[Mark Suszko]

There is; the iconic piece-of-film-stuck-in-projector-gate-melts-to-white.

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

[Mark Suszko]

In all the banter about frame rate, anybody check and match the audio SAMPLE rates?

[Mark Suszko]

I didn’t respond to this right away, because I don’t have your *specific* answer… but seeing as nobody else has replied in several days, I wanted to ask; why would you want to treat the different internal clients “differently”? My shop is based on a revolving fund, so it’s really mostly Monopoly money, moving back and forth between the same accounts, not like a commercial business. So I don’t have a good perspective on your situation.

But what I’ve proposed before, for an in-house shop situation is, you don’t charge anything for the service but you ration access by TIME. Edit time. Studio production time. Pre-production, script services, any tech help. Everybody gets x amount of free hours a month to spend for their divisions. You decide if unused time carries over or is trade-able between divisions.

But how I suggest it works is this: If client A’s particular job exceeds the hours for the month, and others are waiting for their turn, you go to the back of the line to finish… or, you can”buy” more hours with a funds transfer, typically this would be a trade-out on getting more equipment. Or training. Because more equipment, or better training, if it’s the right sort, makes the whole unit more time-efficient, so you can help more people for the same outlay. The clients soon learn to be more efficient in their internal processes, so as not to waste their hours unnecessarily. That’s good for YOU.

A side benefit of the time-based rationing is, you can show metrics for how much work you are doing every month and what the overall demand level for services looks like. Whether it was several minor jobs, or one mega-job that took the entire department a month to handle, the hours tell the story better than just a tally with no context of how many productions were turned around.

Actually billing internal clients, or putting them on tiers, always struck me as a way to discourage them to use the internal services, and promotes competition from rival outside providers, or worse, it incentivizes the clients to start doing more of the work themselves, without you, and often with less than great results. None of that is good in terms of promoting the internal production office. Because you lose the justification for having one.

But I’m willing to entertain a different perspective.

[Mark Suszko]

Good to know, thanks. Must be a problem specific to my friends’ install.

[Mark Suszko]

blah blah blah, can’t do this, can’t do that; you are freaking Hamlet over here. Always with an excuse not to do something. It’s trolleriffically boring. Look, I’ve always tried to cheer new people on and encourage them. I try to be diplomatic and supportive, to a fault, and I try to keep my criticism constructive… Others here have, too. You just keep throwing it back in our faces.

I think you’re in love with the *idea* of being a film maker, but the way you go about all of this, it’s never going to go anywhere for you, not with your attitude…

You reject opportunities to learn the craft, then wonder why your projects come out… the way they do.

You ask for advice, then never take it, always whining back with an excuse why you can’t apply it.

You claim you study film; you throw around random tech and historical references, but never seem try to apply the most basic, straightforward techniques, because, I don’t know, they’re boring or too obvious or something, you’re claiming you’re trying to challenge and improve yourself, but won’t learn the basics and get them solid first…? You only want to be avant-garde or something.

I recommend some time-out to deeply, deeply re-assess your life choices. Get counseling. Maybe try welding school.

(His next reply will, true to form, go something like: “Okay, thanks… what kind of counselor should I go see, and should they know something about film? I don’t want to research the difference between a psychoanalyst and a therapist, because Google isn’t a thing; can someone lay it out for me? Do they have to be local, or are they better in Toronto or Quebec? I can’t afford to go to those places, by the way, because reasons, but thought I should ask anyway, just so I can get you to say sure, go, whatever, and then say I can’t afford to go to them. Though I’ll then deny I don’t have money… never said I don’t have money… I have plenty of money, I just can’t spend any of it on the basic things I need for the job, because I might not have enough for the exotic and inappropriate thing I want to buy and use in the wrong way, that has nothing to do with the job at hand, and would actually ruin the entire project, and I don’t want to rent the exotic thing I totally can so afford, because that’s too hard and I can’t manage the timing, because my volunteers control my schedule… but I’m pushing ahead with more productions, even though my current ones aren’t finished…that way I have an excuse not to start the new thing AND not to finish the old thing, at the same time… I was told I was unresponsive to advice and counseling, so maybe I should just keep going in circles, doing what has not been working for me, yet again, instead? But I’ve always done that clockwise; is there a professional reason to do it counter-clockwise, and does that still hold valid when I shoot in Australia? Because I’m not going to Australia. But I wanted a professional opinion on it. My friends say Tasmania is cooler though. Except in the summer. Does it matter if the counselor has one of those fainting couches, or can I sit in a regular chair? Should the chair be ergonomic? In case I have back problems? I don’t. Have back problems, that is. But I thought I’d ask, just so that once you spend time answering that, I can say it didn’t matter… and then I’ll stand, or I’ll maybe get one of those big, bouncy inflated ball chair things, but what color should it be, because I think that’s really important to my process… Should I watch movies with psychiatrists in them, before the counseling, to get a perspective on the process? And which ones from obscure directors would be best? Or should I just go to the local Timmies and chat up the counterman over Timbits and coffee? (Which coffee? Because I wanna talk at length about the coffee choices, then tell you I don’t drink it, I actually drink tea. Or more accurately, KambuCha, which I ferment at home, but it doesn’t come out tasting professional, despite me not following the brewing instructions I got from three different Kambucha forums and using a bean tin for the fermentation cell; I want to be a trail-blazer of Kombucha, so I throw in different things to make experimental infusions, and I don’t know why the last guy to drink some of it was hospitalized, I didn’t have the money to go to the hospital to ask him and find out… okay, I *did* have hospital money, but something about the lime Jello there was just bugging me, it’s not pro enough…The Tim Horton’s countermen are.. they’re like, kind of like a bartender, and bartenders listen to people and give advice, right? At least they do in movies. Or maybe Dunkin Donuts would be better? I could go to one in Toronto… but my car isn’t up to the trip, I really want a Lotus Esprit to make that trip, but I’m saving up for a Maybach with snow tires in front and duallies on the back. The car I use, after I didn’t listen to the guy at the garage, I took two wheels off, so technically, it would be a motorcycle, but it doesn’t handle like the Ducati’s at the track do, I don’t know if it’s my technique, maybe I can send you a video of that for analysis….would YouTube be good enough for that, or should I use Vimeo for higher quality? I don’t know why you people refuse to help me by taunting me with advice I asked for but refuse to take. Hey, do you smell burnt toast, all of a sudden?” )

(falls on floor, frothing and spasming. Nobody reacts.)

[Mark Suszko]

You could ask the guild if you could job shadow a real DP or take an internship of some kind as an unpaid grip, and just observe what the pro does. Remarkable how much you can pick up by observing and osmosing.

[Mark Suszko]

You ever read “Stone Soup”?

[Mark Suszko]

Before you hire a production designer, hire a DP with lighting gear and experience. A lot of your footage needs better and more consistent lighting technique, and lighting that enhances the mood you’re trying to create. Some of this can be adjusted a bit in post with better color grading, but it’s not a miracle cure.

I know this is hard on a micro budget, but lighting and sound are two things you just can’t afford to skimp on. They’re fundamentals.

[Mark Suszko]

It’s very easy in Apple Motion to use the tracker to do this. Then publish or export the vid to fcpx.
You *can* use FCPX plug-ins to stabilize footage in a general way, automatically, as in shaky footage. And you can keyframe the video x and y positions in the timeline in FCPX, but doing that by hand can become tedious and will not be as accurate as using the tracker in Motion.

[Mark Suszko]

There’s a ton of free online training out there on lighting for film and video. But one place I point people to when they are starting out is the online interactive lighting setup made by Lowel. It’s very fundamental, but timeless because of that. I like how you can turn on and off various lights in the interactive lesson to see their effect. The lessons use all Lowel gear, obviously, but the principles are universal for film and video work, and will work with any brand of lighting gear you own.

https://lowel.tiffen.com/edu/

As to running an external monitor for the DSLR, well that’s fine for times when you’re fixed in one spot, but not very easy to do on locations where you move around a lot. I’d encourage you to consider getting a dedicated video camera, even a used one.