[Mark Suszko]

“When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

AE is so darn useful and flexible, it invites being used to solve many problems, even those for which it was not really designed. But it is only one tool of many.

[Mark Suszko]

For the software, on PC I like the versions from DRS-Digitrax. Free to download and try, they are the full application; if you like it, pay them and you can unlock the nag text it inserts every couple lines. Seems to work in every flavor of windows, and any PC or laptop, even my old 486 can run it. Runs rings cost and performance-wise over the more “broadcast standard” makes I’ve used.

As to the prompter head, you have many choices there. Instead of recommending a particular one, I would just state my opinion is that most prompters are too small, particularly portable field models. You can’t really back up more than a yard from the camera and still read easily, unless the prompter mirror is 16-inch diagonal or bigger, IMO. If all you ever do are news standups, it may not matter. For anything more dramatic or requiring more distance and flexibility, you’re out of luck with the tiny screens.

If the screen is smaller than 16″ on the diagonal, you must compensate for distance by making the text fonts larger, but that in turn means fewer words can fit on the screen at the same time, so you have to scroll much faster, and this can severely limit what the talent can read well. Your eyes need to see the next line coming up in peripheral vision to start decoding it, while you are reading the active line. It is subconscious, but it’s one of the keys speed readers use. The rest of us use it to help decode word shapes.

That’s how we read, by the shapes of letters and whole words, which is how you can make out words even when they have sutble typos in them That’s why mixed-case type reads way easier than all-caps on a prompter. All-caps adds a microsecond or two for your brain to decode the unfamiliar word shape over mixed-case.

[Mark Suszko]

The situation was much worse when I was doing weddings with tube and early CCD cameras, and I survived it…. but I think you need to pick an overall philosophy and stick to it. Mine, that I shared with my clients, was pretty much to always stick to existing light only, using supplemental lighting only at the reception and then only for a few key moments, as has been suggested. The rest of the time I was expected by everyone involved to be as inconspicuous and non-distracting as possible. When people are losing themselves in a moment of candid behavior during a dance, you just document it and don’t interfere to spoil the moment by blazing them with a 1K spot on the camera.

People coming in with vest-mounted steadicam arms and big PAR’s, making a big to-do about their working the event… that’s just not what I or any of my clients ever wanted. Makes people too self-conscious and unnatural in their behavior. Now some brides may actually WANT that ostentatious “my wedding is Trump-level and we’re shooting it like it’s a real movie” look, but nobody I ever knew did.

I used to have pretty good luck working with the DJ, who normally had lots of lights, to find a level with his colored banks and spots that worked okay enough for both of us. You can use a LED lightpanel or dimmable or a china ball affair for interview close-ups. You can use a spot for the first dance, even if you just bounce the ceiling with it. But for the general walking around the reception, I’d just go with upping your gain a bit and enhancing it in post.

You guys today with your way more sensitive cameras, complaining the light is too low, make us old guys with onions on our belts laugh until our upper plates fall out:-)

[Mark Suszko]

You would want to be sure that you could handle the sudden influx of orders. Sounds like the kind of “trouble” most people would love to have, right? But if you have to turn a bunch away because they all want to book the same weekend, have you really done any favors to anybody but your competitors?

Plus, radio and TV commercials are generally very scattershot: you are probably going on in drive time for radio when everybody is in their cars, you are hitting one engaged girl or mom of the bride for hitting a hunded non-customers that way… doesn’t seem to be good demographically. TV is worse: on cable, they promise to play you mostly on, say, Lifetime, soapopera and Oxygen channels, but I think they still put them up on random channels and times. Audiences for TV have been plummeting all year. It would have to be a spectacular deal for me to consider it.

Now perhaps if the station has one of those “Delilah” type radio shows, with all the gooey dedications, corny letter readings and six Celine Dion songs in a row marathons, then perhaps a wedding biz commercial in there would get more of the key audience.

I think the better way to use TV and radio commercials is to buy in to a co-op group package promoting a weekend bridal show or bridal expo. This concentrates only pure sales prospects, the brides and their moms, herding them into one killzone, as it were. Brides and their moms account for probably 95 percent of the hires for wedding event coverage. Grooms may get to pick the reception band or DJ, maybe even have a say on the honeymoon travel planning, but pretty much everything else wedding-related is usually a tag-team of mom and daughter.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve had problems playing off the timeline into a Panasonic DVD recorder. Mine was because the recorder was never set up to any kind of reference level, nor was the FCP system.

I found that by normalizing my timeline audio for a -6 DB peak, my output to DVDStudio as well as play-outs to the stand-alone recorder resulted in a better overall audio level, without further needs for adjustments. Why -6? Dunno, came to it by trial and error and by ear, not very scientific. Scientific would be everything peaking at 0, I guess… I know from testing that stuff mastered at -6 peaks on my system will play and sound “normal” in comparison to movies on DVD rented from blockbuster as well as the level of the shows on my local cable channels.

I think your existing recorders use AGC for riding the levels? If so, you want to feed them a level that doesn’t force the auto-leveler to clip the peaks or pump the noise becasue the incoming signal level is low.

Yes, a more expensive deck with independent audio controls onthe inputs can solve this, but it’s treating the symptoms, not the disease, if you take my meaning. Follow your signal chain back to the computer and any mixer/amp/speakers you have outboard of that.

Go back to basics and use your tone genrators and displays, and a sample of human speech, to get everything lined up to the same reference level, then you won’t have to constantly be figuring out “fudge factors” between different hookups. Then, when the knobs for the speakers and headphones have been set, glue them down, tape them over, rip them off, anything to disable them from being messed with again. Or I suppose some sharpie marks would do as well:-)

The point is, in a shop where people share systems, you’d better have some kind of standard reference points established for everything, or you’ll never have the same mix setup twice.

Everything will just come out sounding “right” the first time.

[Mark Suszko]

A 16:9 letterbox in a 4:3 window gives you plenty of room to wipe or PIP a signer in on one side, and put the captioning in the black bottom area of the letterbox for good contrast while still being inside safe title.

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t know beans about AE.

But I think I could save this job as-is, by doing a rough garbage matte on the guy and just concentrating on changing the blue background to green. Then once the BG is set to that, try to do the entire comp as per usual. This would be faster and easier than roto.

A quick method to try would be to use the color sampling tool on the BG blue and have AE’s color change feature just alter that shade; you can probably choke the tolerances just enough to avoid color-correcting the shirt. The lasso tool could be used to rough-in a garbage mask to include or exclude the alteration.

Another alternative would be to skip chromakey at first, make this a luma or difference key job. You could do this by working in just the luma channel to build the matte, then use blending modes. It is incredible what you can do by just using histograms and playing with extreme settings in just one channel. Once the luma mask version is clean, just swap it in for the blue screen in your stack.

But this is just supposition because I don’t know beans about AE.

It is, however, what I’d try with the tools I have.

“Never give up! Never Surrender!”

[Mark Suszko]

Some of the best candid stuff I got in wedding coverage was just after they went out the doors and I’m still shooting the rest of the exit procession. They had completely forgotten the wireless and were saying some very cute stuff, nothing embarrassing, but along the lines of:
“Oh, I just can’t believe how great that was, and now it’s over”. “Oh no, hon, it is just beginning!” ” You are SO beautiful right now, MRS. so-and-so!!!” Stuff like that, my description doesn’t do it justice. Clients loved it later. Yeah, I’ve caught grooms saying stupid, insensitive things in the waiting room, locker-room junk. I backspaced over it with a cut-away before handing the masters over.

As far as mics and recorders go, anything you hand to a client or guest, etc. should be already on and running and locked-off in every possible way. If it has a switch, they WILL try to work it, out of nerves or whatever. If it is not nailed down, someone will decide to move it. If you pre-set a height to prevent the “clown nose effect”, somebody will wrestle the stand until they break it, just to adjust it a centimeter up or down, then eat the mic the whole time they are in front of it.

Murphy loves to attend weddings.

[Mark Suszko]

Not a fan of using a still camera for grabbing the screens, you could use a consumer mini DV camcorder on a tiny set of sticks to do that and have audio and movement too, plus, it would all fit inside your “big boy” camera bag.

But here’s something: you don’t necessarily need a laptop to GIVE a powerpoint show, long as there’s a TV or projector with a composite NTSC input there, you can store the slides as jpegs and play them out of most no-name $30 digital stills cameras in slideshow mode. If really pressed, one could also use this method as a cheap feeder for a teleprompter, one page at a time, of course, and the whole page instead of scrolling, with no editing ability, but still… very compact… they come with a composite video out….

I often suggest to folks that are nervous or otherwise reticent about using a laptop in some places, that a $30 DVD player from the Walgreens will play a CD with jpegs on it and give you a fine slideshow, without any fancy programming, software or authoring required. If you can burn jpegs to a CD, you are in business. The remote usually also lets you zoom into the jpegs and pan around within them if you need to. If the DVD player gets stolen, you’re out less money than the gas it took to drive across town.

[Mark Suszko]

I once did a 2-3-day freelance corporate shoot in Frisco for an Oakbrook Illinois company. Instead of me adding the travel and hotel bill to my invoice, they just had their own in-house travel department book and pay for my flight and hotel; we (about 50 people) were all going to the same conference that I was going to record, and they could get a bigger discount using their own booking agent, so we all saved money on that deal.