Mark Suszko
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What I do for blurs is select “draw mask” or “shape mask. Both of these have feathering controls. Apply your gaussian blur inside the mask and done. As far as keyframing, it’s not really that bad if you use the idea of sub-division: keyframe the first and last frame. Then go to the middle, adjust and keyframe there. Now pick a spot halfway between the center and the end, adjust and keyframe that… and now, skim the track to see where it starts to go off, and only add adjustment keyframes in those spots. The machine will still do the bulk of the work that way.
There are now A.I.-assisted blur tools out there, if you can afford them, that will track a face via recognition and keyframe everything for you.
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Mevo specifically was one I was thinking of. I might buy stock in that this year, as it would be a very popular tool for all the distance-learning customers and such. Drop-ship it, plug in and go.
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Variety story on how the late night hosts are handling it…
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We are living in science fiction times.
Back in1967 a sci fi writer, Norman Spinrad, did a story called “Bug Jack Barron”, about a future TV talk show host, doing a show very much like today’s “The Daily Show”. The show featured live interviews between Jack at his desk, and a guest interview subject live on location. This science fiction story predicted the first African American President and legalized pot, sold by the federal government. The plot revolves around the talk show host uncovering a deadly scandal.How the show in the book worked was, the guest would be at their office or home or wherever, and a messenger would arrive with an envelope. The packet contained a small self-broadcasting camera/monitor the “guest” was supposed to set up on the table next to him or her. The interviews were often set up like the “gotcha” interviews made famous on the early “60 Minutes” shows. If you didn’t open the envelope and submit to doing the show, the messenger had you on a second camera, live, showing you ditching the opportunity, and fear of looking scared or guilty on live TV coast to coast forced most people to submit and do the show, wherever they were at that moment.
I think it would make great movie or series today, I’d cast Patton Oswalt as the talk show host, but Hollywood would probably pick someone like Aaron Eckhart…Meanwhile in the present, there are a couple of stand-alone webcams that can remotely do multicam live shots by manipulating a 4k image to simulate a 3-cam shoot with programmable wide shots, 2-shots, closeups, bumpers, pans, etc. in a pretty small package.
What you don’t get with these things is any sort of lighting or really professional audio. While you can shoot very high quality interviews with a properly prepared iPhone, it definitely needs help with audio, at least a plug-on shotgun, preferably a lav. And a soft light panel. Those come in roll-up LED versions now so it’s not impossible to mail something the size of say, a briefcase with all the components put together as a “fly-away package” . I could imagine the inside of the briefcase containing the soft light, camera mount, mic and monitor, plus a bonded cellular modem and ifb. You open the case and lay it sideways and bam, it’s a self-deployed interview station… I mean, you have most of that built into any laptop now, but most laptop video sucks without a lot of augmentation.
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Bob, you are loved. Well, maybe that’s a strong word, but you’re a respected guy. I think you’re cool, because you may be gruff but you’re rarely wrong. The disagreement, I feel, is not coming from your fierce work ethic but only the fact that *traveling* to *physically* go help your clients is bad juju for everyone just now.
I applaud everything you’re trying to do for them remotely and I wish your efforts nothing but success. Try to see that that’s the part we were all reacting to, the travel and hands-on. We love what you do, we’re just asking you do it from home for a bit, as so many of us are needing to, because the travel and hands-on endangers more people than just yourself. Your body, your choice – when it only affects you, and not potentially dozens of lives. That seems pretty fair to me.
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Nobody doubts your commitment, Bob, or your work ethic. And if that’s how you wanna go – face down in the gravy boat – I’d miss you, but it’s your call.
The thing about your analogy is, you having a grabber at the buffet is all on you. Like I said, we’d miss you and tell grand lies about you while remembering you after, but we’d be personally unaffected in our own health, as would our loved ones.
This is no longer a case where the only question is about or own medical destinies, though. Everything that’s happening now during this crisis is about the health of everyone I love, and the loved ones of people I know and will never know. It is for the literal good of all that the plugs have been pulled and everything has to take a break for a bit. And if careers have to suffer, well, that’s what’s gonna happen. Today I got the word I’m on paid standby at home for the duration, (That robot camera we put in is filling in for a lot of us and we don’t need three guys to watch it ) and to an old Fire Horse like me it feels dammed weird to sit here at home, hear the fire bell, and not work. So believe me when I say I can empathize with your feelings about your craft and your dedication to it.
But FWIW, … and this is in no way a knock on you or your stance, because I deeply respect you – but, your heroic notion of dropping in your traces like that? I lived it with my dad. Nothing at all romantic or heroic about dying at your desk. At all. The security guard who found him had no idea how long my dad had been laying there when dad went in on a Saturday, alone, to grind out some more stuff on his own time so it would be ready to present on Monday. He wasn’t doing it to impress anybody. He was doing it because he’d spent decades putting three kids thru college and paying off a mortgage and only now, at the waning end of his career, was he able to concentrate on making his own retirement fund nut, catching up after helping his entire family all his life. The EMT’s restarted his heart but his magnificent brain had been oxygen-starved for untold time and he spent about a week in a vegetative coma before my mom had to sign waivers and take his breathing tube out by her own damn self because he hadn’t signed a Medical Will and the hospital was afraid of a lawsuit for unplugging him. They made my mom do it. My mom. There was nothing (expletive) noble or heroic about any of it. All it was was tragic. At his wake, people said a few nice things about his stupendous work ethic, but what everyone was thinking, I believe, was: “what a useless way to die, for something as ephemeral as an office project deadline”. I know I was. He still would have maybe had that heart attack on Monday, but at least people would have been around him and might have kept him alive with CPR until rescue came… and my two younger kids would have known their grandfather. Which brings us back to this goddamn virus. And how I don’t want any part of that kind of experience for my family, or anyone else’s. Not even yours. I wish you only health and happiness and that that face-plant into the Beef Wellington or whatever is a long, long way off still.
Right now, we got bigger things to worry and think about.
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I’m seeing an urgent need for a secure telemedicine phone/tablet app so doctors and therapists can see patients virtually. Facetime would do it but it has to be secure. I see an instant booming market for this particular kind of thing. And it’s needed: therapists and such should be able to work remotely with patients and that’s especially useful in a stressful time like this. They shouldn’t have to go to an office just to facetime with a patient. And the more remote facetime-like diagnosis for Covid we can do, the more we can reduce the influx on hospitals.
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Man, whatever they are paying the server jockeys at Netflix and Prime, it ain’t enough! The growth to keep up with the increasing demand for streaming services is today’s gold rush.
My work these days is largely ENG production, with webinar training production thrown in.
This week I put up a poster at work; a picture of our remote camera in the Chicago press room, 200 miles from where I wiggle the stick and push a button in a control room in Springfield. The caption: “2020 MVP Nominee”.
“Kilroy” as I call the robo-cam, took years to get installed. Every time I proposed it, the answer from every single person was: “it will take away our jobs”. I answered that it was a “force multiplier”, enabling our crews to do other, more demanding field work at the same time as we covered press conferences. And that it could cover when a distant field operator took sick or was otherwise unavailable, say, stuck in traffic. Nobody in the shop envisioned what has happened, not even myself, but we’re all very glad the camera is there now. The thing has paid for itself several times over in just the last three weeks, obviating the need to dispatch me and others on a 400-mile, eight-hour round trip to cover a 15-minute spray, or try and hire a local stringer of unknown quality and reliability. We’re doing daily Covid updates to the networks with it, feeding uplinks and Facebook, and a web stream and a number of stations take that feed and turn it around for their own use. “Origato”, Kilroy!
What happens after? Who knows. I don’t make policy, and I’m not a soothsayer. But I know I can’t edit from home without having a home based RAID to work from. I maybe could get authorized remote access to the office’s archive server to pull down files to then work from locally… but that transfer speed is deadly slow and my home internet is a soda straw. Everything would have to be very tiny proxy files. I could even access the Adobe account from home if it came to it. But the security angle has already been mentioned, never mind others. Also, I’m not excited about doing work stuff on my own home machine. They’d probably need to issue me a laptop to keep things ethical. My luck is that before the curtain came down I had 99 percent of my projects done thru May. My biggest luck is, unlike some friends who will really be hurting soon, I still get paid thru all of this (Unions FTW!) I have no idea how my family’d survive without that.
I think my shopping list of things of interest for next year’s NAB would include NAS solutions customized for work from home. And fly-packs of quick-setup remote stand-alone PTZ cams with reliable bonded cellular and ethernet to control the cam and get the shots back. I can imagine the fresh Newtek spam hitting my in-box in 3…2..1…:-)
Long term I think webinars are going to get a bigger focus for my customers as a way to spread information and education without spreading infection. But there are two things to consider there: the tech, certainly, but also improving production value and really using instructional design to a higher level in the planning and execution of this stuff, something I’ve been advocating for years. I look at “training” videos on YouTube and a large number of them are cringe-worthy, not just in production value, but in HOW they try to teach what they are teaching. The tech is the easiest part. There is still work for English Majors here, I’m sure of it.
On-the-fly captioning needs to improve and get easier and cheaper to do. AI is helping but it’s not fully there yet.
One other thing: I play in a couple of hobby bands, and all our gigs and even practices have fallen thru for the season so far. The bandmates were all excited by the idea of virtual band practice using Google Hangouts, or even virtual concerts using something like Skype. I had to be the buzzkill and explain how latency and variable levels of service and bandwidth made it impractical for eleven scattered people to jam together in time, without spending a lot of money. I wish there would be an affordable answer to that, because it would help not just our stupid little ukulele band, but have massive applications across many disciplines. Including our productions.
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The station should have a document somewhere on their site or sent to you with the exact specs for that but typically you would deliver a video file and a “sidecar file” with the timed captions that the station will integrate on their end.