[Mark Suszko]

Those are terrible stories but also all too common.

I was gonna say, send the files encrypted, to say you made delivery, and release the decryption key when you get paid, but the end effect would be the same as if you sent nothing until the check arrived, so why do more work for still no money.

“2/10/net 30” has to be written in the contract, and even then, the cheapskates will bluff you, because who wants to go to court over it? That almost never ends up net positive after the time and money spent. And they know it. Apparently political campaigns are really really bad with this, from what friends tell me, and recovery after the election is incredibly hard, more so if they lost, so they demand payment in full up front or no work.

I don’t have a magic answer to this. Every time you reach out to interact with a human being, you are taking a calculated risk. Best you can do is defend yourself with consistent policies, and mine would be that payment on delivery is mandatory without exception, and if you can’t swing that, good day, sir. I’d rather take the loss and not deliver, than get a reputation as someone who can be screwed-over. In the end, you’re out money, either way. This is where i admire Bob’s hard negotiating, but it seems even he has a soft touch… or did at one point. Probably less so, now.

Just about the only leverage you have is the clock and calendar; if *they* have a hard deadline themselves. If they can afford to wait you out, they are likely to. So you have to be an incredibly uncompromising (redacted) to such people. Really, it’s similar to child-rearing with an intemperate toddler. You’re either consistent or you’re not. And they have to believe it.

“Where is that file? We have to go to air in three hours!”

“Your file is ready and it is perfect. And its yours, when I have a check. That’s the deal we made. Not next week. Not in 60 days. On delivery. Or no delivery. Like a pizza. I can have a courier at your door in twenty minutes. Or not. Your call.”

“We can’t cut a check that fast, there’s a process…”

“You knew the terms when we started, you signed a contract.”

“Even if I wanted to, I don’t have the authority…”

“Not. My. Problem. Go talk to the authority.”

“$%#&$%@”

“Very probably. But I’ll still have my job in three hours when you go to air with a test pattern… The contract is super-explicit about this and a judge will agree. It’s just business, and I work for money. No money, no file. Shame too – we did really good work on this. Let me know if you change your mind. We also take wire transfers or PayPal.”

(well, it plays better in my head with the dramatic music and Aron Sorkin walk-and-talk actor behaviors, but there you go.)

[Mark Suszko]

I cheat and use an external application to cut up such a master and export individual clips, which I then bringing FCPX. (MPEG Streamclip still works on my workstation, but this could also be done with quicktime….) But another way to do something similar, is to blade the selections, highlight them, then export only the highlighted clips. You can name them on export.

[Mark Suszko]

A common thing people might miss with scaling footage is unchecking the option in the inspector that offers to fill the frame for you. You want the “none” option checked there, then you can scale it correctly. blowing up footage that the computer has already scaled up to fill the frame, drastically hurts the apparent resolution.

I have had to do post-production zooms into 2k and 4k footage and beyond about 20 percent the softening in 2K footage gets noticeable. Sometimes I find the best sharpening tool to improve this is to use the “denies” plug-in with both setting options set to “low”. Try that and see if it helps.

Another technique I’ve used to give the impression of more sharpness is to add a duplicate video track above the real one, and change the blend mode and opacity of it to highlight just the blacks.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m going to guess that the disc may not have been finalized properly. This is a common problem in SD DVD production in burners, where you might forget to do that step manually. My other guess is, look closely at the formatting you’re using on the bluray, are you asking it to contain a streaming file instead of the correct mpeg codec?

You can burn optical disks using Compressor. I’d export your movie to Compressor and try burning it there.

Let us know what happens.

[Mark Suszko]

Bob is correct here, as usual.

It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, which is why my standard advice to new people starting out with an editing boutique and no track record is to build a portfolio and contacts thru doing PSA work, even “spec” spots. Do stuff for causes and projects you personally believe in supporting. You pitch directly to the organizations, not to ad agencies or studios, at first. You’re bringing clients free stuff. Everybody likes free stuff.

Helping a charity of any sort is never a bad thing, all by itself. But there is good karma attached to helping charities with their media campaigns, because the kind of people you intend to eventually work for, people with money and influence, people in large corporations, also are involved in these charities, and when you can’t get in their front door to get a meeting, you might find that you can exploit this charity work you have in common with those potential patrons, to network with them and get on their radar. You may find them contacting you first, because you’re a known quantity and you have “mindshare” in their heads. When their corporate internal meetings decide; “hey, we gotta do a video about xyz”, your contact will say: “Oh, I already know a guy/gal.” That’s the whole ballgame right there.

I call this “getting in thru the kitchen door”. Back in the day, you might meet these people on a golf course or whatever, and some still do. The overall point is to contact them in an outside, neutral, social context first, letting them become aware of you as a person, in a setting where they don’t have all their usual barriers and filters up.

Second, the spec spots make for a useful portfolio addition, if you know how to market it. Every time you do a spec spot you have to try and create some buzz about it, thru press releases about it, thru attractive public presentations, both online and physical. Entering the spec spots into competitions can help a lot with your “earned media” profile-raising efforts. You gotta keep getting out there and tooting your horn, showing off your skills. This helps risk-averse clients see that you are “for real”.

And now, you are no longer “some guys I never heard of”. Now you’re “Award-winning creatives who’ve worked with people I know”.

Something I’ll say about pricing and value:

When you give them the spec work completely free, you don’t have any further obligations attached to it; i.e., they can’t really call you back and ask you to re-edit something for free, they have to take it or leave it. It is very important though to attach an invoice to the free work when you deliver it, one that states the value you put on it, plus the notation that it’s been comped.

If they then tell you they really like it but need a tweak, you can offer to convert their project to a billable hours project at that point, referencing the rate from the previous invoice, or you can walk away if they don’t want to pay. And you should, because if you don’t, they’ll keep you on the hook doing the free work until doomsday. Because you’ve told them they can. And everybody else will hear that you’re a pushover as well. You may never be able to negotiate a fair rate in that town again.

This isn’t so much about getting a big payday from the first gig: it’s about establishing the rules for the ***NEXT*** gig. The one with the big payday. And all the ones to follow.

If you are truly desperate to work with them, you can do the job as if it’s regular billable time at your real day rate, but always invoice them with a message that “this is what it is worth, but we’ve discounted or comped the work by this amount, in this one instance”.

What you’re doing by this is benchmarking the actual value of your work and time, on your own terms, so that the next negotiation, for a *paid* gig, will start at the rate you’re asking for, not one the client sets. It’s funny human psychology, but people give more respect and value to something when it has even a token amount of real money attached to it, compared to being a totally free gift… This is the same principle that keeps people returning their empty shopping carts to the rack at the local Aldi’s, in order to retrieve their 25-cent deposit.

[Mark Suszko]

The best technique i’ve found for efficient rotoscoping is to keep cutting the problem in half, every time you set keyframes.

That is, in the example of your footage, I would add the “drawn mask” effect plug-in and set a keyframe at the first frame where the hand begins to touch the boundary between green and no-green. Next, find the last frame you need fixed, keyframe that, adjust the mask. Now go to a spot int he timeline mid-way between those two keyframes, mark the keyframe, adjust the mask.

Now pick a spot half-way between the first point and the middle point. Keyframe and fix that frame. Keep going to a spot half-way between existing pairs of keyframes, setting the keyframe and adjusting the mask. The point of this is to let the software interpolate as much of the job for you as possible, reducing the overall time spent. Once you’ve laid in about ten of these keyframes spots, start playing back and monitoring how well the computer guessed at the changes. Where it went really badly, create a new keyframe there and start sub-dividing the job again. Now you only have to tweak things a little bit here and there, instead of trying to hand- mask every frame.

This is the fastest way I know to do it. There is one other option: content-aware fill. You could try using that to paint-in replacement green by just lassoing the problem area and letting the computer take a whack at it… To help that work, it might require tweaking the overall color and brightness levels to emphasize the differences between foreground and background.

[Mark Suszko]

I wouldn’t consider h.264 as an acquisition or editing codec, especially not for green screen work. It’s a delivery codec.

I’d acquire the footage uncompressed or maybe using ProRes 422, preferably 422HQ, if the clips are short and you have adequate storage. Good chromakeying follows the GIGO rule as far as quality of your raw shots.

I have followed this “light board” thread with interest for some time: I find it ambitious and intriguing, and doing it on a limited budget is quite the challenge. When it all comes together and the presenter is on their game, the look is distinctive and engaging.

I think from my reading of the thread I remember you have limitations on the markers and their colors, so the simple answer of “pick different markers” probably isn’t an option.

When building a chromakey, you are interactively tweaking a luminance key and a color-based key at the same time, and anything you do in color timing changes the key. I think a lot of people skip a step and don’t calibrate the raw footage *before* going into the keying of it. I try to always shoot a Macbeth chart on the set of the key, and I set up the initial color grade and highs/mids/blacks based on the chart. I find that when I take that step first, and only then start trying to chromakey, the “automatic” settings of most green screen fx plug-ins do a perfect or near-perfect job, needing only a very small tweak.

Real MacBeth charts are pricey. I lucked into mine. If you can’t swing buying one, find a color bar chart you can afford, or worst case, print one out in as high a quality as you can, on matte paper, and even if it’s not a great standard, it will at least be a *consistent* starting place for each shoot, under the actual existing lighting and lens. You can even make a chip chart out of formica or paint color samples from the Home Depot or whatever. The important thing is to have a consistent starting point and to get the levels right -before- you add the keys.

On the specific key you’re tweaking, where you’re so very close but not quite there… a couple things to try:

Lighting: can you add some more diffusion to the light panels? My keys were happiest with the light very flat and even, and the green at maybe 80 IRE, and well-saturated. Some people go for making the green too bright, and that’s counter-productive. Even and saturated is what you need, not blindingly hot. Small details might need a customized backlight on them.

Have you played with the “light wrap” settings in the keyer? Have you tried doing the key in a 2-step process, replacing the original captured green with a system-generated solid green, or blue, or some other oddball shade? Then take that new sub-composite and apply your keyer to that as if it was the original? I’ve done that, and where I had tricky edge problems I tried adding a hard drop shadow (verrrry narrow, like one or two pixels) that was eye-droppered to be the same shade as the green screen. When it went to the next step, I had less tearing-up of edges. This was one of my “secret weapons” on hard-to-key sources back in the late analog/early DV video days. The ease of adding drawn masks now to the shot, in multiple iterations, also makes keying jobs easier.

[Mark Suszko]

Another vote here for ‘Andy’s Better 3d” but I also use “simple 3d”.

Also, you can always do this kind of thing in Apple Motion as well. I think there might even be a preset for it with drop zones, but if there isn’t you can make one in a hurry, it’s not complicated.

[Mark Suszko]

Set color balance to 3200 on manual white balance. If the stage lighting changes (and it does), auto white balance will try to keep correcting the colors back to “normal” and you don’t want that. Same with the iris. Put the iris on manual and turn on the Zebra Bars in your display, expose so the zebra bars barely register. Leave shutter off. Leave Gain off unless you just can’t see anything.

[Mark Suszko]

Multipoint masking of the hand.