[Mark Suszko]

How I always did this task, I learned as a kid, splicing together longer tubing in my model rockets. Just buy more of the SAME tubing, you don’t need anything else. Cut off a piece at least the length of a dollar bill, then slit that piece so that from the side it looks like the letter “c”. Squeeze it to compress it, jam it in halfway into a piece of the track tubing, release, done. Well, hit it with cyanoacrylate (super glue) or plumber’s PVC cement if you want to keep the connector trapped in one end.

The other trick that goes along with this is that you must stagger the joints so the wheels don’t hit a joint on both sides at the same time.

The slit connectors also can be used as clamps, for example, you can make a butterfly frame out of PVC tubing or pipe and use the clamps to trap the diffusion or chroma cloth or what-have-you onto the pipe framework.

I am luck that thanks to my RC mode plane hobby, I have a cutting bow made with nickel-chromium “nichrome” wire or stainless steel fishing leader wire, stretched on a non-conductive “bow”, powered by a variac. With this I can carve and sculpt foam or slice thru PVC like butter. You can also cut the PVC with saber saws, a drill with a router or zip cutter bit, and other things. Once you make a jig to hold the piece safely, many power tools can be adapted to use.

[Mark Suszko]

That sounds like a creative but ridiculous way to measure. Would it be easier to create a box or rectangle that size in photoshop and then just super it in a layer while editing as a check?

[Mark Suszko]

One laptop, Dave, but many inexpensive drives, they are under a dollar a gig now. They are going to wind up on a RAID anyhow, why not start there and save some steps and some bucks?

[Mark Suszko]

I see ads in the back of TVTechnology magazine for decks like this sometimes, try their online version. Our agency just surplussed a Sony one-inch machine in cherry condition, do NOT contact me about it, but if you want to look for it, google up the State of Illinois surplus property auctions. Some stuff they auction online, ( I think it’s called I-Bid) and even ebay. Other items, you have to come down to a 4-times-a-year auction in Springfield to bid on in person with cash in hand. They sell off old bluesmobiles, john boats, dentist chairs, all kinds of things, but mostly office furniture and old computers. Do not contact me about this, I have nothing to do with it and want nothing to do with it, you’re on your own and I will deny I ever heard of you. I can only tell you that when it left here, it was in perfect working order with good life left on the heads, it’s an older manual-threaading model. What happened when it got stuck on a pallet and shipped out to the surplus warehouse, I have no idea. Could be sitting pretty or already stripped for rare metals, don’t know. Do your own detective work.

Consider too that this may be a big year for local TV stations to surplus out their old decks as they transition to more digital gear. Ask around your local TV stations and college Tv departments to see if you can take one off their hands, free for the hauling… or borrow some off-hours access time.

I don’t know that bumping to digi-beta is smart for this, I’d rather see you use a laptop and hard drives to convert it on the fly into some uncompressed format. Digibeta decks are expensive if you don’t have one, the tape for a thousand hours is not cheap, and are they technically even HD? I’m not sure they are, I don’t think they are. Not that your source materials are HD but certainly I should think you want them uncompressed so you have them as good as you can possibly have them right at the outset, no further cross-conversions needed. Plus putting them to hard drives right away as you play them off lets you start adding the all-important metadata right there too. That’s going to be KEY when this project gets going full-bore.

[Mark Suszko]

52 drop-frame or 52 real-time minutes? 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Ease of pickup of physical items for TV stations may be important today, but less so in the future as more and more distribution is handled by direct FTP transfers over the net.

We had a discussion on the COW maybe a year ago, a guy had his post business at his home, which up to that time was a great deal for him, and one client turned out to be literally a crazy person who physically assaulted him in his house/suite. When something like that happens, you have no place safe to go. And if your clients make a lot of stress, you have no escape and less privacy. So I think there is something to be said for having your production boutique close to home but not necessarily co-located in your home. Maybe better if the boutique is also zoned for you to have an apartment there, where you can crash for occasional overnights, separate from the actual home.

A boutique or communal space can be great. But commonly I think the basic issues that arise involve not enough rules from the start and a blurred line about who pays for what and who owns and has access to what. Like roomates in off-campus college housing, it doesn’t take much to turn a harmonious crash pad into a drama den of cross-accusations and backstabbing over responsibilities and behaviors, etc.

If you start out with a very firm and comprehensive set of rules and policies in writing and people you trust to live by the rules, I think you can do very well in such a setup, where each member brings his or her own skills to the jobs and riffs off each other’s creativity. How you share the jobs, access, bills, and the income can be hairy. Have rules on how to kick out or buy out a member’s share BEFORE the thing is begun.

[Mark Suszko]

Old sign in our office:

“Lack of planning on YOUR part does not constitute an emergency on OUR part.”

It is hard to resist the urge to be the Big Hero and save the day every time. It IS fun and an ego boost, but people can use this against you sometimes when they realize you never say no. Superman and Batman can afford to be heroes for free; me, I have to charge.

[Mark Suszko]

Just one little thought about the choice of “hiding out” or expanding your marketing in tough times.

There is merit in dedicating yourself to retention of existing customers in hard times. Because it is way more expensive to find brand new customers than maintain existing ones, and existing happy customers also get you referrals.

A company needs to consider then, how you retain those existing customers. You can send them a discount coupon, works for pizza, I guess. Maybe for ten free DVD’s of their next project? Whatever it is, it better not be a lowering of your rates!

My opinion is that you do it by reminding them of the relationship that exists, of reviewing their past successes with you. It’s like a marriage and you know if you’ve been married that you can’t take the spouse for granted for too long before things blow up! Same with clients. You have to stay in their subconscious in case they get a notion to do another project, or their eye may start to wander…. That involves spending marketing dollars as well. Just targeted a little differently.

OTOH, if your company just rolls up the carpets and turns the lights out and sits by the phone waiting for another call, well, that could be a long wait. Better to pick up that phone and call the last ten clients and tell them about the latest upgrade you gave the suite, how it will improve your graphics, or how you’re doing something brand new this year, like DVD authoring, you didn’t do last year. Or that you won an xyz award for one of your clients by using the new frannis plug-in by whosis in a novel way. An evergreen in hard times is to look at how to re-purpose their existing back catalog of projects to leverage the asset, make it do more work without having to start from scratch. I’m thinking something like compressing and porting over old videos to the web, converting them to podcasts, whatever. That’s just one option.

It doesn’t have to ask for a sale. It’s an informational call, updating someone you already have a relationship with, and sharing some ideas. You’re not doing a sales call. You’re problem-solving for a client. Who just happens to also end up paying you.

You and the client are going to get ahead of the ones who are just waiting for the rain to stop.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

People don’t want to be sold stuff. I hate selling stuff, I’m not good at it. What I think I am good at is discussing needs and coming up with a solution to a problem, with reasons why it will work. People don’t like to be sold BUT… People do want a problem solved. I always approach this kind of thing as that I’m the guy with a way to solve your problem. I’m bringing you something of value. I don’t want them to decide to be sold, I want them to decide they want to buy what I have, which is what they need. If you don’t need what I have, I’m not going to bother you in the first place. I’m here to help people solve a problem. I just happen to get paid for it as well.

As to the bad economy excuse from clients, the best time to make a bigger marketing effort is when the competitors are all hiding out. You get the stage to yourself, your company has the opportunity to build a huge lead in mindshare and brand, usually at a fraction of the normal costs compared to when there are more competitors doing the same thing. By the time the others come back out to play, if you’ve stayed out the whole time banging the drum, you should really own the market space. If you don’t chicken out.

It’s not an expense, it’s an investment.

[Mark Suszko]

Have you tried manually fast-forwarding and reversing a tape while digitizing it, and layering that back over the normal one? There’s also a visual synthesizer program or two out there that you might want to look into playing with, some of them let you work with live video. Check this out:

https://www.synthetik.com/

Studio Artist. I have an early free copy and it can do some awesome things in the hands of an actual artist.