[Mark Suszko]

If you’re moving around a lot, the Osmo might work for you.

[Mark Suszko]

“Change Order”.

[Mark Suszko]

The Fresnel lens may direct the photons in a tighter beam, but aren’t they are still the same number of photons?

[Mark Suszko]

The challenge of film production has not changed… it is: “How do I get the money to make it all happen?”.

There are some recent new techniques, for example, using Patreon, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, etc. But those aren’t exactly “new” either, just enabled in a new way by modern tech.

Been reading a book about the director, John Frankenheimer, and a section on his movie adaptation of “The Iceman Cometh”. That movie is 4 hours long, and they had to cut material from the play to get it down to that length. One of the details of the production I found interesting was, the film was meant to be part of a series that were shown to audiences by “subscription”; i.e. you pre-paid for a “season ticket” to get exclusive access to see this and several other movies, specially made for this project and this audience. It’s perhaps similar in a way to the business model of “Fathom Events”, which I’m also fascinated by.

But John Frankenheimer was doing it back in 1973. It didn’t pan out back then, because not all the movies in the subscription series were of a scale and quality of “iceman”, so the subscriptions didn’t sell out, and regular Joes could walk in and buy a ticket the day of the screening, if there were seats available.

[Mark Suszko]

That to me implies that it’s an issue with trying to read directly off the cards, if you can transfer the file to the desktop and then import it and no longer see the issue.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve seen this using gopro type footage in FCP 7 when I imported the footage directly and didn’t first convert it to prores 422 in mpeg Streamclip. Looks like the same kind of “tearing” you experienced in this shot.

I guess I’d try a re-render first, then try to re-transcode the footage and import it back over the original shot.

[Mark Suszko]

Izotope will almost certainly fix it. For a price.

But there’s a Hum remover effect in FCPX audio plug-ins, and I would definitely first try using the FCPX parametric EQ and noise reduction plug-ins. They will have *some* effect on the quality of the speech in places where the frequency range overlaps. It may or may not be too obvious.

You could also export the audio into Logic Pro or, for free, into Audacity, and try the plug-ins there. I’d suggest notch filter tailored to the exact buzz, then parametric EQ and maybe also downward expansion, as well as Noise Print.

Izotope is a great investment that will pay for itself if it saves your edit once or twice a year, and it gains you a reputation for being a genius audio-repair-guy when clients bring you original materials that have poor sound.

The buzz happens because you’re connecting balanced 3-wire output to un-balanced input. The connector on the camera is not the best place to do that, as physical loads and strain can break the connection partially or even damage the connector internally when weight or sudden snags pluck at the cable. I’d suggest you get an adapter from Markertek or Monoprice that makes a clean, breakaway connection and then inputs to the camera with a connector it was meant to use, with all-important strain relief. Makes for a little awkwardness with the extra wiring, but you tie wrap or gaff tape it into a bundle that will keep stuff from snagging and losing connection.

[Mark Suszko]

“Lens”, not “Lense”. Pet peeve of mine.

[Mark Suszko]

Turbosquid will have nice 3-d models, relatively easy to animate, if this is for something like a used car spot, should do the trick well.

[Mark Suszko]

Well it never hurts to ask the station what their tech requirements are. Though it’s often hard to get a straight answer, unless you talk directly to someone in Engineering and not sales. Your region may differ but where I am, even if you submit 1080, it’s still converted and delivered to the final audience as 720.