[Mark Suszko]

Thanks, Mick, er, I guess, for the compliment that you read my post all the way through. Do you usually just read, like, the first word of every sentence, looking for codes or something? 🙂

I’m surprised that more of you folks aren’t as burned up by this topic as I am. Making money is important, but this is about the soul of what we do. I’d hate to think I was a lone nut in the wilderness on this topic. The interests that are quashing access count on indifference to help them win.

[Mark Suszko]

Often times I’ll just export a single-frame targa of the frame from wherever my play head and in-point are, and re-import that into my bin, I can make that targa any length I want with a drag. This method has some downsides if you revise the footage leading up to the still in any way like color correction or filters; the still will have to be treated separately. So what you’re doing may be better if you end up doing many changes.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ll tell you why I am irked. I’ll refer to some politics, but really that’s not my main thrust here, not only is this not the place, but I don’t think this is a left or right issue.

You know PEG and access programming has a stigma attached to it of being low-budget, low-craft, crude stuff with a lot of crazy people interspersed with boring do-goodders sitting on on Goodwill furniture yakking in front of a dark curtain and plastic potted plants. OK, I get that. A lot of access programming is not something I’d want to watch. Make “Wayne and Garth” jokes. It is deserved. But I am a real zealot when it comes to providing that channel to the the community. I’ll try to explain why.

This goes back to the founding of the FCC and it’s charter, including
the principle that the airwaves (and by modern day extension, regulated bandwidth) are a public resource and must be protected by wise stewardship so they remain accessible to all. Cable franchises madea a deal with their communities that in exchange for this exclusive access to eyeballs and basically a free printing press to make money with, they would give a little bit back to that community and provide these PEG and Access channels and facilities for local citizens to communicate over the system. recent changes in laws are now letting the cable coo’s off the hook for this requirement, and those that are not just dropping the access completely are hiding it away in a dark corner by putting it on “channel 99” and then forcing you to go thru several sub-menus to finally find it. What that really is is forcing free non-commercial access programming to act like and compete with commercial channels, and this is completely wrong, in my opinion.

These stations get to have 300 channels on which they can sell you vital products like Chia Pets and Shamwow towels, or charge you a fee to watch programming uninterrupted by such commercial messages. All those channels are trying to sell you something. Access and PEG are trying to TELL you something.

Access is non-commercial speech. That’s why it is so important to preserve it. If all communication on these networks is only commercial, with no local voice to counter it, what you get is a world of information colored by commercial interests and concerns. That means a world of information where anything counter to selling you things is actively censored or passively censored by just not finding it. The people selling you the things make the decisions on what you get to see and more importantly, not see. You will wind up in a world where you don’t even know what it is you DON’T know.

For real world examples I would give as an example, if all your news came just from Fox News, you would still think (this I am extrapolating from several recent viewer surveys of Fox-only viewers) that Saddam was behind 9/11, that he had WMD’s, the president-elect is a foreign terrorist, and things of this sort that have been proven to most people’s satisfaction to be erroneous.

Now you can chuckle and change the channel and look at other commercial news networks and PBS and the BBC and etc. and come up with a more rounded view of things and be a better judge of what may be true. But see, you HAVE that choice now. What if you didn’t?

What if the PBS and BBC were taken off because they couldn’t “compete” with commercial providers? These media companies are combining into ever fewer and fewer, but bigger and bigger ones. A smaller selection of views being sent your way results. As they aggregate markets and reduce stations to robotic repeaters managed from a central source, local input, local information, local control goes away. The community loses it’s collective nervous system and local identity. Which is just fine to mas-marketers who want exactly that result, because it makes selling simpler and cheaper if every market becomes generic. Any fans of Clear Channel here?

Access type programming creates a protected space where opposing views and alternate information can still be heard, where people can present their counter-arguments to the public. Congress thought this was vital to a healthy democracy, as well as to maintaining community, and so we have had these requirements.

But a strong push for (I think too much) de-regulation in the past eight years, pushed by powerful lobbies with commercial interests, now threatens to mute this voice and in many places, remove it completely. If we were talking about a different, authoritarian dictatorship, I think most would immediately cry “Foul! You should not quash peaceful dissent or differing views!” The difference is that we’re not talking about Castro’s Cuba stomping dissdents here, we’re talking about commercial broadcasting interests grabbing eyeballs and not wanting to be bothered with pesky public service requirements or messages counter to their selling points.

Where will it end? We lost the fairness doctrine. We lost equal time to everyone unless you’re willing and able to buy the time. That’s highly undemocratic in my opinion. Public service Announcements only get run for free in the deadest unsold hours, where they reach the fewest watchers. And now cable companies want to get out of a measly PEG and Access requirement? How much profit is enough and where is the give-back to the citizens who own the spectrum?

Time, I say, to draw a line in the sand. Digital conversion of analog channels frees up hundreds of new channels, surely PEG and access can have 2 or 3 easy to find ones per market. Level the playing field between cable companies and new IPTV providers like U-verse that don’t want to do ANY PEG service. The Pubblic Access requirement should be shared by all services to a market, not just stuck to one. That’s eqaully unfair to the one. Fund the production studios. buy them new and good gear and fund trainign and adminsitration for local Access productions so your paycheck does not determine if you have a voice. Make every competitor in the same market pay into a shared pool fund to run the access operation and put the programming on where people don’t need a geiger counter or witching stick to find it.

It’s OUR airwaves. You commercial interests are just borrowing it. Free speech is impossible if they charge you to be able to hear it.

I’ll try to cool down now and not drag politics into it again, but the policy discussion is I think a valid one. If you all think this is too off-topic, Ron can move it to another forum, fine by me.

Long as we can still find it……. like access programming and PEG channels.

[Mark Suszko]

There’s a company that does something like this, called thought equity. They shoot and buy video packages like video clip art that can be re-mixed into local cable spots, stuff like that. You might approach them with it and see if you can get it sold a bunch of times.

[Mark Suszko]

Can’t say what’s legal in the U.K. In the U.S. the only thing that matters at the end of the day from a legal standpoint is what is on paper and what can be proven. Absent that, judges fall back to common practice and in that case in the US I understand it to be the shooter’s tapes and footage unless some other arrangement was made in advance. But nothing is ever simple.

For many people their personal code of ethics demands more, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it is not a legal requirement. This is something you choose to do, a commitment you make.

Legal or not, code or not, a third element is to ask oneself what is good for business in this situation. Well, the best thing would have been TO HAVE IT ON PAPER UP FRONT EVERY TIME. (sorry for the shouting). But failing that, will witholding the footage gain you business or lose you some business, regardless of your legal standing?

This has to be your judgement call. My personal feeling for this specifc case is that the footage can’t be legally cleared to use elsewhere, so the shooter owning it in perpetuity is legal, as far as that goes but it is a pyrrhic victory, since you now get to store tapes you can watch but not sell, (they can sue you for that aspect) and you’ve ticked off a customer who will try to burn your name and reputation in the marketplace. In this business referrals are mother’s milk, the main way you get more business. Antagonizing a client on principle may be noble and right but not be in your best interest.

The better part of valor for this specific case is to bill for the tape stock or hard drives the footage resides on, (unless these were already paid for under the terms of the contract) and any personal time you have to take to transfer it off your system. Bill for those things not already paid for under the contract, cash or certified check up front, and hand the tapes over, with a smile. And make a vow in blood to never put yourself in an undocumented contractual situation like this ever again. Write the terms you want, present it, and if that includes retaining the tapes, live with it if the clients say “no way”. Or figure that in when you calculate the rates.

I would not hand over project files or edit decision lists you created in your shop though, as those I would consider proprietary tradecraft. Much like the t-shirt shop that makes your custom tee will not usually give you the master silkscreen frame itself unless you pay extra for it, and the chef usually doesn’t give away the recipe, just serves up the meal. Again, you will want to explain this up front to the next client so there is no misunderstanding; if they want tradecraft like project files and AE comps and anything you generated internally that they didn’t supply, like custom music you made, they have to pay for it separately, IF you are inclined to release it.

Or they can put you on salary with benefits and own everything you think, do, and say, all the time. Again, this is a U.S. perspective, I don’t know how much is directly applicable to a U.K. or E.U. situation.

[Mark Suszko]

Could have been motion controlled camera in that one specific shot, but then again, I don’t see anything there in that referenced section that couldn’t have been done without it. What looks like a pan is IMO just a really *large* aftereffects comp, and you’re taking each independent greenscreen shot of Justin, adjusting an overlap, and sliding it at the same rate in the one axis. Think of it as a stack of layers of glass, with one shot on each layer of glass, includign the fake background and floor, then you pull them all past the virtual camera at a steady rate, your eyes “read” it as the camera doign a pan, but the camera is locked down and th e*room* and the iterations of Justin are what’s being moved.

You could do this with the motion tabs in the regular FCP timeline, somewhat easier in Apple Motion though. This kind of comp is something AE people do as second nature.

[Mark Suszko]

Do you need a corner cove with 2 walls and floor, or a single wall? For single wall, I love to hang sheet vinyl flooring from the grid , light stands or back wall with the back side of the vinyl primed and painted in latex flat. It bends to a natural curve at the floor, it is cheap because you can buy the ugliest color or pattern that isn’t selling for pennies on the dollar, it comes in good seamless sizes, is sturdy to walk on and easy to clean or touch up. Can be rolled up and moved or stored but is of course heavier than a paper roll.

The only down side is I have yet to find a workable way to bend it into a corner cove.:-P

There are prefab fiberglasss snap-together cove sections for that kind of thing you can buy, paint and bolt to wall studs and be done.

[Mark Suszko]

How large?
As big as you can afford, so that you can work from further distances. I’m about to build one 42 inches wide for a special application.

This size thing may be the number one issue. Any prompter is useable at eight to 10 feet. Now, say your talent is nearsighted, but the shot requires a long throw of 20 feet to the lens. With a smaller monitor, what you end up having to do is make the text larger on the screen.

This is a trap however, because with fewer but larger words on the screen, you have to scroll much faster, and sentences are no longer completely visible but seen only as fragments. This definitely makes clear and smooth reading harder for non-profesional presenters, if you don’t want to sound like you’re reading.

We read by decoding the overall shapes of words and sentences. When you give inexperienced people text that’s all caps, you break up the familar shape of the word, and they fall back to decoding each letter first, then stitching the word together, before they can say it. The dif fern ce is a few mic roseconds to a se cond, but you can de fini tely sen se it as a view er. Like that last sentence.

The same applies to reading whole sentences or paragraphs: the subconscious is already decoding the complete line by shape alone, before the conscious has caught up to it, and the brain is already figuring where to put emphasis, pauses, breaths, etc. based on experience. So a bigger screen lets you put up more text at one time and scroll it much slower, and this is what you want for best results at any distance.

LCD based units are the norm now, but if weight and being compact are not a huge issue, like in a permanent setup in a studio, CRT’s are still OK and may be cheaper. CRT’s with a standard composite-in also allow you to add on repeater monitors anywhere you can throw a simple BNC cable and splitter. With some LCD-based units, you’d need a VGA Adapter cable, or scan converter to do the same thing. Whether or not this is a huge issue for you depends on your specific usage situation. LCD based units are harder to read outdoors over a CRT, for example, and generally cost more. If you move around a lot though, it is hard to deny LCD for their low weight and compact travel size.

Also, don’t believe anybody that says a monitor next to the lens or above it or below it is “good enough”. You can always tell the difference by viewing, and a real beamsplitting mirror with a lens behind it is the only way to go.

For prompting software on the PC side, I love DRS-Digitrax, they have a couple at various price points and they work great on almost any machine you throw at them.

[Mark Suszko]

Exactly what authority does a company about to disappear have over you anyway? Obviously your lawyer will have the best advice but I say hold firm and don’t cave, especially on the back-dated stuff: it would be up to them as far as burden of proof. I think you are in the strongest position and need not have terms dicated to you atthis late stage.

[Mark Suszko]

Do these women wear glasses? That could prove a problem with all the large-source/bounce card front-lighting being suggested, though that is the best way to hide wrinkles. Find out first so you have time to adapt. Remember angle of incidence=angle of reflection.