[Mark Suszko]

So… worth it / safe to update right away…? or should I wait for the inevitable “Heyyy! That wasn’t supposed to happen!!!’

[Mark Suszko]

One thing people may not remember or think of is that you can use Greyhound busses to ship parcels cross-country. A tripod in a container I think just fits their maximum length rules… you can look that stuff up on their web site… it can be as fast as FedEx overnight, but sometimes faster and cheaper, because it goes point-to-point, station to station, no stopping at hubs or sorting centers in-between.

[Mark Suszko]

If you’re talking about how to present editing concepts to non-editors, I would start by putting them at ease with a few analogies.

One, that editing video can be just like editing a word processing document. Your goals are to fix mistakes, take out everything extraneous, and shape a narrative of your choice. Show how a typical paragraph can be improved with editing, using group input.

I’d explain that NLE editing is non-destructive; the analogy I often use is that of a iTunes Playlist: you can shuffle the order of the songs, even duplicate some and take out others, but none of this changes the actual *songs* – the only changes are to the pointer information the device uses to play them in the order you wanted.

Timeline interfaces are strange to newcomers. An analogy here might be to shoot some model train cars on a section of track, showing how they can move left to right and right to left as a unit, or that cars can be uncoupled, yanked out, and placed in a different order. As a bonus, you could lay a second, parallel track, with more cars, some of them flatcars, others box cars… and show how, when you line them up and put the camera lens at their height, the flatcars can reveal other train cars *behind* them on the next track. Another way to do this without the model trains would be to use clear sheets of plastic or glass, and show how images can be stacked together in the layers to have a base image, a key effect, and a superimposed graphic over the “top”.

Next I would lay out the major features of NLE’s that are more or less common, and discuss what they are called. Bins, tracks, viewers, meters. I would, in your place, first show some examples of old fashioned “bins” as used by real film editors, back in the hand-splicing days; cloth bags with stands of film hanging in them to keep them organized, and how an editor would take a clip from the bin and bring it to their Moviola or Kem and “audition” it, then make a splice. Our NLE GUI conventions came from the film editing world and the icons and skeuomorphs of our editing interfaces come from that world.

Now it’s time to walk thru the editing process in a logical sequence starting with the ingest and logging part, principles of organizing your raw footage to make editing easier and more fun, then the initial laying down of images and sounds on the tracks, how to make gross adjustments like trims with the i and o keys, audio level changes, and the most common shortcuts like JKL transport controls, the space bar, and etc.

Explain the “grammar” of editing: when and where cuts are used, what fades, dissolves and wipes traditionally “mean”, in terms of implying a change in location or time. Explain the main types of framing; xcu, cu, medium shot, wide shot, and how we choose to use them to establish a location or action, to orient the viewer, then to “punctuate” dialogue, action, or plot.

Advanced editing “grammar” would include the principle of the 180-degree line of action, matching cuts on action, parallel action, slo-mo and fast-mo, flashbacks and flash-forwards, “en res media” storytelling, POV shots and choosing the angles to serve the story. Demonstrate L-cuts and J-cuts, where sound and image do not change at the same time but one leads or follows the other. Demonstrate the importance of B-roll, master shots and how even supposedly useless bits of footage can be used to save a shot. Demo the use of a clip of “room tone” to fix an audio edit, and a b-roll cut-away to cover an awkward transition, remove a sound bite that’s too long, or shorten perceived passage of time.

Then comes effects like keys and supers and color correction. How a chromakley is set up and executed. How a luma key works. The importance of white balance and how to correct everything to a basic standard. What scopes are for and how to read them. How altering the color correction can drastically affect the storytelling: demo a day-for-night shot, a tri-tone blue- tinted shot for a music video, a black and white, “noir” effect, and selected color effects, AKA the “Pleasantville” effect.

Then a section about audio in depth. Not just levels, but sound design, reverb, compression, EQ effects, foley, adding music and effects cues. Show an edit cut to a pre-made audio track. Show a foley session to add footsteps and a door hinge and gunfire. Show how to record good clean audio narration,. Show how ADR looping is done. Show what audio “stems” are. talk about sample rates and levels, clipping, room tone, and how to repair common audio problems that come in from the field.

On day TWO... lol

[Mark Suszko]

Scrappiness and will to work are essential to succeed. But they don’t guarantee success. You can be the hardest-working, most deserving and ruthless Randian SOB out there and still not catch a break. You can be totally undeserving and have it fall into your lap. The odds favor the prepared and the striving. But the winners in the race often don’t recognize that we don’t all get an even start. And the system has evolved to not be a level playing field. leveling the playing field is not about entitlement, except that you are entitled under our laws to have the same shot as anybody else, and the rest is still up to the individual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K5fbQ1-zps

I like this video, but the referee should have also said near the end: “take four steps back if you have 2 x chromosomes.” Because women HAVE been handed an uneven playing field, in this business. There’s no denying it. And it won’t fix itself. We have to take active steps to do it, or it won’t get done.

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[Mark Suszko]

As great as the COW is, and while I’m sure it will give Tim and Ron a grin, I hesitate to concur with your statement that it alone devastated the paper-based industry media organs. Rather, I’d say the rise of the COW coincided with their downfall from a number of reasons, including postage costs and other “inputs” like paper and transportation and storage and printing, that were becoming more costly and reducing profit margins… even the COW did a paper-based magazine for a time, but I think that too fell away as online became more prevalent. (correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the printed mag is available any more) Like the evolutionary shift where dinos were dying off and fast little mammals began their ascendance, the online niche that the COW and some others occupy expanded and thrived, while the old print-based ecosystem became unsustainable and unresponsive. The COW didn’t “kill” anything, so much as the “victims” walked themselves off a cliff by refusing to change course. That’s my own take on it.

I’d also opine that one reason the COW did so well was that the content was timely and authentic, being highly user-based with a lot of industry pros contributing content, versus print-based mags that were not able to stay ahead of rapidly evolving topics, and their over-emphasis on “advertorial” content that was thinly-disguised advertising or obvious re-writes of press releases, with little “actionable” material to the average tech/creative person in the field. If you DID get something usable out of, say, DV Magazine, you had to wait months for it. That was my main complaint about POST; it was a pretty, glossy thing to lay on the coffee table by the client’s couch and look cool, but whenever I thumbed thru it, it was like the society party coverage pages of a newspaper; who merged with whom, who opened a new boutique, who won an award for what. But rarely anything I could use about, you know, actual *editing*… It was all Architectural Digest and not “Home Handyman” or “Popular Mechanics”. Even for free, it gave me no value.

Not so with the COW. Got a question? Get an answer. Today. Before lunch, even. And people offering actual how-to tutorials, and discussing their trade-craft openly. Not because it did THEM some immediate, particular good. But because it felt good to share and to benefit from the sharing of others, non-competitively. I can’t remember a single thing from any of my old printed subscriptions that I could have actually put to use on the job… but the COW still helps me almost every day.

[Mark Suszko]

“I can invoice you for three hours of my camera assistant’s time, or I can step-rent you a couple of lighting trucks with generators and operators and union electricians for two hours, plus the permits and street security, to light up the building practically at night… your call.”

🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Following up on Nick’s suggestion, you could also take the same locked-off shots at dawn and/or dusk, and blend them with the actual night shots, to get back some lost detail. One way I’d try that would be to convert the daytime shots to grayscale/ monochrome, then adjust blend modes and opacity to taste.

This would be easier if the camera can be locked off for several hours, and not splitting the shot over two different days. Getting everything to line up again would be difficult.

[Mark Suszko]

Didn’t we used to be able to do this task in QT Pro? Thought I’d read that someplace.

[Mark Suszko]

Any NLE should be able to do this. When you set up the bin that will hold all the stills, pre-set the duration of all stills for one or two frames, whichever works for you, then import the stills from a folder. Pre-set the timeline for the codec you want, go to the bin, select>all, drop them into the timeline, play/render.

One thing to watch out for is to make sure the individual source files follow a consistent number/naming scheme. If you have 4000 stills, frame one out of your 3-d animation renders should be named animation_0001, and not “Animation_1”. Every ten frames you’d have a discontinuity in frame order, unless you start with enough zeroes.

[Mark Suszko]

I gotta wonder if it isn’t better to not use the plane at all for taking the gear along, and to use another method like overnight delivery. If the most crucial gear is able to fit in carry-on (and is allowed), I’d rather carry it on with me and gamble on my clothes and toiletries, which are more easily replaced, making it too.

The “is allowed” part is, I’m sure, a moving target. Between TSA and mercurial decisions by airline ticketing baggage people, changing the rules and adding surprise fees at the last second, I don’t know how traveling shooters can reliably take *anything* with them on planes any more. In a situation like this, the entire trip could end up losing you money in a worst-case scenario.