[Mark Suszko]

I’d guess either could work but maybe Fusion would give you easier control and simpler ways to revise the overall timing and the masks/layers.

Think of it like the misdirection techniques a magician uses to hide his trick. Pull their eye to a static, unchanging element, while you swap out other elements in the background.

[Mark Suszko]

There’s a free video effect plug-in called coverflow or cover-flux, something like that, that will make a file of stills behave like you are asking about. It’s drag-and drop easy. What I can’t tell you is,how you take the video generated by that and make it a file that scrolls forwards and backwards under a mouse.

[Mark Suszko]

Instead of transitioning between two complete frames, what if select pieces of one frame were replaced separately? As in, mask off the stream element from the first video, and dissolve it into the incoming shot, before replacing it with the actual stream in the incoming shot. Next, mask off the foreground from one shot and replace only that… etc., see what I’m saying? You’d still be doing dissolves, but dissolving a feathered selection, rather than the entire frame at once. Staged carefully and timed right, it may give an other-worldly quality, or just a different feeling.

[Mark Suszko]

Actual doctors and lawyers may have some job security for a while yet, however….. there’s a glut of lawyers on the market, depressing their income potential dramatically. We graduate more new lawyers every year, than the total of all lawyers in Japan. That blows my mind.

In fact, a lot of new law school graduates end up doing non-law work, in marketing and operations, the degree being more of a certification, conferring proof that they have a head for organizing and administrating. Paralegals are already feeling the pinch as AI “expert systems” have started replacing live workers in this field. What’s coming, and is already partly here, is that paralegals and young newly-graduated lawyers are less frequently setting up an office or joining a partnership, and becoming migrant workers.

They now go to a place similar to a “boiler room” call center, where they are “rented” to process legal documents on a per-task basis to any company legal department that wants some scutwork processed. Corporations are “virtualizing” their legal departments with these out-of-house contractual firms. And that’s highly efficient compared to keeping a staff or lawyers on retainer… but it doesn’t put a dent in the law school and college student loans it took to get to this point for the worker. And that cubical lawyer isn’t building a career or professional reputation doing this kind of anonymous scrivnerism.

Now just imagine a similar scenario for video editing. Wait. …you don’t have to. A laptop, a fast internet connection and cloud-based tools and storage… and you’re an editor, working from the dirt floor of a yurt somewhere. It’s already here. Working from home, you can be competing for edit jobs against people from Milwaukee to Mumbai. And can you survive at this career, if you want to live in Milwaukee on Mumbai levels of income.

I foresee that our industry will stratify into a small layer of well-paying, high-performance “superstar” practitioners, and a low tier of cube farm fodder, telecommuting in to edit people’s wedding, iPhone and YouTube videos for them for a few cents an hour… and not much of a middle layer at all.

Surgeons are going to be okay for some time yet, even with robotic assistants. But the armies of medical paper-pushers… that’s going to face extreme pressure from the health care and insurance industries to replace people with programmable systems. And as the population ages, you’ll find more unskilled and semi-skilled jobs for nursing home attendants and personal care technicians… but these already get paid minimum wage with few benefits.

Will we get to a place with Universal Income? In some ways, we’re already there; it’s just not yet recognizable as such because it’s a patchwork web of inter-connecting programs and services, layers of them, each covering one small area of need or concern. Cost-efficiency, more than social concern, will likely push a consolidation and streamlining of this web of supports into one, simpler program covering everyone.

We’re in for a few decades of high social disruption, as the economy adjusts to fewer workers and lower-paid workers and higher levels of unemployment/ unemployable people with a lot of leisure time, but not much money to spend enjoying it. Altruists might envision a new Renaissance or Enlightenment, as people with basic needs met and lots of time on their hands turn from useless toil to pursue education, art, culture…. and some of that is going to happen, I suppose, for a relative few…

But the rest is going to look like the worst parts of “Idiocracy” and any of a couple dozen dystopian Sci Fi flicks.

[Mark Suszko]

Izotope is the magic wand for this, but if you can’t afford that, the noise removal system in Audacity is very good, and that’s free. Consult Youtube for one of a hundred tutorials on how to use that.

[Mark Suszko]

It does. The COW serves as a sort of “institutional memory” for a lot of folks, the wise old office expert that never retires. You may not want to keep all the sturm und drang stuff, or the petty slap-fights, but even some portion of that will have a certain value later… as a window to what people’s thinking was at a certain point in time. To know where you’re going, it helps to have some idea where you’ve been and how things got that way. If only so that we can question the underlying assumptions from time to time, and use that insight to move forward.

Thanks for all you and your “boss” have done and continue to do.

[Mark Suszko]

I feel that I’ve been exceptionally patient about this, because I sincerely like mentoring where and as I can. And some of what we’ve talked about could conceivably help others.

But your posts continue to read like the most elaborate trolling attempts I’ve ever seen. I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt. I’m not the only one who’s thought this, but I was giving you more chances. I gave you script, directing and editing advice when you asked questions. But you don’t ever take it. You only come up with reasons not to try it.

Time to put up. It’s a long weekend coming up, and I can’t donate any more time to this right now, I’ve got edits of my own to finish…. I don’t know if this is really a troll, or someone on the spectrum who needs a sympathetic and patient ear, but congratulations, you’ve run out my clock and I have billable time to put to use elsewhere than play rope-a-dope. Just close your browser, try cutting the footage the way I suggested, and then post it here, and let others comment. Then try their ideas. Either it’s better or it’s not. Actually try it, don’t debate it any more.

But right now, you’re not moving the plot forward. I can’t add water to a full glass.

[Mark Suszko]

Try a cut based on my suggestions with what you DO have and get back to us.

[Mark Suszko]

Ask Mike Figgis:

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

[Mark Suszko]

OK this is my honest reaction to your new clip, me trying to give constructive criticism:

Shots 1 and 2 are unnecessary. Pick it up with 3 and 4 and 5; the red ‘vette leaves frame left, on the cut to her observing, add a beat to the front of that before she makes to start and follow. It works even better if she has a book, a drink or snack she has to put down first, so the audience can infer that she’s been staking him out for some unspecificed time prior, then there’s finally some action. That’s art direction helping add semiotic details.

Let her drive out of frame as a psuedo-wipe. The following shot from behind is redundant in light of the very next shot from the reverse angle, and the “tromboning” effect of the two shots cut together like that, back-to-back heading into and away from the camera without an intervening transitioning angle is jarring. You need one, not both.

So just pick it up at 17 seconds with the ‘vette approaching the parking spot. Throw a stabilizer plug-in on the shot to remove the camera shake, this should have been a locked-off shot. All of them should have. Stabilize them all.

The shot of the guy exiting the car and walking out at :32 sec is too short and too late, up-cut it and extend a beat or two.

Front windshield shot of the girl is redundant; go directly to the side shot of her reaching for the glove box and the XCU of the gun in the glove box.

Shot of her putting gun in pocket at :39 is redundant and very awkward; doesn’t move the story forward and looks clumsy and impractical as action. *Some* of that , perhaps you can sell as being in-character for her if she’s an ingenue, and not meant to be a private eye and is just a civvie winging it, but I’d dump that shot if that’s not in the script.

Skip all her walking shots and go right to her peeking thru the bushes at :53 sec.. Audience can make the jump between the tight glove box and the new establisher of the bushes, and it’s a cleaner transition in terms of line of action.

Do not make the audio of the two men audible.

She can’t hear that dialogue from that distance. And the dialogue is worthless, communicates nothing and is awkward. Much better and more realistic to keep it a mystery. You could throw in some XCU cuts to tight 2-shots so we can try to lip-read or at least see expressions as they talk. But that’s not strictly needed, just a frill.

I don’t know how or why we can hear this conversation at all… Unless you mean to shift POV suddenly to audience being omnicient, which is probably a mistake at this point. You’ve spent all this time setting up the girl tracking the guy, to see the rendezvous, trying to get us invested in her quest to find something out and make a plot connection… then you make all that irrelevant if we suddenly are invisibly omniscient and can hear them talking to each other… is she (and by proxy, us) meant to know this info at this stage or not?

May as well have just started the scene there in the construction site and saved many minutes and pages and shooting.

Also, that rendezvous out in the open like that makes no practical sense, for several reasons. One, you don’t sell what the old man is doing there specifically, versus some other location. It would have helped if he’d been walking a dog. Or supervising the disposal of a body in one of the construction holes. Gives him an excuse to be hanging out there at that hour, apparently alone in a spot nobody would choose for casual outdoorsiness.., Or if it’s a property of his, the old man should be seen organizing some workmen, inspecting the job, controlling or supervising or inspecting something meaningful to our understanding of his identity, his role, the plot. Heck, even him sitting there playing with an amateur telescope would have worked. As it is, he’s only there because you wanted him there, not because the story needs him there.

And we don’t see anything meaningful about the briefcase he delivered to the old man. We don’t necessarily need to see into it and at that distance, we can’t… but the action certainly doesn’t sell that the case is important enough to deliver out there, rather than anywhere else… if it’s worth killing for, they’re not treating it like that.

From that distant POV, I’d have the old man seem to wind-up his conversation and suddenly motion to or turn towards the spot where our POV is, and motion towards our general direction, ….the younger man follows his pointing finger, nods assent, and starts to walk purposefully towards our girl, our camera POV… We don’t know if we’ve been spotted, or if the old man just asked the young man to check out the parking lot, but the result is now the same: he’s headed our way.

Smash-cut back to her at the bushes, seeing that he’s heading her way to check something out, startling, and she’s having an “oh $%#^” moment, has to bolt… but to where? Can she make it to the car? The way you set it up so far, yes, it’s right behind her. If you’d have had her move around to try to get closer, then there’s the opportunity for her to be cut-off from her car as escape and that motivates a chase or at least an evasion sequence…. and now you can intiate a chase that starts slow but builds because he didn’t really see her until she started to run, his path towards her was initially just coincidence.

She brought a gun… does she mean to use it? To confront the young man, the old one, or both? To try and grab the case? If it’s for protection, would she pull it at this point? Just to be ready?I s it even loaded, did she check that? It’s going to affect if she decides to stand or run. Would fumbling with it now and re-considering it’s use, add a meaningful beat here? Chekhov wants to know!

That’s what I’d do with these shots, more or less, not knowing the script.

Also, all this talk of lenses and rigs and do you not own a tripod? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, why is evey shot hand-held-looking with no reason? Is this the long-lens technique you were going on about? Because that’s not working for me unless you stabilize every shot. This ending shot of the two guys needed much shorter DOF in my opinion, and a telephoto *should* have given that to you, but I don’t see it here. You might be able to fix it a little in post by adding some vignette gradient blur to simulate the tighter DOF. But you have no objects at different distances in the line of sight to sell the DOF or help frame the shot or add interest. The concrete pipes are an obvious choice for that.

So the TL/DR version: you can tighten this up a lot, but you need a few shots this sequence doesn’t yet have, to make it really work, plot-wise, and the shaky shots all need stabilizing. And you need to make some choices about when and where to switch viewpoint to omniscient. I’d avoid it as much as possible here.

I hope I wasn’t too brutal, but you asked for advice and I’m making a sincere effort to help. I don’t mind at all if others jump in with alternative suggestions, and they may be more right-on in their opinions; this is how we all learn, myself included. I don’t pretend to perfection. But I have my own style, which you can derive from my comments. There are always multiple ways to interpret a scene and even completely revamp what it was meant to be, no one “rightest” way. But there are plenty more ways to get it wrong.

Always ask:

Does this shot or sequence tell the story or reveal character, and does it move that story along.