[Mark Suszko]

I would second advising the use of a camera app like Filmic pro, to get complete control over the phone camera, and of course you want to add external audio to it as well. Shotguns and lavs suitable for iPhones are not all that expensive. A good mount and tripod on a dolly goes a long way to making the look better.

In terms of your snap-on lens adapters, yeah, those are an option. Ollo is popular. My suggestion though is to use the existing lens and physically dolly the phone in and out, rather that use any kinds of zooms.

What I’ve seen from people doing this kind of shoot is, the phones suck power, so have external battery or AC adapters handy. The phones can also overheat in warm outdoor conditions. Outside for sure, some kind of sunshade hood is vital, to see the screen and controls. The phones also run out of memory at the worst times, so some kind of way to offload or external-record is wise to have.

Of course, if you add up all these extras, it adds up to getting a dedicated camcorder. But you say your budget is zero and the phone is what you will use, so, okay. What I’d like to emphasize here is, getting the most out of the phone cam requires decent lighting and close attention to audio capture. Saving on the phone is one thing; skimping on lighting and sound will kill the whole thing in the end. Lighting doesn’t always need to be expensive, and if you can describe the shooting situation there are many here who can make helpful suggestions on low-cost yet effective lighting gear, even DIY solutions.

If you have a 4k gopro or go pro knockoff handy, these are very useful for locked-off cover shots and b-roll.

[Mark Suszko]

This is fairly easy to do in Motion, which you then port over to FCPX.

I can think of a couple ways to do it, depending on the exact shot.

For example, an eyeless skull sitting on a desk, that otherwise doesn’t move, in a static shot:
I’d take a still grab of the frame into photoshop or other photo editor, add the eyes there as a layer, make several layer versions with different eye positions, all stacked and registered together. Save as .psd or tiff with all layers preserved and an alpha channel.

Save the skull in a version with an alpha channel where the eye sockets go.

Bring all that and the frame grab into Motion.

In Motion, you can import all the layers in the stack, and turn their visibility off and on as needed, with keyframing, to give the appearance of the eyeball moving. I said eyeball singular, because technically you only need one, then when it does everything you need it to do, you just duplicate that and offset it to fill the other socket.

But what if the skull is attached to, say, a puppeteer-ed skeleton, moving around in the frame?

Then that’s going to need a preliminary step in Motion, using the tracker. The motion track then drives a layer with the eyeballs in it matching the skull’s motions. I might shoot video of my own eye, then mask it off, apply initial scaling and warping to that masked eye, connect it to the motion track, then just adjust the positioning, duplicate it for the other eye socket, done.

A way to do it in FCPX with flat graphics would be to take a simple image of a black dot on a large white circle, and use one of the effects like bulge or fisheye to make it seem round. Scale and shape-mask that off, layer it under another copy of the skull layer that has the eye socket masked off. Add vignette effect in the eyeball layer, to create a highlight and shadows in the socket and sell it’s fake, spherical-shape more. The eye can be keyframed to seem to turn and move around, using the inspector controls for that effect to make the “eye” seem to rotate left and right, look up, down, etc. Fold all the parts of the one eye down into a compound clip. Again, you copy/paste and stack this compound clip to make the second eye, “eye-dentical”.

A skull has no eyelids, so say instead it’s a creepy doll head. You just take a still into photoshop and use it to craft a closed-eyelid version. Mask it off so it’s just the eyelids, bring that back into Motion or the FCPX timeline as an overlay. It just needs a 2-frame duration as a cut, to sell like it’s a real eyeblink. Put those in randomly.

There’s usually more than one way to do this stuff. Rampant used to offer a free “kit” of monster effects like scary eyes, zombie and vampire flesh textures, etc, that can be applied using some of these techniques, so you need not start absolutely from scratch.

I encourage you to check out their monster tutorials and then play with it.

[Mark Suszko]

What do you specifically want to do?

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks!

[Mark Suszko]

You using it as a boundary mic?

[Mark Suszko]

I can also tell from that still grab, you have a lot of audio problems ahead of you.

Do you really mean this is going to be a “PBS” show, or do you really mean “local cable access TV”? I’m beginning to think you really mean Public Access and not PBS.

I’ve been looking at a “standards” document on deliverables, from one of the Cable channels we ship public access programming to, from our shop. Your mileage may vary, of course. You can look this up on the web site for your particular local cable company under “public access production information”, or something like that.

Their Cable standard around here calls for an mpeg 2 file in 4:3 aspect ratio, (let’s do the time warp again!) for their access channel programming. You can tell by this, they give up free bandwidth to serve the public only grudgingly and under duress. It’s literally the least they can do, by law.

They go on to say in the list of deliverables, you can letterbox your wide-screen programming to fit that 4×3 box, and if you shot wide-screen originally, that’s what I’d suggest you output as, letterboxed 16×9 inside a 4:3. If you submit a full-frame wide-screen, they say they will squeeze it to fit 4×3 and that looks terrible, even if a viewer adjusts their TV at their end to “un-squeeze” it. I wouldn’t count on viewers to know how to be able to do that, so I think your best bet is the letter-boxing. Their last suggestion is to crop the 16:9 to a center-punched 4:3, but unless you shot everything with that in mind, it’s going to look horrible. I have had to think this thru for my own shows, and basically that’s what I’m doing: is shooting wide screen but “protecting” for 4:3. That is, I make sure the very most important stuff stays in the center 4:3 marker zone. Then I master the program as two distinct edits: the high def, high quality, 16:9 version for YouTube and Vimeo, etc., and the 4:3 pauper version for Comcast. These days I’m pretty sure the YouTube one is going to get seen more. That’s not my fault. That’s because commercial pressure to kill Public Access drives the standards.

Most letter-boxing is black, top and bottom. But I don’t know for sure that that’s mandatory. Which means there is space in that real estate for some “branding” graphics, if you’re feeling “sporty”. Nothing that would distract from the content in the middle, of course. But a soft, tone-on-tone logo of the show name could go there, and even phone/ web info or the dates of the next broadcast.

[Mark Suszko]

No, you -can- have wide-screen16x9 in standard def’ -that’s how DVD’s look.

We’ve shot in anamorphic standard def DVCPro50 in 16×9. That’s not HD but it IS wide-screen.

Since broadcast TV is now digital, Grandma ain’t going to see anything on the old square TV without a digital OTA tuner-converter, or a cable box with analog TV-out, which will put up the wide-screen picture of your show as a letter-boxed image, if I’m right. Some cable systems may use SD sub-channels for lower-tier content, but generally you still feed those from a higher quality original source.

And if you were a good grandchild, you’d have gotten her a modern replacement set by now (JK).

If you shot it in HD with the idea that you can do “punch-in”‘s to a single from one master wide 3-shot during the edit, well, that’s definitely possible. I do that with my hobby videos sometimes. But that trick works best if you capture in 4K resolution at least, and output to 2K or lower. At only 2K resolution on the source video, punch-ins to singles and 2-shots will still look noticeably grainier and more pixellated.

You can get the tech specs from the station and alleviate your concerns. Call the station and ask for the Chief Engineer’s office, tell whomever answers the phone that you are editing a show to play on their station and need to know the deliverables for their broadcast specs. I recommend you do that now, before you do much more work that may need to be re-done to meet standards.

[Mark Suszko]

Erase the drive. I Guarantee the owner will suddenly call you, looking for it and the files, and some change orders, within 24 hours. It’s like voodoo, every time.

More practical answer; That you have that many drives coming and going must mean you’re doing a lot of business, so congratulations on that. But it sounds like you need a better way to organize and track these physical assets during the intake phase. That’s the most practical place and time to do it, as it comes in the door. Make your own label system if you need to and stick it on the drive somewhere the day it comes in the door, with some code to associate it with the specific client. At least write a client name on it with a grease pencil or sharpie somewhere. Then you always know, and you can mail the drive back with their bill, or whatever. Or at least know whom to contact.

I would not re-use other client’s drives. Or send them out to others with my product on them. I wouldn’t trust them unless I knew more about them. My and my organization’s reputation is attached to the product. After all, you are trying to present your product as well as possible, and what does it say about, say, your hamburger, if it’s wrapped in a re-used wrapper from another restaurant? I don’t stake my reputation on mystery hardware I didn’t acquire. And it somehow just doesn’t seem… polite. They will come looking for it eventually, so I’d put it in a sealed plastic box with some desiccant and label it with a date at least.

Back in the day, when the world was young and puppies were the oldest animal, tape dubs were often made on recycled stock. You were supposed to bulk-erase it and/or”black” the tape by recording black video or bars and silence over it, then you would put your new content on it, scrape off any old labels as necessary, and ship it… saving money. If the tapes were new with just a few passes on them, it was no big deal. But people get sloppy and complacent. They started skipping steps like pre-blacking the tape, figuring the recording of the content itself is good enough to cover over the previous material.

I leave it to your imagination, what can, and sometimes did, happen.
Good and important clients get clean, new drives. Always.

[Mark Suszko]

There is some new technology out there that uses “Deep Learning” to teach an A.I. to map faces and heads onto other bodies, and you could certainly limit such an application to eye replacement, and perhaps even make it look convincing and realistic. The software is out there for people to experiment with. And in typical human fashion, instead of something noble or artistic, it’s being used mostly for simulating celebrity pornography.

But it’s not something that you can just do with a couple of button presses in the timeline. It takes time and expertise.

The “old-school” way to do this is with a combination motion tracking and rotoscoping, in AfterEffects, hopefully with high-rez captures of the original person’s rers, and this is not the kind of job that a beginner should learn those skills on.

[Mark Suszko]

The most basic thing you can do in the absence of paper releases is to roll audio/video on the person while you’re mic’ing them up, as part of the sound check, ask them to spell their name, give a phone or email, and say where they’re from, and you ask them, on-camera: “and do you give us permission to use your interview without any other compensation?”

It’s not iron-clad, but can help discourage any later complaints.

You can shoot in public spaces, but malls are, contrary to what most people think, private spaces, and you need mall management permission, even to shoot a commercial for a tenant in the mall. Your client/producer is burning bridges if they forego the rigamarole and formal permissions with the mall people. The next time you try to shoot there, you’re burned, and will be escorted out or even charged formally.

You have to protect yourself. It’s up to you to decide on taking a particular assignment but you need to understand your legal exposure and risk more fully.

When you deal with jerk clients that don’t respect the legal issues, and they don’t respond to your counsel about it, what’s going to happen is, you either go along, and accept the risk, or you don’t. A “Jerk” client’s most typical response to taking a principled stand is, they will just fire you because you’re making their “easy” plan too complicated, and go on to the next willing enabler. And there will always be a line of those guys ready to take the business, and shoot stuff that’s uncleared, or use music or graphics without clearing the rights, etc. either because they’re desperate and/or uninformed, or they too are the kind that don’t care about the risks because they think they’re “under the radar” and can get away with it. Or they don’t expect to be in the business long enough for this to hurt them. You have to accept that taking the high road is less profitable in the short term.

One thing to have in your arsenal are actual links to proof of the potential consequences, because to many clients, both jerks and non-jerks, this is often seen as an abstraction, and highly unlikely. You being careful and procedurally professional can be interpreted by the unschooled as just being a scared-y-cat ninny. Show them a citation of someone who got zapped for doing it wrong, and your argument will have more credibility.

“Security thru obscurity” used to be what rights violators counted on, just a couple of years ago, when posting ripped materials. Being one tiny plankton in a sea of krill, you might have gotten away with it. But consider that AI and web spiders have gotten much more sophisticated now, and it makes copyright enforcers’ job of finding you much easier today.

And you’re on the public, permanent record now, by name, as asking about your potential legal exposure in a public forum, so you won’t be able to claim ignorance as an excuse. It wouldn’t have worked in any case, but lawyers can find this thread during pre-trial discovery and show you and the client were planning to violate the law… and were aware you were going to break it. That’s the ballgame, right there, in court.

And always ask yourself, in sketchy situations, if a year from now, it will have seemed worth the risk exposure of losing your personal assets and going thru expensive and time-devouring litigation. It’s easy to make the fast money, working dirty. It’s not a good move in terms of building a career. The people that ask you to work dirty do not care about you or your career.

You have to. And sometimes that means walking away from easy money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0rolwpvj_E

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