[Mark Suszko]

There are a couple Sony HDV cameras under 5 grand, not by much though. I have worked with the Panny HVX200 and I actually kind of like it, for a smaller format camcorder. The P2 part I’m not crazy about, but that’s just because it doesn’t work well for my particular needs and workflow. If you shoot short-form stuff, and not too often, however, the 2-slot P2 system may be all you need. If you are talking about shooting many hours, I’d go with a firestore hard drive instead. But the camera is nice and gives a pretty picture. You can shoot SD DV tape with it when you don’t need HD. Or shoot to an external hard drive. JVC has a funky, long-looking camcorder that can shoot HDV to tape and/or hard drive at the same time, no flash cards. Saw a demo in the studio, not a bad setup. First time I saw a Fujinon lens I didn’t hate!:-)

If you are in a large market city, you could try renting a couple different ones, one for each time you need it, then you’d have a track record of experiences to make a better-educated choice with.

[Mark Suszko]

What an awesome look.

You know, the logical extension of this is to shoot a much higher rez and map HDRI textures to the data, then you basically have a cheater’s version of 3D TV. Though the perspective is limited to what the LIDAR can see, if you use two or more LIDARS you have the entire volume of the set to play with from most any angle.

Even if you just put a single LIDAR on the front of a “normal” camera to capture the depth data at the same time as optical capture, imagine the layering you could do in post by extracting z-axis information. Another way to “fake” 3-d by forcing the layer separation.

Very cool stuff to muse over. The song sounded nice too.

Thanks for the link!

[Mark Suszko]

The question is kind of misworded, and I don’t mean the title. It is less about the specific camera you buy, and more about the format you record in. The better your color space, the easier it is to pull a good key. If you can capture uncompressed, that would I think be the ultimate source. But any 4:2:2 or better codec should be fine. With the latest plug-ins, even 4:1:1 DV25 footage will key all right.
Since I don’t hear anything good about AVCHD, I’d personally steer clear of that scheme. But most other formats seem fine.

That said, these days you can pull a decent key with almost any footage from any camera, if you’re using the right software, and you seem to have that already. Long as the green is evenly lit, you should be able to make it work using most any camera. With badly lit green, you make more work for yourself.

[Mark Suszko]

I dunno. It’s a good start on a draft document, but I think it needs more work.

To my mom’s eternal regret, IANAL, however, I find that qualifying language on who-what-when-where in the sample document to be less detailed than I’d personally like. I think it still leaves a LOT of wiggle room in the interpretation. Too much so. These things are shot down by a judge all the time for being too broad or restrictive.

Also, in this modern world, it is not impossible to find out after the fact that you’ve done work for a subsidiary of a subsidiary that’s owned by a holding company of the client. Hard to know who owns what in a world of mergers. And small to mid-size agencies are constantly re-combining and changing their names and the principle partners. Plus you have a non-objective measure of how much it takes to be “competing”. A good lawyer could easily bust this paper, I’m thinking.

I don’t think you can successfully enforce this document. Excessively long restriction periods also get shot down in court all the time.

If it said: You promise to do no work of TYPE OF WORK in NAME OF CITY for the corporation known as NAME OF CORP for one year from DATE ON FORM, that’s pretty specific. That’s the direction I’d go in, if this kind of protection was important to me.

But here’s a different take:

Since you don’t know at hiring time which clients the employee will be working for in your coming year, wouldn’t it be easier to have them sign a specific NDA/ Noncompete form for each important client they work on at the beginning of the job? Right on the billing sheet? I can see some advantages to that. What do you think?

On a side note, if many former employees are turning around and poaching all your clients on a regular basis, I’m guessing there are more and broader issues going on than a simple legal memo can fix. I’d like to hear from some of you owners about how big a problem this has actually turned out to be for you: a constant battle, or just one rat fink backstabbing you over the history of the company? Did the fink prosper in the long run?

[Mark Suszko]

try Effects>Dissolve>additive dissolve.

Heck, try ALL the alternate dissolves FCP offers. Learn that they all give a different “feel”. As does where you place the start of the dissolve, at the beginning or the middle.

[Mark Suszko]

Seen SnapzPro from Ambrosia?

[Mark Suszko]

Perhaps more effective is a personal introduction or recommendation by some mutual acquaintance. Which is I guess why these various networking systems like Linked-In are gaining popularity. Your colleagues act as the first-stage filter.

[Mark Suszko]

As I understand it (which is not at all well) this is something how the new Adobe video pdf system works: all footage is first mirrored at two sites, hooked together live, with a skype voice line alongside. The software locks both sites to the same time code reference so both site displays are always looking at the same exact frame. You and the guy at the other end, say, a client or director on location, both have control of a timeline of the project that can be step-framed or shuttled at any speed or direction at will. The data overhead is low because you’re not actually streaming the pictures and sound, just the timeline shuttling commands. Then each workstation moves it’s timeline around to match. Supposedly you can annotate frames and draw right on them in telestrator style. Seems like a powerful collaboration tool. Or on the bad side, a way to over-micro-manage someone remotely. If you and your editor are really all that far apart in how you’re looking at things, technical solutions may not help. If OTOH, you are leaving a lot up to the editor and just use this tool to see and understand his progress, again, that could speed things.

[Mark Suszko]

Sounds like there’s a psychological/ personality component to this story that we only partially understand. My guess from reading between the lines and sensing your indignation is, that you came on a bit strong about the proprietary nature of the work, without a strong legal grounding for the argument.

You caught her basically “cheating” on you, called her out in her own office, and no matter how nicely you may have put it, she took that badly, and lines were drawn. I think you’re done there as long as she’s in charge. I suppose you could try going over her head, but that’s only going to make her hate for you permanent.

If you were a cruel and vindictive person, I suppose you could send a CAD request to YouTube to pull the clips for violation of copyright. The way I understand how this goes, Youtube generally pulls the clips immediately upon the first formal request, just on anyone’s say-so, to be on the safe side, and then it’s up to the disputing parties to prove who owns what before the clip is allowed back on. Which may take a long time.

Generally this tactic happens when someone posts a clip from a broadcast TV show, music video, or commercial and the copyright owners complain. Should this happen to that fine company, and their web visitors go to see clips that are no longer there, that might be bad for business. If you were to employ this tactic, and I’m not suggesting you should, I bet you would be getting a call back from the lady or her boss right quick. To her boss you can explain that this all got out of hand because the lady didn’t understand how things are done, acted unethically, if legally, and you’d be happy to make things right again at little or no charge if the boss would let you. But it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best, I fear. Pyrrhic victories are too expensive for businessmen.

No, I think your best bet is what the guys above have already laid out for you. Consider it like a no-fault divorce, send her all the stuff they paid for, and forget about them. If they come crawling back for anything, bill them quite stiffly.

When the management reshuffles at that place, if you left everyone else there on good terms, you might get a callback.

[Mark Suszko]

A thanks like that is like a paycheck for me, you’re most welcome.

I know a little about a lot of things, but I don’t know that I know enough to make a coherent book out of that. Certainly not an instructional one. Maybe ‘Writing “For Dummies” books, for Dummies’? You know, how to write a “(whatever it is) For Dummies” book. Like Kramer’s Coffee Table Book….:-)