[Mark Suszko]

Based on some headaches my friend once had doing this, be sure you standardize all the footage to the one same codec, shutter, and frame rate, etc. so there is no need to transcode and everything stays native. The friend had major issues mixing 24 p and 30 fps footage in the compositing, eventually had to transcode the oddball elements first.

[Mark Suszko]

I actually really like how well powerpoint for mac works with my mac and FCP, I can export to FCP from the PPT as video or as a folder of jpeg stills. The jpegs can take up very little drive space, but play as long as you want to, since the drives just repeat the still over and over to make the time you set. The export as video takes up a bit more space in the scratch drive, even though the video is just repeated frames of a still.

I don’t think that’s this guy’s trouble, though. What’s happening to him somewhere along the line, I think, is that during compression into the m2 files for burning the DVD, something is making his files so big he can’t fit them all into a single layer. Which seems crazy for stills and audio.

Cutting the audio down to mono at a lower bit rate should help a tiny little bit in freeing up space, but the mpeg compression should be making those jpeg stills pretty compact, since nothing is changing on the screen after each slide initially comes up. So I would be looking into the specific bit depth and compression settings in FCP and DVDSP, and seeing if something is getting re-translated back into a “fatter” format that we don’t know about. If I can burn 4 to 6 hours of video onto a disk with a stand-alone DVD recorder on single-layer DVD-R, he should be able to get this project done, with higher quality in less space, on a single disk too.

[Mark Suszko]

Another vote for Nattress; have them, love them, and he’s very responsive to customers.

The Magic Bullet Looks are also popular.

[Mark Suszko]

If I understand the description, there are NO shots of people talking for any of these, they are just the slides and a voice-over, reading them? “Radio with pictures”?

If I remember right, you can put slide shows into a DVD in DVDSP. If your disk in slide show mode is generating a single still frame per page with audio, that’s way less data overhead than an mpeg stream, I reckon. Maybe this is a more compact way to deliver and still be a DVD in standard DVD format? Does that sound right to any of you guys that use DVDSP?

[Mark Suszko]

Panasonic I know sells LCD’s in various sizes up to monstrous, with a touch interface option. Google up their home page and you’ll probably find it.

[Mark Suszko]

Not true “live”, but, if you have a laptop already, you could do a “look live” at the scene for free by shooting your footage, saving or compressing it, and doing a file transfer FTP to the home base rather than trying to live stream it. Maybe go firewire into the laptop, convert to h.264, then FTP that file. The quality will look clean as a microwave hop. Time factor? Depends on the codecs and if you’re on dial-up or something faster. Figure 2-3 times real time to compress and feed the clip, so you can’t do this too last-minute and hope to make air with it.

The other downside is, it’s not live and you can’t do the silly banter back and forth with the anchors or that stuff. But if you self-contain the reporting into a self-standing package, you can do a complete stand-up VOSOT with b-roll and all, FTP it, and have them roll the clip. It’s free to try, anyway.

For sport or a happening like a rally, shoot everything like b-roll, ftp it up, then do voiceover audio by cel phone over the top of it, and then the anchors can talk to you and ask questions while the b-roll is playing over you. Cable news places do this kin dof thing all the time, for far-flung locations where they can’t use a fly-away satelite uplink.

Back on the streaming side, read up on “mesh networks” and how to cobble together your own wi-fi repeaters to feed a stream back from places where you don’t have fiber.

[Mark Suszko]

Have them look into the camera when directly addressing the bride and groom for later viewing, like if it is a good-luck wish. If you’re interviewing them at length to get them to tell a longer anecdote, eyeline off to the side usually works better, is more formal and impersonal, detached. More like a documentary style. But no law says you can’t mix and match.

The other thing to do is change the width of the shot between answers, while you’re asking the questions, so that when you cut out the questions, the answers, edited together, flow naturally. What makes this work is asking questions that cannot be answered in a “yes or no” manner, but HAVE to be “essay answers”, that “put the question back into the answer”. If they still give you monosyllabic answers, ask follow-ups like “why”, “How is that?”, “What’s the reason for that?””What happened that made you decide that?” “How does a person get to do what you do?”. Leading questions.

Example question: “What’s your favorite ice cream?”
Wrong way answer: “Rocky Road”
Right way answer: “My favorite ice cream is Rocky Road, because, it has nuts, chocolate, marshmallow, all these different textures that work together…etc etc etc.”
See, you can EDIT something nice out of sentences like that. Try editing monosyllable answers together, without the question to explain what you’re asking them… it’s horrible.

I knew a news cameraman who stuck a little fuzzy mini-figure on top of his viewfinder: he found that it always made people look towards the lens but not quite into it, and they tended to look into his lens more than any guy on either side of him, because that incongruous little troll doll or whatever it was was an eye magnet. It worked especially well when interviewing children.

[Mark Suszko]

Why not just cut off the connectors that don’t match, and solder on the right ones? If you don’t feel competent to do this yourself, any guitar shop or music store that services keyboards, amps, etc. can likely do it for a nominal sum, certainly for less than throwing away several perfectly good mics and replacing them with more mics. Should take about an hour to do four.

If you want to do it yourself, pin-out diagrams can be found online, the parts can be found at suppliers like Radio Shack, digi-key, or Markertek. Heck, Markertek loves doing custom jobs like this, see what they’ll charge to convert these for you, if the local guitar guy can’t help you.

Alternately, Markertek can sell you adapters for the mini-connectors to convert to XLR. A little more bulky in the cable that way, but you have more flexibility and can re-sell the mics in their original condition later.

I love Markertek; they are like the Warshowski’s or J.C.Whitney’s catalog of the electronics world.

[Mark Suszko]

You unknowingly touched on one of my hot-buttons with the question. Back in the 80’s we used to throw around a loose rule of thumb figure for all productions quoted to customers as a thousand per finished minute. Back in those days, (when puppies were the oldest animal) the equation had much fewer variables: it assumed shooting for a day in beta SP with a nice 3-chip camera, editing linear on one-inch for a day with very basic Chyron graphics and some needle-drop music, final output to one-inch master and some VHS dubs.

Nowadays, you could offer the same K/hr rate, but you’re using much more powerful gear at a fraction of the relative cost, and either you’re generating way more product in the same time frame (because the NLE lets you try more creative things, non-destructively) or slacking for a good portion of the two days because the editing goes so much faster. The work could be done at any quality level along a sliding scale from handycam and imovie to FCP in HD, and look better than the stuff we made in 3/4 and betacam back then.

I just can’t see coupling a fixed rate to all those variables. I think it only worked out more or less “right” for our shop in the 80’s by pure coincidence.

In the case of your Flash job, I don’t know much at all about Flash, but if it’s anything like 3d animation work, or building interactive DVD’s, a good deal of time is killed in just rendering things out. But the actual hard brain work is in setting everything up in the project that leads up to the pushing of the render button. Do you charge more for the time spent on that, and less for sitting watching progress bars go by in the render phase? Or is it all one rate, and everything works out in the end? The gear is tied up either way, and by extension, so are you.

[Mark Suszko]

The Knot is very big, I hear. But my sense of it is that weddings are still chiefly a referral-based business, and any “standard” advertising you do is only going to attract the low-end business that chooses just by price alone. To get the eye of the high-dollar clients, you have to pass their gatekeepers, or infiltrate their preffered media.