[Mark Suszko]

Maybe a Terranex hardware-based scaler could help a little, but TANSTAAFL.

If I was desperate, I might try exporting the video as a frame movie and using a fractal-based image scaler on it thru Photoshop. “Genuine Fractals” was the trade name, I recall.

[Mark Suszko]

Some servers and Master Control switchers may be programmed to do the fades at their end, automatically, so starting and ending on full frames would not be an issue there.

If the place taking your deliverables demands no fades, that’s what you do.

I generally use a 7-to-15-frame fade top and bottom on spots, as a default, sometimes the fades are faster, may come up faster and go out slower, but occasionally, if I want a more jarring effect for some reason, or the spot is *really* cramped for time, I’ll also skip the fades. It’s literally one second more of viewing time, but sometimes that one second makes all the difference in the pacing.

For web-bound stuff, players generally pause on the last frame, so to keep the logo or other information screen up and visible for people to read/copy down info without them having to manually pause, I’ll also end there on a full frame, which becomes a freeze frame in the media player.

[Mark Suszko]

Jeff; One thing I have to caution you about is to be wary of any deal that requires the discounts up front. In my lifetime, I have never seen this work out positively for the video person. Indeed, if I’m in a meeting with a new client, and they throw out the old: “we’ll give you a lot of our future business, if you can cut us a price break on the first one” line, I would just smile, stand up, and walk out. Because at that point, they’ve revealed that they are scammers with no intention of paying anything, and you’ve saved yourself a lot of time and money not being sucked in.

As to getting an actual template for the “deal memo”, you really need to have a contracts lawyer write it. Consider it an investment, not an expense, and roll the cost of the lawyer’s fees into the project, or at least part of that cost. A consult over the phone or by email could be as cheap as fifty bucks, and could save you very much more.

Some of the details that will need to be covered in the deal memo would include a very specific technical specs and deliverables description, a set time schedule, how many revisions the client gets for free and what constitutes revisions that incur an extra cost, terms for the down payment and progress payments, a severability clause that explains what happens when the parties want to stop at any certain point, and who gets what, then there’s kill fees or non-refundable deposits for situations where you have had to outlay funds to retain rentals or staff for a certain date. You need a rain-out policy, defining what happens when a key factor like weather or a crew getting sick or delayed, or the client failing to show up as scheduled, prevents completion of a shoot. You need in writing who on the client side is authorized to make final decisions, who has “sign-off authority” for approvals. You need to spell out who owns the rights to the raw materials, what the client owns at completion, if and how you can use any of the product in your own advertising and promotion, such as in demo reels. You’ll need some stuff for the O&E Insurance ( omissions and errors), and you need paperwork for the IP clearance and rights to things like copyrighted music or purchased music, stock footage, etc. . And a clause about your own IP; your work product, your project files, etc. and who owns that. Because it’s not unheard of for a client to demand you turn over all the “secret sauce” you used to make the product, so they can re-use it themselves and not keep paying you for it.

THEN on top of all that, you have language that details the discount schedule and overall costs per episode.

So all of that is definitely worth fifty bucks or more to hash out in a consultation with a contracts lawyer. One benefit of having it professionally drawn up is that you will then have the “boilerplate” for other future deals as a reference.

I’m relatively handy with tools. But I don’t do my own brake jobs or electrical work. When my life and the lives of my family are on the line, I let a pro handle that work. So too should you invest the time and money to meet with a lawyer.

[Mark Suszko]

Search for autosave vault. And in prefs, you can set how long the machine waits between auto-saves. I’m paranoid so I set that for five minutes. Too much can happen in two hours to risk losing it.

[Mark Suszko]

Your Olympic and Dr. King examples are among the hardest of things to get permission for. And no, it doesn’t matter that you got them off someone else, or that they are short. You can’t legally use them without a clearance, you’re not going to get a clearance, and if you still go ahead and use the clips you can expect a take-down notice very quickly, or a “strike” against your account in YouTube’s rating system.

You want to make a promo video for what you do, you are going to have to shoot yourself doing what you do. No shortcuts.

[Mark Suszko]

Instead of asking for a kill fee, which probably isn’t enforceable across ten episodes (You’re lucky to have a kill fee work for one individual episode once it’ in pre production or production) my preference is to set up the payments in stages attached to “milestones” .

Like the old idea of billing in thirds: one third up front before you start, which should cover any advance money you have to lay out for crew, rentals, etc. Then another payment at the first edit, and a final one at delivery. So that if the project has to stop at any stage, for any reason, everyone is covered for their outlay and nobody pays for stuff that wasn’t done.

For a multi-part, 10 part series, I’d still try to bill for all of the first show up front, because that’s the main hurdle. If the pilot is good and works, and everybody’s happy, the other nine should go well and now you have a template for costs and time.

So I’d want to bill for the pilot and the first episode up front, then we can talk a sliding schedule where each follow-on episode will be done for x amount less, down to a “floor” price for the final one that still makes me a profit, but reflects a discount for the streamlining and systematization that happens along the line in producing multiples of something.

You don’t need a kill fee unless the production outfit has to commit resources and make personal commitments for time or hiring staff. It’s only right to bill for resources that were committed and can’t be un-done in time, so kill fees have to be tied to some kind of deadline in time.

[Mark Suszko]

If you mean from the editing timeline, well, that’s up to you. Export one massive rotated clip and cut it up, or mark ins and outs on each clip and export them off the timeline as individual renders, one at a time.

But they’re rotated now:-)

[Mark Suszko]

If you put all the videos on a timeline, rotate the first one only, you can highlight it, hit “copy”, then apply that as a “paste attributes” to all the others, done?

I don’t know if VLC or QuickTime Pro can batch this action, but almost certainly ffmpeg can. Though I have no skills in how to set that up in ffmpeg. You might ask in their COW forum.

[Mark Suszko]

I can think of one way to try and fix that kind of damage. It would involve exporting the video as a “frame movie” of single frames, taking the frame movie into Photoshop, and using the healing brush on each frame individually. Not “roto” in the conventional sense, more like “painting”. A highly time-intensive process, with no guarantees of perfect results. There would probably still be artifacts, but instead of dropouts they’d be areas of slight blurriness. But that healing brush *is* pretty amazing. Adobe’s new “sensei” technology, recently demonstrated as a “coming” feature in AfterEffects, would do a better job. It is used for rig removal and the like, relying on finding clean frames of the same scene and interpolating between the unwanted regions and the “plate” Sort of an A.I. based rotoscoping app.

[Mark Suszko]

Tom’s #1 and #4 are especially smart. And I’m inferring from reading between the lines that this wisdom came from an expensive lesson or two in the school of Hard Knocks.

Building the pilot is more work and expense than any other episodes; you have to establish the looks, the titles, music, graphics, style of editing, sound treatment – then all of that gets applied to the follow-on episodes. Maybe when you budget for the show, you explain the first one will be the most expensive and the rest will be x percent less.

I think what I’d do if it were me, is contract for the shows individually, and offer a price break on the last five, or a steadily increasing discount per episode, that progresses as you get more episodes to do. This might somewhat offset the client urge to run-away with the other eps to a low-baller rival, or to take them “in-house”. I would build that discount into the bids from the beginning, “front-loading” my key expenses, so I’m not really losing anything, but the bills look smaller each episode. That way, if they do suddenly drop out mid-way, I’m not left hanging with unpaid contractors or rentals.