[Mark Suszko]

I think what I’d do is, if this is just a couple seconds as part of a montage or something, just create a silhouette of the lights on their poles, shot from directly below, in photoshop, just by drawing them, or by taking a digital still photo and creating a masked alpha version. Throw a still of an evening sky behind the silhouette, add a flashbulb light effect to the top layer in the same place where the bulbs of the real lights would be, and just play that flashbulb pop effect in slo-mo, finishing with throwing the contrast to the extreme, in a fade to white, as if a video camera’s auto-iris were being blown out.

You could do this without any advanced compositing at all, just 3 layers of luma keys and the stills, with a slomo maybe. If you throw a slow slight overall pan or dolly move on the entire composition, it will sell the real-ness of it a little bit more.

[Mark Suszko]

Produce your own spec work and go to town on it. Or ask around your favorite charities to see if you can do soemthing pro bono or paid for them, say, to put on YouTube. Add that to the reel.

[Mark Suszko]

Time lapse it, speed up the footage, add fake light and luma-key it in during post, add lights using a compositor. Many options.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

I know that Video Toasters have built-in DDR’s in them, what I don’t know is if the DDR can be used like this internally. Might want to ask somebody in the Toaster forum.

[Mark Suszko]

I have not done it, single or otherwise, for a long time, but when I did, my two positions were along/behind/parallel with the First Base line, about halfway between Home and First, and thru the backstop fence, behind the plate, for over-the-shoulder shots of batter and pitcher in telephoto-compressed 2-shots. By controlling depth of field you can shoot thru the fence as if it was not there, only losing a fraction of a stop exposure.

By taking a position halfway along the first base line area, you get batter shots, pitcher shots, a decent play at Home Plate as a runner comes in from third, folks in stands and the dugout, scoreboard, and the chance to catch all the other positions reasonably well. Behind the backstop fence gets you complete coverage of the defense and pitcher but poor coverage (just his back) of the batter and obscured views of slides into Home.

I guess what I’m suggesting is, if you are only covering YOUR team, with a single camera, you switch between those two spots depending on which side is at bat and which you want to favor with the coverage. If you are trying to cover both teams equally with just one camera, I’d probably choose the first base line somewhere.

If I had two cams, those would be my first two choices as well. I would avoid crossing the line of action and putting a camera in the outfield looking back towards home, but a thrid camera would probably be outfield looking back to second base, the pitcher’s mound and Home plate. Keep all cams to an arc on one side. Yeah, the WGN guys, who are real pros, do a lot more, you would too if you had their budget. i’m tryingto keep it basic.

There’s a cool giant monopod, called HiPod, that is great to get high-angle, stable shots in sports fields where there is no good elevation or bleachers. Lets you pan and tilt remotely. But now we’re talking much more money and crew. At that point, you might as well bring out a Tricaster and live-switch it too.

You could do it multicam live with webcams and a laptop running something like LiveCannel to switch it live and record to the laptop’s hard drive, but I think the resolution you get makes that not worth the effort.

Cheapest “real” switcher I’ve seen at B&H was $999 for an Edirol, but I suppose you could score a Panasonic MX series on Ebay for less. Have to work out AC-powering it and a monitor and deck, and laying cable. But when you do the math, you’re going to be hard-pressed to deliver an acceptible product at a price the parents are willing to pay for any multicam live switch, and you say you don’t have the time to edit.

Assuming you have to digitize tapes, a 2-cam edit might take you from six to twelve hours to do. Faster if you use Firestores on the cameras, but still at least four hours with those, I’m going to say, for a rough cut. How much is your time worth? That’s why live switching looks attractive.

Have you considered what your local cable access channel can do? The one I interned at had a mobile live truck with a 6-input Grass switcher, three cabled cameras with intercoms and a CG and CREW (of college interns, but still). We took it out to Little League championships a time or two, which is where I got my experience from. You might look into seeing if you can request similar coverage, which you would exec-produce and direct. That’s the cheapest thing I can think of that would still have some quality. And it should fit in with the requirements of the cable company’s charter with your city, long as it is unbiased overall coverage.

[Mark Suszko]

One decidedly cheap way: a used TIVO with analog video/audio inputs in your signal chain, somewhere between the switcher and the streaming encoder, recording and playing back in real time, but offset on the playback by a minute. You’ll have to throw up some kind of graphic to fill until you can use the TIVO remote to skip past the bad bit and resume the stream. But used TIVO’s are dirt cheap. It does add a layer of A/D conversion to your signal chain which is bad for resolution, but your boss has to weigh cost versus functionality.

[Mark Suszko]

Old sign in the shop:

“Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on MY part”.

In an in-house situation you pretty much have to just take what they give you and hopefully you have some union rules that cover overtime and working thru holidays or vacations.

You have somewhat more flexibility when you work for yourself. If you know your rates, you don’t have to guess, just decide what the hours are at the higher rate. This is another reason not to bill a job on a fixed, all-encompassing total amount, but on an hourly basis. If you bid it fixed-price and they then set you up with some change that means you have to work all thru the night to get it delivered on time, you just lost a whole lot of money.

If you have even a slight suspiction that a client may be looking at overtime or rush hours, it is your duty to tell them the rates up front as well as what your criteria are for applying the overages. Should be in the first conversation about costs that comes up when bidding the work. Telling them afterwards always leads to bad feelings and conflict. They may even refuse to pay the higher rate. Get that information out up-front, save a lot of drama later.

[Mark Suszko]

Chris, just be sure that you retain the rights to future use of the footage for other projects. Don’t permaneently give away all your rights on that footage, you may be able to re-sell it many times in the future, making more than the $100.

[Mark Suszko]

Well maybe the easiest thing is to start shooting whatever sports are around you, free, for the practice. As much as you can stand. Local school games, YMCA, company picnic softball intramurals etc. Try to practice a couple quick standard interview questions and practice your shot framing and mic technique to get useable sound bites from players. Demonstrate you can frame a stable and proper shot, with considerations of lighting and what’s in the background. Demonstrate you can follow the action, and know when to follow the ball and when to widen out and let the action unfold in your frame. Show you can “edit in camera”.

Build a reel of your best shots and drop that with the sports director at your local TV news station. Show that you know the standard positions for covering each major sport by having those shots in your reel. Don’t mention your fees but have a rate card ready in your head in case you get an offer.

In the spring (Basketball) and fall (baseball/football) local small stations are hard-pressed to cover all the simultaneously-occurring playoffs and homecomings, etc. for the local high schools and preps, and I know they sometimes will recruit extra temp shooters on the big weekends to get that coverage. It doesn’t hardly pay anything, some stations ask for volunteers even. But, if you’ve already laid a base with the sports director and he can see you can shoot something, you have a shot at a (very low) paid gig shooting freelance sports for Tv news. But humble as it may be it IS resume’ material. From there you add to the reel and keep looking for more and better assignments. Lots of college teams need free or low-cost footage of practices and games. You keep doing it and raising your rate as you get better and better. Just as the athletes you watch start humbly and build THEIR skills and eventually get to the stage of getting paid.

Then one day you look in the mirror and you are a paid sports shooter, how did THAT happen?

[Mark Suszko]

Unless somebody here volunteers some, you’re probably going to have to pay for stock footage clips. Only other alternative would be to model it in 3D CGI with Poser characters and/or layers in AE, but you’d have to be pretty good as an artist to make it look real even after blurring. If you mean just a TV control room, those are much easier to mock up than a news room, which is generally just an open office space.

A control/monitor room is something you can throw together in photoshop from a few stills of just one rack or monitor, cropped, repeated and grouped. Create a frosted “glass” distortion layer ahead of that monitor wall, and in between you could create silhouettes in alpha of staff people moving around by getting yourself and one or two others in front of a green screen.

A trick I used on my fake control room graphic was to fill the TV screens in a few places with static, then make an exact copy of the image but with the regions of static flipped within their frames and offset by a pixel or two. Set up a fast repeating A-B cut between the two images ( I do this on an old Pinnacle Alladin) and you get the slight flicker and roll in the Tv monitors that makes them seem live. Don’t overdo this though, you only need one or two in random spots to sell it. The same A-B flicker can help animate a waveform monitor and a couple of tiny red LED lights on panels of decks here and there, again, use it like a spice, in moderation. When this is set behind an obscuring “glass partition” layer or overall gaussian blur, it is a very convincing illusion.

Unlike the local NBC affiliate here used to do. They bought a painted photographer’s backdrop of a control room with a rack of tiny five inch B&W monitors as part of the monitor wall. The static images on this backdrop never changed, so you could always see the image of Boris Karloff in closeup in one of the monitors. “Look ma, Frankenstein’s on Channel 20 again tonight!”:-) Painted backdrops have their uses and can look very dimensional when the lighting and camera positioning and framing are all correct. This just wasn’t one of those cases. And it was a poor choice to put overly recognizable images in the monitors in the first place.

Can’t help as much with the open office scene, sorry. Anyway, do they even HAVE real TV newsrooms anymore? I thought it was all just a couple racks of servers now and a few cubicle monkeys? 🙂
(ducks, runs)