[Mark Suszko]

Quick, somebody tell Hitchock and Welles they’re doing it all wrong!

🙂

Your “friend” seems more into staying within the rules of what is usually done than in understanding how and why the rule evolved and when it is okay to break it. If the sequencing of shots tell the story most effectively, you have satisfied Rule number One, in my book. Formalism has it’s place to be sure, and beginners should try to stick to these rules of thumb until they develop their own eye, but don’t let it paint you into a corner.

If the master shot has the reactions and body language you need to see in the reacting character, use it. If the recipient of the monologue and their reaction to it is more important than seeing the speaking actor deliver facing the camera, so be it. You could even cross the (gasp!) line of action, briefly, if the situation demanded it.

Rules are important guides, evolved from lots of experience, and to be deeply considered before you take the step of deliberately breaking them and making a NEW rule.

But you can do it, *if it works*.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve never produced a cheap car dealer ad myself, but would be interested in the creative challenge of making one that was elegant and smart and inexpensive yet brought in the sales.

My wife’s a graphic artist and designer, and when we see bad signage or commercial art, I point to it and say: “They need you, hon”. She likewise does the same when we’re watching TV at home and bad local spots come on.

Sadly, I don’t think any cheap local car dealer is going to bankroll me on an untested and experimental spec spot for him, when he’s obviously getting a decent enough response doing what he’s always done, or he’d have tried other things…

But I have done a ton of low-budget PSA’s involving transportation issues over the years, functionally similar to car spots, and many of those looked very good and worked using very little money, because they had a simple but well-thought-out message leveraged off powerful visuals and good cutting.

But back to the car dealerships for a minute.

When I had to shop for a used car, the very last thing I paid attention to were TV and radio ads. I glanced thru print ads in the paper and free weeklies and “shopper” papers, did a lot of internet research on the repair histories and user comments, and read some consumer reports and similar things, narrowed down to exactly two makes/models. Went out and rented the one of those two cars I had never driven before, drove it for a day trip. The wife and I compared notes between our two candidates, picked the one make and model we wanted and the year we wanted (used), then checked all the print sources and internet sources for that exact car near us. Test drove three candidate cars that matched our specs over two weekends at three dealerships. Picked THE car, sat down with all our research and cost estimates and haggled to a respectable deal. Done. Process took about two months from the time we decided it was necessary to buy a replacement vehicle.

In all that time we NEVER looked at anybody’s TV ads and ignored all the screaming radio ads. Maybe we are not typical car buyers? When I watch the TV ads, they seem to really try and get a viewer to pull the trigger for a snap decision, stressing panic and deadlines to act. But only an idiot would decide that trivially on a purchase costing thousands, right?

Maybe I’m answering my own questions?

[Mark Suszko]

I would say “not yet”. I don;t consider the ones I’ve see “ready for prime time”. While there are a few apps out there that advertise using your mac laptop as a switcher, like chanel storm Live Channel and a couple others, none of the ones I’ve seen are yet really up to the task of live-switching 4 equal sources in realtim with braodcast quality and with the same efficiency and ability as a purpose-built hardware switcher. And I doubt you’ll get much savings trying it anyway over a hardware based switcher. Not if a real switcher is just $999 or less.

As far as making lots of DVD’s in a hurry, before everybody leaves, well, you can get stand-alone 10-drive duplicating towers from microboards and a few other makers that can do ten DVD’s every 6 minutes, but that only gets you 30 dubs made in the half hour or so you’re asking people to wait around. Probably not cost effective, better to run dubs overnight.

[Mark Suszko]

Much earlier versions of Premiere had this time lapse capture feature built-in in the import settings controls, which let you do time lapse grabs on existing footage paying back in free-run mode… but the ability was removed in later versions. Now you have to buy On Location to get back a feature that the older versions had for free.

[Mark Suszko]

Absolutely.

Easiest thing is to just keep ramping up the playback speed on your timeline, try right-clicking your timeline and looking thru the properties tabs to find a playback speed adjustment. If it is not fast enough after that, you might need to export the sped-up timeline, re-import it, and repeat the accellerating again. You may or may not want to add some trails or freeze-framing trails to the treated footage to enhance the look. Play with it. It is not as elegant as true time lapse capture, because you are using much more hard drive space to generate a very short final run time. But it is simple and it works. And hard drive space is cheap to buy these days.

There are freeware and shareware apps you can use for this as well, that will look at a straignt tape playback off your DV camcorder or deck and just take grabs at designated intervals. On the PC side there is Scenalyzer. You can also use stop-motion software to capture off existing tape as well.

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, the 3 cameras go into a switcher, some switchers have some graphics capability in them, most don’t, so if you wanted to add title screens, lower-third supers, (you know, things like the chapter and verse at the bottom of the screen while talking about a bible passage), you’d need a fourth source, apart from the 3 cameras, to supply the graphics. That could be something simple like a laptop with video-out, running powerpoint slides, or a full-blown character generator, or anything in between. It mixes into the switcher just like the cameras do. The switcher then outputs to a monitor for you to see the final live mixed signal. Your audio runs separately in most cases, from an audio mixer to the inputs of your master recorder.

Some switchers like the Video Toaster, Newtek Tricaster or Sony Anycast, combine literally everything into one box, the switching and effects, the audio, the graphics, even recording to a hard disk and internet streaming. Of course you pay more for that. Cheapest Tricaster I saw (comes in three levels of cost and size) was just under five grand. But it’s a complete portable TV station in a box essentially, just add cameras and go. Pretty popular with churches and the like.

I was at a Walmart the other day (against my will) and saw analog DVD recorders without a TV tuner, just analog inputs, going for around $60. This would be perfect for you to burn a live DVD master copy from the output of your switcher, up to 2 hours long. You then would use a computer or stand-alone DVD dubber to burn additional clones off that master DVD. That’s the fastest, most efficient way to do it. For duplicating small runs of DVD-R’s, I like the Bravo Primera Pro. Makes a 2-hour copy about once every six-ten minutes, with printed label.

When buying the stand-alone DVD recorder, it makes sense to spring for one that also has an internal hard drive that can record simultaneously. What that does for you besides having a backup to the blank DVD itself is it lets you make additional DVD copies in that machine, faster than real-time, and even do rough editing in the sense that you can use the remote controls to copy over only the segments you desire, by setting in and out points. It’s like setting up a playlist on an ipod, not all that hard to do. You may also be able to set chapter markers on the fly during recording for main sections of the service, so people can skip right to the part they want.

The cheapest switcher I saw recently was just under a grand at B&H for an Edirol brand, kind of targeted to disco video VJ’s and perhaps smaller churches. You’ll want to select a 4-input (minimum) switcher that can automatically synchronize any analog video input, look for mention of that feature somewhere in the documentation.

I imagine how you’re going to shoot is with the cameras somewhat distant from each other and running the analog video back to your switching station on composite BNC or S-video cables. Cheaper than firewire and longer runs that way, though quality may be somewhat less. But those sources need to be synchronized or “timed” to make them work with the switcher. Most modern switchers have the hardware for this built-in, but be sure to check for it, this is a deal-breaker.

I’m not sure by the flavor of your original question that you are quite ready to dive in this deep. If you have cable TV in your community, it would be useful to sign up for a production course at their Local Access channel. You’ll get free or low-cost training on all this type of gear, so you’ll be able to make informed decisions on purchases later as well as know how to hook up and use what you’ve bought.

[Mark Suszko]

“Do it all ” to my mind also means arranging the time buys and the fulfillment (you know, taking the calls and processing and shipping the orders from viewers). You do that too?

Reading between the lines of your post it sounded for a second there like he may be talking spec or commission to you for making the spot, instead of paying you up front. I would advise caution if he proposes anything along the lines of “make the spot for free, and you’ll get a percentage of every sale we make”. I have never known a case where this was not a scam.

There may be some legit ones I don’t know about, but I’d be afraid of such a “deal”, which basically means you are out all the time and money and may never see any payback.

[Mark Suszko]

Hope nobody did that to the camera calibration targets on the Phoenix:-)

[Mark Suszko]

See, I don’t know what you do when its an HDMI source, but we’re still analog over here and the answer in that case, when you don’t have the lights or gels to match it, would be to run the monitor’s signal thru a proc-amp and time base corrector, use the procamp to jigger the colors around until they looked “right” to the camera.

There was an old practical joke they used to tell stories about. The original source is lost to me, I want to say it was somewhere in New York. Two teams of engineers were trying to match color on remotely located cameras, and instead of color bars, or a live person’s face (takes too long under hot lights of the time) they used a bowl of fruit.

Some wag paints the bannana blue or red or green, can’t recall which now… engineer at the other end just about stabs himself in the eye with his “greenie” because whatever he does to make the bannana look correct, it throws everything else in the fruit bowl into crazy colors.

If you’re feeling naughty, you can do the same thing to somebody with color bars and photoshop these days.

[Mark Suszko]

Did you try adjusting the colors on the display? Deliberately throwing it off to the eye but making it look right to the camera? If there is a live studio audience this will be a problem, but if you are in the studio alone with the talent, only what the camera actually sees matters.