[Mark Suszko]

I don’t use Time Machine so I can’t help there, can you embed a still or video of what you mean in your next response? It’s not like the “cover flow” effect you see in new versions of Image preview or iTunes, is it? Because there’s a free plug-in that lets you get that look on any video, of the many “pages” flipping past, reflected in the black glassy floor underneath the images That plug-in can be founf in the “free stuff” aera of the COW..

[Mark Suszko]

I’ll let the more experienced guys talk about assets and debts, depreciation schedules and etc.

Back in my college accounting classes, they said one of a company’s assets you had to track and account for was “goodwill”.

This was a slippery thing to get a hold of, being somewhat subjective, but has to do with your company’s reputation in the public eye. Like anything that for example has the name “Google” attached to it is going to get a boost in people’s attention and perception from the association, be seen as advanced, cutting-edge, worthy of investment, etc.

It is the estimated cash value of the amount of advertising and PR work you would have to do to get a new company up to the same level of fame and popularity, might be one way to describe it.

When one company buys another, they also buy some of this magic “aura” with it, and someone puts a dollar value on that. (Though if you can tell me who got the goodwill out of the TimeWarner/AOL merger, I’d appreciate the explanation) If the company, on the other hand, takes some hits, and their reputation declines, you have to write down some of that as loss. But I never made it to the advanced classes that told you how you quantify such a thing and declare a numeric value to it with a straight face.

This concept also comes up a lot when companies consider a name change. A long-established brand name carries with it considerable weight in good will, and you throw that away to start fresh under a new name, unless you can find a way to call back to that “source” brand.

What a one-man boutique production company carries as goodwill is arguable. Depends on who that one man is, I guess. A name like Will Vinton carries huge good will from all the popular work he’s done over the years. Then again, when you hire RSA, you tend to assume you’re going to work with Ridley Scott at some point, even if he does have lots of staff to farm things out to now. On the flip side, a one man band can raise his own profile through association, by aligning with a larger company.

[Mark Suszko]

Simplest would be a frame of white cut in, then dissolved into the next shot. To get fancier, you’d want to add some posterization in the fade, to mess with the chrominance. There are also plug-ins, some free, some not. Try places like toolfarm or Nattress for those.

[Mark Suszko]

Do you mean a stop-motion effect like the classic George Pal movie The Time Machine, or some effect in an Apple application like the back-up storage program called Time machine?

Or do you mean, you’re looking for a program that will take a bunch of stills and fly them around the screen in a montage to give the sense of someone growing from a kid to an adult?

For that last one, there are many choices, some of them you already have within your Apple FCP studio package or on your mac. Slide shows or slideshows with motion.

On the simplest level, like within Apple iPhoto, or iDVD, you just dump in a folder of pictures, numbered or titled so they are in the right chronological order, and the program will compose the slide show with motion and transitions and music for you, automatically. You can output that as video and edit with it. Is that kind of where you are going with this question?

[Mark Suszko]

The cheapest I’ve made a TV PSA was ten bucks for blank stock, took one hour to shoot and one to post, and it won a local award over my buddy’s spot, which was in the same category but had a thousand-dollar budget( he hired some clowns and had some special effects for his ).

I’m so used to working on small budgets, I’m afraid I wouldn’t know what to do with *real* money if they ever gave me any. But I know I wouldn’t waste it.

When clients ask me what a standard price for a video is, I ask them what’s the difference between a mansion and a shack, if they both keep the rain off your head. What’s the difference between a Lexus and a Yugo, if they get you across town in the same amount of time. The difference is all in the level of details, the customization. The quality of the finish. When you tell me how you like to live and how you like to drive, I can tell you about what that kind of house and that kind of car cost.

Every job I do is a custom job; at a standard fixed rate, the only variables you have are time and quality. You get an estimated cost by knowing how long the various parts of the job will need to take, given no unforseen surprises, and multiplying that by the rate you’ve set.

How good you are will have a bearing on how long some things take to do, so even if your rate is higher than another guy’s, if you’re faster because you’re better, the overall cost could come out about the same as the slower guy. The question then is: is the quality at the level you wanted?

[Mark Suszko]

You’re right about that. Nobody points to a TV show or commercial and remarks about what edit system it was cut on. The last time I know of anybody doing that, it was because nobody but Newtek had falling-sheep kiki-wipes at the time, so you always knew on sight who had a Video Toaster, but lacked the self-control to avoid employing the sheep wipe:-)

I would say 95 percent of what I edit is cuts, 4 percent dissolves, 1 percent something more exotic. I have the power of Castle Grayskull at my command, but I use it only for good:-)

[Mark Suszko]

I think the more even debate would have been Final Cut versus the latest version of Adobe Premiere for mac. A much closer horserace, that. But that wasn’t the question-)

[Mark Suszko]

Speaking of stickers, one way to tell rubes from pros is, the rubes never remove all those little colorful feature stickers from their cameras. 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Additional thoughts on how to get your correspondent’s in to your control room from various locations.

One way that’s simple but low-rez is to do it via ichat or other webcam chat software., and record that at your location with a screen recorder or a tape capturing off of a scan converter hooked to your VGA out. That’s going to look pretty gritty if you have more than two people on cam at a time, unless you have very high bandwidth.

There are ways to cheat around this, but they all cost time or money. Here’s one way, not the only way, but one way I would look at producing such a show:

I would hook up all the participants by iChat or at least on audio via regular conference call or Skype. I would have each location roll an honest to goodness camcorder to do a capture of each person speaking in highest local quality possible. Conduct your multi-person conversation any way you like, while all cameras are rolling at all correspondent’s locations. Record the conference call locally.

After the conferencing is done, have the remote folks burn their tape to DVD or compress it in high quality and FTP it to your home base, unedited. If they lack that ability, or you have more time, they can all just mail you their DV tapes.

You then set up a multitracked, multicam synched edit at home base and re-create the visuals in high quality, using the master recording of the live low-rez conversation as the template.

This is time-intensive but otherwise inexpensive. You also could not do the show live this way for your audience.

I got this idea from a technique they use in public radio when they want a high-quality remote radio interview, but don’t have an ISDN line to the location.

They have someone roll a quality mic and tape or CD locally, while the interview is conducted by regular old nasty-sounding phone. The high-quality audio recording is then mailed or FTP’d to the NPR studio and someone re-edits it along with the reporter or host that was on the initial other end of the call. (Obviously, they already have a recording of that side from the actual event.)

Line up the two tracks in synch, then you can cut it any way you need while retaining a quality level comparable to the two people being in the same booth the whole time.

My version just adds video to that same technique. It is the cheapest way I can think of to do the job while retaining high quality. That old Iron Tringle: you can have it fast, good, cheap, pick any two but ONLY two. Where your personal time/labor is not a huge factor, the extra editing work saves money but keeps quality high.

[Mark Suszko]

In simple terms, what’s missing from the list is not gear, but hosting. You need to get a service to host your video so you can play more than a few streams at a time as people click in to watch. A Tricaster can host a stream with it’s built-in internet ability but by itself can only serve a handful of viewers at a time. Typically, for a larger audience, the Tricaster’s feed would get sent to a mirror site where more copies of it could be shared simultaneously.

You need to buy services from a host. Especially if you want to do live programs on a repeating schedule. If you’re going to produce a show and record it, then make that available for download, that’s a different proposition, and perhaps an easier one to start with. That could be as easy as setting up a director’s account on youtube or posting thru itunes podcasts, or something more grand, but in any case, you need somebody with the bandwidth to serve up your stream to the world audience.

I’m not well versed in these things, but the last time I looked at it, there were a couple dozen companeis that handle the provisioning of the feeds, the one that’s easy for me to remember is called Akamai, they are a biggie and will charge a lot.

Some pricing plans ask you to predict your audience, then the company sets aside enough resources to be able to feed that many viwers at once. If you under-estimate, they come back to you afterwards with an extra bill for the extra pipes and mirrors, etc. they needed to deploy to serve your live audience. If you over-estimate the audience, you’re just throwing money away.

If the program doesn’t need to be live, but can be served up same day as live, I think you save a lot of headaches doing it that way instead, as a simple download, and not a live stream.

But again, I’m far from an expert on this topic; I generally am only concerned with getting my video to the IT people’s input spigot, and the rest is all incantations and animal sacrifices behind closed doors, of which I have no role or participation in. 🙂