[Mark Suszko]

I’m not as experienced as some of the others here, but after doing the white limbo thing with real white and with cheomakey, I still prefer shooting it chromakey and adding the white later, to me, and my limited pallete of lighting tools, it is easier to concentrate on lighting the figure properly, and putting an even wash on my green wall, than it is to balance exposure between figure and white BG. I also like the added flexibility in post of really tweaking the white to just what’s needed, over having to try and modify an original white in the camera master.

I was heartened to hear that I’m not the only one who thinks “less is more” regarding filtration during the shoot. Frankly, the Red type cameras are showing the way to a future where pretty much every filter you could think of is a post production effect and not in the camera master shot. Now, if you know what you’re doing with polarizers, grads and such, more power to you, but I see a trend among the young wannabees to throw a matte box and French Flags on the front of a camera, for the same reason “Tuners” put excessive spoilers, “Type R” and “Nos” stickers, a coffee-can muffler and ground effects wings on their mom’s Corolla to make it seem like a “ricer”. Matte boxes serve specific purposes, and should be more than a fashion accessory to make the camera “look cool”. Or don’t use them at all.

[Mark Suszko]

For the video stuff, one source is trango.
The more range you want, the more expensive.

Lower budget, try some of the wireless stuff from Supercircuits.

Most people I know of that use FRS radios or cell phones for a wireless intercom have not been overly happy with them, it was a “this or nothing” kind of choice. To get good wireless intercom, you might want to look at rental until you can afford to own.

[Mark Suszko]

Dan, I don’t want any lawyers suing me for unlicensed practice; take your time, incorporate the advice that makes sense for you, then, when you get it all done, spend 50 to 100 bucks for an hour of a real lawyer’s time to go over your document in person or over email, and point out any flaws or omissions. If you want to bring up specific items here in this thread, I’ll keep an eye out, but I’m not really a legal or a “parrot-legal”, just watched a lot of “The Paper Chase” episodes:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Eric, our facility sounds about the same as yours. We shoot dvcpro25 and a little betacam, though these days it’s mostly used for studio work and not in the field. We have four edit suites which once ran the gamut of systems between a Grass Valley linear system in the control room, Discreet Logic Edit*6, Panasonic’s own Postbox system, and a PC box running Premiere/Pinnacle Nitro. It was hard for an editor to move from room to room to help out on projects or trade jobs, there were too many contradictory mouse and keyboard commands to keep straight, and you never felt fully comfortable on any one of them, you always felt like a beginner, never a “power user”.

We decided it made the most sense to standardize on one platform, so that the three editors could all become equally adept and interchangeable, room to room. We could then cover for each other as needed, and share skillsets.

The macs are simple to inter-connect via ethernet, so transfer of graphics and sound files is possible, (slow but we’re not fussy at this stage) but we have yet to really need to do things that way: While we theoretically could all edit on the same project simultaneously (one guy cutting, one guy scoring, one guy massaging graphics, for example) we’ve never had the need to try that out yet.

Instead, each editor pretty much stands alone, and we occasionally sneaker-net files or videos on usb drives, CD-or DVD-rom burns, or DVC Pro tape using SDI in and out when soembody neesd something in another room. If we want a SAN or NAS at soem point, the macs are already configured for it, but keepign a bunch of files spinning on central drives is not the way we work here: we still put tapes and DVDs on shelves for long term deep storage, and don’t have a need to load many terabytes into instant-access. Some folks do. Angry Bob over in the Broadcast forum wrote a neat COW online article about cheap and easy DIY central storage you can cobble together yourself, you might want to look at that as a stepping-stone to a bigger NAS or SAN.

We picked the mac/fcp route because it was a little cheaper than Avid, because I had experience with macs at home and so did the chief engineer, many local VAR’s on the PC side were bums… even though with Avid and Final Cut both, you’re still talking about essentially closed systems with one supplier, we also found the mac/FCP workflow much easier to handle and more comfortable, and that is advice I always give someone shopping for a system: they all can do basically the same things with a few specialties here and there, but the best system for you is the system that works the way you like to work, that feels transparent and simple for you, comfortable. You spend so many hours a day with the thing, you want to pick one you just plain like more. A system you like more, you get more adventurous with, you push it’s limits more and become faster, better, more creative on it, even if it may not be as powerful as some other system. The user experience and competence is an important part of the equation.

As far as reliability, well, macs are pretty good, I must say, compared to most PC’s I’ve worked with, but they certainly are NOT immortal or infallible, they break down or get deranged occasionally, usually the fix si pertty easy. We bought extended 24/7 phone support with our FCP systems and the VAR is here in town so service calls are quick, generally. One time we smelled smoke in the building, but couldn’t find the source. A week later we finally figured out that the mac tower’s video card had had a component literally burn a hole right thru the board during a lightning strike, but aside from a few gltiches in the LCD display,(not the actual output) the darn thing kept editing clean video for another week while we searched for a problem!

Avid has history in newsrooms, newscutter is very popular, and if you are a big and busy broadcast news bureau, maybe Avid is for you. The old joke about Avid is that it is a powerful database management system with an NLE attached to it. If you have, say, three stations near each other as part of a broadcast group and you’re consolidating news ops, so they shoot in three places but cut and distribute from a central control location to all three stations, an Avid system is probably what you want a demo of. If your operation is somewhat more laid-back, say, your company mostly cuts VNR’s about the medical field for syndication to many stations, then the Final Cut system may be as good as Avid for that and yes, cheaper.

Other considerations commonly include what is the most common platform used locally by others. Two reasons for that: available extra help to come in and cut for you, and a local knowledge base for the hardware. The main systems people are hired to know these days seem to be both FCP and Avid, if you know both, you should always be able to find work. A nice feature of Final cut is that you can remap the keyboard to duplicate an Avid’s key commands and so, if you’re used to cutting using hotkeys on Avid, there is little or nothign to re-learn. You can store multiple user setups and each editor can call up their own version of the interface ready to go. When you use final cut, it is the same on a laptop as it is on a tower. With Avid, you have to always wonder what “flavor” of Avid someone is talking about, they are not all equal or do things the same way.

Avid used to have a lock on high-dollar value editing for film and TV, I feel that is no longer the case and while Avid-cut shows still outnumber FCP ones, the delta is shrinking annually. Ask your higher-ups if they are wanting Avids for the cachet of the name, or for some other reason. IF the promo units have to talk to the newscutters, that may be their reason, but from your description, that doesn’t seem to be the case for your operation.

FCP works very nicely with P2, we’ve used rented P2 cams to shoot and edit HD spots.

My bias is obviously towards FCP, but really, you have the opportunity to try demos of both systems, and you really should do that. Bring a tape and cut the same project with the sales engineer for both systems and see what your heart tells you. Then consult with your engineer and manager about how to make the numbers work, or if they do.

Good luck.

[Mark Suszko]

My 2 drachmas:

Define in your agreement who has the power to sign the bill and authorize payments, and make that person also the one that authorizes any changes once the project is under way. This will prevent a lot of drama when some back-office person or committe of persons suddenly gets the notion in mid-edit they are a producer and want to make changes in a script that was already approved and shot a particular way.

Signature authority should not be diluted; a secondary signature authority is only for emergencies when the head honcho is out of town or otherwise incapacitated. You do not make changes or spend extra time on things the honcho did not approve, and the honcho gets a memo detailing the additional expense to authorize before you commit to it.

You do not deliver the final product into their hands without a final payment by cash or check in hand. Deadlines be dammned, do not hand it to a fedex guy just because somebody sent him over, it doesn’t matter if the station time buy is already set in stone, if the bill has not been paid. Put the outstanding bill in the fedex bag instead. Grinders use that for an excuse all the time. If you are contracted to deliver by a deadline, they can certainly be contracted to pay by said dealine too.

Tell the client up front that you do business like this, because you are not a bank. If they are legit, they should have little to no problem with any of this. Speeches about “well, we never pay on delivery, you must submit the bill to our billing department and wait umpteen weeks” should not move you. If a water pipe breaks above their main server room, you’d better believe they won’t ask the emergency plumber to wait to get paid, they have funding lines assigned for this kind of thing. And they have enough advance notice of the project that your one-third progress payment is easy enough to schedule in advance and have printed up in a nice check format, ready to hand over. Like the doctors office sign says: “payment is due at the time services are delivered”.

Define the criteria for payment. Have payment in approximately one-third size chunks: one to begin the project: pre-production, scouting, treatment/storyboard/script, shooting and editing up to the first “rough cut”. Second payment covers all editing to get to a finished, approved master.

Detail in writing how many re-dos they get for the money, beyond which, you must charge extra as a “change order”. My own tradition is 2 re-edits after the first rough cut is presented. Also, My personal rule is, if they spelled a name wrong or gave a wrong title, etc. they pay to fix it: if they printed it right and I got it wrong, I pay for that. All elements delivered from the client are assumed to be korwrekt and accuraett, and legally cleared for use. If that turns out to be otherwise, the responsibility belongs to the client to make it right.

The final payment is for the delivered, corrected master, any services like adding captioning, and any dubs ordered. Changes or additional tweaks to this master after final payment are considered a completely new and separate job, and require a deposit to begin. You will not take on such work until all outstanding invoices from that client are paid. I don’t care if your project is still on the drives and the tweak is minor. It won’t always be that way, and if you open the door to such nonsense now, you’ll regret it far more later.

For the love of Toland, get it in writing NOW who owns the final master and who owns (and stores) the raw footage from the project. You also should have a clause granting you permission to exhibit small excerpts and stills from the work for your portfolio and web site to show other clients what you do. You in turn promise not to sell complete or partial copies of the work to anyone else or otherwise make money off them without a contract from the original client. The client agrees not to re-use any cleared music or licenced elements for other works without your consent.

Have an understanding about how or if you can enter the work or a portion of it in contests, if you like to do that sort of thing.

Those are some of the highlights I’v e seen pop up over and over again. There are suer to be others, maybe someone else will chime in with more suggestions.

[Mark Suszko]

Check the free stuff section of the COW for some plug-ins that animate bar graphs and meters based on sound.

The oscilliscope/ ECG images of a heartbeat have a characteristic “double-sharkfin” sawtooth shape, for non-scientific entertainment purposes, all you need to do is draw that shape (GIS examples of the trace on google), and vary the spacing of the re-draws to match the different rates. The size of the beats stays pretty much the same, person to person, just the rate or interval between beats changes, making them closer together and “squished”.

You could make it look more like a real trace by adding some trail fx/decay to a glowing dot and making it track thru the trace shape using keyframes. Or for a strip recorder look, draw the sawtooth pattern out in a long repeating strip and animate it passing by in a loop, perhaps with a wipe or window cut out above it on another layer to reveal it as it passes by.

[Mark Suszko]

We saw this same thing in the 80’s when desktop publishing arrived. After the intial surge, the inexperienced or untalented mostly fell away, but it was ugly for a couple years.

The good news is that a lot of the bottom feeders die off relatively quickly because their proces are not sustainable, then you pick up their slightly used gear for pennies on the dollar.

The bad news part is, the lowballers certainly hurt the industry reputation universally.

I think the only thing you can do is hold the line, resist the urge to lower your own rates below what is reasonable. Those kids have to move out of their parent’s basement some time;, when they do, they’ll see what the real cost of living and working is, and that you can’t get tech support on a mission-critical project when you’re rocking an academic version or cracked copy of final cut and charging below subsistence rates. The first time they get sick with no insurance, thye’ll sell off their gear for health care or to make the rent.

Hold on, work smarter, not harder, and outlast them.

[Mark Suszko]

A couple things that might help:

Structure the payment for the deal in thirds: one third to start the work, one third at the point of showing the first “rough cut” of the master, the final third upon delivery after final changes. This means they can’t make you wait to get paid until the end of the project, and if you get into problems and the project is canceled in mid-production, you are paid for what you already completed and they don’t pay for what has not yet been done. Both sides are protected.

The sudden changes they keep throwing at you indicate that your project may be missing some essentials that help organize and define the work. Before the project starts, you need a document called the Creative Treatment, which is a descriptive outline of the video, scene by scene, explaining what is said and seen but not containing the actual dialog. When everyone can read this around the table and agree to it, there can be no excuses later that “this isn’t what I had envisioned”, and every scene has already been discussed and justified in an overall context. Do this step BEFORE the actual script is written, the treatment is the blueprint for writing the script.

If they STILL want to throw more changes at you after this point, the deal memo or contract you wrote up before starting needs to state that there are extra charges for such changes, and that you are not responsible for the additional time/lateness of the project. When this is being done for a corporate project, it can be helpful to insist that any changes outside the original document must first be signed off by the company president, with his understanding that the “change order” is adding cost.

This is often enough to discourage the “back-seat producers” from indulging their muses, because they are suddenly on the hook to their boss for explaining the changes, rather than you, a person that is not know to the company.

[Mark Suszko]

That’s great news, guess I must RTFM again because I went thru a LOT of menus and couldn’t find it, assumed I could only get an SDI out.

[Mark Suszko]

I think what I would do in your case is invest in some live projection gear or monitors. Look at the Daily Show’s set, yes, it is a little over the top, but the neat thing they have is a huge projection wall that acts like a cheomakey synthetic set but is only a simple (powerful) rear-projection, and with it, they can change the mood and theme of a set from moment to moment, and it isa ral, existing set in regualr camer shots. This is like haveing changeable dura-trans panels without the cost, and you get the benefits of al-electronic creation without the processing overhead of the chromakey effects, worries about failure modes, and you can pan and move a camera around normally.

Issues that would come up include: do you have enough room on set for a rear projection setup of decent size, how expensive is the projector, how much noise and heat does it create and can you deal with that. Most of the bigger projectors have a 2-bulb system with an instant backup so losing a bulb live opnly means the backdrop dims a bit, nand not that you are suddenyl looking at ugly blue or green blank walls during the show. And you cna also have a backup of cheap ellipsoid spots with precut gobo patterns to shine on that rear projector screen in emergencies.

If you just don’t have the room for projection, then LED or plasma walls would be a choice with similar benefits. See what CNN does with The Situation Room and their video wall.