[Mark Suszko]

Should probably be in the “pet peeves” thread, but I have a hard time not eye-rolling and correcting people in production meetings that mis-use camera movement and shot terms by saying things like: “pan down”; or “Pan-in”… and one guy in the meeting kept describing a key scene in their script as “the money shot”… I waited until we took a break to walk over and quietly clue him in. He found someplace else to be after that.

Then there was an executive one time, rejected my well-written training video script, saying he knew all about movies – because he used to review them for his college’s student paper. This is extra-funny if you know how college radio and newspaper movie reviewers were selected by their editors – “Hey, got a free pass to a movie screening in the mail; who wants to go?”

And the “editing house” manager who told me they couldn’t dub my mini-sized, 15-minute portapack U-Matic demo reel because “it wouldn’t fit in the Sony Umatic player.” Had to go over to the place to see this.

The guy and his head tech are standing there, telling me that the machine’s wide slot is obviously made for a larger-sized tape shell. The owner is so proud of his head tech, who looks a little defiant. He’s holding up a wide, 60-minute tape cassette shell: “See, it only takes THESE“.

I point to the little centering guides on the opening of the player: ” These ridges are centering guides for smaller shells – Mini’s go in the center of the feed slot: the hubs remain the same distance apart, no matter which size you put in these things”. I slap the mini tape in (centered), ….and watch their eyes as it retracts into the player and threads up and I reach over to hit the “play” button. The look on their faces… That tech guy wanted to kill himself, and the owner probably wanted to help him. “Glad to see it’s not broken or anything; seems to be playing just fine.” Yeah, I was an arrogant young pup at times.

[Mark Suszko]

Subtle burn, Grinner; I give it a 9:-)

Made me think of the conversation about black and white in this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KNyf9ExMxQ

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[Mark Suszko]

A real “screening in theaters” would imply you need to make a DCP file. But it sounds like you just want to screen this in a classroom.

Classrooms and informal local gatherings in a hotel ballroom or something like that will be using consumer grade and prosumer-grade display gear, most likely. Something like 80 percent of the computer gear out there in the field where you show the things is Windows-based, the rest is Mac and a little Linux-based stuff. I’m not saying that’s good or bad; just that it’s the reality of the installed base.

Prores is going to be a higher quality than the mpeg4 IMO but the installed base of *consumer* oriented gear out there today won’t generally recognize a ProRes file, much less play it without needing a conversion. They *will* recognize an MPEG4, and MPEG2 (with a really high bit rate), as well as a .WMA file.

I can’t tell you how often a client will be asked for the specific format and codec and come back with: “it’s just a Quicktime file“. (facepalm)

[Mark Suszko]

I imported my own as well and keep them in a couple of places; easiest might be to keep it with he “solids” under the Titler section.

[Mark Suszko]

I think I have seen this also in one of my projects, where everything was supposed to be synched to audio in my multi-clip, but everything in one particular angle is not. Still tracking down why it’s wrong in my setups. But the frist thing you learn about multicam in FCPX, and actually I think in Premiere as well is, every track has to absolutely be the exact same codec, frames rates, etc. if you want this to work properly. I’m guessing your trouble might come from this one track being someone not exactly the same specs.

[Mark Suszko]

From your lips to their ears..

[Mark Suszko]

This is a pretty problem indeed. My gut is not much liking the contact proposal on Linked-In. One of the problems I think you face here is that the decision to record a conference and who will do that, is typically made weeks or months ahead, during the initial planning. I think a lot of the time, clients for these conferences will just surrender all of this areas to the hotel and their in-house services.

Hotel in-house services are your rivals for this business, even if you just want be their subcontractor, so you have an uphill climb on this.

I am disappointed that the local Convention and Visitors bureau doesn’t see the value in promoting AV support service packages for conferences; the synergy makes so much sense. So I’m going to blue-sky some ideas; they may or may not work, but perhaps they’ll spark some other approaches when you think about them.

If you think you want to work within the Linked-In ecosystem, I think you want to create a stand-alone AV support presence there, with a weekly column or podcast or whatever they let you do over there… it could be as simple as a weekly one-page newsletter with bullet points of helpful info, photos of setups, common questions answered, that kind of thing. Sweetwater has me on their mailing list and they send out a monthly newsletter with mini-articles, profiles of some of the staff, demos, etc. Occasionally I look at those, if the topics interest me, though generally they are fluff.

But what that weekly presences does here is create a node for potential clients to connect to when they are planning. You’re doing what radio spot campaigns do: get you some “mind share”. You’re not selling specifically, but rather, getting your name in their heads, so when they start to think of needing these services, your name is already in their heads and they look you up. This is so much of the game of selling when you can’t be one-on-one.

The second idea is bigger, but maybe too much work, for uncertain reward… that would be, since the Tourism Bureau won’t package it, create your own bureau. That is, form a sort of keiretsu (check Wikipedia) or loose association of your local rivals, pool your resources to make referrals to each other and to advertise as a block of service providers, like a city Restaurant Association might. I think that’s the perfect model for what I’m talking about. They are all nominally competing yet they market collectively on the theory that getting a piece of some steady business is better than getting no business at all.

It seems against human nature and certainly doesn’t sound like conventional capitalism. But I’m not suggesting you make a cartel and collude to fix prices. This is much looser than that; a handshake agreement to help each other out when one of the group has an equipment problem or shortage, or needs extra staff, but most of all: you’re pooling the ad and PR money to targeted buys, probably on facebook and Google and aimed at corporate HR people and Corporate travel agents.

Dunno if this works or is useful. But it’s what came to mind first.

[Mark Suszko]

They didn’t tell the guy if it’s supposed to be a DCP file or what codec or anything, just the frame size. No audio information either. Is it Surround, stereo, etc.? Some “festivals” are pretty casual on the tech specs, and others, very rigid. Leaves this poster with little to take action on, until all the proper specs are communicated. That’s incredibly frustrating, like ordering a pizza and telling the chef to guess what the toppings and proportions of them need to be… and he has to get it right on the first try.

[Mark Suszko]

I do what Jeff says with my P2 cards, and it solved my issues. The “import” function in Premiere isn’t even recommended in the Abobe training manual I bought… it’s kinda broken, maybe. (At least, it doesn’t work as well as it’s FCPX counterpart does, IMO) Which gave me no end of problems the first two months I used Premiere at work.

But Media Browser will do the job, if you first copy off the footage as Jeff described. That’s just good practice, since then you can eject the cards and hold onto them as last back-ups, should something fail hard.

On my home rig, MPEG STREAMCLIP still works, and for my prosumer camcorder SD cards similar to what your students use, I often use that app to pre-convert everything to ProRes first, then do my actual ingest using the ProRes. If your rigs can’t run Mpeg Streamclip any more, there are other free and low-cost options out there. FFmpeg comes to mind, and now there’s a simple GUI-driven interface for that. VLC might, “Switch” also is an option. You could also make and store a sort of batch process in Media Encoder, I guess, as a preset. I wonder if you couldn’t also do this converting with QuickTime?

[Mark Suszko]

Compressor can do automated batch renders, so, multiple versions at once and overnight, and it will email or text you to tell you the status. How well that all works for you rather depends on the robustness of your particular rig.

As I’m learning Premiere, one nice feature it has is one-stop batch output of as many formats as you need, right from the editing interface. Though it’s probably actually just leveraging their version of Compressor, aka Media Encoder. Still, they make setting that up relatively simple.

Sometimes, you want to master at a resolution higher than your end client deliverables, because that’s a far-thinking thing to do. Sometimes, it’s better to master your timeline at the final output specs from the start, and this situation sounds like one of those times for you.

I don’t know if your facility has multiple networked edit suites but maybe this is a case where all your editors can use a shared copy of the master and team up on running the exports from multiple machines at once.