[Mark Suszko]

Depending on the lighting and camera lens, you can shoot thru chain link and make it “disappear”, shooting telephoto, with proper depth of field control. But what I was suggesting is, attach the go pros directly to the outside of the chain link fencing of the cage, with just the lens poking thru. There must be posts in the corners that could also have some padding carved away to expose a go pro lens.

Has anyone ever hung a go pro on the referee? I mean, he’s inside and all over the space, the shots would be brief, but, occasionally they would probably be awesome. Head bands, hats, chest mounts. If it was a WWE ref, you’d want to mount it on his back, because he’ll have it turned towards the action, every time the heel hits the face man with an illegal chair, etc. LOL

As to hardwired cams or wireless, you’re talking a LOT of cameras here. Your main ones at the very least need to be powered and hardwired, especially for live streaming. Tape-delayed instead of live streamed is so much less complicated: the cameras can all run off local power bank external batteries, and you multicam it like it was a live-switch in post. Live streaming the matches, in the ambitious way you want, is a much more technically complicated and expensive thing to do than multicam post.

[Mark Suszko]

Another way to go, and What I do for casual grabs at home, is, I have a combination VHS VCR and DVD recorder. I can grab any DV (thru firewire) or VHS tape to DVD , finalize it, then Import the transport stream via various means. I would do something ore high-end if it was for work, but this flow works well for my home movie junk.

[Mark Suszko]

There’s a free online fake DOS command prompt thing called hacker typer or something like that: I used it for some stuff about computer viruses, and it does what you need, for free, just screen grab it off your web browser.

[Mark Suszko]

You don’t say if this has to be livestreamed multicam, or if you will edit first, then stream it. Huge difference in cost and complexity. Since you say its a demo, i will assume no live stream, just an edit.

You can multicam edit for free on DaVinci Resolve.

As to your camera options, what’s nice about a 4K or better camera is, if you’re delivering in only 3K, the larger resolution shot will allow you to capture a wide shot, then digitally zoom-in, pan, and re-crop in the edit, and it will still look good as a 2K shot. There are knockoff go-pro-like action cams in 4K in the 50 dollar and under range now. If you can build them into the cage, you’ll have good coverage all around.

As for an overhead, there was a guy advertising a remote go pro platform on a single wire. This is also something you can make on your own from RC car parts: you just need the single channel for the forward-reverse, to act as a winch on the overhead cable. The steering wheel, for extra credit, you can change its servo output to rotate a Go Pro left and right on the cable. But this is going to require a live operator.

I’ve had good luck putting lipstick cameras on long poles to simulate drone shots before there were drones. Certainly you can hang a gimbal on a long pole over the top of the cage too.

As to switchers for a computer, ATEM is the popular choice here. But I’ll caution you that, people buy computer-based switchers to save money, then find out they maybe didn’t save as much as they figured, once all the peripherals and odds and ends and upgrades happen. And such rigs tend to get messy and take up a lot of space to set up on remotes… So do also look at a used Newtek Tricaster, which can also live-stream.

[Mark Suszko]

A technique that’s been used a lot, and I also do it for certain projects, is to use a pan head that gets your camera tilted 90 degrees on its side, to grab a tall. full-body shot with as much resolution as possible, as close as possible. I’ll do this for greenscreen shots in amateur music videos of mine. Then I’ll just rotate it in post and adjust the sizing and cropping, etc. as needed. The only slightly tricky part is, when using the crop tool, you have to use a different edge to represent the top and bottom and sides, but you get the hang of that in a few seconds. You can collapse the rotated shot into a compound clip and treat it afterwards like any other source.

I was shooting several of my music videos this way without greenscreen, just because the set was about as wide as a phone booth, and I couldn’t get the camera back far enough to capture the framing I wanted. In post I put the 90 degree “skinny” framing up on one third of the conventional 16:9 frame, then punched-in on a head shot on an identical synched track of my skinny shot, to fill the other two thirds with a closeup where I can do in-post fake tilt-ups and downs from face to instrument… Looks like two different cameras.

I think several NLE’s will automatically re-frame a source image for the various social media platforms, but to do it, yes, they might re-scale the frame and lose some resolution. But my personal take is that if the original is 4K or better, that’s nothing much to worry about.

If you don’t have a ball type pan head that is notched to get to 90 degrees, you can clamp your existing tripod to something with bungee cords , etc. or cobble together some kind of cradle to hold the camera sideways, (cardboard boxes are easy for this) or attach a spare mounting plate to a piece of wood or whatever. Not the most elegant look, but hey, it’s the resulting image that counts.

[Mark Suszko]

Or the Bossanova….

I get long, boring stuff to re-edit a lot. For captioning, I post it unlisted on a youtube channel, and let YouTube auto-caption it for me for free. I still have to add capitalizations and some punctuation, but it’s way less work than hand-typing it all, and the price is right.

There is image posting code, used in internet forums, that will create links specifying a play range within a longer video. I don’t have an example to show you, sorry. But I see them used a lot.

This part’s not what you asked for, but my two cents is, I try like heck to improve raw screen recordings like these, any way I can. I owe it to the viewers. So if I can add stylistic touches, supporting graphics, or tighten up a sequence with transparent editing, I will.

One other thing I do as a viewer, and I can’t be the only one, is I almost always play back this kind of stuff in faster-than-real-time mode, on YouTube. We can hear and understand speech that’s faster than realtime, and for me, it reduces the boredom of following. I jump back to normal speed for things that are of particular interest, but I think many people just watch stuff in scrolling speeds all the time these days, we’re just more used to a faster pace of communication and information assimilation. If you watch TV show editing from two decades ago, you marvel at how darned slow everything is presented, relative to modern productions.

[Mark Suszko]

All the popular NLE’s can now multicam from both time code AND audio waveform, so relax on that score, as long as the audio is intelligible. Though it would be good practice to stop and start the cameras close to simultaneous, a few seconds late on one won’t stop the NLE from figuring it out. To help, you should have the talent clap hands one time before each take starts, or have some other visual/auditory synch marker system based on how you are shooting. Some people flash a photo strobe off their phone, for example. Whatever works for you. PS you can end-slate with a synch marker too, if you forgot to get it up-front, as long as you didn’t stop rolling yet.

Be sure your external audio recorder is using a sample rate compatible with your video system’s audio sample rate, or you will get unfixable drift. Well… not completely un-fixable, but tedious, and no fun and costly, if you choose to buy an app to re-render it in matching frame rate.

I use a consumer grade b-roll camera recording multiple hours in h264 and/or mpeg4, and after conversion/uprez to prores422 or HQ, it plays very well for me alongside prores or other formats from a more “pro” camera. As long as everything is in Prores, one way or another, my older FCPX system is very happy with it. The downside is the files get way bigger. You can never have too much free drive space.

[Mark Suszko]

First, thumbs-up on Boinx iStopMotion. Very fun software. As far as your question, if you’re capturing the still at their maximum bit depth, that’s all you can do… but maybe it’s not a waste, because once you’re operating in prores 422, at least you’re not losing any more… and the potential for editing with more layers and effects in FCPX or Prem Pro or whatever is better if you can operate in prores. IStopMotion is very good for the price point, if you’re concerned about higher quality, then maybe ToonBoom or something more higher-end is really what you’re wanting.

That said, when people ask me what software is best, I say: “the one you like the most”. because, if you like it, you spend more and more time with it, and that leads to mastery and efficiency and an output that will rival whatever the competition is. If the interface is intuitve for you, and you like the workflow, Keep going.

One idea that comes to mind is, you probably have photoshop. PS can run batch actions on your grabs and convert them to tiff or other formats. It won’t add resolution or detail that wasn’t there before, of course. But if you need the stills to be upscaled, so you can do more synthetic pans and zooms and croppings in a video edit, that might be an option. Apple Compressor and a few others can also do that.

[Mark Suszko]

Hi, Gerardo, I think I understand what you’re asking. But I’ll ask a few clarifying questions as I go along, ok?

The first impression I get is that you’re asking for a transition for the new incoming images, which I assume are stills, and that transition should make the incoming shots look like they are inked-in, or uncovered by a spreading ink stain effect. If that is your goal, any number of means can achieve it; you’re basically doing a luminance key effect with an animated mask, and that mask is in the shape of spilled ink or paint. You can get something like this pre-made at MotionVFX.com, and from Digital Juice, but if you’re trying to do it for free, download some free, public domain footage or stills of ink or paint spills from youtube… or make your own footage by shooting black or light blue ink or paint, spilled over white paper.

The next step in that process is to make a sandwich of video layers, putting the monochrome ink spill footage on its own track on top and applying a luminance key effect to it. (If you have green or blue ink, you could also use chromakey effect here). You might have to reverse the key. That inkblot becomes the window that reveals the footage below it. You will also be playing with opacity settings and the blend mode of that track – see if it works better when switched to “multiply” or “screen” or “overlay.”

Now maybe I got your question wrong, and you meant you want to turn your images into something that looks like ink or watercolor? Photoshop has presets for that, for stills, and they work the same way in AfterEffects, but also, there is a video effect program out there I have not worked with in a long time, but it was really excellent for all kinds of effects mimicking ink and paper, or watercolor paint… that was Synthetic StudioArtist. (I just checked: they still sell it, very worth looking at ) https://synthetik.com

To get a virtual camera tracking across your scattered images, my first go-to is always Apple Motion, because I find it more simple and intuitive than A.E., but AfterEffects is the Big Gun.

<font face=”inherit”>Motion already has some </font>but<font face=”inherit”> in paint/ink splatters in it’s library, so if </font>you<font face=”inherit”> have Motion in your collection of apps, definitely play with that.</font>

<font face=”inherit”>
</font>

<font face=”inherit”>How did I do?</font>

[Mark Suszko]

“No contract was ever signed“. Is there any paper or electronic trail for this job at all? A conversation that covers the deliverables, delivery date, and the payment?

IANAL, but you have several things going on here, and I have to address all of them.

The very first is, going by what you posted, you can’t prove you even had a contract. A verbal agreement that can’t be proven, doesn’t exist. The good news on that is, if there is no contract, there is also no clause in the non-existent contract about whom you can or cannot talk to about anything.

A contract that a judge will accept in a court consists of three things: An offer, an acceptance, and “consideration“, which is a fancy name for money exchanged (as little as a dollar) to “seal the deal”. Without consideration, the contract doesn’t represent a complete “meeting of the minds”. The offer states what is to be exchanged. The acceptance confirms you both have the same understanding of those requirements, and a willingness to go forward, (IN WRITING) and then it’s still not a contract until money changes hands, even a little.

(I actually learned this a few months before my situation happened, by watching an episode of “The Paper Chase”, so my legal advice came via John Houseman and not a J.D., but it was accurate, as far as it went, …and the judge agreed.

This is how I won a small claims case against a client who used my video and then stiffed me on residuals, claiming we had no enforceable contract. I was able to prove with a paper trail that we’d negotiated in good faith to deliver a product, that we did in fact deliver it, and he accepted and used it and sold it, and that he’d made initial payments, but then stopped paying us while still making and selling more copies of our work, without telling us. (The dubbing facility owner was a friend, and told me and my partner how many more copies were being made without the client notifying us).

What rights do you have as the videomaker?

The rule of thumb in the US tends to be: in the absence of a written agreement, your video is considered a Work For Hire. That means, the customer pays you one time and owns everything you made, and can use it any way they like, as long as they like, with no further obligation to pay. The IP is their property. They are generally not also entitled to your raw footage, or the EDLs and templates you created, but at the same time, you can’t re-sell those things to someone else without the original client’s permission, so, kind of a stalemate.

<font face=”inherit”>That you handed over any product before getting any money is something I hope you have learned to never do again. That work product, and their deadline, is your best and often only leverage. If they insist on looking at a copy for approvals before payment, you give them a watermarked version that they can’t just use commercially, to prove you made the product. Typically, I ask for a third down to start a job, a third halfway thru the process at the first rough cut, usually, and the final third upon completion and in exchange for delivery. Only then do they get a clean, non-watermarked copy of the video. That up-front payment gets you the </font>contractual<font face=”inherit”> “consideration” you need to prove to a judge.</font>

<font face=”inherit”>
</font>

<font face=”inherit”>(A digression: Some folks here will take the risk to deliver and wait for payment, because a common tactic of big companies is to say they always take thirty to sixty days to cut a check. They usually have extenuating circumstances or a special relationship with such a client, so </font>they<font face=”inherit”> trust them… or, they are just so desperate for the money, and ongoing </font>business<font face=”inherit”>, they’ll knuckle under, pray, and wait to be paid… Personally, I will not take a job on those terms, but some might. What they are doing is giving out a free loan without charging interest. My answer to: “bill us and wait” is “I am not a bank. If you need thirty days to pay me, start the paperwork now, for x amount, and I’ll come back with the video in a month, expecting the check.”)</font>

<font face=”inherit”>
</font>

<font face=”inherit”>Next, you say the guy you worked for has not paid you, but has forwarded on your work to someone who has ostensibly paid -him-. Do you have proof you did this work at all? Original master files, that kind of thing? This will be important in court to establish </font>original<font face=”inherit”> authorship.</font>

<font face=”inherit”>
</font>

<font face=”inherit”>My non-lawyer opinion is, unless you signed some kind of NDA (and NDA’s are not always enforceable anyway), you can contact anybody on the planet you want to, if they’re willing to take your call. But getting the final, actual end-user to pay you, instead of the middle-man, is going to be an uphill climb. Which starts with you issuing them a DMCA cease and desist order, telling them you own the footage they are using and you have not been paid for it. I’m guessing you don’t have the time and money to actually take this to court, so they could ignore you. But you might get lucky if they think it’s easier to pay you off than create some Public Relations scandal. Of course, after you do this, you will be good as dead to that company, as well as the middleman, and anybody he tells about you.</font>

<font face=”inherit”>
</font>

<font face=”inherit”>Not to pile on, I do feel bad for you, but your case history is basically a roadmap for the very worst way to conduct your business: You didn’t get even a simple deal memo on paper or email, describing the scope of the work, the deliverables, the payment schedule and amount… You handed off files that were not protected against piracy, and you didn’t get any money up front, not even a token down payment. At this point, you basically gave a guy something “on spec”, in exchange for… nothing.</font>

<font face=”inherit”>
</font>

<font face=”inherit”>I’d say go ahead and call the big company guy and explain you are a sub-contractor who made the work product and have not been paid. Maybe you get lucky, but I </font>wouldn’t<font face=”inherit”> bet my car on it. There is nothing more you can do about the middleman, and do not give him another thing, y</font>our relationship is burned. Do not contact him except thru a lawyer.

“…threatening to sue me if I contact their client…”<font face=”inherit”>
</font>

<font face=”inherit”>As to that, anybody can sue anyone for anything, doesn’t matter if they can win or not. They often do it as a bullying tactic, knowing you can’t afford the fight, even if you are in the right.</font>

<font face=”inherit”>The amount of money you expected to get is likely not as much as what you would have to pay in lawyer fees and court costs. But you can talk to a lawyer on the phone, get an initial consult, for between fifty and three-four hundred bucks. Depends on the stakes. And the quality of the lawyer. The last time I needed a lawyer’s professional advice last year, they were a top person in their field, and it cost me 200 bucks for thirty minutes, but considering the stakes, it was worth it.</font>

<font face=”inherit”>Good luck, do let us know what happens. I’ll give you one more piece of free advice for your next negotiation. If the client ever says anything like: “If you can give us a price break on this first one, you can make it up on all the subsequent ones we will send your way, you’ll get all our future business…. Smile, pick up your stuff, and GTFO of that room without saying another word. Because that has always been a scam phrase. Always.</font>