[Mark Suszko]

The chroma-pop is nice, but you’re really just paying extra for the wire flex frame, there’s nothing else “magical” about it that you couldn’t do as well with a roll of fabric and 2 light stands. Still, there’s a reason people pay extra for something at 7-11 than the local grocery store…

[Mark Suszko]

The expensive but good way is to use a motion-controlled camera to shoot the woman alone on the street, then the street full of people and no woman. Rotoscope the woman into her own layer. You then can apply all kinds of time-stretch effects between them.

A cheaper way to do this but with less control is to shoot in time laspe mode and have the woman walk super-slowly, like a mime would, only an inch per minute or so, while everyone else moves thru the shot normally. When you speed up playback to make the woman look normal speed, the background people are then super-fast. But they won’t necessarily “blur” unless you use a special camera/settings, or if you apply a streak type filter to them in post, and that filter will work on everything in the frame equally unless the woman is rotoed out to her own layer and the buildings are too.

So you have to make trade-offs in how you shoot these, depending on how you’er going to do the editing later. There are many filters and plug-ins to add motion streaking and trail effects, shop around.

[Mark Suszko]

You’re welcome. I suggest if the music fits, go for a bluesey tritone blue, use for example, the colors in the background of this Panasonic switcher ad here on the COW web page we’re reading, and don’t worry if the contrast gets “crushy” while in the blue mode. Then make this tritone layer like a vertical racing stripe down one third of the screen, the other 2/3 all normal. See if that looks cool or not, depends a lot on the shot composition/proportions and how simple the frame looks. Too much detail going on in the shot takes away from the effect.

You can also add some atmosphere by duplicating the video layer, adding a lot of gaussian blur, and mixing between the layers thru opacity change and blend/compositing mode set to “multiply”.

[Mark Suszko]

This is common and comes with the territory. You were trying to please the wrong person. The person to please, ultimately, is whoever signs the checks. And that is not always the guy that sits in the suite with you while you work.

If you can afford to tell them off, you can, otherwise, smile, nod, do whatever they (think they) want at the moment, and always bill them for everything. To protect yourself, it is handy to have someone sign a time sheet of some sort that implies they approved what they just watched.

My personal best horror story like this, just to show you this is a big club you are in:

We once had a client come in, she spent most of the day trying to choose between several fonts and colors for some bullet points building on a screen. This was in the linear tape editing days, and the bullets were part of a sequence of dissolves. For you youngsters that only know NLE computer editing, this meant every time I had a change in one bullet point, I had to re-edit the same dozen shots dissolving between decks that dissolved into the first bullet screen before going forward, to make sure we didn’t have chroma shifts or jumped frames/fields before we even GOT to the bullets, a process that took about fifteen minutes each time she asked for a change. Like if you didn’t have a word processor, and every time you changed a large paragraph on page 3 of your document, you had to re-type the next four pages to accomodate the change in spacing. I explained the situation to her in just that way, when she started asking for do-overs.

I tried using non-destructive, non-recording previews to show what the new cut would look like on the master TV for her. I explained carefully each time that this was not an actual edit yet, that it was a rehearsal to see if she approved the change before I made it permanent, I needed her to approve and be positive about the change before we committed to it, or we’d have to go back and re-build the dissolve sequence yet again. She’d say yes, she understood.

She watched the preview, said yes, that’s how I want it, go ahead and commit it to tape. She watched me commit it to tape. I’d then go forward one edit from that point. Two edit points. Starting to set up a third. She’d ask me to stop and go back. Play the building list of bullet points again for me. (or was she saying “Play ‘Misty’ for me”?)

And she’d make me go back and change the bullet point shapes, fonts, and colors back to one of the originals.

This went on for four hours until she finally went with, of course, the first version I had done originally. At day’s end she complains to my boss that I’m slow and that we have not made all the progress on this project that she’d been expecting; I obviously was incompetent. Boss called me in. I explained my side of things, and that we were all lucky I hadn’t gone postal from this yet. He gave the project to two other producers, who each in his turn all had similar problems, and communicated this to our boss.

My boss, God bless him, then called HER boss, the GTSTC, and explained why the very simple program was taking days longer to complete. They transferred the lady out of her office the same day and told our editor to finish the job on his own from the supplied script. Which he did in an afternoon.

The Guy That Signs The Checks looked at it and loved what our guy had done on his own.

[Mark Suszko]

P.S. if you have any influence at all in the shooting, get the cameras and director to tape all the rehearsals from alternate angles to what the final shoot will use, then you have a lot of extra cut-away or alternate take stuff to inter-cut with if you need it. You also can deliberately mix it in and make the final product look as if you had twice as many live cameras.

Usually, you can get cameras into shot locations during rehearsals that could never happen for the real actual shoot. Close-ups into the musicians’ faces from low angles, or real detail shots of various instruments during solos… almost anything.

I once shot a girls’ ballet recital this way, making two cameras look like four, and getting shots that would normally block too much of the audience front row. During the actual show, stagefright suddenly made one solist completely blank on her solo dance part, she vamped for a bit and the piece went on. She had nailed it in the more relaxed conditions of the rehearsal, and the timing was such that the swap was a drag and drop replacement (in a cuts-only linear editing era, it was an insert edit). Made me a super hero with the girl and her mom, who was one of the people paying for the project.

Tape is cheap except when it’s blank after the shoot, so burn thru it and shoot everything, because you never know what little piece can save you later.

[Mark Suszko]

This is just a guess, but all it looks like to me is that they are doing a dissolve/gaussian blur effect on the non-alpha-chanel parts of the layer and un-doing a stretch/scale effect to reveal it to the virtual camera. Virtual cameras in AE comps can do some wondrous htings.

I tend to visualize shots like this in 3dCGI terms, so in my head I would just have one massive comp with all the layers already present in 3-d space and then fly my animated camera around and thru them. But this is probably not the most efficient way to go about it, if you have a lot of such layers, like your proposed montage.

In which case, I would build it in smaller steps and create places where a one-frame freeze/cut point is not visible to viewers, then stitch all those together. I’m not an AE guy, but this thing seems like it calls for nested comps and the use of expressions to create a seamless and standardized “move” for each sub-comp.

[Mark Suszko]

Digital Heaven has a plug-in called Big Time, lets you float a time code window anywhere, any size. I don’t know if it works during the play out to tape but if it does, this may be the thing for you.

[Mark Suszko]

Is the actual singing any good? Sometimes, less is more, and if the performance is really good, you may not NEED to jazz it up with more effects.

That said, you could try tinting with tritone effects and layering the tinted and non-treated versions with overlaps and PIP effects. Another trick would be to go find some royalty-free b-roll footage that has something to do with the subject of the song and intercut with that. But that will cost time and cash.

[Mark Suszko]

I think in most recent cameras the zebra bars can be adjusted in a drop-down menu to trip at whatever level you want to set. Some cams have 2-part zebras where you can set an independent high and low, or an overall and one just for skin tone, etc. So consult your manual for your specific camera and come back with moer questions.

[Mark Suszko]

It may not be his fault, Bob: one of the crazy things about some accounting and procurement systems is there are some items too inexpensive to buy.

What I mean is, some vendors have a minimum order amount you have to meet before they will bother with all the payment paperwork, when you’re a government account or a charitable organization or something other than a national network accounting office. They are used to big orders from big companies and if you want one little machine part, for example, it may not be worth their time. It is irresponsible to order the bigger, more expensive stuff if you don’t really need it. Or it could be something really specific like a replacement pinch roller or video head… So you may have kill a few months to scrounge up enough other little worn-out items you need to replace, and which are also offered by the company, just to make an order up to that supplier’s minimum amount, before you can get it filled.

We had this problem with one supplier for years, and because of it we could only get a certain replacement part ordered about once a year, after saving up enough other orders to be “worthy”. So if that unit with the worn part went down it could STAY down most of a year because the part was too cheap to buy. Unless you personally went and bought it out-of-pocket for cash, then tried to get reimbursed for it. Which I don’t recommend.

How this still goes on in this modern economy, I don’t know: you’d think a supplier would do anything in the world to satisfy a repeat customer these days, no matter how small, just to keep their business. But that’s not always the case.