[Mark Suszko]

.

[Mark Suszko]

Idea #1: Tinkerbell.
Tirefly LED lights, the kind that are used as valve caps on bike and car tires. Cheap. Easy to find in auto parts stores or the bike department of large chain stores or of course, bike shops.

They come in various colors, and begin to flicker when they detect movement or g-force. Pretty small, but pretty bright, easy to “fly” on some monofilament, no power required, they have their own batteries. The tirefly is about half as big as your pinky finger. Easily dressed up with some craft feathers or leaves and hot glue to look apropriately fairy-like, and the air drag of the feathers or leaves or whatever will help guide it when you swing it around, I suggest a fishing pole and quiet reel. Every time you twitch the monofilament line, it will flash for about 2 seconds.

idea #2: Pan in flight.
My first thought is a Source Four Junior ellipsoidal spot with a custom-made size M insert in the shape of the flying figure, or reversed, the shadow… use gels to add more to the effect. If you had a scroller attachment, you could semi-animate it, sort of. Rosco can custom-cut you the insert but that takes time and money, last time I looked it was a $50 minimum. You can maybe make your own using some copper foil and a PC board etching kit from Radio Shack. You print the shape you want on the foil with a resist chemical, dip it in the acid bath and the acid eats away everyting not covered by the resist. Still not all that cheap, but you could make one overnight at home.

Andy Cidor once published a design for a projector device that runs cool enough you can just print whatever you want with an inkjet on clear acetate and project very nicely without the thing melting. Have to google around for that one.

Idea #3: make your own pan-shaped or tink-shaped filter cap for a $5 laser pointer, and use that from the stage wings.

[Mark Suszko]

We don’t have this model, but we do use a Microboards DVD dubber and it is awesome. I don’t think you’ll be too disappointed.

[Mark Suszko]

Five drives, two pair and the fifth I expect is the parity drive

[Mark Suszko]

Or, duh, it turns out that I could have done what I wanted all along had I paid more attention to the settings in the profile section. So never mind, I’ve got my favorites all set up now, and thanks.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, you can make some nice but cheap light off the 0ne-k’s by adding a home-made soft box to the front. I stole this trick from Bill Holshevnikov (sp?) a long time ago and it works great.

Take your 1K open faced light, lay it out on a concrete floor or something and turn it on just long enough to mark out the angles of the cone of light it emits. Note the angle and add a 3-5 degrees more to it. Trace those angles onto four pieces of white foam core board, so that when cut out, you get four identical trapezoids. The short ends should measure the same size as the square opening defined by your barn doors. Lengthwise, try to make them as long as your arm or the size of the board will allow. We’re using standard sized foam core panels like you can get at any art store or craft store. Tape the pieces together with gaffer tape or metal aluminum gutter/duct tape, to make a truncated 4-sided pyramid. I only ever used white gaffer tape and never had an issue with heat. I attribute that to the next step:

The foam core pyramid is attached to the outside of the barn doors with either wooden clothes pins or metal “bulldog” binder clips, but it is VITAL that you keep an air gap around the edge of the barn doors and the instrument for cooling. The unit is finished off with a sheet of diffusion on the front, attached with push pins thru the foamcore or whatever’s handy. I use Rosco tough-spun for this, but opal frost is nice too.

Our chief engineer said this thing was a fire trap when he saw it. To settle the bet, we turned it on and left it running for four hours. The foam core barely got warm. I attribute this to the air cooling but also to the idea that the cone of the box is a little bigger/wider than the cone of light the fixture normally emits, so the hottest part of the beam does not impinge directly on the barn doors or the foamcore. If you pointed a 1 K six inches from a sheet of foam core head-on, it would melt pretty fast I think. The walls of foam core on this fixture however are not so much being used as reflectors, but only to trap stray light that’s not hitting the diffusion sheet on the far end, so you can point the diffuse end at targets and not spill uncontrolled light everywhere you don’t want it.

In any case, these fixtures will give you much the same effect and control as a Chimera or Rifa, but on a micro scale budget. Maybe ten dollars or less except for the tough spun. You can get single sheets of real diffusion cheap from Markertek.com and other places online. Some organza or tulle fabric from the local sewing supply store can also work in a pinch but lacks the fireproof qualities of real toughspun, which is actually a spun glass cloth. When the shoot is over, you can throw the softbox away, or slit one tape joint and fold it flat to travel with or store away for another time. The first one I made lasted eight years before the gaffer tape dried up and I had to re-tape it.

What you’re doing when you make a soft box is taking the harsh and tiny point source of the glowing lamp filament, and making it into a large, diffuse source. This makes a light that flatters people’s faces and doesn’t cast harsh shadows. Try using the fixture at a distance of around ten feet, and an angle of 45 degrees off the camera’s lens axis as a starting point, then play with it, adjusting to taste. Extra sheets of diffusion will dampen it as will more distance from the subject, or using a lower-wattage bulb.

An even simpler thing to do is just bounce the 1K you have off a white reflector like the sheet of foam core or some kitchen foil, first crumpled then flattend out and glued to cardboard, and use the reflected light to light your talent, but this is harder to control with exactitude, gives off spill that must be flagged off, and requires more room which is tough in your cramped location.

Other diffuse lighting tools you might try involve the traditional paper and bamboo or wire-braced “ball” type lamp, you can find at import type stores like Pier-One; hang them on a stick and hold them nearby out of shot. Be very careful though, these paper lamps are not treated for the heat of our tungsten instruments and can poof into flame instantly if precautions are not taken. In fact, forget I even mentined them, they are that dangerous. Chimera makes a heat-proof version of the same light in a nomex diffusion cloth that’s safer, called a “China Ball”.

I think if you try one of the softboxes I just described, that’s a good mix of safety and effectiveness on a very low budget. It can work with even home depot-type work lights, but is better with a real video light.

[Mark Suszko]

No, far as I know it is set up as RAID-5, which is supposed to be a good compromise between speed and reliability. Drives are rated at least 7500 rpm, I’ll have to dig to confirm.

[Mark Suszko]

Do you perhaps have time code breaks with different hour numbers that can trick the system into thinking you’re asking for several hours of recording?

[Mark Suszko]

John makes a vital point, not only all your video and sounds but your fonts need to be in the same one folder so PPT can find them. There’s a “make self-contained” feature you need to check when building the final presentation. Check the help files for more.

The video format that is guaranteed to work embedded into PPT is Mpeg 1, but it looks like, well, you know. Mpeg 2 is a little better, but depends a lot on the horsepower of the machine that will run it.

I expect you’re needing to do some driver and plug-in upgrades on her laptop for this to be more reliable, as well. If you’re lucky, you won’t need to add RAM, but you might need to defrag the laptop’s HD and make enough contiguous space on it for the video files to play well. Everything has to play off the C drive generally. Don;t expect to be able to play this off a CD, you’ll need to transfer it to the actual C drive to run well.

The other alternative I can think of is to have to jump out of PPT to play the video files, then back into PPT for the slides.

One other non-intuitive way to go would be to do the entire process backwards, so to speak, and make the whole thing a DVD with each PPT slide/still a looping chapter of it’s own, so she can still control everything like a slide show, but the chapters with motion video play normally, and this should work on any computer that can play a DVD or a $30 player and remote you buy from the corner Walgreen’s, for that matter. Myself, I’d much rather make the DVD and know it’s solid wherever and whenever, than try to debug the ppt with video links in it.

[Mark Suszko]

I agree Rosebrand is a great source for extra-wide chroma cloth. Our studio setup has a green-painted canvas backdrop and not enough floor coverage for some of the full-body shots I need.

I went to Ace hardware with a sample chip from the canvas and matched it in a flat latex. I also already had a $50 roll of white photographer’s background paper, and I used the paint on this paper with a simple roller to cover the floor. Garbage mattes in post handle the scene to either side. Remember, you only really *need* an inch or so beyond the talent and the rest can be matted out in post, so you don’t always need as much screen as you may think.

Where the paper meets the cloth, I just have the paper roll over the top of the joint, away from the camera, and I get a very uniform green and a clean key this way, lighting mostly with a handful of large Lowel Rifas. The paper has lasted thru six jobs but does get more damaged each time. I was happy if it lasted for two gigs for the price.

If I was doing this more often, I would apply the paint to 2 foot or 3-foot square cheap basic linoleum tiles, which I can lay out or pick up off the studio floor as needed, or the back of a sheet of vinyl floor covering, the side that takes the contact cement usually takes paint really well if you prime it with a white latex primer like Kilz brand primer first. Just be sure the flooring is the cheap flat vinyl and not the foam-padded stuff.

In fact, my number one suggestion is to make the whole chroma or white/gray limbo cove with just the vinyl flooring, because it is rugged and you can walk on it and not hurt it, yet it will still roll up if you need to make room for something else. (Well, it IS heavier than cloth or paper, but will last forever and is easy to clean and touch-up with spare paint left over).

The flooring is cheap because you won’t care what ugly, poor-selling color or pattern is on the top side, so you can get end rolls and cut-offs and clearance sheets for pennies on the dollar at Home Depot or Menards or whatever, in various good widths. Sandwich one end between some 2×4’s with screws and glue, hang that board from your grid or heavy light stands, let it curve down and bam, you’ve got a nice long cove in white or green with the “infinity” curve in it. The only downside I have with it is I can’t do a corner cove with the 3-way seam yet, but maybe if I study some more origami and paper cutting patterns…:-) We used it with contact cement to surface some large double-size plywood flats for a set wall; it was the cheapest thing we could find in that size that was seamless, and it worked very well for the faux finish we put on it.

Anyway, for a flat one-direction cove, I think this can’t be beat for ease of construction, price or effectiveness in a studio setting. On the road, where you need light weight, cloth or paper is better, OTOH wind isn’t going to bother this vinyl until it’s registering on the Fujiama scale…

AT 50 bucks or so a roll, photog’s background paper in chroma green is practically disposable, and comes in enough length to tear away one damaged “set” and still have enough for one more full-length single-person shot, if you’re careful not to waste it or crease it, and watch the stilleto heels walking on it.

I’ve keyed with everything from the “real” Rosco paint to carpeting to plastic picnic table runners from the dollar store, and had success with all of them, long as they were wrinkle-free and evenly lit. Modern keyers, even in Dv’s poorer color space of 4:1:1, can handle almost anything now.

The even lighting is the most important thing, IMO.