[Mark Suszko]

What they all said. mpegstreamclip.

Your way thru the camcorder would work too, if you first recorded onto the internal Dv tape, then captured from the tape.

[Mark Suszko]

In his lapel, in the boutonnière (flowers) he wears. In a button hole. I have hung one over the top of a person’s ear, hiding the wire in their hair, securing it with a little blenderm tape, and it picked up great wherever they faced, with no change in level. Nobody saw it under the bangs. You can run from the inside back up to the neck if they have long hair, that covers the back of the collar, then run under the coat collar to the lapel area.

lavs are almost universally omni mics, there are a few oddball exceptions that are rare. The clothing noise is often vibration transmitted along the rest of the mic wire, so one early thing to try is to tape the entire cable down inside the coat so nothing is free to rub.

[Mark Suszko]

Dave, your friend was almost correct. This happened to Harlan Ellison, and the version he tells in his book is classic and hysterically funny, since its happening to him and not the reader. The reader’s digest version is here:

https://www.snopes.com/disney/wdco/ellison.asp

And the key line is “you don’t (expletive) with the Mouse”

[Mark Suszko]

Tried cropping the green? Crop tool is in the motion controls tab.

[Mark Suszko]

Your plan sounds good overall, you do not want to be shooting, you’re an important, involved guest. The alternative is for you to bring along one of your trustworthy workers to shoot to your specs like any other job, and hire a local with his own gear as the second camera. That covers all the bases. If you just brought your own gear to loan to a local, they may break it, mess it up, or have an error from being unfamiliar.

I’m told you can throw *anything* at Vegas and it will handle it, but conventional wisdom is to convert all the nonstandard frame rate materials all to one universal frame rate anyway, then edit.

I think 24p is a useless and trouble-causing affectation unless you mean to do a film-out. 30 P is just as good for a film look and easier for video to display.

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, but only with the IP Law firm plug-in.

[Mark Suszko]

If it is for live, it will be expensive to make it look good and be foolproof. If this is just for post, go crazy. However, of the pre-built sets I have seen, too many of them look like discarded video game levels. The ones that look truly photoreal and well-designed, not surprisingly, cost beaucoup money to be made by, yes, rea; set designers.

One source has a link to the Newtek toaster web site, look for a link to additional sets or something there.

[Mark Suszko]

If this is a conversation versus a monologue, what I’d do is record both sides in the same room or within earshot of the two speakers, so they can hear each other and judge their delivery timing. If the replacement lips person can keep their head still, it is a huge help. Some type of strap or neckbrace or padding to keep the head immobile will be helpful for this.

I did this gig once with analog tape and a simple Grass switcher and I put my replacement mouth person on the carpeted floor, on their back, with carpeted apple boxes kind of wedging his head so it would stay still. Set a soft edged oval wipe around the lips and done.

The rest after that is cake in plain old FCP. Just put that guy on another layer, mask him off with a matte generator or wipe, and keyframe the positon, rotation, and scaling to taste. You wouldn’t necessarily need AfterEffects for this at all, on the primitive Conan O’Brien-type level.

If the head (and thus the mouth) won’t stay still, then the motion tracking and matching abilities of AfterEffects or Apple Motion become needed.

Something you haven’t yet considered maybe: teeth versus no teeth, and how much interior mouth you want to show. You can look up the old Synchro-vox technique used for Clutch Cargo and Space Angel, basically, that was using special colored lipstick and chromakeying the lips over still animation cels in realtime. The teeth generally didn’t show. The actors listened to pre-recorded tracks and lipsynched to them to get the mouth shapes done.

For a more realistic look, you’ll show more interior mouth. A well-known example for this would be the opening title sequence of singing lips from The Rocky Horror Picture Show…

(By RKOoooooo...) But I digress…

…That look in “Rocky” can be a little too real and detailed, and depends on geat dental work and etc. to look good in closeup. In a medium to wide shot, maybe not as big a problem.

Just pointing out that your look has a lot of variables to consider, and that will drive your choice of techniques used…

[Mark Suszko]

Chaz, nobody else answered your question, I think it is unique for every situation, I’ll just offer what we want to do in our own shop.

We have Panny 900’s shooting to DvcproHD tape and simultaneously to firestore hard drives. The volume of our HD is way less than yours, we decided against putting hard drives on shelves as an archival method, and are planning to burn everything to bluray for HD archival and also as a distribution medium for those clients that can’t take product via FTP. My theory for this is that BD is the best overall value *for us* and offers multiple ways to access the material even without a computer, thru game systems, stand-alone set-top players, as well as computers with BD-capable drives in them. It is that ubiquity and flexibility that I think helps give a standard more longevity. Not to mention it is darned cheap to burn multiple copies fast when you need them. A little harder to locate, load, and send out multiple hard drives that will work with anybody’s computer:-)

Does BD have the overall capacity to handle your much larger files? I can’t say, perhaps you’ll have to span the big ones across multiple disks. No solution is perfect for everyone.

[Mark Suszko]

There is something like that for Windows, ermember seeing it once, but I can’t find it right now. The thing is, even when you find it, you’ll find often that your hardware is too limited to get good results.

This is why Newtek Video Toaster or Tricaster or Sony’s Anycast are so popular: an optimized package of software and purpose-built hardware that’s turn-key.