[Mark Suszko]

I’m happy to see .srt files working in the captioning now… that saves me some cross-conversions.

I’m hopeful this “extensions” approach will lead to a flurry of third-party providers adding in interesting and powerful new “toys” in the toolbox. I think it bodes well for making FCPX viable long into the future.

It still bugs me that I can interactively drag around on a piece of video in FCP7’s windows to move and distort, it but I only have the sliders to do that in FCPX… or did I miss something in the manuals?

[Mark Suszko]

I can’t comment: they made me sign an NDA… I think. Or maybe that was just a ploy to shut me up….

[Mark Suszko]

This could be built in Visual Basic. The modules for the various timing, display, and scoring functions are probably already written. A trip to GitHub is in order… and a sixer of red bulls for your coder.

[Mark Suszko]

One of the fun things in Marvel movies is finding Stan’s Hitchcock-like cameos. I hoped he banked a few before he left us.

Also, he’s going to have a sit-down with Jack Kirby now for sure.

[Mark Suszko]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU3qfDtWFmk

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[Mark Suszko]

Depends on the battery chemistry and if it’s a “smart” charger, i.e. a “balancing” charger.

LiPo batteries with multiple internal cells use special circuitry that evens-out and matches the voltages in the individual cells with little pulses of charge or little microsecond discharges. That keeps the battery healthy, so in those cases, you leave the battery on the smart charger until it needs to get on the camera. Most of the time the lithium battery is on the “smart” charger, it’s not so much charging, as it’s having the cells continuously checked and balanced. When the cells get out of balance, the battery heats up and resistance goes up, which can lead to runaway overheating and ruining one or more of the cells. That’s how the fires start, typically, that, or a dead short.

I don’t know anybody that still uses nicads for their batteries professionally; they’re all on some flavor of lithium technology now, because it’s lighter weight and more capacity.

Nicads, you wanna keep them topped-up all the time.

Lithiums are happy stored somewhere around middle to three-quarters charged, then fast-charged to full shortly before use.

Lithiums don’t have the same “memory” problem as nicads, but they are sensitive to over-charging and really easily damaged by over-discharging beyind their built-in cutoff voltage, which nicads shrug off.

Saw a news station once that used hydrogen fuel cells for a while, but they were not popular and got discontinued. They actually made noise while powering stuff, little fan inside the pack… and the infrastructure for recharges was limited, so they weren’t great in the field for long duty. Also they worked less well in the cold.

[Mark Suszko]

You’re probably right that the short turn-around time makes it impractical to break the payments down into a down payment and a final. Though that’s always the best way to go IMO.

So you are going to have to be tough and uncompromising at the other end, and do NOT give up the clean, finished version until they put a check in your hand. Bill them TODAY, NOW. Start the payment clock running. You set a fixed price so you must know the number. Five days is plenty of time to cut a check for a fixed amount, if they *want* to. If they tell you that’s not true, they are lying.

Get as much in writing as possible, even if it’s just email. Leave the correspondence as a chain with the previous messages left in. Actively ask at multiple points: “This is how I understand what we discussed; do you concur?” You can make a message mid-week, saying: “Here is a sample to show the progress on the deal we made for program x, it will be delivered Friday in exchange for $n amount in cash or check. Is it looking the way you wanted?” This gets them on the record, regarding the amount and delivery terms, when they respond. If they respond elliptically or not at all, it’s a warning sign.

In American courts, contract law looks for three things to determine if a contract was valid; offer, acceptance, and consideration. Consideration means, did any kind of money or thing of value, even a token amount, get exchanged as part of the deal. A down payment or starting fee fills that role. Documenting the email as I described gives you some evidence on paper that there was an offer and it was accepted.

They may tell you you have to wait 30, 60, or even 90 days to get paid. It’s up to you, and that’s pretty common, but I’d fight to get paid sooner. Otherwise, you’re a bank, loaning your own money out at zero interest. If they insist on 30 days, offer them a discount for early payment (which you already had figured into your bill in advance because you’re not an idiot at this game). I understand some companies bully providers and try to take the discount without making the early payment. If they did that to me I’d never work for them again, except for cash in advance.

[Mark Suszko]

In Motion, you can animate a behavior that’s linked to an audio source, then publish that to FCPX. I made a plug-in that way once to blink the screen to black on the loud drum beats of an incoming music track, it was the fastest way to make a lot of 1 and 2 frame cuts when the dj “dropped the beat”. Volume can also be used to keyframe changes in scale or other values, so a shout, for example, could drive the “wiggle” and scale effects to make a title seem to react or act in synch with someone shouting.

That the kind of thing you’re looking for, or just a way to trigger titles to match in synch with dialogue?

[Mark Suszko]

This is a ridiculous ask on the part of the client. Nobody can afford to work like that for more than a week: the client is preventing you from being available to do other jobs. In labor law cases settled by the Supreme Court, this is a case of “being engaged to be waiting”, not “Waiting to be engaged” and they need to pay you something for the fact that you are on stand-by to serve them.

If you really want/need to work on this project, at least ask for a retainer. The fee for being on retainer is based on your day rate, discounted over a set amount of time.

Say your hourly rate is 50 bucks and your day rate is 400. A week is then $2,000, without any discounts. A month’s work would be $8,000.

It’s important to make the distinction that, assuming you can find other gigs and they all pay the same rate, you would be making that 8 grand, not just from one client, but collectively, from several different ones. They are all paying for your time, and eight grand is the max you can make per month.

If the client you mention only actually needs you part-time, but is making it impossible for you to commit to any other work, then they owe you ALL the time, used or not. Let’s hope you can find one other client that’s willing to work around this ridiculous availability schedule. But if you can’t, and they’re only paying you half the time, you’re losing 50% of your monthly income. And that’s a generous estimate; from your description, sounds more like you’re only making maybe 25% of that monthly maximum. Right there, the math should tell you, you’d be better off in a job that comes with a plastic name tag and spatula. At least there, the time commitments are something you can schedule around.

So, how much should you demand for a retainer, to keep yourself exclusive to this one client, yet make enough to eat? It’s got to be more than fifty percent of your monthly max. That’s just survival. I’d opine sixty to seventy percent, to be exclusively “on-call”.

Anything less and you are giving it away. There may be cases where you would want to give it away – it’s a rare opportunity to work with someone of great stature, for example, or the end product may be something award-worthy that’s good for your resume’. Sometimes you do it because you’re really into a certain cause, or you’re doing it for love. Maybe it’s religious material, and you’re “editing for Jesus”.

But absent those kinds of circumstances, you’d be foolish to keep going the way you have been. It’s signalling to the client that you’re a chump who can be ripped-off. It’s a de facto reduction of your rate. In effect, you’ve made yourself a bank, lending this client your own money at zero interest. And I will bet you this client eats three squares every day, no problem.

For your long-term financial survival in the business, and for your self-respect, you can’t let things continue as they are. Offer them a retainer of at least 60 percent of your max monthly, tell them it reflects a 40 percent discount on your day rate to be “exclusive” to them 24/7, and be ready to walk if they say no. That’s the second rule of negotiation: they have to believe you will walk away from a bad deal. If neither of you believes that, they own you. And everybody in that production community will know that they can talk you down from your rate, because you gave in once. This one bad deal could ruin every deal that comes after. You have to think long-term.

[Mark Suszko]

That’s an interesting way to go about it. If you’re telling them their project only rates a bronze-level service, though, does that provoke them into going off to DIY it without you? We once went thru a belt-tightening phase and a lot of the smaller clients stopped doing projects at all, or did really bad attempts in-house, rather than coming to us. I don’t believe the projects were any less worthy of doing during that period, but they just didn’t get done, and whatever problems the videos would have helped solve, stayed problems.

In real-world production, budget drives the choices made, of course. And you can be creative inside of any particular budget range, I will admit. If I know there’s not enough money for a grip truck, or for pro actors, or for real world location shoots, I can start narrowing the creative options and thinking about how to maximize production value within the scope of what’s valuable. in fact, I like that challenge, it’s like haiku poetry, to be creative withing strict, small limits. Give me an unlimited budget, and I wouldn’t know what to spend most of it on…

But the questions that start the ball rolling, for me, are: what’s the problem, and can a visual communication piece solve that problem? I then would ask: how much is the problem costing, and how much profit is made or saved by solving it? Then the biggie: what percentage of that big number, in a dollar value, is it worth to them, to spend, nay; INVEST, to get that projected savings or profit?

That gets you to a number for what this is all worth, and what you might need to spend, and I like that approach better than arbitrary buffet menus which ask the end user to decide, in broad terms, how “good” his/her product is going to be. More of a bespoke approach, I guess.