[Mark Suszko]

Well that clarifies it a bit. You should add this info to an edited re-post of your question in the cinematography forum, and the guys who know how to work with DSLR’s will chime in there I’m sure. And they won’t try to sell you anything.

[Mark Suszko]

It might help a little to know what exactly you’re shooting with the DSLR: tabletop product demos? How-tos? Unboxings? Fashion? Plant tours/ real estate walk-thrus? Training lectures? What? The subject, and the final use the footage is put to, dictate so much of how you shoot and what toys you need to enhance it.

[Mark Suszko]

You may not have expected this response, but I think you may be missing an opportunity here. Bear with me.

Ask yourself why they’re depending on using their phones if there’s a dedicated shooter/editor available.

Is it because you’re spread too thin and aren’t as available as they need?

Is your turn-around time too slow?

Or is it that they are unaware of your services, or it’s too time-intensive to do something spur-of-the-moment with you?

Do they just not know what you can do?

Or do they just a very casual opinion of media and how it’s done?

Do they think phone video is “better”, i.e. more “legitimate” or “truthful” or otherwise valid, than using more traditional capture methods? ( I have to laugh here as I personally still don’t much care for using DSLR’s over dedicated camcorders but that’s a discussion for another day).

See, none of those problems will be solved just by taking more DSLR courses. Though of course, take some if you need them… No, there’s a different problem here and if you want to have good job security and advancement, pay attention to what their actions are telling you. They are choosing their phones over you. It is vital to your job you figure out why, and what you can do about that.

They’re shooting badly with their phones; you could turn this issue around, and give mini clinics or one on one tutoring or make a tutorial slide show or in-house video on how to do that better, and point them to things like proper apps for shooting from the phone, that control focus and iris and sound, stabilizer apps, etc. you could help them get cheap, even used tripods and mounts, and a shotgun or wired lav for the phones, those lavs are like 20 bucks but make a world of difference. And not coincidentally, they end up giving you better, easier raw material to work with.

There are various benefits to this approach that may not be immediately obvious. One of which is, you’ll be establishing, or re-establishing yourself, as *the* video authority, the guy everybody comes to, who makes their stuff better. You’re proving your value. You will make good personal connections to these people by mentoring them and making them look better and do better. You build trust with them; instead of looking at them as competition, you’re recruiting them. What you may find happens next from this approach is, even though you’ve given them the ability to work independently from you, and have better results, because they have grown an appreciation for what goes into good media, they will start handing off more things to you that they want “done right”, instead of doing everything themselves. On your end, you’ll have to be very fast on turn-around of their stuff, and always improve the look and sound of what they give you, any way you can. They give you crummy vertical video of a bust shot? Frame it to the side and add graphics and text to the rest of the frame, to make it look polished and intentional. Clean up their audio; you can’t believe how huge an issue this really is in making your stuff stand out from theirs.

Other people can give you better tutoring on the DSLR stuff. But realize you have something more urgent, more fundamental going on here and IMO you need to address that as a priority.

[Mark Suszko]

It sounds like you may have made an error in marking the end point of the timeline. Go to the timeline’s end, and mark an in-point (“I”) where you want the thing to end, then hit the right-arrow or the “media end” button to take you to the end of that long section of black, mark the out-point there (“O”). Cut or delete the highlighted section.

Now, re-mark the in and out points of the part you wanted to output, save the project, then export.

This kind of repair can also be done from within Quicktime or using VLC or MPEG Streamclip to mark the section you want to export.

[Mark Suszko]

Too late to help, but wanted to add that Photoshop can batch convert a folder of tiffs or whatever into targas or whatever.

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t normally disagree with Gary, but Storyboards can be very helpful, particularly for inexperienced teams.

They don’t necessarily need to be highly detailed or fancy. Somewhere I still have a literal cocktail napkin with some stick figure sketches that the client and I used to storyboard a spot. I grew up on using the two-column TV script format with little TV bezel-shaped drawing boxes across from each key piece of dialog, and stick figures and arrows were about all you could do in those, unless you got creative with the Xerox machine, scissors and glue. Later, I used the free version of SketchUp to make my boards with, sometimes, PowerPoint slides output to paper.

Point is, the specifics don’t matter. The boards, in whatever format you want, make for a quick visual way to communicate the needs of the scene to the crew, so they can get on with logistics, props, lighting setup, camera placement, etc. and they give an actor an impression of the framing the Director is going after.

This can save a lot of time by standardizing everyone’s understanding of the Director’s vision. Of course things may change and evolve from there, but it’s a starting point. I do not suggest the boards be super-elaborate for live action. Gestural, simplistic is better. For Animations and CGI, heck yes, the more elaborate the better. How to share the boards with the crew is, whatever works best for you.

Important note: the kind of boards you do for the set, would be very different from the storyboards you present to a client or potential funding people, or the editor. When you are pitching a project, more formal, detailed, artistic, fleshed-out boards and even animatics that spell everything out are necessary, because the people you’re pitching to may not have the creative vision or ability to extrapolate what a finished product might look like. The flip side of that is, they may fall in love with or get hung up on a specific image in the boards and make decisions based on that, which will have deep, lasting consequences. You never know.

[Mark Suszko]

I’d suggest that rather than just a gray card, you get an actual color bar chart to use on set: part of the chart is specifically made to calibrate exposure.

And if you can afford it, get a Macbeth chart, which can really help you in the color correction phase of post.

Camera-generated bars are next to useless; you need a chart shot thru the lens, under the actual lighting conditions.

[Mark Suszko]

Apple Compressor should be able to convert the DVC Pro in batches. MPEG Streamclip can do them one by one but it’s free. But I think Mojave may have killed it.

[Mark Suszko]

The great thing about Lawrence’s suggestion is, it reduces the storage overhead because you’re not making multiple copies of the footage over and over for each new thing you make. Saves a lot of drive space.

“All magic comes with a price”, though, and the price for this trick is, lose the raw footage that’s in one shared pool, or just corrupt the symlink, and you’ve borked *every* project that depended on it. So do consider having a secondary backup somewhere.

[Mark Suszko]

Still funny, though:-)