[Mark Suszko]

To add to the good suggestions here, FFmpeg now has a GUI front end; for a few bucks, it will replace mpeg streamclip in cases where your OS upgrade kills that app. But I’d first go with batch converts in Compressor, if you already have that.

[Mark Suszko]

It would be wise to find out ahead if there are issues. Did you try this:

https://www.iatse.net/member-resources/local-union-directory

[Mark Suszko]

Unmotivated zooms are an affectation. You’re not Wes Anderson. Unless the film is a parody of Hong Kong or Bollywood martial arts films, there’s no reason to make such a camera move today.

[Mark Suszko]

It sounds more like you were recording a deposition. And I’ve done those too. In one way, it was some of the easiest money I ever made, at the time. Locked-off medium shot in a board room, just change the VHS tapes every 2 hours, make sure the audio is good and that there’s an analog clock with a second hand somewhere in the shot… this was back in the very early 80’s…

While I can tell your experience was tense, shooting DITL or prospectus videos on location is a bit different.

One malpractice case I worked on, at the time it was for a record amount. Case of a birth delivery gone wrong, and the kid got brain damage. Pretty severe. Only, not easy to figure out what the kid’s level of awareness was, since they were paraplegic, nearly quadriplegic, very little motor function, and unable to verbalize. The issue was how much money the award was going to be, in terms of the costs of supporting this child for whatever their natural life span was going to be, and the costs of the very intense therapy involved in seeing to the kid’s cognitive needs, as well as physical. The opposition’s argument was that the kid had no higher brain function so there was no point in awarding extra money for tutoring, etc.

But how do you know? How do you know how much cognition is in a toddler’s mind when he’s locked into an unresponsive body?

This is the part of the story that really stays with me:

The family was working with the Rehab Institute of Chicago, one of the world’s best. Their techs had come up with a communication system that used what the kid could still control, which was his eyes. And it was a real swords-into-plowshares moment, which grabbed me. They basically hacked a version of the helmet-based gun cuing system from the Apache attack helicopter, which was new tech at the time, and turned it into a communication device for the child.

It was built into a pair of eyeglass frames: an Infra-red laser LED bounced a beam off the eyeballs to track eye movement. In the Apache, this tech let a gunner aim a turret-mounted machine cannon by just -looking- at a target. The clear lenses on the kid’s glasses had little icons in a circle around the periphery of each lens: the icons represented things like yes/no, hot/ cold/ hungry, thirsty, pain/no pain… numbers and letters. Even a little ghost (the kid liked stories about ghosts). It was cabled to an early Macintosh, running custom code, all strapped into his wheelchair. Reading the eye movements and blinks, the computer gave the kid a voice.

Yeah, same one as Stephen Hawking’s.

So we’re there to document the physical care the kid has to get every day, the changing, the washing, catheterization, urine bag change-out, the dressing, the feeding… that’s pretty intense stuff, very private, you have to show it while trying to not be obtrusive or show an angle that’s overly dramatic or embarrassing… then once the kid was set up in his chair, we documented the process of testing this coms rig, demonstrating that the kid was aware and able to communicate, and to what level. Watching him smile and tell his mom: “I love you, mom” using his eyes… well, I only made day rate on that job, but I’ll never forget the job satisfaction I got from the assignment.

It was also a technical challenge, in that we had to observe the testing of the kid without being seen by him, which would have distracted him too much, and called the entire operation into question. Because the other side looks for any reason to disqualify the video, remember. Our rigs were primitive, big and clunky; Ikegami HL79’s and u-matic portable decks. My boss was at wits’ end on how to do it, wishing he had a camera blind of some sort, or a one-way mirror. I had an inspiration, and said we needed *two* mirrors… we rigged up a kind of periscope using gaff tape, two mirrors we found in the house, and some auto-poles, rigged in vertical mode, so we could shoot from behind the kid, out of his sight, while the lens could still see him from the front, by shooting telephoto and bouncing thru the mirrors. Worked better than expected. The boss was super-impressed by my improvisation. Yeah, I felt I earned my money that day.

More to the point of the case, thru the use of the eyeglass device, experts were then able to evaluate the kid’s cognitive abilities and determine that yes, he was aware… he -could- be taught and educated, at least to a high school level, maybe more. And so the jury award or settlement money went up substantially, not just to pay for what had already been achieved, but to pay for the expensive tutoring and therapy that would improve the child’s quality of life, allow them to interact with the family, and to help take the eyeglass system from lab prototype to something reliable and simple enough for their daily home use… and coincidentally, to help further develop the technology, so it could help others as well.

Another case I worked on was related to discrimination against the handicapped. It was a more straight-ahead DITL job to show all the little things that pop up to hinder a chair-bound individual in getting thru their day and going to work. She was the victim of a prom night car crash by a drunk driver. Left her paraplegic. Basically an ADA accommodation case, we were documenting all the bumps and barriers that the award money would go to eliminating or mitigating, from widening doors and adding motorized openers/closers, to re-doing the kitchen and bathroom to accommodate a chair-bound person’s height and reach, and making modifications to the workplace, back when ADA was a new idea. Again, this was a case where once the other side’s lawyers saw what a jury was going to see, they quickly settled, and the plaintiff got what they needed to live their life.

They’re not all happy endings, though. On one case I worked, it was a unique combination of deposition and DITL/ professional evaluation, to try and show the level of residual mental function in a head injury victim (bike accident).
All I’ll say about it is I will NEVER ride without a helmet.

Ever.

So yeah the stakes are high. The money’s OK. Not great, but OK. The sense of personal growth and job satisfaction is very high, though… this is not about using your craft to talk people into changing their brand of toothpaste. The job changes lives. And it changes you.

[Mark Suszko]

You *could* add to the existing DVDs you make, a “Bonus material” folder containing the High-def version of the show in MPEG4 or h.264 or h.265 format, or just burn the files to DVD with a note on the disc that this will only play in a computer. Of course, you just made it easier for a pirate to copy your high-def product as well.

I wonder if you could do something where you stream it thru their phones without it being able to be archived locally. You’d basically rent a live viewing each time. Split the charges with the provider/provisioner. Still can be defeated by a determined pirate, but maybe too much work for the casual viewer.

[Mark Suszko]

You could change from DVD to BluRay if it was only an issue of high def quality. Every Xbox is also a BluRay player. But I’m going to suggest that your entire business model might need to change.

I’ve had this conversation before. There is no bulletproof technological fix to thwart a dedicated pirate. People are too clever and enjoy the challenge of defeating copy protection schemes for fun as well as profit.

Instead, I suggest you leverage the power of human nature, which is highly reliable. There are two kinds of pirate: fans that simply want to altruistically share the material as much as they can, (without paying, if possible) and mercenaries, who are in it to make a profit. You can leverage one and defeat the other by going one of two routes.

They are both based on a key strategy: give the product away.

By that, I mean, charge an up-front price to even begin the project, based on a figure that takes into account your costs and your profit margin.

Version A of this model is, you take a small token fee (“consideration” is the term of art) up front, to make it a binding contract, then shoot and edit it, but with the written agreement you will never release *any* copies to *anyone*, until you hit a minimum target number of advance pre-sales. You thus get ALL your money up front, by day of show, so the piracy won’t matter. You also have to be comfortable with the all-or-nothing nature of this deal, and the fact there will be few if any follow-on sales. But it’s a question of a certainty for receiving one amount, versus the risk of not making enough the other way. A feature of this approach of a minimum buy up-front is, it recruits all the stage moms into becoming your sales force, to make sure the payment is secured. They are also self-policing. This is a model that worked for me in my early recital shooting days.

Version B of this model is, you get a sponsor or group of sponsors to underwrite the costs of production and your minimum profit margin. Same as a high school or college yearbook, or weekly church bulletin. This is more work for somebody, probably you. You use the underwriting to pay your expenses and most of your profit margin, while reducing the price to free or maybe five bucks a throw. Typical underwriters would be the local soda distributor, restaurants, Military recruiters, prom/formals rental boutiques, youth fashion stores, car dealerships, any business that targets that demographic. In exchange you put advertising breaks in the product, and you give it away. You actually encourage copying to widen the distribution. The fans who want to share the material will now become your free distribution army. And the mercenary pirates won’t waste time and energy pirating something that’s free or that they only make two bucks on.

I suppose another variation would be to put it on YouTube with full monetization, get paid by YouTube instead of the moms. Again, that model gets better, the wider you make the viewership. There however, you will have to be scrupulous about having all the various rights and permissions properly obtained for the play, the music in it, etc.

And you hinted at this one: get the school district to pay you and they get it back thru activity fees or tuition or whatever. There the issue again becomes complicated by the legalities of proper copyright procedure and school district lawyers will be very risk-averse.

I’d like to hear what you finally decide to do, and how it went. Best of luck.

[Mark Suszko]

Realistically how often would the camera in such situations need to be zoomed or have the focus changed in the first place, from being fully wide and focused at infinity? In the example given, leaving autofocus off and setting the camera full wide, focus at infinity, with sufficient light to have good DOF, there would have been no issues when the hand was raised into shot. The typical use for a hand-held cam is to work in close around a moving subject(s) and the shots 99 percent of the time would not need any zooming or re-focusing because the camera is already being physically moved to re-frame and direct our attention from moment to moment.

My cranky-old-man’s take is, if you’re also needing to do complex manipulations to the already hand-held camera lens *besides* moving it, you may be over-complicating the shot, …or using the wrong tools.

[Mark Suszko]

OK, but I retain the movie rights:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Grinner still has that fire in the belly of reckless youth; he’ll sleep when he’s dead. ☺

I was the same when I was younger. I took the long hours and toughed it out, partly out of the drive to work, partly because when you’re young you can recover from the hard hours easier. And we’ve all done it, to some degree.

I know my friend Grinner is kidding a little bit, but the topic makes me want so say something, not directed specifically to his comment so much, but just in general…

But now I’m in my… (momentary audio dropout)…’s, and I did a 17-hour day yesterday, shooting and driving, no breaks, and yeah, I can function today, but would I be at my best? How much use am I to the next client, when I’ve burned the candle so long? Or to friends and family? Are they getting my best effort? Am I making the best decisions? Are my skills sufficiently sharp after being degraded by fatigue? Did the client pay for me to be performing at this level, or at a higher level, and am I living up to the expectations?

The overtime is nice and all. I get to send it to mom, or buy myself a new toy from time to time… But too many of these trips in a row, and now you’re talking safety hazard, to oneself and others. Never mind the quality of the work you can do. And overtime, I must point out, is a penalty paid for stealing away the quality time you would have spent elsewhere, with people that matter to you. It’s a penalty but not really a replacement for those lost moments and at some point in time, when you look back, the trade-off may seem to have been a less-optimal choice. (Insert “Cat’s In The cradle” video link here)

Every individual’s got to weigh the pros and cons and decide when and where to set a smart limit. to know the real value of the time you give away, and the real value of what they’re paying you for it. When you let yourself be pressured into over-extending yourself, the mistakes made can be expensive, in ways you never imagined.

[Mark Suszko]

The cool kids tend to use a cart called the rock-and-roller. You can get add-ons for it that create shelves and things.

I’ve used the same old fashioned hand truck from Harbor Freight for three decades, changing out the wheels as they wear out. It’s narrow and shorter than a Rock-n-Roller, but makes it easier to navigate narrow spaces. Porta-Brace wanted an insane amount of money for a tripod holder… I bought a $1.50 metal electrical outlet box at the Ace Hardware and bolted that to the bottom of my cart’s frame; the tripod legs rest in it like a cup, the top gets lashed to the handlebars with bungees. Works great.

I recommend a cart with the fattest air-filled tires you can manage, to make it easier to traverse bumps. Also, get one or both of the smaller, swiveling caster wheels on the cart to be equipped with a foot-operated friction brake. This makes loading and unloading much easier on non-level surfaces outdoors.