble and money you initially spent to get the shot, then adding some reasonable markup to that. Those numbers, you probably do have a good grasp of. But also consider that if the usage is exclusive, you won’t be making any more off of it, until the exclusionary period is over. If you think you’ll be able to re-sell this shot over and over in a stock footage library service, you’d want to charge a little less and make it up on overall volume. If this one usage is going to basically “burn up” the demand for the shot in the long term, so you won’t get many more sales out of it after the campaign, you can raise the price a bit more.

So I didn’t really give you a hard number; I gave you principles that could lead to computing the number, based on what you yourself want to do and how you value the product.

Some viral campaigns might come and go and lose control of the stock footage they used, only to find after some time that parody-makers now can get the same shot and use it to make their parodies more effective. Not likely, but also a non-zero chance. I suppose.

[Mark Suszko]

I find most civilians don’t get that the screen-side camera on iPhones and iPads is actually of a lower quality (this may be different on the latest model , IDK). So when I ask people to record remotely I ask that they face the screen away from them and have an assistant or themselves frame up the shot first. Then it’s easier to put an eyeline target right on the phone or off to one side.

My biggest problems have been teaching folks not to have windows and heavy backlighting behind them, and to not shoot up their nose. That, and explaining that vertical frame composition is of The Devil.

Thinking about your “kit” idea, I’d suggest sending them a v-flat made of white foam core, tape-hinged down the middle. If they lack a tripod, you can pre-cut slits across the corner of that v-flat to hold the phone or iPad at a good eyeline, assuming a standard desk height (this can be modeled at home before you send it out). For my indigent friends I showed them hoe to make a “box-pod” for their phone out of any empty cardboard box, even a pizza box, in 30 seconds by holding the phone up to the corner of the box, marking lines top and bottom, slicing the lines with a kitchen knife and punching the cardboard inwards… creates a custom holder. Back to the v-flat…

The V-flat is also something you can write on with a sharpie, etc. to put up script notes, questions, place an eyeline target, what-have-you. For some of my uke video friends I tell them they can hide their sheet music right on there. with tap or pushpins.

The v-flat makes for a nice soft face bounce of whatever incident light is already happening on location, and may create a little audio isolation, though I’d also send a lav mic along. Even a 20 or 40–dollar wired lav is going to get better sound than the built-in mic when the phone or iPad is five feet away. One could also ask them to use a second iPhone in their shirt or coat pocket to record audio using the built-in voice memos function of the iPhone.

Audio for these things is always the more important of the two, and the thing that goes wrong most.

[Mark Suszko]

It’s a little weak in the Middle Eight, but it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it, I give it a 70.

[Mark Suszko]

Well if you download the free fcpx templates from BolderVideo, that gives you many preset walls in different numbers, and the space in between can be varied from none to a lot.

But you might not want to lock yourself into doing just a uniform wall. The next one I do after my current one will probably be a hybrid: large panel or panels in the center, smaller blocks above and below. You can also go asymmetric: look at Mondrian abstracts for design hints.

My home system was bogging down under the load of so many tracks, even at lower rez settings. I ended up turning off tracks until I got it down to a set of five, mastered those over chroma green, then turned off those tracks and turned on the next five, exported, etc. These will all stack perfectly in the final composite but the system will look at it as only three or four total video tracks and not 20 or 30. But it is forcing me to be careful building mixes in the submaster layers.

[Mark Suszko]

Baby steps, Ty, LOL.

I have level controls figured out in GB now; you turn on the automation window and now every track has rubber-banding, so that’s all good. In my virtual band projects I’m now making and mixing things 20-30 tracks deep, and learning fast. Logic down the road at some point, but I’m still not pushing the limits of GB and I’m saving up for a resonator ukulele first.

Here’s a recent thing we did, a virtual jam with about 20-25 audio tracks sweetened in GB. Not perfect, but a good learning experience. I’m in the blue Prince Kuhio shirt with the white hat, yelling “let the good times roll”.

https://youtu.be/N2EqGVb4S7w

Already working on a more ambitious one, people from 6 cities or more, probably 30 tracks deep.

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