[Mark Suszko]

IMO, it is always better to slightly under-expose Dv footage than over-expose it, because, once blown out, those white areas have no detail to recover.

A repair trick you can try is to make two duplicate video layers of the same material. Apply your adjustments for brightness and contrast to the “ground” layer to suit, and never mind blowing out what’s left of the sky. Next, pick the other layer behind the “ground” layer, we’ll call it “sky”. Apply your contrast and brightness corrections to this layer. Now under “composite modes” play with the various modes there, first try “multiply”. This should sandwich the two layers in a way that keeps the best settings for both layers. May take some trial-and-error.

If the “sky” layer is still no good, replace it with a fake sky layer generated in photoshop with a pale blue gradient and try the composite mode>multiply trick again on it.

People avoid the composite mode controls sometimes for lack of understanding how easy and powerful they can be. I know I did, until I saw a great tutorial at Digital Juice’s DJTV video tutorials section (in the “Cutting Class” section). If you don’t grock blending modes, this is an easy and clear introduction to their power. Chris Gates did an excellent job there.

[Mark Suszko]

Wish I could just give it to somebody else, but we’re a very small shop with a big job and we have to do all that stuff internally.

I don’t mind so much as I am a control freak anyway, and most of the product is only 30- sec. spots or maybe 15-minute VNR’s, so hand-typing the words in is no big deal to me. I just want a work flow that doesn’t require AD/DA conversions or generational loss; I prefer a software-based solution within FCP. or at least, within the same mac that holds my FCP edits, so all I have are a few export-import steps.

I’m surprised there aren’t a lot more obvious resources for this, since the federal mandates came out. I know a lot of stations went scrambling around the end of last year or so to get gear to find a way to be compliant, but most solutions I’ve come across were specific to each installation.

[Mark Suszko]

That looks like a good start, thanks Shane. But if I read the fine print right, they can’t really work in HD yet. Do you get that from reading their web page?

We’re not HD in our shop yet, except for a a few specific projects, but what happens when we say the final good night to NTSC? How are we to do this job after the digital switchover? There’s a federal mandate for it and I need a reasonable way to comply.

[Mark Suszko]

You have a couple choices for the 16:9 footage.

You could center-punch it. That is, show only a 4:3 window view of the center of the 16:9 picture. This would be like when you rent a movie that has been made “full-screen” by the pan-and-scan process. Easy to do in any NLE with just a wipe or crop.

You take a risk with a center-punch not containing all of the vital picture information due to he way the original was framed. Which is one reason why I hate pan-and-scan movie rentals.

OTOH, you have an advantage that you can shift that underlying large wide picture around on it’s own layer to try and get the best 3:4 window out of it, as well as to add pans and tilts and even zooms that were not in the original. This method also doesn’t hurt the final picture quality as much as scaling might.

When the original shooter is composing his or her frame, some like to shoot to “protect” the 4:3 ratio. That is to say, they shoot wide but arrange the key parts of the shot to still fall into a 3:4 center spot. You do that mostly when you are not sure but suspect that this will get a lot of use in 4:3. It is definitely an aesthetic choice you must make, and some folks say you are crippling the ability to make a better picture in wide screen if everything must be shot for “protection”. A policy discussion on this is best held and agreed to before a single frame is shot.

Scaling is the other choice, re-sizing the entire frame. I think generally this is not the way to go, because it needs to radically shrink your widescreen picture to fit into a letterbox or pillarboxed window, which only keeps drawing attention to the difference in proportion. At the same time you make everything in that shot too tiny by comparison, and add distracting black bars.

If the majority of the footage is wide screen, I say, conform the 4:3 footage to match the widescreen. There are some tricks that let you get away with that. If most of the footage is 4:3 ratio, I would rather see the wide screen cropped to mach the smaller framing.

[Mark Suszko]

You can’t do this legally without getting a number of permissions, which will cost you. Particularly for DVD’s you plan to sell. The process for getting clearances and rights for clips of this nature can be quite rococo and convoluted, and will take a bunch of time.

You could ignore all this and press on, hoping not to get you and the client sued… but I advise against it.

Check out B-Z rights & permissions to get an idea of the scope of the problem and what it might cost to get done legally.

If this is something they REALLY want, another way to give it to them legally is to buy cleared stock footage with that period look, like from WPA archives and the like. Or you can try to parody the originals using brand-new footage.

[Mark Suszko]

Couple things I noticed about “Bill N.’s” piece:

You have virtual and real horizon lines going thru each man’s head right at their eye line. In every shot. Pretty much in focus too. Why are you doing that? Once I noticed it I couldn’t stop noticing it. To me, it breaks up the outline of the head and makes it harder to recognize a face/ break it out from the background. Pull the cameras further back at least and throw that background into softer focus by using tighter depth of field control. Makes your talent pop out of the scene and look more dimensional, IMO.

The blinds behind the head would be less distracting if they were less bright. This too is personal preference; I like the BG a stop or so darker and out of focus unless it has some important context.

The head-on medium shot could have used more fill, IMO, but this is individual preference.

The cut-away to wide side-angle helps break up the long take, but takes you too far away from the subject matter and what he’s saying, IMO. I’d instead tend to use that wide cut-away up front or at the end or to signal a shift in topic, and would prefer a change in angle on the head-on shot, going to a slightly wider or tighter framing to break it up. If you only have the two cameras, (that’s what it looks like), I think the thing to do is ask the question a second time and shoot with a re-framed shot head-on, and cut between those takes.

[Mark Suszko]

Is the plane going to be doing aerobatics? Then the camera mountings have to be set up for high g-forces and the install will have to be signed off by an FAA inspector, or the pilot could lose his license. Not to mention his life, should the thing go flying around the cabin and hit him in the eye or head while maneuvering, or interfere with the rudder pedals, control cables, or stick travel.

If it is a gentle, no-stunts flagpole-circling cruise around the pea patch we’re talking about, you *might* get away with gaffer taping a small lipstick camera or ice cube POV type tightly to some part of the cabin structure. You’d run a cable from there with more gaffer tape to a recording deck tightly strapped into the second seat.

Forget suction cups.

A lipstick cam is good for this because it has small size and low mass, can be put almost anywhere with confidence it will STAY there. Don’t even consider a handicam for this: it will become a deadly missile in the cabin under sudden accellerations.

You should probably consult the local FAA safety inspector regardless, before proceeding.

[Mark Suszko]

I would suggest you keep the audio, but use a combination of compression, filtering, and EQ to make it very muffled and indistinct, like hearing people above you while you’re underwater. This lets you keep the volume a little higher but emphasize a subjective distance. This works even better if coupled with a “Hitchcock Zoom”.

There have been a few moments in my life where it felt very much like one of those movie scenes where all the audio drops away and you just hear your own pulse. None of those moments were good experiences.

[Mark Suszko]

For the love of God, don’t send all the hard drives together; at the very least, have them mirror each drive and keep one as backup while sending you the other. Think of it as keeping one hand on a safety rail at all times. Look what happened to one entire episode of “Lost”. Hint: it got “Lost” and had to be re-shot.

Is there no way they can send you lower-rez proxies via FTP to work from?

[Mark Suszko]

Well, I am a big proponent of using BluRay for this, wherever you’re not using an FTP type internet relay process. The dubber/printers are cheap and fast, much better than tape, and the Blu disk can stand alone on a shelf as an archive if they don’t want to tie up hard drive space. The media is priced at about what we’re paying now for betaSp tape stock, but I think it will keep going down in price.

The fact that you’re getting mass deployment of the format in consumer hands means that with Blu-capable drives for computers and stand-alone players, you have an end-to-end HD solution that can go from board room to rec room to news room. I think that in the next ten years this is the closest thing we’ll have (and may never have again afterwards) to the old betaSp as a “standard” interchange format. The rest of the market space will remain completely fractured with too many competing formats, IMO.

But Blu is a format you can use to inexpensively distribute HD for things like wedding/events production, commercial production, indie film or industrial production, legal/forensic, etc. that has a chance of being “universally” playable, and doesn’t rely on internet and hard drives. Sending out spots on Blu Ray, the station needs less than five hundred bucks to make that happen for them, using either a computer BD reading drive to ingest into their in-house play-out system, or a consumer type player, patched into their systems. Compare that to the cost of an HD tape deck, which may or may not be able to play ebery HD format, and the accountants will say Blu makes the most sense.

The only fly in my soup is that you can’t burn Blu natively in FCP/ DVDSP yet; if you want to do it today, you have to go buy Encore for your FCP suite, which is patently ridiculous. Apple should be ashamed at this. I am fervently praying Apple and Sony get their (bleep) together in the next year and get that BluRay functionality happening natively in FCP and DVDSP.

But I don’t think the rest of the market is going to wait for them to catch up. This is a huge advantage for Adobe and Sony Vegas.