[Mark Suszko]

Light the talent with HMI’s or additional sunlight bounce, to reduce the contrast ratio and allow you to bring the sky back down.

Or, optimize exposure for the scene and people, and let the sky blow out …and replace it in post. That happens a lot more often than people realize.

Adding shutter can work like adding ND… up to a point, then you get motion artifacts.

Substitutes or quasi-substitutes for ND filters include ND gels, scrims, and black panty hose stretched over the lens or better, the back of the lens.

[Mark Suszko]

Answer: neither : use a jib:-)

[Mark Suszko]

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s absolutes.

No, 100 percent of editors do not own creative cloud. A nonzero number of them may own (“own” being the operative term) older non-cloud versions of Adobe applications, but they may also have analogues to those Adobe products made by others, things like GIMP or Affinity, Apple Motion, Fusion, etc.

Each artist chooses the tools that they like best.

[Mark Suszko]

You can make a lot of shots work better as long as the eyelines are right… I mean “eyeline” in both the sense of the direction the eyes are aiming at, AND an imaginary line across the screen that the eyes rest upon, regardless of the framing.

The viewer subconsciously keys on eyes and mouths and their relative positions on the screen. Any discontinuity or change in those relationships jars the awareness – we call those “jump cuts” and they can be used to deliberate effect or minimized to improve the visual flow.

Specifically to your question, then, (and I wish you could post stills to illustrate the point better), I ask, does the 2-shot of the couple still preserve the line of sight and overall spatial relationship, when the 2- shot switches in and out of singles? This is what I would strive for, that in the live switch or the edit, the viewer’s subconscious never has to figure out if the seating arrangement has changed or the look-space has been steered to a new target.

And does it violate the line of action rule? If so, is it justified for some creative or dramatic reason? Or just to monkey wit the viewer’s spacial perception?

[Mark Suszko]

Well, the approvals thing is not uncommon in corporate or government situations. The main problem I see is that your approval process is linear, hierarchical, and undefined, and they need to “flatten” it to one step where everyone sees it at the same time and gives their two cents and then one designated person makes the final decisions on what feedback to act on.

In your case if it was me, I’d post the video on a private YouTube or Vimeo page or on a corporate server, then make a group email to the list of stakeholders who have a say, give them that link. Preferably, a link that “expires” in one week, to put a clock on the decision making process… Then ask that they come to a consensus between themselves and tell ONE PERSON, who then tells you.

Really, this is a failure of management; IMO, there should be one person designated as the point person and interface to the stake-holders, and neither the ex-peer or the boss above seems to have voluntarily assumed that role yet. That’s a bad sign.

Another point I’ll make as a writer, editor and producer, is that using a Treatment stage before the script stage eliminates a lot of the changes that will otherwise come and hit you out of nowhere, at the end, there they cost the most time and/or money to fix. If all the decision-makers had spent the time in pre-production to go over and work thru the treatment, where changes cost nothing, and everyone gets a good grasp of the project, there should be few surprises in post.

As to the spellcheck issue… really, Prem doesn’t do that? FCPX does….

[Mark Suszko]

You might see flicker from the refresh rate of the LED’s. So have a camera with an adjustable scan rate, Sony calls theirs “clear-scan”, but most camera makers have something similar in their higher-end units.

[Mark Suszko]

I recall how they started the first “The Incredibles” movie: it’s documentary interview footage meant to set up what their past was like. To get across the time difference, the doc footage was 4:3 matted into the center of a widescreen frame. They do a slow push to make it bigger, but they always keep it centered with lots of dead space around it. When they then smash-cut to more modern times, they go full- frame.

A concept I like in mixing old 4×3 footage into 16×9 is to project it onto an iconic object, something that references back to the period, and *that* object is shot in widescreen. Could be the side of the building where it happened. Could be a still life of related prop objects, like clothing, personal effects, etc….

A very typical version of that is to composite the old stuff onto an old 4×3 TV set on a limbo backdrop, and then fly 16×9 camera moves around that TV to punctuate and add emphasis. Makes a fun device to cover edits. You can get more creative yet, and composite the shots onto the monitors of a TV Director’s live-switch room, as well as the viewfinders of studio cameras, with a reproduction of the original set on the stage, perhaps. So you’re like a ghost walking around the production as if it was happening in real-time, but only visible in those monitors and viewfinders.

You can do something similar by setting up an old projector and movie screen in a smoky dark room, then compositing your old footage into that screen, and again moving your camera around this framing device.

Yet another method that doesn’t involve pan-and-scan is to to make a multi-matted 16×9 composition, putting your 4×3 stuff in one side and then adding changing trains of dissolving stills in boxes around it. Change the positions and arrangement of the boxes from time to time but keep using the rule of thirds and golden mean in creating the arrangements.

These are creative ways to avoid using the pan and scan blow-up or the matted duplicate blurred clip as background.

I run a youtube channel and some people that send me vids give me vertical video. 9 and agita, obviously). I found a public domain shot of a hand holding an iPhone, and I composite their vertical video into that 16×9 frame to show what they sent me, and I like that a lot more than the blurred sidewalls thing. You might consider THAT for your 4×3, with the conceit being that your clips are all on a web site you made up.

[Mark Suszko]

…Rewrite? ☺

I’d say go for what’s practical, forget the super long lens approach, which is going to provide more headaches than you realize now, and shoot with motion-compensating rigs. You should be able to rent something usable in any bigger city.

Also, think about what might be possible using digital set extensions in post, if you can shoot practicals in a smaller space but then extend it via planar tracking and compositing. This is a trick that goes at least as far back as the old Captain Video serials. Shoot a ton of HDR stills of the entire garage, leave subtle markers in key areas, before and after you shoot the action… You might be surprised what a clever compositing ace can do, if you block things out beforehand.

You might look at the FilmRiot videos online for some inspiration on how to pull off such shots on your budget.

[Mark Suszko]

If they went with a lowball guy instead of a Greg Ball guy, it’s their loss… but maybe you can make some back-end when they come to you to “fix this in post, pretty-please?” Or the next time they are deciding to do something, maybe they’ll remember you.

Standards have changed and a lot of these kinds of gigs have been lost to lowball operators and amateurs who don’t see the value in the gear and skills we bring to a job. However… the product they get out of that lowball approach typically doesn’t last very long and is soon deleted or forgotten. Because bad communication is not effective. A bad job isn’t worth the “saved” money. I think that’s where you can still make a sales case on these prospects: “sure, you can DIY it and get *something*… but will anybody watch it and be moved to the action you want? Because recording something is one thing, but crafting a successful, EFFECTIVE message… that’s quite another.”

[Mark Suszko]

Check out the Mevo.