[Mark Suszko]

For cartooning, you might want to try toonboom studio over AE, just because it is customized for this kind of work.

[Mark Suszko]

We do a statewide webcast at least once a month for various clients, it is an added-value thing we include when we do satellite teleconferences. Our guys use Windows Media, I think Helix. I don’t have much to do with that side except to provide them a signal to encode.

One problem we face when doing a simultaneous sat and web broadcast is, the longer the show runs, (and we typically go as long as 2 hours) the more the web cast falls behind realtime. I would say, after an hour of live, the web stream could be twenty seconds behind the live shot. If all you do is stream lectures one way with no interactivity, not an issue.

Where this makes for trouble is, we have live call-in Q&A segments in our shows. Before webcasting was really big, the worst delay you faced was 2 seconds of sat delay to someone on the phone, easy to adjust to, especially since we feed a mix-minus to the phone to cancel echo. But much of our web audience finds it hard to understand the longer delay over time, and so you get a lot of awkward pauses and false starts on the phone-ins when the sides of the conversation are simultaneous over the phone, but they are paying attention to their computer screen waiting for the cue to speak.

So far I deal with this by running lower third crawls that re-instruct viewers continuously that if they are on the web, listen to your phone in realtime, and not to the screen, while you are on hold with your question. You don’t miss any content that way, but the audiences are resistant to doing this for some reason I can’t understand.

You would think that with decades of listener experience hearing 7-second delayed talk radio call-ins, the average person would understand about the delays, but they don’t. Not without continual on-screen prompting about it. I am still looking for a better answer, but I fear it will have to be on the streaming software/hardware side and be out of my budget reach to implement.

Next such show starts with a 60- second tutorial before the live Q&A to remind the audience about web delays. Inelegant, but what else have I got?

[Mark Suszko]

If your color temps are the same, the type of light shouldn’t matter. If you want to stay within the Lowel product line, as a hair light you might try the L-light, or the ViP Pro-Light, with some of Lowel’s awesome clamps and attendant mounting gear to put the light where you want it. Scissor clips, and their spring clamp, for example, as an alternative to a floor stand. I am a huge fan of the Lowel Omni pro lights, they are so gosh-darned versatile.

[Mark Suszko]

I remember carrying HL-79’s on MY shoulder, and it was never a comfortable experience. You put up with the pain for the “Handy-Looky”‘s image quality, but those cams were also rather finnicky, at least ours were. You don’t see them much now because IMO they were too high-priced to compete in the larger lower-end market.

They sure blazed a trail with non-tape on-camera recording, but I always got the impression, and I guess the general industrial public did too, that that was still mostly a lab curiosity than an everyday product.

[Mark Suszko]

Well that’s a little over simplified.

Your first issue is, getting that backdrop lit EVENLY all the way across and up and down and all around. Waveform and vector scopes are very useful for this job. In a pinch, camera viewfinder zebra stripes can also show you hot and dark spots.

These days you can key with almost any camera, but Dv cameras with their reduced color space information have a reputation for being more difficult to pull good chromakeys with. The bigger the chips and the better the codec you use, the better the effect works.

If this is an infrequent kind of thing you’re doing, I suggest you rent a really nice camera for shooting on the one day, they can be surprisingly reasonable. The better your ingredients, the better the finished cake turns out, you know?

[Mark Suszko]

It is machine vision and real-time motion capture. I have seen software that uses a camera shot closeup on your lips or face to recognize changes and drive a model face in real time, but I can’t remember a name off the top of my head. Try looking for a link to this stuff on turbosquid. They probably advertise there.

There are also systems that use puppeteering techniques. These are all pretty spendy.

On the lower end, what some folks do is use a MIDI keyboard or keybad with assignable functions, like those for WOW or CAC video games, or even custom apps for wii controllers, and assign a key or motion to each “muscle” of the model, to “play” it in real time.

[Mark Suszko]

If the chairs are okay to be seen, sled-type chairs, with or without arms. No casters, no swivels. In some cases you want the chair to be almost invisible, armless stool type with a narrow back is good for this. I like to have backs on the chairs to keep talent from slumping over time.

Still photogs have special posing chairs, check out catalogs.

But no swivels, ever.

[Mark Suszko]

If a motion control rig was used, you don’t necessarily need the green screen. Though, it can help speed the roto work between layers in post, if you have a clean back plate and a foreground plate; a difference key will notice which pixels between the two don’t match, and key them as if it was a chromakey, fairly automatically.

To mix normal speed action and time lapse action with motion control adds complexity since the rig has to move exactly the same path as the real-time pass, but much more slowly for the time lapse path, I should think.

Check out the Artist DVD’s of Michelle Gondry and Spike Jonze for some behind the scenes of this kind of stuff.

[Mark Suszko]

Two main resume formats are chronological and functional. Of the two, I prefer and recommend functional, meaning a resume that gathers like tasks together regardless of their chronology. It also tends to hide gaps or other quirks in employment history.

A chronological resume is a boring, linear read; you usually don’t get to “the good stuff” right away. In a functional resume you might break it down into sections like:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Logging and database management-
-3 years experience for xyz handling proper ingest and filing of footage for the lead Avid editor, became official assistant Avid editor and system maintenance technician in (year). My preparation of elements and footage let our editors work faster and deliver award-winning work, thanks to well-coordinated databases and clean, reliable storage I maintained. Spent free time studying for Avid Certified status.

Client account work- -One year working as main client office contact, coordinating edit sessions and scheduling for clients and services at AQT corp. Praised for outstanding client relationships and being able to translate client needs and requests into logical scheduling and billing documentation. Also spent this time training on Adobe AfterEffects compositing, on my own initiative. Continued my schooling at (college name), pursuing a Bachelors degree in communications.

Lead Editor, online Cause Marketing project for (big charity)-
-as a Pro-Bono effort, edited and compressed YouTube videos for (charity name) on spec to promote (charity event) online and stretch my skills in animated graphics; We learned to work in a team with other creative professionals…. (this is a slightly puffed-up way to describe, without lying, that you and some friends goofed around one weekend with borrowed equipment to try and learn something and make a useful video in the process. Remember, you have to be ready to show, document, and defend anything you claim to have done, so don’t stretch the truth very far on such things. Treat them as what they are: examples of your learning and initiative).

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

yadda, yadda, yadda, it goes on like that: you group by functions first, to tell a story of where your skills and triumphs are, without concentrating on the chronology and why you were between jobs for 11 months. Use active language, as in the above example.

Something else I suggest you do in a resume (and the mandatory customized cover letter you target for each specific position) is to be sure to drop in relevant buzzwords.

By this, I am referring to what goes on in modern HR screening of resumes and letters: a computer reads your submission before any human does. They scan it by OCR or decode it from an electronically filed e-resume, and compare your text file to a list of keywords the HR people have picked as significant. They also reject any application with typos. The more times the keywords are found in the resume and cover letter, the higher the machine scores you as a potential applicant, and if you score high enough, you move up to a real read from, and maybe interview with, a live body from the overworked HR department.

I would say that if you are responding to an ad that mentions a specific app, say, Avid, you better by gosh put the word “Avid” in your text a few times. If you just refer to “online editing experience”, and not AVID you score lower with the computer than someone who name-dropped the keyword of “Avid” a few times. You lost the race before they dropped the flag.

Now of course don’t get obnoxious with the number of keyword mentions, Be logical and smooth about it. But don’t ignore it.

When I make a functional resume, I put little blurbs down the left margin that work like pull quotes or captions, they point across to the more detailed entries like the ones listed above. The margin caption for the first section might for example say:

“Editing Hardware
and software systems skills”

These little separate captions draw the eye right to parts of your resume most relevant to the human reader. They should be as tightly worded and edited as you can make them, and they should all try to add up to a person who is well-rounded and understands that editing is a tech job, but also a creative activity, and (often forgotten but invaluabe) one that relies on great interpersonal communication and client skills in order to be successful.

There are tons of free examples of functional resume writing on the web, go check them out and compose your own custom look.

[Mark Suszko]

Or you could just author chapters in a DVD, the menu would give you direct access to each chapter, and you just use the DVD remote for the rewind, slo-mo, still, loop, etc. I think this would be easier and faster to do than Flash. Simple chapter menus are something you can do in even the most elementary DVD programs like iMovie, which comes free with a mac, or the PC equivalent, whatever that is.