[Mark Suszko]

Never send one anywhere until you are sure you have one and preferably more backups retained where you are. Typically packages like this are only insured for the value of a blank drive mechanism, not the multi-million-dollar value of the footage on it.

[Mark Suszko]

David said:

...son of an exec. at his company had bid $5000 on a job I was going to bid on at between 15 and 20K. They pulled the project before I could even start on the budget and gave it to junior.

The most popular old fashioned barber shop in town has a row of parked cars sometimes ringing the block, all loyal customers. Why? Major clue: a simple sign out front:

“We fix Seven-dollar haircuts”

If “junior” satisfies them, then forget it; you never had this business anyway. The sweet revenge will be on bidding to repair or re-do the botched job later.

[Mark Suszko]

Yopu telegraphed the Krispy Creme thing a little too long, and I wanted it more prominennt in the last shot. In my town the local donut is Mello-cream, and it beats KC all to heck.

[Mark Suszko]

As far as Lowel being flimsy, I have a Lowel kit going on 24 years old, still working. Yes, replaced a knob or two over the years, the heavy-duty versions of their stands are better value, but the stuff overall is good. I think it is smart to invest in owning lights, I’d buy lights before buying the camera, in fact. They retain good resale value as well, often better than cameras do.

But think first about the kinds of shots you will do most often, and arrange your light purchases for that, reserving for rental the oddball occasional shoots outside your norms.

Will you shoot mostly outdoors? Then you want to invest in HMIs, maybe like the joker bug.

A lot of indoor, close-up interviews? A softlight like the Lowel Rifa, or the Fluorescent Caselight is good. The flos run cool, and pull less power, good for places where juice is limited.

Then again, you may need to combine a softlight with more traditional 3-point hard lights, or shoot in a lot of different places where you need to throw lumens with abandon. If you want to travel, then open-faced lights are lighter, cheaper, more rugged and easier than fresnels, and this is what I have used most of my career. Lowel Omni’s and omni pros are very flexible.

Yeah, I’m an unapologetic Lowel fanboy. Not that there aren’t other brands just as good. But I like their mix-and match kits and all their 007-like accessories.

[Mark Suszko]

Let us assume the worst, that the burn is permanent, and not a metadata feature that can be made invisible with a menu setting.

Some things I might try:

If the video is short, just buckle down and hand-roto it, or have photoshop do it: export a frame movie (or progession of stills) to a folder in photoshop, create and record an action to clean the first frame, then apply that recorded action to the entire image stack in the folder, go get coffee. Something like this may work since the burn is always locked into place on the screen, so you can limit where an effect has to be applied with some precision. Will it be perfect, no, but better, maybe. Remember you need leading zeroes to keep the frames in proper sequence: if you have 1000 frames, the first one needs to be named 0001, not 1. The seocnd one needs to be 0002, etc.

Here’s something else I’d try:
Dulicate the video track and gaussian or motion blur it severely. Stack the tracks in synch. Use a luma key or play with modify>compositing mode to key in the gaussian blur layer only thru the white parts of the burn layer. This should get you into more of a glass-letter look instead of hard white, without modifying any of the good pixels around the burned areas. Shifting the x/y position of the gaussian layer may also help.

In a compositor, track the footage, and apply an offset copy a few pixels over to cover the white characters. I think I’d have to make a separate instance for each letter, but I’m not an AE guy.

Please let us know how this goes, it is a common problem for editors that have footage brought to them by clients with consumer cams.

[Mark Suszko]

The time to set your policy is before these jobs happen, and the time to tell the client is befoer the project starts. Afterwards seems to the client like you are making stuff up and making excuses. They tend to makea lot of assumptions unless you lay down the rules up front. This guy asssumed once you made the product, the additional flash encoding should be free, for example.

If you have not been paid for anything but they want to see raw footage, give them raw footage with a time code window burned across the top right third. This is good enough to review and make decisions, but is proof against piracy of your work.

I may be cynical, but it sounds like they want to rip you off and not pay. If you cave in easily, you will always be their punk and never get their respect… or more importantly, their money.

[Mark Suszko]

Doing the best I can, this is like building the landing gear while the plane is in flight, I can’t stop the work I’m doing long enough to fix the problem that’s hampering the work I’m doing…. but I’ll do what you said as soon as I can.

[Mark Suszko]

An update, still have the problem, was starting another project and fooling with the easy setups between 8-bit/ 48 khz uncompressed and 10-bit /48 khz uncompressed, then testing with short grabs of tape via SDI (which is how our deck is set up to fed the IO, the io of course runs firewire into the apple). I made sure everything was set to the same uncompressed 8-bit 48 khz for project and capture.

I digitized some clips in 10-bit as stated above, and these play flawlessly in my 8-bit timeline with no hiccups, but the audio tracks are blank, no waveforms, and you can’t hear anything. I switch to recording in the 8-bit, drop the 8-bit grab into my 8-bit timeline, and now I have video and audio waveforms on the tracks and I have sound when I play… but I am back to the system skidding to a stop every two or three seconds of playback, with the same darn trouble message.

So I’m thinking, there’s perhaps something set up wrong in the scratch drive settings or drive assignments that is creating too much lag in tracking the audio for the video to keep up, thus causieng the brakes of my hotrod to lock up. Right uo till now I had the box that says “make separate audio and video files” UN-checked, it’s been that way all along. Tried it with that box checked, but the machine apaprently won’t allow assignment of the audio to any folder in the video RAID. Or at least, that’s how I’m interpreting what I’m seeing.

Do you think I’m onto something, and if so, walk me thru what the correct settings on a system should be, please, that way maybe I can see where things have gone wrong. I should be able to nuke the system late Friday and start the new week clean, with better settings, only, WHAT ARE THEY🙂

[Mark Suszko]

I’m not an AE guy. But since these things are going to be attached to the roofs of the cars going by in a blur, you can get away with a lot.

My guess though would be to make the light bar head-on, in photoshop, apply an expression to each of the red and blue strobes to make them cycle, then do a perspective change to make the whoe thing look right once tracked to the cars. GIS images of mars lights and cop light bars for guides when building it.

Guess 2, build the things already in perspective, you can do a mirror flip on them as they reach exact screen midp-point (covered by a flare) and they’d still read correctly as the car moves out of frame. The motiion is relatively easy since all your cars look 90 degrees to the camera the whole time and make no moves in z-axis.

Why didn’t you just build the cop cars with a light bar to start with, then you’d only have to track a blinking light?

[Mark Suszko]

I would just go to Amazon and buy the kid a used copy of Zettl’s college video textbook, most any edition will do, since the lighting stuff basics never change.

Ross Lowel’s “Matters of light and depth” would eb good too.