[Mark Suszko]

You nailed it, Marco: the 1080 HD was set to interlaced, not progressive. One click and we’re good to go, thanks very much! This, right here, is what makes the COW such a valuable resource. Have a great weekend!

[Mark Suszko]

MotionVFX might have something for this.

I’d second the suggestion of Apple Motion. What I’m thinking is: it has a 3-d particle generator effect set that is pretty easy to use. And it has image wells. So…

…Create one emitter on your map. Put a push pin in the image well of the emitter as a source, with an alpha channel. Set the emitter parameters to make just one image and give it a path or a behavior of floating straight up. Group that emitter and Copy/paste this emitter group all over the map wherever you need it, offset the timing slightly if you want a nicer effect. Render the pins flying up off their spots, then just reverse the resultant clip to have them falling into place. But that’s how my head works. There are probably other, more elegant ways – that’s just the first idea that came to me.

You don’t technically need the emitter either, or Motion, you can do this in FCPX, if you just create one clip of a keyframed pin drop, right on the timeline, you can copy/paste it into place with a key effect and use the positioning tool on the FCPX timeline to offset and target each landing spot with starting and ending keyframes. If you have a lot of pins, you may need to do it in stages or make compound clips or sub-renders to manage the processing overhead. But it’s quite doable. I’d prefer doing it in Apple Motion because the 3-d virtual camera can add interesting camera moves to the entire sequence.

[Mark Suszko]

Anything like that that I can think of, would also tend to ruin your shot visually. The sound will just go over and around hung blankets. This may be a case where a well placed lav and a good shotgun are the best and only practical options.

There are some amazing capabilities for noise reduction in Izotope and other plug-ins, particularly with notch filtering and hum removal for steady-state noises, but the transient sounds will always get through. Your location implies some amount of noise anyway but it’s up to you how much gets through.

Another trick you could do is, loop the audio in post, that is, bring in your narrator and have them watch themselves while repeating the same exact lines and delivery, but in a quiet studio. match them up and mix. And you can do the reverse: pre-record clean audio, play it back in the field, and have them lip synch to that. Been done for many decades, particularly in Europe, but if it’s good enough for Orson Welles, it should be good enough for anybody.

[Mark Suszko]

Poser comes to mind, and there’s a lot of free or cheap content like pre-built walk cycles available for it.

[Mark Suszko]

Yeah I found the same thing out about a minute before you posted. So, no van-mounted fly-away… for now. That’s okay, but, the Ku dish on our roof is getting long in the tooth, and I gotta wonder if Starlink or the competing service planned by Bezos, will be where we end up going in the future. Based on cost-savings alone, on hardware and personnel costs, I would anticipate migrating to that, though there are many other factors to consider. I wish I had clear answers however on the technical issues about the quality and speed of the connection and if it’s going to be up to the task of broadcast-quality live-shots from an Illinois studio to Atlanta or New York for the Sunday Morning pundit shows. That’s one of our main uplink jobs these days. Will the bird be better and cheaper for that than terrestrial fiber?

[Mark Suszko]

I’m old school, but I’m with Paul on this one; use a scan converter on the computer to grab video and audio independently of whatever the software is doing, Paul’s right about over-burdening the graphics card and the drives.

My experience of OBS was not impressive in terms of quality. But that may vary depending on the individual systems.

[Mark Suszko]

This effect starts with shooting multiple takes with the camera locked down as much as possible, if your budget can’t afford a motion-controlled camera. Each time she performs, it’s a little bit off on the timing of her movements. Your task is to sandwich all the takes, synched to the audio, and control the opacity and transfer or “blend” mode of each take in the stack. AfterEffects would give you more control options for this, but it’s not impossible to do in Premiere. How I might go about it is, each new layer is going to be made in its own compound clip with the source footage and a layer of a gray solid. You’re going to change the blend mode of the footage so that the gray solid has an effect on how much of the track is going to get affected by the opacity and keying changes to come. So, you’re making a sandwich of sandwiches, and what’s why I suggested AE might make the job easier. But if you’re only going two or three levels deep, Premiere should work.

The footage is easier to work with if as in the original example, the person is lit and the background is limbo black.

[Mark Suszko]

Now I’m gonna ask you what “natural” means to you. Hard light or soft? Obvious lighting or more subtle? That’s not a color temp question but one of type of instrument used and the technique. Do you have spotlights that can focus from hard-edge to soft? Do you have soft boxes or banks? Do you have bounce cards for the fill lighting? If “natural” to you means the lighting isn’t attracting attention, then I gather you want soft light from broad-front sources, or a lot of bounced light.

You mention what might be a black room limbo type setting, perhaps something like what was used on Charlie Rose interviews. Okay, for that, you need a lot of control to keep the spill from raising the overall level and revealing the walls. Lots of barn doors and cutters and maybe even a “negative fill” black card on a stand, just out of shot. Short depth of field helps here too. I would use soft lights with attached grids to keep the light from spreading too far off the talent, and I’d keep the number of lights small, making each key work double-duty as fill for the other side of the interview. If I didn’t have the big soft lights, I would use PARs with Roscolux tough Opal or spun glass tough-spun diffusion, and maybe extend the barn doors on the lights with some black cinefoil.

[Mark Suszko]

The short simple answer is “yes” balance to daylight color temp on everything.

The more nuanced answer is; “maybe”.

Indoors, there is no hard rule you must favor tungsten or daylight for the white balance: it’s all about the look you are trying to achieve, and which balance makes that look easier to achieve.

There is no one “normal” “natural” interview lighting setup. Once you do your white balance, that is a base level for the color reproduction, which you would then probably start to enhance in one way or another to get to a final look for the colors, on the set, or in post. A shot white balanced to daylight and one balanced to tungsten are, all other things equal, going to look pretty similar in color rendition with, one a little “warmer” (the tungsten balance) than the daylight. The difference can be subtle, or blatant, if you mix sources in the shot with varying temps. What kind of instruments are in your studio? Are they fixed to a particular white balance?

Also, when you light for “daylight”, I gotta ask; what time of day is the daylight? Sunrise/sunset is going to be much warmer than high noon. Your “daylight” at sunset could look closer to a tungsten white balance at that time of day.

If you are going for a classical three-point-lit, two-chairs and a potted plant kind of interview set, I’d suggest an indoor white balance.

[Mark Suszko]

I dunno. It still carries an odor of investment banking to me. But you know your customer and I don’t. Are we addressing the wrong problem, maybe? The sign-offs seem to jump out at me as the real problem; this client pays you when they are supposed to, but the approval step seems to be the hitch you think a retainer fixes. Maybe I got that wrong, but that’s how it looks from here… and the retainer doesn’t actually fix the approval delay/bump.

It’s an interesting puzzle, shortening the approval cycle. I’d ask myself, and anybody at the client company with insight, what is it that makes the check-signing guy or gal occasionally delay pulling the trigger? Is it because of internal finance/accounting cycles, and they delay because accounting needs things to happen on a particular timetable? Certainly it’s not a trust issue? Their repeat business with you suggests that’s not it. The guy/gal’s just a control freak? Are they shopping around and comparing prices against rivals you don’t know about, either internally or externally? Is there an internal media person lobbying to hold on to the project internally? Is the particular project something different or sensitive, needing extra eyes on it from legal or something? What else could it be, and is there a way to fix that? I’m sensing the retainer idea is a way to put the job ordering on “auto-pilot”, so this check-signing guy in the way is out of the loop. If that’s the theory, then I don’t think it will actually work, because they’ll still ultimately have the veto anyway. S/he’s got some reason. When you know what it is, maybe you can solve it. Until you know the motives, the right move to make is a mystery.