[Mark Suszko]

I’ve done this several ways. I think the very best way is to use bilingual talent and shoot independent English and Spanish versions.
Of course, if this has already been handed to you as a done deal, with no budget for reshoots, you may not have the option. But you can start suggesting to the bosses they plan all future programs that way, and save future headaches. Something else to think about in the planning stage is to build in longer, slower-paced shots that leave room for longer Spanish tracks, as well as to always archive versions of the audio mix that keep the music and nat sounds and vocals separate. But those are probably pretty obvious to most people.

The timing of how the lines are delivered is always going to take longer for everything in Spanish. To get someone to dub over English into Spanish, but yet retain the English version’s shot timing, the Spanish voiceover artist will have to speak mucho rapidamente… and their delivery sometimes becomes an unlistenable blur.

Sometimes, they just can’t compress it any further, and what then happens is they re-translate and edit the words to fit the time slot. A possible side effect of this is, the edit makes an error in content because the translator on the spot making these judgement calls is not the content author. Later, you’ll get yelled at for unauthorized changes that altered the meaning in some significant way.

As far as characters, I tend to have men do the mens’ voices and women do the women and children, with a separate man’s voice for a narrator. I’ve done versions where one voice did everyone; it can sound like a book on tape where the speaker plays many parts but unless the translator is pretty talented, it becomes hard to follow dialog.

You can use some editing tricks here and there to help add the padding so the translator doesn’t sound like an auctioneer, and the copy stays lined up with the shots more or less. Some of the editing tricks are more subtle than others. Slo mo and freeze-frames can help, so can looping a shot,or playing it backwards, but you then are forced to use the gimmicks consistently everywhere in the show or they stand out too much. You could also add padding thru more title cards. Find new b-roll that fits and use that for padding. Do picture-in-picture corner pins, anything that gives you a visual pad.

As for this specific job, the translator should probably just stick to what the people say and not try to talk over the title cards as well. If I had the raw footage of the 7 speakers, I’d re-make the titles and bullets in Spanish, nothing else would look as good. If I didn’t have the clean plate of the speakers, I might do a 2-box shot, kind of like the look of an isight mac webcam 2-shot, and put the English version video on one side, the Spanish text, only, in the other box. This perhaps will not work if the text in the English version is too small when reduced into the smaller box, but since this version is for Spanish speakers, and the Spanish version’s graphics will be larger and legible, maybe you can get away with this, and it would still allow for a Spanish sound track along with text points.

At some point, you get into diminishing returns, and you’ll see that it costs more in time, effort, and cash to fix the problem material than to just re-shoot it right from scratch. My late friend Louie Rosenblate used to have a saying about this when he saw wasteful practices on sets: “Stepping over dollars to pick up dimes”. So beware of false economies and that slightly consescending and dismissive attitude that re-purposed English material is “good enough” for a “secondary audience”. If you look at current census data and trends, there’s nothing “secondary” about a Spanish speaking audience anymore. I think an audience that sees you went to the extra trouble to give them equal quality respects you and the message way more than a half-hearted effort at adapting existing material.

Before you go much further on this job, meet with the proper people once more and discuss the pros and cons one more time. Do your Spanish-speaking audiences not deserve as good a program as the English speakers? What will their opinion of your organization be, if they see all they get is a version with less production value than the orignal? Will this project reflect well on the AG if it looks like a crazy quilt? Is there a cheaper way to re-do the show in Spanish? Can you just find seven or so Spanish speakers and spend a day re-shooting those parts? Or collapsing seven narrators into one or two? Could you pause the program and cut-away to a studio shot of a Spanish person every so often, going over the main points up to that mark? You’ve got options, but you obviously need to choose which will fit the time-cost-quality triangle best for YOU.

Laurel and Hardy sometimes shot their movies twice; once in English, then with phonetic Spanish cue cards for an export version (They did not want any other actor’s voices depicting them). Bela Lugosi shot vampire movies in Spanish as well: at night, a complete second cast and crew would come in and use the same standing sets to shoot Spanish versions of the movie, then Bela would find some time to shoot his inserts and cut-aways with Spanish cue cards as well.

[Mark Suszko]

You include a promo sheet with their billing statements, right?

[Mark Suszko]

So far, Bob, all of them. And a couple, repeatedly, as they tried for different jobs. Out of curiosity I forwarded the question to a college friend who works a career in HR and she was 100 percent for it, for what that’s worth. The issue, she said, becomes more important the bigger the job is; you might not bother doing it for a teenage burger-flipper, but for someone pursuing a career track job, yes.

The legal troubles that I’ve seen in google searches of the topic tend to come up when it is not clear who can say what in a person’s written employment file, and who can see that information and how long it is kept. The ugliest incidents arise when someone writes down a subjective statement that is hard to verify. Besides official annual or quarterly evaluations or reviews, there may also be memos in there detailing a specific incident. Such memos are generally one-sided on the part of the writer, and sometimes written in anger, and so I’d want to hear or read a candidate’s response to the memo before passing judgement. But do you even get to know that’s in there?

Depending on if you work for government or private business, the office policy may be to give up just the bare minimum objective data of dates worked, title, and amount of pay over the phone, and refer everything else to HR. Even if the guy was terrific and the favorite of everyone there. Which can look weird if you’d been bragging on your past there and all they say is a curt “Yes, he was here”. As a potential employer you want a sense of if the person left on good terms or not and the curt response may make you suspect the worst. Whatever disciplinary issues or other such baggage the employee had is buried, lest the ex-employee come back and sue for libel or slander. The suit may be without merit, but in this litigious society often the mere threat or possibility is enough to stifle any subjective opinion about the ex-employee.

Hiring sure is a guessing game when you are trying to judge applicants. I think the sealed private reference letter can help, and certainly can’t hurt.

[Mark Suszko]

That’s why I say use a TIVO and just pop to black in the switcher during the commercial skips.

[Mark Suszko]

I was pretty sure he was talking about reflecmedia when I read the first post. Reflecmedia works, NFL uses it, from what I hear. But it has up and down sides. The down sides include:

Price. The cloth is just really expensive, especially in larger sizes. The cloth contains retro-reflective glass beads that bounce the ring light back towards the lens. You might be able to simulate the same thing with scotchlite fabric or road paint, but it will be way more expensive than latex flat chroma blue or green. I can wrap an entire studio in chroma blue or green fabric or paint for the price of an xtra-large sheet of this cloth. The price of the cloth is what held this system back from becoming a huge success with great market penetration. At the same time keying software has improved so dramatically that you can do way better with blue or green cloth now.

But because the whole principle of the thing is to only bounce back a keyable blue or green directly back to the lens, if you want to key a much wider area, the ring lite becomes a limitation as it only shoots light straight ahead. The sides of your shot will get less and less light from the lens ring illuminator the wider you go, also the farther back you go. A regular chroma background can be at almost any distance or angle and still work if it’s lit ok.

The ring light is also a problem if you want to put a teleprompter in front of your lens, it reflects in to the splitter mirror and the mirror attenuates the ring’s output as well.

Meanwhile, software gets more clever. My wife’s imac isight camera comes with a remarkably good live keyer effect in it that uses DIFFERENCE KEYING. You turn on the keying with a mouse click, step out of the camera shot for a second so it can grab a clean plate of the room behind you, then you sit back down and bam, the imac can put you live into most any static or moving backdrop you choose. Some included with the mac were the Eiffel tower, a tropical beach, and a roller coaster car in motion.

I expect to see more of the difference keying trick appear in consumer and prosumer apps.

I think it was some MIT work I saw online where they have a method of capturing the entire frame of a shot in perfect sharpness and then let you roll the depth of field control anywhere you like, like you had a tilt-shift lens in post.

Here’s my blue-sky idea: I can foresee using z-depth cues for future keying technology. For example, we know our image sensors can see IR wavelengths and today we add filtration to the sensors to screen it out… but what if we remove the filtration and/or had an extra sensor in the same optical path sample outlines in IR to determine z-depth, illuminating with a camera-mounted IR source, perhaps IR laser LEDs, and then apply that data as an alpha channel layer in real time in the camera? Any flat wall of any color could become a chromakey type wall, or no wall at all, you just need a foot or two difference in distance between the actor and anything else to select it for the z-depth. Not only that, but, if you extend this to a logical conclusion, you have a ONE-LENS LIVE 3-D TV CAMERA as well, if you can keep the various items in z-axis separated and tracked with their z-axis metadata. Is 10-bit enough to hold all that? Maybe? IR is not as sharp as visible wavelengths, so the key you cut using IR might be a little softer around the edges than a conventional chromakey. But I think edge detection and correction could be figured out by a clever coder.

I just want 1% of the gross for the idea.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

You might not get much grief from the quickset concrete mortar people, but you may from the quickset tripod makers. Did you do a lot of name checking and googling before you picked the name? If you haven’t really started yet, this may be the best time to make disruptive changes to the identity.

As far as tips on marketing such things, I would buy an ad on turbosquid.com for one thing, because that’s a huge resource for people making, buying, and using such products. Also downloaddotcom for people who need something cheap in a hurry under deadline pressure. Outfits like sounddogs probably sell their audio clips most after five PM when there’s no other place to go and you need it NOW.

My best tip and a customer request:

I think virtual sets are going to be a growth business, however, what I see looking around out there is a lot of product that looks more like FPS video game levels than practical environments. There is no getting around the need for a real artist and designer’s touch, even in tools made for non-artists to use. So I would invest in high quality components for the “construction kit” approach, and offer some less-obvious but useful sets besides the typical newsroom/office/control room/bar/game show type sets. There are tons of office and bank simulations out there already.

I was thinking about this the other week while watching the incredible art direction on AMC’s “Mad Men”. It is really hard these days, because of security and other legal hassles, to shoot scenes in airports and airplanes, for example, or grocery stores, or churches, courtrooms, dentist offices, exam rooms and surgical suites, schools, or malls, or automotive repair bays, or movie theaters and their accompanying spaces, to name a few. This is a niche not yet well exploited, with a demonstrated need. I would indeed pay good money for virtual sets in those locations, with and without brand name product placements in them, that look believable. Accurate historical or period locations would be useful too, for people making dramas and documentaries. From Roman baths to a 40’s diner to a Pullman car… you get the idea. Once you have the basic model built in whatever software, you can then sell or rent custom texture maps that re-dress the same object in multiple ways, some with green screen textures applied for use in 2 d compositing apps… and this lets you sell the same object multiple times. I think nobody offers quite this kind of collection yet and someone offering it would pretty much dominate the market space for that kind of resource. I would call it the: “You can’t shoot there” collection. Or “Impossible locations”.

I want 2% of the net for the idea.

Mark Suszko

[Mark Suszko]

TIVO?

[Mark Suszko]

Also use zebra bars to check evenness. I don’t agree 50 IRE is the “magic” number, I like it a bit hihger than that, but anything between 50 and 70 should work fine, if its even. You don’t need it brighter than everything in the frame, is my main point, you want saturated chroma, not screaming luma.

I’m doing pretty well keying Dv25 in FCP6 using just the FCP keyer, but can’t wait for them to install my copy of Ultimatte. The adjustment to virtually add spill control helps a lot in both keyers.

If you want to control spill contamiation on the actor during the shoot, and you can’t just move them away from the screen because the screen or room are too small, use a magenta backlight on a green set and “bastard amber” gel backlight for a blue screen set.

[Mark Suszko]

Nice idea John, but these things usually boil down to what the customer wants: you can play a DVD on almost any modern computer, but you can’t usually play a powerpoint on a CD off any consumer DVD player. So his audience must really need it to be a certain way, and a tech solution that doesn’t meet the audience deliverables requirement may work, but won’t be accepted. They ask fora hamburger, you can’t say no, have a giro instead. Even if it’s a really GOOD gyro.

Mmmmmm, Gyros………:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Having asked about Encore myself, before, the answer I get most often from here is that it barely works, if all you want is a straight-thru playback in BD, but anything more advanced, like menus, is hit and miss. For my own needs, straight play-thru in BluRay is all I need, but I’m on the fence about buying any hardware or tools until somebody else has worked all the bugs out and gives a list of approved known working drives to attach to the mac.

I think it’s a crime Apple is so far behind on BD capability for FCP and DVDSP, and I blame it all on the lawyers.