[Mark Suszko]

That sounds loonie.

[Mark Suszko]

“With many companies now having full in-house media departments even if I work on a project solely on my own system, I’m often asked to collect the project and send it to the in-house folks so that they can potentially make use of it in the future.” -GJ

I hope you charge extra when they demand that from you. It’s bad business practice not to.

[Mark Suszko]

This is actually making me hesitate pulling the trigger on a new FCPX/Motion purchase for my home rig. I think I’ll put the money in escrow and give it a shot first. If I don’t like it, the new FCPX isn’t a bad “safety school” at all.

[Mark Suszko]

Don’t forget to buy a UV filter and a set of screw-on polarizers and ND filters to deal with the bright white outdoors. Add a monopod for run-and-gun work.
A brace of 4K action cams and mounts and accessories will be handy for many things.

Regarding the camera decision, you’re asking this camera to do a lot of things well. On a percentage basis, how much is it going to be shooting skiing and boarding outdoors, versus non-ski events and promos etc. indoors? That will guide your choices.

A crazy suggestion: You need, not one camera, but two. For event work and such, it is incredibly useful to have a second camera covering wide shots and cut-aways/ b-roll. You can often get away with a lesser camera for this role, but I’d argue it’s smarter to have two identical models that share power supplies, batteries, chargers, etc. and have identical optics and color response, making post easier and faster. Even for situations where you plan on needing just one camera, the other becomes a “hot spare” in case something goes wrong with the first one, or you can do simultaneous coverage from multiple locations like the top and bottom of a run. More cameras means you need fewer takes of something, saving time and eventually, money.

[Mark Suszko]

But does it rip the lid off Tashi Station, and the Biggs Darklighter controversy? ☺

Lucas seems to have kind of retconned himself as the editing genius of this movie, but I think there’s enough evidence to show different. And later as he gained stature, and people began to fear losing their jobs for contradicting him, Lucas became less able to take suggestions and “notes” from others, leading to great decisions like jar Jar Binks.

There are a few pretty good YouTube videos that deconstruct the editing decisions of the film in a similar fashion to the book, though obviously not as detailed.

This is a good place to start:

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

And of course, there is the deep background piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ49Smi2SLQ

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[Mark Suszko]

IMAG is a unique case and you can’t really do IMAG well and expect it to also cut well for conventional use

[Mark Suszko]

This is a great and much-hoped-for update for me in terms of the captioning. It doesn’t include free built-in transcription, but baby steps, right? I like that I only have to caption the show once and if it needs to be re-cut, the captions track with the changes. That’s a time saver.

Why is captioning important to non-deaf people?

It makes the entire program keyword-searchable, which is incredibly useful to end users and archivists or researchers.

[Mark Suszko]

I keep an old FCP7 suite with DVDSP just for these kind of jobs, but If it doesn’t need menus, I export a DVD from the timeline in FCPX. We also use Roxio Toast for authoring something that needs rudimentary menus but not all the bells and whistles of DVDSP.

Man, I wish I could still run DVDSP on my home system. It was sweet.

[Mark Suszko]

Something my shop does a lot of these days is oral history interview recordings. We cover a lot of various subjects; from veterans of various wars, to politicians, to farmers and “regular folks”. But we shoot them all the same way; with essentially static cameras from a wide 2-shot, and a medium iso of the guest, plus a single of the interviewer that isn’t iso’d.

I switch these shows live in standard talk-show type format, only without breaks, and I stay on the guest a lot more often without reaction cut-aways, than I would for, say, the public affairs politics talk shows we shoot for local access distribution. Those are done in a pretty conventional manner.

But it’s different for the oral history gigs, which can run into multi-hour, multi-day sessions. I’m cutting not just for the present, but preserving clean versions for some future director and editor or scholar.

So no fancy trucking moves, no jib tongue moves, no sliders, no whip pans, just plain. simple. documentation… of a conversation that’s engaging enough to the viewer not to need any tricks.

A person might think: “well, that’s some pretty static directing – you could up the drama quite a bit with more camera motion and more kinetic pacing of cuts and angles.”

They’d be wrong.

You really don’t need embellishment for a man telling you how at 16 he lied his way into the Air Force and after less than a full year of training, got assigned to a B-17 bomber …and piloted his first mission – his very FIRST mission at the controls – into the disastrous daylight raid on Schweinfurt. You don’t need a slider on the shot when you can look into his eyes and hear him describe how the flack was so thick it looked like the sky was paved with stone and you could walk home on it… how desperately at that moment he wanted to walk home on it, because something like 3/4 of the men he took off with were falling to the Earth in flames to every side of him, the whole damn time he was clenching that yoke and fighting his every natural inclination to press on to a target and make a drop, before he could turn around…

And then he had to do that job another twenty-four times. And living with what he’d seen and experienced. Lives he took, and lives he saved.

You don’t need special camera moves for that. Or fancy switcher solos. You shut up, stand back, and let the story tell itself.

My cuts, when I do make them, are used to frame a section or “punctuate” a tale being told, and that’s all the “enhancement” we want in this kind of thing. Because we also keep camera isos, someone in the future can overrule my directing decisions as they like, or extract unmodified passages of the recording to suit whatever their future needs are. The shots are made a little wider than usual so there’s room to add virtual pans or zooms in post somewhere down the line. But we don’t add any fancy razz-matazz when we shoot it. The story doesn’t need tricks to be compelling.

We keep it real.

[Mark Suszko]

My point exactly. But a lot of newer practitioners just don’t comprehend or accept this principle. My sense of it is that the ones that abuse that angle/shot don’t generally have much of an education in film aesthetics, so they tend to mis-apply things that they think look “cool”, – without understanding the semiotics or context of when to use such a shot.

Now I have to adjust the onion on my belt, so excuse me…