[Mark Suszko]

A scary statistic I came across: the kids in high school today can look forward to holding an average of five or more different careers during their productive lifetime. I didn’t say five JOBS. I said five completely different CAREERS. This is really completely different from my own life or my father’s life: though dad worked for many companies, doing different things, they were all related to his core career. Something to think about.

But assuming you just won’t be happy unless you make TV of some sort for a living, the first thing I think about is, New York and LA are VERY large ponds and way overstocked with talent. Even the very experienced and high-level people in the field are struggling there. Would you consider relocating to somewhere where the competition is less? You could also expand your ideas of where video is used and useful: there is a LOT of corporate work to do, a lot of medical, a lot of governmental and non-profit outfits that need video, there’s educational markets too.

That job the other poster, Chris I think it was, turned down, the local government development job… I bet you that position could have been leveraged to produce, shoot, and edit promo videos to encourage business development, explain city planning, etc. as part of it’s function. The work is where you find it, but also where you MAKE it. If you think of yourself more as a person who delivers communications solutions to problems, then a whole additional level of opportunities to apply those skills opens up to you. I hope that doesn’t sound like a pat answer. I am SO glad I’m not in your shoes right now. But even if you have a steady gig, it is always smart to have in mind a “plan B”. I think in today’s market situation, if you want to succeed it is more about creating your job than finding one to apply for or compete against others to win.

Best of luck, let us know what pans out.

[Mark Suszko]

Well the way I look at it, if you make one huge grab of the tape from end to end and just edit by invoking multiple iterations of that one clip with different in and out points, you haven’t technically “wasted” hard drive space, *assuming you will wind up using almost every frame*, since what we’re doing here is non-destructive editing. I can imagine situations where you grab a multitude of individual clips that comprise 95 percent of the original footage, yet you fill over 100 percent because each little separate grab probably came with a few seconds of heads and tails for “handles” on it, and that would represent loading in additional copies of the same original footage over and over, in those little increments. Unlikely to be a huge issue for most situations. I would not base the decision on hard drive space unless I was really up against the wall for dive room. Depending on your time frame to work, you could always digitize at a space-saving rate, then reimport and remaster after getting a lock on the edit.

So, what do you give up, just loading in a tape from end to end? For one thing, efficiency in locating and identifying specific sections. Yeah, you could do it later by marking out selections and making them independent clips. But one way or another, you have to log it or deal with the equivalent of logging. You can do it on the front end during ingest, or on the back end when you should instead be concentrating on editing, but you WILL end up doing it at some point.

One problem I can see with working off one massive source clip is, if that clip gets damaged or accidentally disconnected, your entire program goes offline. If one of many clips in a bin goes a-wanderin’, you have just one little hole in your timeline.

Now depending on what the job is, I do things both ways. I used to always just digitize the whole tape as one and cut it up on the timeline. That, I think, is because I was raised in linear tape editing where scrubbing back and forth thru reels is all part of the game, and part of getting familiar with the footage. In that paradigm, you end up “logging” little pieces of shots and cut-aways and such in your head, and at some point, you might be stuck for a shot, and the brain says “you know, I saw a couple seconds of so-and-so on this reel in the last half, never meant to be used, it was just part of some slating, but it could be useful here”.

The longer I work with FCP though, the more I like to take advantage of bin management and logging functions. What I’m doing when I log on ingest is I’m already “pre-editing” in a way, selecting out only the stuff I know I will need.

The longer the finished piece is, the more complicated it is, the faster/ more efficient the bin/multiple clip method becomes, versus just grabbing the whole tape and slicing it down. If I am working on news, where it is mostly subtractive editing, cutting down to fit a time, but still a linear narrative, I grab the whole thing from where I know the good stuff starts to where I’m sure there will be enough to finish, digitize it as one chunk, then razor it down roughly in a speed pass at faster than real time. Then I go back and refine the cuts.

I have just a tiny amount of time so far working with P2 clips, which come in as their own clips based on stop-start info. These I find still need renaming to make finding the shot you want faster, but if it is news cutting, again, I might just select all; and drag them into the timeline, because I’m used to that.

[Mark Suszko]

You probably would have better luck just using a multiplexer, there are many sources but all the big Brodacast guys, Sony, Panasonic, etc offer them in their security video divisions. Supercircuits sells some too.

[Mark Suszko]

The term for this is IMAG, Image Magnification.
Does B&H rent? They would be my first place to try.

On a way cheaper level, supercircuits and other video security companies sell less expensive gigahertz band wireless video transmitters and receivers.

Are you sure you need to be wireless, or can you plan out a position that allows you to just run some coax with someone there to pull cable for you?

[Mark Suszko]

I’m not a hugely religious person, but one of my favorite bible stories is that one about the guy with the vinyard, who starts the morning’s harvest with one crew, but over the course of the day, sees a need for moer men and keeps hiring on more guys, even just for the last hour. Comes time to pay everyone, the guys that started in the early morning complain” “hey, you’re paying those guys the same as us, we worked all day, they just worked an hour!”

Foreman says:

“Did I pay you exactly what I promised I would pay you, to the penny?”

Worker: “Well, yes, to the penny, but…”

“And isn’t it my money to do with as I please?”

…”Well, yes.”

“Then don’t hate on other people getting a good deal when it was not at your own expense.”

And what I take away from that is, if you’re getting paid what you think is fair, go ahead and compare to others who do similar work, as a rough guide to see that you’re not too farout of line, but OTOH don’t beat yourself up over someone else’s success, and don’t try to gauge your own happiness by whether or not you make more than some other specific guy. Like some kind of sibling rivalry with people unrelated to you. You will never be happy, truly, doing that. I did that for a while, and I’m glad I stopped.

Chase the fair deal, not so much the outrageously great deal.

[Mark Suszko]

Dissolves, and by extension, fades, “traditionally” imply a change in time and sometimes place. it’s a convention established over the history of film and audiences understand it subconsciously. In my college TV class, as an experiment, we shot our own Twilight Zone dramtic episode using nothing but dissolves for every transition, I mean every one. The audience certainly got creeped out, but not due to the story:-P

That’s why I’m always uncomfortable substituting them for cuts just to hide a jump cut. As a one-time band-aid, sure, sometimes. But to cut a long sequence of the same framed medium shot full of dissolves can IMO sometimes make thing overly pretentious, if the underlying material doesn’t support that kind of aesthetic. When I cut interviews, it is almost always in such a way that the speaker tells the whole story without any of the questions left in, as if it was a natural narrative. This is easy if you ask the right essay type questions in the right way.

Unless you’re shooting depositions for lawyers, why would you ever just roll a locked-down shot on interviews with no changes in angles and no cut-aways available? Seems like lazy shooting to me. It is no big deal to snap-zoom in or out, in between the questions, so you have some more angles to work from, even single-camera. Takes less than a second on manual zoom, maybe 90 frames with a power zoom on. I guess if you only ever shoot with primes, it can be a hassle to dolly in and out, but you know, most interview questions take five to ten seconds to ask, and you usually cut the questions out of the final mix anyway… so a shooter should be able to swing the jib in or out or dolly in or out the foot or two needed during that interval. Somebody tell me why they don’t ’cause it makes no sense to me.

If they insist on the lock-down during the interview, see fi they will shoot two minutes of wide at the end where the guy is just listening to the interviewer. With that, you can L-cut the front or tail of a reply as voiceover with the wide as your cut-away.

[Mark Suszko]

Play with the decay time for the particles and the random seed. Not a user of Particular, does it have the ability to use an imported image as the particle? Like a pre-made bubble with the rainbow sheen on it?

If the rate of bubbles is low, you could also make one perfect bubble in photoshop or from a real photo, and loop it with keyframing in AE or other compositor to make as many scaled iterations as you need.

[Mark Suszko]

Just my own opinion based on what “feels” right.

It certainly seems like a murky area. For sure a percentage bonus to the guy off the first year’s billing, I should think. Not as sure about a continued bonus every year, unless you establish profit-sharing for the whole office, such that, the guy that brings in a big fish gets the bonus, but everybody gets a taste of the firm’s extra profit in the regular paycheck, or in additional retirement or other benefits…

In that way, you’re rewarding initiative of the individual without de-motivating the rest or making them fight within the office, the team who actually serves the new client. After all, the referral isn’t good for long if the team doesn’t follow thru and service the client well. You want the competitive effort always facing out the door, aimed at new business, not on inter-office rivalries. But I’m not a sales manager, so maybe I’m wrong.

Back when I was a kid in Chicago, if somebody referred you for a job, and you got it, it was worth one month’s worth of the job’s annual salary as a thank-you. Not a kick-back, not baksheesh. Just a thank-you, and nothing expected after that, and it was never actually asked of you by the guy that referred you, it was just sort of customary. More like: “Hey, Bob, I did get that job you told me about, here, share my joy, have a big dinner on me, or with me”.

These days you just don’t do that sort of thing.

In my youth also, if you passed a used car salesman’s card to a friend who was shopping and they wound up buying from that salesman, he’d give you fifty bucks cash or some equivalent value bonus or service for the lead. I don’t know if that stuff still goes on in the private sector. My experience is definitely dated in this regard.

[Mark Suszko]

They let you have an LCD monitor?!?! Wow, your bosses must be rich; I just get to stick the output end of a piece of coax in my mouth to taste whether or not there’s a voltage on it:-P

Look, there’s non-critical monitoring and there’s master monitoring. Every shop I know of has at least one “God Monitor”, the reference standard, the one you have the Big Boss watch when budgets and approvals are on the line.

Then you have a bunch of crummy cheapo monitors that are just to know that ‘yeah, this is the correct source coming out’.

While you can edit on the crummy monitors, you can’t really color-correct on them, or judge the fine quality. Even if your destination is YouTube, the better your initial quality is before the smash-down, the better your final product.

I have spent years working on really low budgets, I hardly know how else to do a job now. The thing I’ve consistently found is that while clients and bosses love a low budget on paper, they still bring high-budget expectations for what they want to SEE.

I have never had much success showing a client something substandard and saying: ‘yeah, its ugly but this came in way below budget’. Their expectations are generally unfair and unrealistic; they want it to look like champagne on a beer budget.

As I’ve dealt with this over the years, I learned many tricks to shave expenses where they don’t show (much), but I have over time begun insisting on higher and higher quality tools to do the work with… because there’s a limit to what you can do beyond what your tools can do for you. If you never improve the tools, well, you may never get to do more than what you do now. The bosses will begin to believe this is all you CAN do, and the more “advanced” work will start to get outsourced, even though you’re perfectly qualified to do it yourself. You wind up fighting a perception that your capabilties are limited. And the perception becomes the reality, as stuff starts passing you by. And one day, boom, they decide in-house guy is not worth the money since the prime stuff is already outsourced. I have seen big, prestige projects over the years get outsourced for way more money, projects I know I could have done just as well, for a third less money, but my group was never considered for the work because of this same perceptual barrier.

So it is with having at least one “God Monitor” in the house. It seems like such a small thing, by itself. But it brings a lot of issues with it, out of proportion to the obvious, immediate usage.

If all else fails, tell them your failing eyes need the extra resolution, it’s ergonomic, or something vaguely smelling of OSHA regs. But get that one good house monitor, for the immediate need, and for future needs.

[Mark Suszko]

I got 4 going off in my town tonight, the PBS will hang longer, they have translator station issues among other things. I have a 5-inch portable Sony B&W set up with my camcorder looking at the screen… We’ll see how …. well damn, snow, there it goes….

The station I was parked on was the Decatur ABC affiliate. At midnight, they began running their standard signoff message. I have another TV in the room on cable, same station, to see the difference. Cable was about 2 seconds behind OTA. Anyhow, they started the 3-minute signoff simultaneously, but you could see someone flipped the OTA transmitter off five seconds past midnight, poof. Kind of anticlimactic; I guess I’m just a sentimentalist, I expected something special… but just a quick dip to snow.

The cable version ran the full signoff, then went to a loop training tape of DTV how-to for homeowners. I went back to the Decatur OTA, its powered up again on analog, but just playing the loop. I flipped past the NBC and CBS OTA affiliates, already gone and into playing the same loop.

PBS is left, Mother Angelica, pre-eyepatch, is on a local OTA analog repeater for Eternal Word. The Fox and CN affiliates are still on but my reception for them is poor anyhow, think I’ll call it a night early.

Anticlimactic is one way to put it. To add in some missing nostalgia, I’ll jot down my early TV memories from around 1964 in Chicago. We had the three O&O’s and channel 9 was the independent. only one station was on UHF at the time, it was considered kind of sketchy. My memories of saturday mornings were: waking early and having to move like a tai chi master to avoid all the creaking floorboards on the way from my shared bedroom to the living room. Big old Monkey Wards color TV. How loud that knob clacked when you twisted it on. I was so early, around 6 AM, channel 9 hadn’t signed on yet. I watched the static snow with eyes crossed, and every once in a while, I would think I saw shapes in the static. Then, power-up and sign-on, Flag and anthem. Orion Samuelson doing an early morning farm trade/commodities and news report. Some news and traffic. THEN, finally my cartoons! I knew I was becoming a teenager when I started sleeping in longer in the mornings and missing the sign-ons.

I was fortunate that in my childhood they still had locally produced programming, people still talked about “the Chicago School of TV” from the earlier glory days in the 50’s. And WGN, WBBM, and WLS and WFLD still made live local TV for kids, as well as talk shows and entertainment/variety shows for adults. I found this site with some interesting bits:

https://www.chicagotelevision.com/calls.htm

WTTW (PBS) is “Window to the world”, but was often mocked as “Waukegan talks to Winnetka”, a joke about high-dollar elitist audiences around Chicago. They were awesome and remain so.