[Mark Suszko]

You may never get it exact, (as far as human visual perception goes) because the overall lighting is so different between them; one being outdoor and the other, indoor. Shooting a color chart thru the lens in both places would have been really helpful to you now.

I start with getting the white balance to match. Then I look at the scopes, make a split screen between the two shots, and adjust based on the fleshtone vector on the vector scope.

[Mark Suszko]

Hello, Hussain:

I come at this question as someone with a Liberal Arts and Sciences school background, not a tech or trade school that only teaches how to work a particular piece of software. I’m not against trade schools, at all. But my philosophy, and my actual life experience of over thirty years, is that the variety of things I was learning in Liberal Arts classes turned out to be very helpful to me in writing, producing, and editing videos, and even in my own beginner-level mograph work. If you do it right, you are getting literary, art, music and historical backgrounds that will inform your work in untold ways when you are struggling, for example, on how to illustrate with typography and symbolism, ideas that are abstract.

I’ll give you an example: I had to do some mograph work to illustrate a script about an educational funding crisis, and a proposal to address it. Nobody really wants to look at charts and graphs, so, how to communicate this stuff while holding attention? I did things like build a little red one-room schoolhouse using 2-d pieces, assembled and animated in 3-d space within Apple Motion. I was able to show the building falling down to reveal a number inside, related to the script. Later, in a section about building educational funding up, I animated cartoon-like flat art of construction cranes lifting pieces of the plan into place onto a scaffolding of girders to build a tower. In another chapter of this series, I created a dark factory that lights up to reveal robotic arms and a conveyor belt; the belt begins to move, boxes go by the camera and the robot arms drop various text blocks of concepts into the “funding package”….

So my point there was, I never took courses in how to work the software; it was more about coming up with the creative ideas for visually representing the concepts, then figuring out the rest. That project made me pretty familiar with learning Apple Motion, for a time, LOL. but every day of my career, I come up against situations where something I learned in school about composing a frame, about lighting, about music, rhythm, form and space… all came from the non-technical, non-career classes I took, at least as much as from dedicated TV classes.

So I’m suggesting, if you’re in school, stay there for now. Soak up as many different areas of learning as possible, because believe it or not, it all eventually fits together.

The other thing I believe in about a Liberal Arts Education is; it teaches you how to learn new things, and that’s something you need life-long. I don’t know your age, but people just now about to get into their twenties will probably change entire careers five times in their working life. I don’t mean you’ll have five different jobs, but entire new careers, with the training and working-your-way-up-the-ladder that entails. Roughly every decade, you’re going to re-make yourself into someone new, doing something different than before. A liberal arts and sciences background makes you nimble and easy to evolve. It’s not the only way to success. I just think it’s a very dependable way.

So, stay in school, do the mograph stuff on the side while you grow yourself as a fully-fledged human being (as much as you can, while serving the practical needs of life and all). There will come a time when you will know you can step out and make this a career. Know that it’s a very competitive field, with an over-saturation of practitioners, so making a really good living at it will be tough because someone can always undercut your rates. You can’t let that bother you. When your work gets good enough, the higher rates will come too. Right now, though, make yourself the best “self” you can be, and just keep practicing, getting better. If you don’t get actual clients, pretend you are one, set yourself a really difficult goal and just work away at it, like the red schoolhouse and factory projects I described for myself. Don’t settle for average charts and graphs. Don’t just drop copy into a plug-in and call it done for animated typography. Practice building these things from scratch, and mastering your favorite tools. There’s no real shortcut to greatness.

[Mark Suszko]

There’s perhaps a difference between the live streamed signal quality, and downloading the archived local recording afterwards. Shouldn’t be, but i think that’s one place to look for an answer. If I was depending on a system like this for my program, I’d insist on local archive at maximum bit depth, then FTP or mail a drive or whatever, to get the good version. The live version for me only would need to be good enough to check for framing and composition, etc. and to conduct the interview.

If you really need to do everything live… I’ve got nothin’. Except to throw more money at it in terms of higher end cams and encoders, and a provisioner that can handle it.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m told it’s also summer doldrums and traffic will pick up more with the seasons changing. I think there might be something to your opinion about the redesign but also there is a lot more competition from youtube these days. However, anybody that looks at youtube comments in tech subjects for any length of time should probably run screaming back to here, lol.

[Mark Suszko]

Can you make it work in a fixed position with speedrail, c-clamps, and a couple of folding ladders on either side? Or does it have to act like it’s on a boom? A c-stand by itself might not be enough, once you add the counterweight.

It’s a warehouse, right? Do they have a spare forklift you can rig the light to?

[Mark Suszko]

I wouldn’t do it in FCPX, but rather in Apple Motion, then import to FCPX.

There’s third-party products from Motion VFX that will let you make and import CGI objects into Motion and FCPX.

[Mark Suszko]

Random thoughts off the top of my head:

Consider a color gelled light on the plant? If you don’t have a pin spot, maybe use black foil to create a snoot on an existing light?

Are the plants real or fake? Plastic ones, you could dose with gloss or matte sprays to adjust reflectivity. Even airbrush new colors onto them. If they are real, maybe shine them up by misting them with water just before the take.

What’s behind the plant matters, too. Just like when trying to light and shoot a bottle. If there’s brighter material behind the leaves, the whole thing will pop better with a lighter backdrop than if there’s neutral, densely busy, or dark area behind it. The irregular shapes and angles of random leaves and branches means you will get a less “flat” look by side-lighting to enhance contours and textures.

If the shot is locked-off, you could tweak the plant in a masked off window during the color correction step. If the shot moves, you could animate the mask, but that’s more work.

Are you daylight or tungsten balanced? Theoretically if you white balanced under either, it shouldn’t matter, but something like a plant might read better just the same if the balance is daylight.

Crazy idea: if it’s green, is it key-able? Could you add chromakey to the leaves and matte in a brighter leaf color, with a blend mode and opacity adjustment to mix the two? Using a color replacement tool is probably a more elegant way to get there.

Finally. You could buy a very cheap light just for this. Like 20 bucks or less. It will be some work to rig it.

[Mark Suszko]

The audio forum will have a lot of opinions. I like Audio-Technica and Sennheiser for this, but Rode also makes short shotguns with rechargeable battery power. Your price range will be around 250 and up, with the higher-end shotguns costing as much as your camera, maybe more.

What would help to know is, what you are shooting with this and how you intend to use the shotgun. If you’re for example doing long-distance nature photography and want to capture birdsong, that’s different than putting a directional mic on a pole to grab speech off a person in a news crew interview.

Shotguns are often thought of as specifically for getting a sound from a distance, but really, you should think of them more as a regular mic except with a much higher rejection of unwanted off-axis sounds from the sides. It’s not always the “audio telescope” people think it is.

[Mark Suszko]

So I took at look at a demo of the software you’re using and I had an idea: because it has multiple track layers, can you create a very simple layer with symbols or colors synched to your music track, then use that as a reference tool for synching your other moves?

I’ve done something like that before in my music-based edits, where I will be cutting to the music. I’ll often cut up a video track by laying down marks to the beat, and just fill the shots with different colors at first, to give a sense of the image pacing, then go back in and replace the colored sections with actual video clips later. It also helps point out to me on the timeline, very quickly and visually, how close I am to completion, as I work the different areas.

[Mark Suszko]

I did some further research and found some reviews; they’re not kind. I thought maybe these were go-pro knockoffs in a different form factor; they are not even that good. They’re just older model webcams, in a camcorder form factor. The 4k aspect is also a bit of a marketing stretch, as you can only get it in 24P. (sigh). Back to looking at used name-brand gear. Which I don’t mind. But you get what you pay for.