[Mark Suszko]

Your results look great. But also you might go back to the scanner settings and look for a feature called something like “remove paper”. They call it different things depending on the manufacturers and what aftermarket scanning software you have. This mode engages some kind of algorithm that ignores the ghosted type on the back of the thin page and only “sees” the front side. It can sometimes make you lose some detail, and I guess on some scanners it can be adjusted in the mount of application. But that could be a timesaver for you if you do a lot of this kind of thing, so you can concentrate on adding the cool effects and spend less time on just repair.

[Mark Suszko]

The DV signal chains were notoriously fickle back in my FCp-7 days…The edit system would not recognize the input unless the various components were powered-up in a specific order.

As to your speed ramping issues, what I’d try first is to re-capture in manual control mode, not trying to use time code or anything, where the NLE is just passively recording, and you use the manual transport controls on the camcorder itself to play out. I think that wobbly control-track was probably causing the NLE to try and adjust playback for the wrong reasons. Where the original camera tapes were started and stopped, there will be discontinuities in the guide tracks, so don’t trust them.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve done the iPhone thing, and if yours is equipped with one of the camera-control apps, it can be a very useful addition to the arsenal.

Sometimes I have to go shoot very long presentations, single-camera. To give the edit some variety and a higher-end look, I will bring along a consumer HDcamcorder and either run it on the mount for the main camera’s light, or I’ll put it on a tripod or light stand of its own, just to cover wide shot cut-aways. it really helps a lot when the conversations ge tot he Q and A portion, because now I have a cover shot for my snap-pans. So I get a pro look in the cutting, instead of the “GoPro strapped to a Labrador retriever’s head”-look of a single camera trying to whip pan 180 degrees and cover a conversation.

And that cover cam has on occasion saved the shoot when the main recorder went down or we lost the audio input to the main camera, and we still had a spare wild track on the cutaway cam.

[Mark Suszko]

Nicollete, it sounds like you’re doing everything right, and I hope things work out well for you.

I think your idea of learning by doing your own productions also has a lot of merit, because it is in those very situations that you will build a lot of useful problem-solving skills. Anybody with a big budget and high end tools can just throw money at a problem and fix it. It’s a different thing to solve an issue that comes up, with only what’s on hand, plus some imagination and the experience that comes from having to solve production problems on the spot, versus the classroom work.

The classroom work is valuable, to be sure. But when I think back to my own university experience, I learned the most useful things in the internships and practicum experiences, as a way of *applying* the ideas that i’de read about in class.

If there are pro production rental shops in your area, it would be a good idea to go there and see if you can get some work operating said rental gear for productions that come thru and rent stuff. it isn’t the same as working many weeks on one movie, but it can be useful to work a day or three here and there on a great variety of things, especially things like commercials. My experience may be out of date, but I did get some great gigs by getting referrals from the rental place when a customer of theirs wanted a tech or operator for whatever they were renting. You make a lot of contacts that way, and networking will be important to your growing career.

Good luck! Hire me when you get famous and rich.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, if the paper was thick, it might have gotten a “calendared” impression put into it by the pressure of the autopole’s cups. When the walls are potentially delicate, you should be spreading the weight with a wooden pad and something under it to help protect the wall surface, even if it’s just some cloth or a mouse pad or something like that.

I love autopoles and used them a lot in my youth.

[Mark Suszko]

I’d ask this in the live/stage forum where they deal with it every day. The more converter boxes you have, the more latency issues you’ll have. That’s just physics.

[Mark Suszko]

There’s a glut on what you’re offering. Big design/graphics/display/t-shirt companies that offer a little of everything at deep discounts to keep the prices low, and your margins, too narrow to compete. And you have no network of fans that promote your work. It’s going to be hard to compete with what’s already out there.

So don’t.

Meaning; find a niche market you understand, and service the hell out of it.

For example, specializing in graphics for bands, or for car or boat afficionados, or cigar shops, or tiki bars, or cosplayers… any group with it’s own community, whatever that might be. If you have a hobby or passion with some kind of similar community, I’d start there and try to see if you can make a dent in that market due to your specialized knowledge and understanding of the niche customer base. When they want something made, they will often first try a big existing shop and find that it doesn’t quite have what they want. That’s where you come in.

Just for one example, in the ‘”cosplay” area, there’s a few people out there that do nothing but decorate customized real or replica pilot helmets. Either for real pilots, or for aviation enthusiasts and movie buffs that want something high-quality to display on a desk or shelf. And they make a good living at it, though they might not move many units a year, because they offer a specialized service with a deep understanding of the product, the customers, and the type of art they want painted and taped onto the helmets. And there’s little competition by comparison for what they are expert at. A subset of one of those companies specializes in decorating the protective helmets worn by some newborn babies, to protect their skulls in situations where the cranial bones are too soft or haven’t quite fused yet. An incredibly narrow area of specialization… but there’s a market for it. The decorated helmets look fun and attractive compared to the “medical” looking normal ones. And parents with a kid that has that need, they pay good money for them. It’s not something they can just go get at Walgreens, dig?

There is going to be a useful profit margin in a niche like that, that can’t be serviced by a “normal” graphic design vendor. There are flight sim players out there that pay big money to replicate airplane cockpits. Then there are SCA and Ren-Faire types that might need armor and shields with painted designs on them, that kind of thing… And did you know, there are fine-art painters that paint nothing but portraits of champion farm animal, cattle and race horses for the people that compete in state fairs?

Niche markets. That’s the play, for someone small but agile.

[Mark Suszko]

Steve Carrell manscaping clip in 3…2…1…

[Mark Suszko]

FCPX “likes” to work in ProRes422 and related ProRes, and normally I would let it… but it’s not mandatory: if you want to edit in MP4, you can alter the preferences to skip the transcoding and work with the original files as they are… performance may take a bit of a hit, is all.

You can also save space by telling FCPX to leave the source files wherever they are, and not import them into the library… only, I find this to be risky, since it makes it more possible that the connections to the originals might get lost at some point.

If you insist on transcoding footage, and you want the maximum quality, be sure you’re outputting at the maximum bit rate, at least. It’s gonna cost you drive space, of course.

Fast-good-cheap: pick any two, but ONLY two.

[Mark Suszko]

This happened to me a month or two ago, on a P2 camera, when the power got interrupted momentarily. The camera itself has a menu setting to recover and re-wrap the corrupted clip, which really isn’t corrupted, it just has the metadata section disrupted.

Funny thing: the camera did manage to restore the clip, but it wouldn’t export from the P2 card. I had to play it out of the camera in realtime via SDI, into my KiPro recorder, to get it out.

I was in such a panic that night, being on deadline, I went looking for software to fix the clip, and so I bought and downloaded Stellar Recovery… but never could get it to actually work. If any of you have used that and actually gotten it to function, I’d like to hear about it.