[Mark Suszko]

Herb, I think the Boring Alert or whatever you wanna call it, is definitely speaking to a core audience of users that Resolve is being targeted towards, that is YouTube and Instagram hosts and maybe also gamers. Those content makers have audiences with particularly short attention spans and so this tool can help the editor keep a particular twitchy audience in mind when cutting.

I do a lot of programming where that alert would be worn out by lunch time, lol. But in the case of editing long lecture videos, it is mimicking what I’m already doing in my formatting. That is, I’m listening to the lecturer and trying to find and enhance a rhythm in their delivery, then punctuating that rhythm using shot changes or re-framings or taking a full screen graphic, or breaking it up into a diptych. The brain refreshes it’s attention to a visual, every time the eye catches a change of some sort. “Shaky-cam” is one way to do that by constantly wiggling the POV, but that wears out the brain after a very short time, so you have to try to not over-use that.

The Resolve boring feature though isn’t sentient and is only an adjustable shot timer. If you slavishly cut on every tenth second, unmotivated by the narrative flow, that’s as bad as shaky-cam IMO. So I don’t hate this feature as much as you might, I consider it just an advisory tool, to use where you as an editor think it’s appropriate.

And this feature isn’t completely new, either: I recall a Microsoft prototype AI Automated editing app that was designed for very casual consumer video-takers, who wanted their rough home movie junk polished up; say, a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. The demo I saw had some face detection ability and would cut at places where new faces were detected, but it also had a “boring shot timer” that would cut away and fast-forward-advance to something further along in the timeline, when a shot stayed “too long” on one subject or framing. Not bad if all you have is b-roll… very bad if your video is oral history and someone doing a long monologue to camera – that would not cut well under this paradigm. I think it also automatically deleted jump cuts and obvious camera bumps. So we’re not in danger of being replaced by AI quite yet. But we can leverage some AI tools to streamline the workflows we DO want. And I think that’s all this particular option is about: use it if it suits your needs, ignore it if it’s not appropriate.

[Mark Suszko]

Maybe calling it a “vignette” is more accurate? It has a “setup” and a “punchline”, like a joke does. It advances a premise. It makes an argument. It reveals a bit of character. You could perhaps assume in the light of the revelation of the various characters’ priorities, those couples are going to sit down and re-assess their values and priorities. When you put that all together, then I think maybe Simon would find it satisfies his criteria. But I don’t presume to speak for him.

I will say that in whatever I do, even in a 30-second spot, I try to incorporate a Campbellian “Hero’s Journey” into even such a short narrative, as well as giving it the equivalent of a three-act structure, even though those “acts” might be only two sentences or ten seconds long.

That’s a lot to try to communicate in 30 seconds, so you want the Photography, music, sound, and especially the art direction and editing to help take some of the narrative load off of your actors and dialogue.

[Mark Suszko]

Absent a written contract or deal memo, a judge is going to assume it’s a work for hire. Almost always.

If you’re just starting out doing this stuff, you might assume contracts and deal memos need a lot of highfalutin’ legal terms thrown in, all that “party of the first part” kinda stuff. Not always true.
You can, and probably should, write a deal memo in common everyday words, and it will work, as long as you are specific enough in the descriptions and cover the main kinds of situations that could come up. Here’s a partial list of the things you want to have an agreement about:

Severability and cancellation policy:

What happens when this project is done, or if it dies or is stopped before the expected time and expected deliverables or results? Who owes how much to whom at that point, and who can terminate the agreement under what terms? What does each side walk away with?

A simple example of how I might word this in a casual Deal Memo: “Severability: either party to this agreement can stop the production at one of four milestone points: One: After the contract is made, but before actual pre-production has begun, Two: after the shooting is completed, but editing has not begun, Three: after the first draft of the edit is reviewed, or Four: after the second edit has been made to address the client’s changes. Client agrees to making a progress payment of (amount or percentage) at each of the four milestone points, and the producers are not obligated to continue the next phase of production without the progress payment being made for each previous phase. Once the second edit is approved, final outstanding payments are due upon delivery of the finished product. Product is released when the final payment clears the bank. The producers will in every case retain the client’s original deposit, and can bill at their hourly rate for the hours actually expended up to the point where the project was terminated. Client will not be asked to pay for services planned or contracted, but not actually performed, except in cases where the producers had to book outside talent or subcontractors or rent additional equipment or buy materials specific to the production. In those cases, kill fees and refunds associated with that loss are the responsibility of the client. The ownership of work product and any collateral files or templates of a cancelled project reverts to the Producers: client may not use any portion of the video or audio or graphics without a new contract and compensation, and Producers agree to destroy the unfinished project materials and to never sell such material to anyone, nor release or publicize them. If the project is interrupted or prevented from completion by a natural disaster or the loss of key equipment, footage, or personnel, the project will be considered terminated and the remedy is limited to payment for kill fees and deposits and the billable hours actually performed. Once shooting days have been scheduled and required rentals booked and actors and craftspeople retained for the shooting day, client will be responsible for the costs of cancelling or abandoning the shoot, paying the day rate for those rentals and personnel, unless the cancellation occurs with at least two business day’s advance notice.”

Additional usage:

Once the project is done, do you want to allow the client to re-purpose and re-cut it, and do you want them to have to do those follow-on or derivative works thru you exclusively? Do you want to let them take your stuff anywhere they like, as long as you get a fee, and how much will that fee be? Do you need to have your name in the credits any time this project is used in full or in part? How do you insist the credits read? Did you use union talent that gets a residual every time this work is seen or used? Did that contract with the union talent have any limits on how else the actor could be used? This could be very important and expensive. I can think of a few scenarios that makes this something you should want to lock down: You hired an actor to be a spokesperson for a campaign of some sort, and the footage of them later gets re-used for something the actor would never agree to be in. You hired a composer to score your work, and the client pirates that score for something else and it turns out to become a huge breakout hit and the composer didn’t get any additional money for that.

There’s yet more that can go into a deal memo or contract, but I’d say 90 percent of the things that become huge problems for the unwary are covered in just these two sections.

The TL/DR version:

Pay as you go; get paid in phases that coincide with pre-production, production, post, and delivery – do not become the client’s bank, charging no-interest loans on work you’re doing for free.

Have an understanding of who owns what and who pays for what, if it all breaks down.

Know what you will own and what you do not.

Lay out what everything costs, in advance.

Always make sure your subs and anybody YOU hire get paid up front.

[Mark Suszko]

The question that answers your question is:

Was your project a “work for hire”, or did you have something else in your contract?

…and you DID have something in writing, right?

If your original work was a work for hire, the client can do pretty much whatever they want with it. That’s what work for hire essentially means in the US anyway. You’re trading your work product for a one-time payout and no continuing rights or residuals on it.

Unknown at this point is, who owns the footage you made the edit with, and if THAT was a work for hire too. In the case of the footage, you can get into a stalemate situation where the client owns the finished program, but the shooter retains the right to the original raw footage, however, the shooter can’t re-sell his/her raw footage without the client’s permission, and the client can’t re-purpose the raw footage without the shooter’s okay.

All of these problems can be solved and never some up, if you make a deal memo or contract that spells out who will own what, for how long, and under what circumstances more can be done with the work product. For a really interesting case study on this stuff, search out “Flagler v. Walmart” https://pinkslipblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/flagler-productions-vs-wal-mart-when.html

[Mark Suszko]

8K is great for 4K 3-d. I suppose.

I’d love to shoot my typical projects in 8K: I could just capture everything as a wide shot on one camera and do all my multicam/ cropping and tighter shot framings in 4K in post.

(You and I know that’s not really the same thing as shooting multicam, the parallax being not quite right is one issue… but for a lot of clients, it’s a difference that makes little difference.)

[Mark Suszko]

At a guess, one of your codecs is “broken”.

[Mark Suszko]

I expect to see blow-out pricing this fall ahead of the prices going up after Christmas, due to the tariff tit-for-tat between China and the US.

[Mark Suszko]

Neil, I think you’re right in that you only still see them because you’re in your own account, but I use “unlisted” all the time for confidential review/approvals, as well as for free automated captioning sessions.

While the “private” setting is yet more secure, the few times I’ve used that, it wasn’t worth the extra hassles and complexity for the end users. I suppose a capable hacker could find a way to locate unlisted youtube videos, but my take is that 99 percent of the user base would never find it, not even accidentally. Do id you know, people upload something like 300 hours of content to YouTube every sixty seconds? Your unlisted clip is less than a drop in the ocean on that scale.

Another option for you is to skip youtube and use a free FTP service like wetransfer.com, where you only give the link out to specific people, and the link and upload both expire in a week. The problem with FTP transfers is, you’re never sure what kind of media player the end user has and what their level of skill in opening and manipulating the transferred file is. I once dealt with a person who had never used a web browser directly. The way they did anything on the internet was to create a Word document and type a URL into that, then click on it. And I’m not talking that long ago.

[Mark Suszko]

I got one more idea; is the original tape all one speed? Because back in the day, there was a lower data rate “speed” and a higher one, not unlike the multiple speeds of VHS tapes. If someone mixed between those two settings on one tape, maybe that would have an effect.

[Mark Suszko]

My goal in shooting the interview would be to have the entire body in sharp focus, and the green screen can go soft – which helps even-out any discontinuities and irregularities in that background. I can always simulate a tighter DOF in post if I decide that’s appropriate, but I can’t re-sharpen it in a non-obvious way, if it was blurred from the get-go in acquisition.

But this project isn’t going to a film-out delivery codec. It’s going to end up 29.97 in a very prosaic internal communications newsmagazine style piece, probably a heavily compressed mpeg4. The guy I’m doing this for just likes to shoot everything in 24 so he can apply pulldown and add the temporal side effects that, to him, make it “feel” “film-like”. And I don’t get what technical advantage this gives. I think it just complicates the project. I’ll do it, because that’s what he wants… I just want to understand why he thinks that’s better. I don’t see the utility of it.