[Mark Suszko]

Next time you’re going to run it, try initiating a screen recording with Quicktime player first. or shoot the screen with your phone to capture what’s happening.

[Mark Suszko]

When you click “get info” on the main hard drive, the system drive, what’s the ratio of total drive space to available space, and what specific trouble messages did disk repair give you?

[Mark Suszko]

If it were me, my next step would be to run disk repair again, then immediately lay-off as much of this material to some other storage medium, muy pronto. I can’t help but think you have an imminent system drive failure in the offing. Get your most irreplaceable stuff archived off ASAP. Then look for things on the drive that you could trash. Trash those, run disk repair again. I’m thinking you may have bad sectors and not enough room for the swap files.

[Mark Suszko]

Probably a dumb question, but, did you run the disk utility on the hard disk and checked for any hardware issues?

[Mark Suszko]

Start-up audio file on my FCP-7 system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDnS4pkmzis

“It’s not dead; it just smells funny”

[Mark Suszko]

I was wondering about how much drive space is left on the internal drive, where I’m guessing your project files are. Especially in cases where the machine needs to render non-ProRes files, it needs enough free space in our “c” drive to swap files in and out. My first guess is, that’s where the “clog” is…. what size is the main hard drive and how much space is left?

[Mark Suszko]

Where are the project files located, and what’s the status of the hard disk space?

[Mark Suszko]

Sorry I saw this so late. You should tell us what you came up with.

You’re shooting just one camera the whole time, from a fixed position? Or does the one camera move at all? This is important to know. I’d also have liked to know if there was ceiling height available to fly lights overhead.

If everything is locked in place and the camera never changes position, then a central, soft key could look natural, a very large china ball or a big silk panel flown above could do this.

I usually have to be limited to floor stands, and in those cases, to reduce the number of stands and instruments, I generally cross-key, so the key for one side is a fill for the other. I’m also not above using clamps to make two lights share a stand.

Why light the black curtain, don’t you *intend* it to be a black limbo? I tell people shopping for a curtain or paper backdrop to skip black and go for a dove gray; by varying the light you throw at it, you get the whole grayscale out of it, from white limbo to black limbo, and the grays in between can be washed with color to become anything you need. And it shows up patterns if you have a gobo or projector. Very versatile.

[Mark Suszko]

His operation is already pretty lean, from what I can see. Your point about freelancers is well-taken, however, I think there remains a need in larger projects for an overall coordinating point of contact: AKA the Producer, if a client isn’t acting in that role themselves. When using multiple freelancers in ad-hoc single-project teams, someone still has that leadership role to take on.

I think you can outsource the “back office” functions such as the accounting and payroll stuff, to a point, as long as they are reliable. In a corporate internal media departments, that’s already handled by others and you -could- get by with just a Producer and their list of freelancers, and literally everything else is rented on the fly, as needed.

But if you’re going out of house, you still tend to lean on expert practitioners to shepherd a project along. In a home building analogy, yes, as the home owner, you could screen for and hire each sub contractor yourself, and deal with them independently, but usually, you pick a General Contractor and let them handle the rest.

[Mark Suszko]

In Lean management, there are 8 areas of “waste” that are continuously addressed.

Transport – Moving people, products & information
Inventory – Storing parts, pieces, documentation ahead of requirements
Motion – Bending, turning, reaching, lifting
Waiting – For parts, information, instructions, equipment
Over production – Making more than is IMMEDIATELY required
Over processing – Tighter tolerances or higher grade materials than are necessary
Defects – Rework, scrap, incorrect documentation
Skills – Under utilizing capabilities, delegating tasks with inadequate training

As far as post production environments, I can see some of these being relevant in video post work:

Transport – the way your files get moved, stored, displayed and reviewed by clients. Ingest, logging, deliverables.

Inventory – I think of this mostly as storage capacity and management/access of the SAN or library you have. But also potentially, the leveraging of created assets for other needs or productions. Stock footage sales? Or purchases?

Motion – the client review/ communications loop, but also, initial acquisition of assets. Legal rights clearance paperwork, for example. Captioning and/or translations, for another.

Waiting – for renders, for uploads/ downloads, compression, and client approvals/authorizations.

Over production – I don’t have much of a take on this area, except the issues of storage and management of many multiple versions of a project, and this might also be considered Inventory, I guess. Maybe another way to look at this one is, continuing to make one kind of product in the face of shrinking demand for it, without seeking a better alternative. Switching for example from live sat feeds to asynchronous delivery via FTP and streaming.

Over Processing – The amount of time and energy applied to fine-tuning tasks like audio sweetening, graphics, color correction, in relation to client expectations. Deciding how much is “good enough”, and who’s the final authority on that, you, or the client?

Defects – The entire QC process, from initial shoot, thru to post to exporting deliverables.

Skills – the amount of time you get to spend, simply playing with different iterations of the edit, trying alternate sequences, new techniques, etc. but also how much time you get to devote to training and research. Also, the ideas your people can generate for new ways to do the work and new kinds of programming. How much time and effort is spent brainstorming this stuff out in group discussions. Are you keeping your people sharp and giving them advancement opportunities?

So, each of these areas of potential inefficiency can be mitigated or improved somewhat by the application of various techniques and technologies. It’s not all slam-dunk stuff, of course. But the inter-related nature of these eight areas means that if you can optimize in just one of the eight areas, improvements flow thru some or all the others in a chain-reaction. Faster file transfer in the “transport” area for example also improves issues in the “Motion” and “Waiting” areas.

Like in the 30 rock clip: “Synergy”.