[Mark Suszko]

Mark Suszko says that he uses the Scan-Do Pro ULTRA, which is now a little old but was six grand brand new. The latest version I was aware of the the Ultra-D for digital, which adds more capability.

I would suggest your next step regarding a scan converter is to rent one for a day, or take a deck and laptop over to a rental shop and get a demo, try out the controls, see how well it works for you. Preferably with one of the client’s older ppt samples.

But from reading your post, I’m thinking the scan converter issue is not your real problem. Too many people have great results with screen recorders, including the COW experts who post tutorials here, for us to easily blame your screen recording software. If you are using one of the top recording programs then we might have to find the problem elsewhere.

I think you may be looking at more of a workflow and settings issue with the steps you’re taking to compress the files for the DVD.

Powerpoint as it comes in default mode in my experience does not format quite right for our screen dimensions, and it doesn’t generally use NTSC-safe colors and levels. That means you’ll already lose some resolution when you have to re-size, re-scale, and re-proportion that initial screen shape, which is probably one source of your “jaggies” problem. The bleeding colors are another gift from the fine folks in Redmond.

So, I think the first thing to try, before spending money, is to open up the presentation from within your own copy of the powerpoint application itself, and see if you can adjust the screen dimensions, safe title area, color palettes and fonts, shadows, edges, etc. for better results. (I need to do this frequently with client submissions, though sometimes it’s more cost-effective to have the Scan-Do handle it all.) The more you improve your inputs, the less repair and correction you need to do to your outputs, it just makes sense. Be sure the client knows you’re making these changes, sometimes the colors and etc. are locked down due to marketing and legal reasons.

The more powerful scan converters like the Scan-do and high-end Extron have the ability to proc-amp the input levels and adjust things like out-of-gamut chroma and too-high white levels or crushed black levels. You can also do that color correction within an NLE timeline, of course, or, the individual slides could be batched into photoshop and REALLY corrected. You lose the transitions that PPT gave you, but no big loss; your NLE can do the same and better. In your unique situation though, Bob, photoshop isn’t going to be much help with the embedded video segments. AfterEffects could handle this job, but it strikes me as “stepping over dollars to pick up dimes” to have to use a big gun like AE to fix a powerpoint presentation. A time-intensive gun at that. In your case, Bob, I might first try running two locked and duplicate timelines in a stack; one that just crops and shows the motion video, and lets you adjust only that, and a layer below that handles all the static slide screens. Render the final to one single flattened stream.

After we’ve massaged the presentation in powerpoint as much as we can, and tweaked it on our NLE timeline, we need to look at how you are encoding these to a DVD. What compression and codec choices did you make? Are there better ones? I think this is where you’ll solve your problem.

For casual stuff, I’m working in FCP and using export>using quicktime conversion>MPEG2 and picking “2-pass VBR” (Variable Bit Rate) mpeg 2 encoding, with the quality sliders turned all the way up. Takes a little more time but looks much nicer than single-pass encoding, particularly with challenging, high-detail content.

I then import those m2t and aiff files generated by the conversion into Apple DVD Studio Pro (DVDSP), just drag the imported assets to the DVDSP timeline, add a menu or first play and looping commands if needed, (just a matter of checking a box or 2) and create the final burn there. Fast and actually pretty simple, despite my over-detailed description. If I was doing something more serious, I’d first use one of the settings in Apple Compressor to pre-crunch my NLE’s timeline files before the import to DVDSP.

But tell us, what are YOU doing when you make your DVD’s out of these powerpoint shows? What’s your exact workflow and what settings do you use? Maybe some expert here will spot something you can do differently or better.

[Mark Suszko]

There are numerous photo morphing software packages on the net for cheap. try a keyword search for morphing on google or downloads.com Build up several morphs and do fast dissolves between them or let the software create an AVI of the complete morph, which you can loop or ping-pong to make it open and close repeatedly.

But the way I would go is, wait until the cat’s feeding time, set up some green paper or palstic on the floor, and shoot tape of the naturally-occurring yowling if you’re just a second late getting out the can opener:-)

[Mark Suszko]

If you’re not confident of your own ability to do the job, maybe you shouldn’t take it, no matter how tempting it is. But consider:

1 Adding a partner or “on-call” person who is already equipped with such skills and giving him a cut of the deals that come your way. Since these gigs are not every day, maybe you put him on a modest “retainer” so he’s ready if you need him on short notice. The danger of course is, if he’s ambitious and unethical, he can decide to cut you out and deal direct with all your contacts. One way to control that is for you to own the gear he needs to use. Another way is to become that guy yourself…

2 GETTING yourself “competent”, thru specific training.

Make a list of all the things these inquiry calls are asking for, then go get trained in how those things are done. At some point you’re going to then have to make a leap of faith and try to do one. With every one you do, you get better. After a while, the worst of the nerves wears off.

I would say based on your post and my past experience, the main thing a station or crewing service needs is a guy who understands how to quickly set up competent 3-point lighting, how to compose a decent interview shot, and how to properly mic a person for good sound as well as good looks. The next most asked for thing would be someone to shoot a news event like a press conference, with an eye for what a news editor needs to tell the story. Which is, getting good sound, establishing shots that orient the viewer as to time and place, and a variety of correctly-framed focal lengths of the person speaking, alternating tight, medium and wide shots to make editing easier. With that you need the sense not to zoom or pan or anything until the person wraps up a main thought, then you are quickly going to another shot before they get up to speed on the following paragraph or idea. The other “news” skill you need there is to be able to hand-hold the camera really steady on your widest lens opening, as close as you can be and keep focus, and interview people after the event, asking a few obvious questions. You need an eye for composition, to see what the background is adding or taking away from the story, what context you can add non-verbally by how you frame a shot. Like having fire trucks in the BG out of focus while interviewing a fire chief on scene, things like that. And enough b-roll and cut-away material to give an editor some choices.

You can go to training camps to learn such things. Sony used to teach a course, the workshops in Rockport are another venue. You want to look for something that stresses ENG and electronic journalism techniques. Other possibilities include courses at the local cable access station, community college or university, as well as doing scutwork and job-shadowing at the local Tv news station.

Then go get some real-world practice around town, go shoot some local town hall meeting or ribbon-cutting or some such thing. Make a ton of mistakes, they are more instructive than being perfect the first time. But the trick is to make the mistakes somewhere where there will be no consequences. Then when you get the next call, you can say: “yeah, I know how to do that!”

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

We use three sizes of Rifa and we love them. I was at an event talking to another shooter, he had a Chimera on speed ring setup. We had a friendly race to see who could deploy first, the Rifa won by a mile. The larger, the better for these, IMO

The other thing I like about Rifas is, the new models can change the bulb from halogen to fluorescent in a few seconds.

The one thing I DON’T like is, the eggcrate attachments are ridiculously expensive, so much so that we never bought them. Instead I just flag the light with extra stands and foam core cutters. The eggcrates make the softlight directional, which is kind of a contradiction in terms, I know.

A good alternative to the Rifa from Lowel, though slower and bulkier, is their caselight fluoro bank.

But when I need to travel light yet have enough for a good interview setup, I use the Rifa in the triangular soft bag, which will hold 2 more stands, an Omni and a Tota, plus some rolled up gels and collapsed gel frames. Easy to carry around, very flexible setup.

With softlights like the Rifa or Chimera, the rule of thumb, as I understand it, is a working distance about 2 times whatever the diagonal measurement of the deployed light is. So a bigger softlight can be used further back, to illuminate a larger target, or pair of subjects. A smaller light has to work closer-in. Don’t forget you can modulate a little by choice of bulb, too.

[Mark Suszko]

So, any chance of a COW tutorial or podcast how-to for doing it?

Outlining the workflow and any particular settings, I mean?

[Mark Suszko]

Walter and the rest of you seem to mostly be thinking about fully-authored interactive BD titles, stuff for public release to the consumer, things that would go to a mass-replicator facility. And that kind of stuff I know is complicated even for SD DVD’s that we have NOW.

But my particular issue, and sorry for me bringing it up so often, is that the BD media looks great as a way to master things like High Def commercials, PSA’s, VNR’s and similar promo material, to archive on a shelf as well as to send to a broadcaster that’s not reachable with an FTP solution, or for some reason wants physical media. To my way of thinking, BD HAS to be a cheaper and more efficient method than using (very!) expensive HD tape decks to move and distribute HD broadcast media. So, the needs for a person like me, who is making specialized product for airing on TV stations and cable networks, are very much simpler than someone authoring full-blown feature-filled and navigable BD titles for the consumer and industrial markets and mega-large duplication runs. I just need my gorram HD spots to play thru or be readable for transfer to a station’s server, period. And I want to simply lay off HD programming to a BD disk, burn 20 or 50 copies in a BD capable Bravo printer, put a master BD disk on a shelf, and forget about it for a year or two, until someone needs it again. That’s about as simple as one could ask for.

For me, for my needs, I can afford to wait for a fully developed HD BD authoring tool for the mac. But I am DYING right now for that simpler utility I mentioned. If I have to buy Toast I will. This method might make an interesting tutorial online or for the magazine, actually. “Simple offline HD archiving and linear playback distribution on BD for the mac… without making you nuts”.

Ok, title needs shortening, but still… 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

I think instead of harping so much on Adobe – which, after all, bad or indifferent, at least has *something* out there, and had it for some time now – we should be pestering Apple more for a BD upgrade or add-on to FCP/DVDSP. Soonest.

I’m sure the delay is because Apple and Sony’s lawyers are still in the thunderdome over rights and piracy and royalties, etc. and not so much over engineering issues. But meanwhile BD technology for our community’s needs is suffering greatly.

Frankly, I would be happy at this point just to have some stable Apple app that would burn an FCP project to a BD disk, even if it was just a straight play-thru format. For distributing spots and the like to broadcasters, you don’t need all that much authoring and interactivity, and even just a little utility like this would be enough to launch a lot of HD work on the mac platform. I mean it would be better to HAVE all the same things in high def we have in SD with DVDSP, but at this point, very little is getting done on the mac platform in BD, simply because of this holdup.

And it makes me crazy, because you have the makings of an HD content creation explosion, all corked up because the “last mile” – burning to HD on bluRay… is not worked out yet.

Come on, Jobs, get those guys to cut the knot and release something that works, even if it is just a simple “archive to BD” utility. We’re dying over here.

[Mark Suszko]

We have to ask where all the time is being spent. Are they first loading all the tape from both cameras into the editing system in real-time, logging every shot as they go? For 6 hours on two cams, that’s about two days work just loading footage, not making a single cut yet. You can work smarter instead of harder.

A faster way to go is to use a hard-drive attached to the camera by firewire, like the citidisk or Focus Firestore. What that gets you is, the drive connects to the editing system and you may use it like part of the editing systems’s drives. That is, no digitizing, plug and play, get right to work. Alternately, you can transfer the files from the firestore or citidisk portable drive to the system’s RAID array much faster than real-time, and this frees up the portable drives to go get more work done.

The clip-on camera drives have other things going for them: longer record times than tape can give you, the ability to time-lapse, the ability to run a continuous loop recording, which is handy for weddings. In such cases as the entrance to the church, tossing the boquet, the limo takeoff, etc. you don’t have to guess when the event will happen, or grind away for minutes to make sure you’re running when it DOES happen. The hard drive records in a five-minute loop, erasing after the fifth minute, but when the bride comes in, you hit the button and the erasing stops right there and it goes into forward record from that moment, meaning you always have a perfect shot of several seconds to a minute before the entrance. Makes you look psychic:-)

There is a different way to go, if you don’t want to use the clip-on hard drives, and that would be to live-switch the two cameras to a recorder or hard drive, then dump only that finished mixed program into the editing system for any litle tweaks or enhancements like graphics. If you still roll tapes in the cameras, you have the insurance of iso backup recordings that can be inserted just where needed, without taking the time to digitize the entire ceremony yet again. Best of both worlds.

If you can’t hard-wire the cameras and a switcher at the churches, you can do the next best thing and play two cameras out in snych thru a switcher AT HOME. Yes, LINEAR EDITING still has a place in 2008, this is a good example of where it has certain advantages. Do a “like live” linear edit, on the fly, into your NLE’s input, then use the NLE to tweak and polish. A side benefit is, you need way less storage in the NLE this way, so you can up the quality and still have room for more projects.

Second, we have to look at how he is editing. Simple things like: is he editing in the format native to the camera tapes, or is he forcing the system to render everything to a different codec? Does the system have to pause and re-render everything on each change due to that choice?

Weddings generally are traditional linearly-told stories. So a fast but unglamorous way to cut is to just whip thru and delete all the dead spots and bad shots that don’t advance the “story”.

You have to balance this against the wishes of the client and your aesthetic and philosophical approach. By that I mean, do you feel the entire ceremony must be shown, (for some devout clients, this is a huge deal) or just the highlights? Some wedding editors try to please both audiences: they do a short highlight cut first, then supply a second DVD of just all the raw footage for people who are “completists”.

If you do a fast first cut of the whole deal on your “A” camera, and just use the
B” camera to insert some cut-aways where the A shot didn’t get the job done, there is no need to digitize ALL of the B camera footage. Think about this: by definition with a 2-camera shoot, you can not really use more than half of your “B” camera footage, otherwise, it’s really the
“A” camera, right?. Why then capture all of “B” into the system, if you only need half? Here’s how to find the right half. If both cameras were initially set to the same starting time code number, you can just fast-shuttle the “B” tape to the rough area of the “A” shot’s time code, now just digitize enough of “B” from that section to get your cut-away,(add a couple seconds of “handles” to the captured shot to make transitions possible) line up the edit and keep moving along.

That technique is for more prosaic kinds of editing, more news-like. If you are going for lots of half-dissolve picture in picture effects, you’re going to need to digitize more B-roll and do more rendering.

I have to wonder if he’s using a non-linear system in a linear way. Beginners tend to do that. Heck, the first time I saw a NLE system I did that too! I was shuttling thru bin footage, marking in and out on a clip, dragging the clip onto the time line, then going to find the next clip…. like assembling boxcars for a train. A train that must have each boxcar in a certain order and filled with their cargo before more cars can be added. S…L…O…W…!

While we’re telling a linear story that unreels in normal forward time, we don’t have to wait until the very beginning shot is finished, just to move on work on another shot. We can hop around the project and work on any part, any sequence we want. We can save sequences in multiple versions and place copies of them anywhere we want, or add more layers of effects to them, whatever. Also, two people on two machines can work on different parts of a whole, simultaneously. That’s the power of non-destructive, non-linear editing.

He normally should be lining up his two sets of tapes in two stacked and synched tracks, one above the other. Then, using a multicam effect plug-in on his editing system, he can play the sets in real time and just hit keys to make the cuts happen in real time as if live switching. All of those cuts can easily be undone or adjusted afterwards, but this is the very fastest way to blast thru the material and get the bulk of the cutting done on a first pass. He can razor thru the stack of tracks, and deleting the unwanted parts of the upper track reveals the desired shot “underneath”.

The guys that do this wedding stuff for a living generally use a template approach to save re-doing much work. He should likely do the same, that means creating titles and graphics and music etc. that can be easily re-used by just changing the text layers.

Other time suckers include repair jobs: fixing bad exposure, color, or sound that wasn’t right the first time. Wedding editors often take extra time grading anyway, to add glows, diffusions, highlights, all the “eye candy”. But repairing bad color should not have to happen. Massaging the sound track wastes loads of time as well, so mic it right the first time and save time.

Also, all that color effecting and processing should be saved for just the shots that made the final cut. Why pre-process a bunch of footage that never gets used? So, cut first, then grading/shading/adding the render-intensive blurs and etc.

Those are the basics that first come to mind. If you can add more detail regarding specific troubles, the folks here can make more pointed suggestions.

[Mark Suszko]

I think you still need mechanical rights. Streaming is not immune. Ask any internet radio station.

[Mark Suszko]

More importantly, it’s a bad business and ethical decision do do that without talking to the couple first. I don’t necessarily agree that it’s bad to put promo footage on YouTube, even if their encoding is bad. However, I agree it is not as classy as hosting the footage on your own site at better quality.

If you leave the comments turned on, what if people say bad things about you or the couple on the Youtube site for that clip?

What does it say about trusting you as a businessperson if you went ahead without permission and did this, and it got back to them? Wedding business is all about referrals from happy customers, they are your best advertisement. Why would you risk turning them into a continuous source of bad-mouthing by going behind their backs? You’d kill more business than you’d get.

Ask for permission, and be sure to update your contracts and sales pitch to raise this issue up front from now on, then give the clients the option. That turns it around from a sneaky rip-off to proactive added-value, where you’re making a few key clips available for all their friends and relatives to see online. And it just so happens to also promote your business, instead of creating bad press.