[Mark Suszko]

Another way to go might be the trick of creating a pseudo adjustment layer and putting your LUT in that. There’s videos on youtube about making an adjustment layer in FCPX.

[Mark Suszko]

I face this kind of thing all the time in my work. You are on the right track. Get a clean audio feed to the Atomos to grab the powerpoints as an iso recording. I also applaud and second your idea of adding cheaper wide shot cam for cut-aways and backup audio. For this, I have three identical Cannon Vixias that are 2k consumer camcorders. On battery they run about two hours but on AC of course all day and with a 132GB SDXC card in each, I have days of shooting time in each one. Though they are consumer grade, they have mic inputs so I can give them a clean feed from the audio board or external shotgun.

How I generally use the untended Vixias is, they stay on wide cover shots, giving me the cut-away I need to cover a fast snap zoom and pan with my main camera to things like audience Q&A speakers popping up, or just tracking the speaker as they wander the stage. I’ve found it handy with stage-walker type presenters to put one Vixia on the far left or right of the stage and frame it so as to compress the horizontal distance the speaker travels. One on each side this way makes multicam coverage look way better. Multicam in FCPX or Premiere Pro, using audio, is a breeze and I find I can cut these in faster than real-time by skimming in JKL mode and hitting the number keys like it was a live switch.

Used Vixias like mine sell on amazon and ebay for around $150 to $250, though I got one matching unit at a pawn shop for $75 and it was in perfect shape.

I’ve also used a Vixia as a cheap way to grab powerpoints off the projection screen, with synched audio, then I can use this as a fast guide for replacing the slides with clean ones in post.

I often edit direct from the native MP4 files but for high stakes work I first convert to prores 422 before editing ingest.

Consider too: 4K go-pros or their knockoffs, can be set up without the fisheye and make for a decent cut-away cam sometimes as well. With 4K footage feeding a 2K master, you have the option of being able to make some synthetic moves like zooms and pans or re-frames, in a limited way.

[Mark Suszko]

My preferred option is to take the verticals into a 4 k workspace in Apple Motion and lay them onto panes or panels, then make virtual camera moves on those. Ideally, you could re-frame and crop the vertical but they aren’t always amenable to that. You could take a still or motion duplicate fo the shot, blow it up to fill the screen, add gaussian blur and lighting effects like vignette, then add the vertical as a layer on top, either centered or offset. I’ve pasted verticals into a still of a phone and then arranged that in a 16x 9 space. You can also do multiple framings of the same clip in different scales and arrange them in designs or patterns.

[Mark Suszko]

You could outfit the Cannon with a hard drive and they can then tap into that, but yes, actually, shooting on iPhones and Androids and etc with camera control software like Filmic Pro would be more practical, once you get them some external mics. A bonus of basing their workflow around cameraphones is that they are likely to be able to cover a scene with multiple cameras; A, B, C, etc. either the same shot done as wide and simultaneous close-ups, or dedicated iso coverage of each actor. Phones s audio records, too, for dual-system recording. Then any of the popular NLE’s can multicam between these shots, and the kids will have an embarrassment of riches in terms of angle choice. Shooting amateurs with multiple cameras is handy, because non-pro actors can’t give you consistent multiple takes, so having multiple-angle coverage of the one time they got it right is what saves the project.

Sell the Cannon, but them tripods and external shotguns and lavs and the like. You can find some in the 20-40 back range that are good enough for learning on. Blow the rest of the money on lighting tools; reflector boards, diffusion scrims, etc., made from cheap DIY materials.

[Mark Suszko]

Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. the fastest way I know how to find out you you need to pay for the rights to those images is… run ’em on the air and wait for their lawyer to call, lol.

Regarding the music, It’s not bad music. Just sounded a little too ukulele-like at the start (and I love ukulele), but it seemed a little “off” for the start of the video… I will say it gets better as it goes.

Something I lean on heavily is SmartSound from SonicFire pro. Their loop-based music has an algorithm that can automatically arrange a song to be literally any custom length you require with variations tailored to use as beds, voice-over support, etc, and you can still add in little flourishes and “hits” on a time cue to accentuate a shot. They cover a lot of genre’s too. And it doesn’t require any knowledge of music theory or composition to use, though if you haven musical ability at all, it can let you further customize the track by mixing the loops around. You own everything you make, pay once and you are set; no additional licensing costs, ever. They have an online version of it now, might be worth a look and listen. No I don’t own stock, but I’m such a fan of them, maybe I should.

[Mark Suszko]

In AE I think this is a variation on the effect called “card flip”; you know, like when people in a sports stadium flip colored cards to make images and giant letters. Or look up “Card Dance” in AfterEffects.

The one time I did something like this in Motion, I think I used particles to make the word, using image wells as the particle sources, to “explode” the overall image, and created or played the thing “backwards”. It was pretty long ago, and I remember I was using a cheap windows program called “Photo Montage” or something, to build up shapes and textures out of folders of stills. The program went thru the folder and characterized each still in it according to an overall grayscale value, and then matched those stills to a grayscale target image to use as the “pixels” for that image. The Target image could be made from text on white, obviously.

I think there’s probably easier plug-ins designed for this now, I’d check Motion VFX and Adobe for templates to do it.

[Mark Suszko]

Jeremy is dead-on right: FCPX is assuming you want that footage to fill the frame it expects, so when you scale on top of the scaling it’s already done, your artifacting results. I’ve had this happen to me with 4k footage and now I don’t take that setting for granted.

[Mark Suszko]

Nice video; I liked the framing device of the moveable map underneath. It’s clean and simple.

I didn’t care for the beginning section of the music, only because the instrumentation in it didn’t seem appropriate, but the track improves as it builds and develops over time.

Can’t help with the other questions, sorry, but…

I don’t think you’re going to convince a judge on the Fair Use defense for these shots, though. IANAL, but I don’t think the particular prong of your potential argument would be strong enough, given that there are other ways to go about communicating the same ideas.

I assume you’ve done reverse-image searches on the photo you want, and traced any links to it that came up.

In negotiating, I’d stress that I don’t need exclusive rights to the image, just limited ones. They might charge a lower fee if the period you use the video for is just a one-time showing. But this is the kind of video the Society would probably want to keep around and re-purpose for the web or something. So consider if you want an expiration date for your access to use of the image. That adds cost.

[Mark Suszko]

You might want to also ask this in the COW’s Drone forum. My first impression when reading your question is: “what’s different about a shooter pitching his or her skills for a job, just because the camera flies?”

Now, from reading your post, I can already tell you’re squared-away on the legal aspects of Drone shooting, and that certainly distinguishes you from the grand-variety freelance shooter who doesn’t do that due diligence. That’s part of what daisies the cost: flying safe and legal, and you want to point this out to potential clients, that they are also paying for a guy that will not potentially entangle their name in any legal problems when they need an aerial. “Yeah, that guy’s rate sounds low… but is he legally cleared with the authorities to fly, is he insured?”

That said, I guess you can pitch your jobs by day rate like a regular terrestrial shooter, or you can pitch each job as if it was a stock footage sale. Either way, you’re doing the same thing: you have already calculated your day rate and half-day rate, your travel and insurance/clearance/paperwork costs, and come to a number, below which, it doesn’t pay to take the gig. Stick to that number as your bottom line, and see what they’re offering you. Remember; first one to say a number, loses. If they insist you go first, remember your magic number and start out ten to twenty percent higher than that. Leaves a little room to negotiate down if they balk and you really want the gig, without low-balling you into taking a loss. You might also want to describe your work in terms of levels of service packages, even before you drop that number. “With this package you’ll also get alternate versions of the shot that can be used for bumper shots, still photos for web, brochures, annual reports, etc.”

You should be checking out anybody nearby that offers the same services and ask them for a rate card. Compare your bottom-line rate to theirs. Ideally, you’d want to price yourself half-way between the cheapest local provider and the most high-end guy/gal. If the pricing competition is tight, see what you can offer in other incentives.

But whatever else, never, never fly below minimums on your established rate 😉

[Mark Suszko]

Well, he did sell those suits, you know… Still, you’d think he’d notice it himself, watching playbacks of his show.

Back in prehistoric times in Chicago TV, there was a certain sportscaster notorious for his really loud and ugly sport oats, which invariably would not only moire’ all over the place, but give the camera shaders fits in other ways as well. It was especially fun to engage the chromakey effects while those coats were on the air.