[Mark Suszko]

If your home is out in the ‘burbs, technically you may be violating zoning regs. Most of the time this will not lead to much if any trouble, depends how many people and trucks come and go each day from your driveway, and how blatantly you advertise. But a cheesed-off neighbor might turn you in some day.

Since I more or less seem to live in edit suites these days, I’d rather it was home. OTOH, if I tried to work out of the home, it’s a very disruptive household, not conducive to clients visiting. Also, every once in a while, you get a creep or nutjob for a client, and now you have them coming to YOUR HOUSE. About a year back, some COW poster talked about how such a setup led to a very dangerous and uncomfortable situation that got physical.

So maybe a studio apartment NEAR the house is a better bet overall.

[Mark Suszko]

Boy I’m glad my keyboard has a protective skin on it!

Nick, I like your version of the agreement as you briefly described it, but I wonder if 2 years is a little long. I guess it has to depend on the specific market. I wouldn’t blink at signing it for 2 weeks or 2 months, but more than a year, for one instance, seems excessive? How did you arrive at your figure, may I ask?

[Mark Suszko]

I agree. Let me add that you can do demo stuff that really matches your personal interests and makes you feel fulfilled. That makes the work fun, if not necessarily immediately profitable.

But to put another twist of marketing spin on it, I always suggest people in your position look at potential clients they WANT to work with, and find out what are the causes and charities they support. If you can get behind one of those efforts and do some pro-bono spec work, you have the best of both worlds. You make contacts and add to your personal network. You get a “calling card” product you can use to wangle an interview with the bosses at that company and thus at least get yourself known to them. You have something you can throw on YouTube and do some subtle self-promotion while doing good for the charity. Because it is a spec piece you have total creative freedom, work the schedule you want, and can take total credit for your brilliance. Use it as an excuse to really learn and apply some new techniques, like Motion and AfterEffects. So it has benefits out of proportion to the expenses.

[Mark Suszko]

Some of the most obvious measures you can take to be greener would include using fluorescent lighting over tungsten where possible, particularly in the studio. Not only do the fluoros draw less power, they make much less heat, which means you spend less energy on noisy air conditioning to counter that heat. Our studio users really appreciate the cool- running lighting. Our accountants appreciate the lower costs to operate and long life of the lights.

Batteries are another area to look at, lithium-ion or lithium-polymer batteries are much less toxic than other chemistries and don’t contaminate landfills or ground water when disposed of, like nicads or lead-acid would. Note though that the lead from PL batteries, particularly car batteries, is very often recovered and recycled, which saves a lot of energy, reduces production pollution and reduces the need to mine more lead. If you don’t have a policy for the spent dry cells used for wireless mics and etc. you should. I understand some folks donate half-used cells to hospitals for use in kid’s toys for the patients, etc. Some dump the used cells off at radio shack or a battery store for proper disposal. Frankly, I don’t use rechargeables in our wireless, we have not gotten the duration or load ability we needed yet out of nicads in our wireless, but it may be time to revisit that once more with Lipo cells.

Switching from mailing tapes to mailing DVD disks or, better yet, using pure internet file transfers where possible reduces weight and bulk and amount of packing material which saves on mailing and shipping costs and the gas spent to move the media. As well as postage.

You can reduce power drain at night by actually powering down monitors and putting computers to sleep or completely off at night. In the olden days, we tended to keep all the electro-mechanical hardware on 24/7/365 because the thermal expansion and contraction of warming up and cooling down made components, boards, connections, and mechanisms more failure-prone than leaving them to achieve a steady state. With modern technology this is much less the case now, so this is an old habit that might need to be re-evaluated.

What kind of printers do you use? Lasers are more economical and less wasteful over the long term than inkjets. Can you look at your labeling of products and reduce ink use? Can you do a better job of planning duplication runs that are “just in time”, so you don’t rack up a lot of storage costs for pre-printed media that may never get used, or overages that have to be destroyed? Can you use drop-ship or combine shipments that can somehow “car pool” to and from suppliers and save a trip?

You could also choose to pay more to the power company for power that comes from renewable sources, or you could purchase carbon offsets if you believe in that system (some just call it a scam, but that’s for some other forum to explore, we shouldn’t get too political here).

Look at your parking lot and building. A white-coated roof reduces building AC costs and reduces city heat island effect dramatically. A parking lot that has a porous surface will allow rain and snowmelt to percolate into the soil and self-clean as well as recharge the water table, instead of running off into sewers and rivers as floodwater, carrying oil drippings and road salt into the municipal water system. Belts of grass and shrubs around the lot periphery act as an additional barrier and filter for water, and if they shade the lot at all, again reduce the air temps. The difference between a sealed blacktop lot and a porous concrete tiled one can be 20 degrees at noon. Ask an architect about LEED credits some time and you’ll get hours’ worth of tips like this.

These are choices you have direct control over, many are “green” and most are also just good business sense because they reduce your costs in some way. Pursue these measures first because you really can’t know which one between a hard drive maker or disc pressing plant in some other country is *really* more “green”. They both use unholy amounts of water and power and deal with metals and plastics.

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t know beans about Aftereffects. But if your shots are locked down when shot or first motion-tracked to generate a locked down plate, you could then perhaps use difference key and then apply an image warp or displacement map to the key signal in a composite. This effect really counts on having a clean master plate, and if you don’t have one you’ll have to roto yourself as well as paint yourself out of the shot, just so you can paint yourself back into it as a displacement. On the bright side, the displacement is supposed to be a visible distortion (that we’re pretending only we the audience can see, so it *should* cover a lot of imperfections in the painted-out layer. But I don’t know anything about AE, I’m just dreaming out loud, based on what I’d try in Combustion.

I wonder if there is a way you could do this using particles.

[Mark Suszko]

Speaking more as an editor than a shooter, I would say there is no hard and fast rule, just that cutting on the beat is very predictable and obvious. Might even work against you by making things too predictable. Sometimes, it actually works better to cut *against* the beat. It’s all situational and depends on just what you’re trying to achieve.

If you cut too slavishly to the beat of the music, what you are doing is making the music composer the editor and director. If the music was custom made for your film, great. if it is something not specific to your message or point of view, it could tend to lock you into a path that’s not optimal for the message you’re creating.

And what about juxtapositions of music that is thematically opposite the image? That can be quite powerul too: to show for example, someone having a lonely breakdown in the middle of a pleasant scene with happy music… You see horror movies do something like that, playing happy music just before the killer strikes, to set up false expectations and thus build the shock of the reveal…

You older folks might remember a TV detective show called “Mannix”, starring Mike Connors. Very hard-boiled, violent crime-busting show, at least one fist fight, car chase, and gunshot wound per episode. Lalo Shifferin, the South American composer that created the theme music to “Mission: Impossible“, also created the theme for “Mannix”. It is the only detective action show ever to use a theme music set in waltz time.

And it totally works. In fact, it rocks out loud.
Who would have even tried that? Or thought to try that? It was not an obvious choice.
Genius.
BTW, you can DL it on itunes, very fun music.

[Mark Suszko]

Not a lawyer, but I think the other side will get your video thrown out of court because the camera shooting at night just isn’t going to be comparable to a human eye. Becasue of how rods and cones work and their distribution in the eye, human night vision is better at the peripheral edges of the visual field than it is dead-center, for one thing: how are you going to model that, by defocusing the center of your image? Just my own opinion, but I think a lawyer could raise enough questions about how well the camera models human night vision that a hudge would disallow it.

[Mark Suszko]

I feel the best foam to use inside a case is EPP, encapsulated PolyPropalyne, or a variant called Elapor, which is something they use inside car bumpers. Has some “give” to it, but retains good enough rigidity that your gear can take a lot of gee forces yet not bounce all over the inside of the case. They don’t crumble like styrofoam does.

One technique I came up with a long time back for making custom inserts was based on procedures I saw other shippers of computer gear and decks use… line the case (or suitable Heavy Duty cardboadrd box) with a thick plastic drop cloth , like visqueen. Fill the largest void areas with cut- out chunks of Styrofoam or EPP or elapor. Packing peanuts could possibly work here as well, you could loosely bag them or corral them with strips of cardboard. You will want a layer of such rigid material on the bottom so your gear will not be resting directly against the container’s outer wall.

Spray in some expanding “great stuff” polyurethane foam over the top of the clear plastic sheeting, and as it is puffing up and expanding, lay down another large sheet of the plastic on that to make a plastic sheet-expanding foam-plastic sheet “sandwich”, THEN carefully lay your item (temporarily swathed in saran wrap would be good) into the case and let the foam and top layer of plastic expand up around it without actually *touching* it. Be aware that the foam expands considerably, and if you over-do the initial spraying, it may grow larger than you wanted. We are trying to make a nest, not fully encapsulate. Try a tiny test squirt into a paper cup first to get a feel for the volume and time it takes to expand and cure. Use the waiting time to make a cardboard template of your camera or other gear, if you don’t want the actual gear anywhere near this messy process. Plunge the cardboard template into the plastic/foam sandwich instead of the real unit, and get a similar final result.

When the foam has nearly cured and expansion has slowed, remove the piece of gear or template you used to mold the custom cavity. WARNING: 2-part Polyurethane foams and “Great Stuff” type expanding foam are among the stickiest things in the universe, you will regret it if the wet material touches anything you don’t want goobered-up. Clean-up generally requires solvents. Once hardened, it is pretty benign and can be cut or sanded, but don’t melt these foams indoors as they release toxic vapors.

This is not going to be as good as a custom hot-wire-cut EPP or Elapor cavity. What you DO get is a relatively cheap form-fitting encapsulation that you can use once and discard or re-use as desired. The “great stuff” type foam doesn’t have the same g-force resistance of the denser foams, so it needs to be thicker all the way around to give comparable protection. But if you mix the expanding stuff with scraps of the more rigid stuff, you can get something fairly sturdy, but custom-formed.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m just a guy. You should quote Ed Tufte.

That guy has credentials. Read up a little on him and his theories about clear visual expressions of data, and of graphical interfaces.

[Mark Suszko]

I’d like to take this off on a different tangent for a minute. While I shoot a LOT of powerpoint stuff, I never really LIKE it.

First off, while there are a few people out there that know what they are doing, most powerpoint slide shows are horrible quality, technically speaking. Much of the blame for this I put on Microsoft. Powerpoint was and seemingly remains designed to cram a lot of visual information into a small memory footprint as the prime goal. It also was and remains oriented towards looking at it on a computer screen from arm’s length away, at most.

What this gives us are graphics that come out of the starting gate with particularly poor resolution for text, compared to what comes out of a dedicated video character generator or broadcast CG software. And nowadays they are almost always projected on a large screen, though never composed for that. Often the colors and brightness levels can exceed NTSC safe levels. On top of that, the built-in “wizards” most users rely on when composing the slides, don’t format the slides very well for video in a 3×4 ratio, I can’t wait to see what they do for 16×9. The themes are often of poor contrast, or poor color choices, the font default choices are bad for video, and they may add a lot of distracting stuff.

You can get around a lot of this if you are an experienced presenter. You can build better custom themes and backgrounds yourself, either in Powerpoint or Photoshop, and use powerpoint as just the shell mechanism for transporting and presenting the image stream. Won’t be as compact a file done that way, but can look WAY prettier. There are also services and artists out there that can create extraordinary and striking slides for you, using all the best principles of graphic design. I just never get to see that kind of work. If I get a really heinous slide show, sometimes I’ll offer to rebuild it in PPT or just export the text data into a real CG and build better resolution “real” TV graphics. Depends on the time and budget available, and how high-visibility the project is. You have to pick the hill you want to die on, after all. Not every project deserves an Emmy-winning effort.

But leaving all that aside, there is an even bigger issue to me.

I don’t think lectures with powerpoint are very good television.

I don’t mean just from an entertainment perspective. I mean as effective use of our medium.
The true power of video is in the combination of sound and images, juxtaposed and combined to create more meaning together than they have alone. Its also a medium that favors broader themes and emotions, not a lot of minute detail. What I’m getting at is, there is probably a better way to communicate the same material than to tape six hours of people reading their slides to an audience that I’m pretty sure can read the slides themselves, faster. But usually, nobody is willing or able to do that work, find the time for it, or pay for it. It requires much more effort to take the client’s information and synthesize a script that tells the story of that information most effectively. Powerpoint’s format for organizing a presentation is also IMO a tool of the Devil. It puts the emphasis on building an orderly outline of bullet points, not on synthesizing an understanding of the material and getting that across to an audience. Not every message really fits the one-size approach of powerpoint. I feel it’s use in early grade school classes as “technology training” is a horrible mistake, churning out kids that can’t compose a proper report or truly organize and understand information. Ed Tufte points out places in corporate and government where these powerpoint shortcomings have led to trouble, including the Shuttle Discovery disaster.

My opinion is that ppt slide shows are often not the best way to communicate the information, just the one that people find most convenient and cheap and expedient to do. I’m not saying that every slide show has to have the quality of an epic film. Sometimes the pure data itself is so engaging to the target audience, your best strategy is to just to shut up, get out of the way and let them see the charts, graphs and tables with a minimum of distraction. I think that’s an exception rather than the rule.

On the other hand, in those situations, those charts and graphs and tables could probably be communicated just as well if you just made a PDF file of them or a hypertext web page, that’s self-navigating.

Ask yourself if the data on these slides couldn’t just as easily be sent out as a email instead.

If that’s the case, isn’t it part of our duty as communication experts and facilitators to tell our clients there’s a better, perhaps cheaper way to tell their story? Don’t we owe that to them, to at least suggest there’s a better way? Reading a book on tape is not television, nor is it usually something we should be calling effective training. What we are challenged to do in those situations is to prize out the parts of the live one on one presentation that really DO communicate and teach, and make THAT the focus of the video. The rest is detail to print out in a manual.

When people say video training doesn’t work effectively, my guess is they don’t really have any to start with. Not really. They have “radio with pictures”. They have recorded a “book on tape”. This is where somebody with experience in Instructional Design could be a great help, to get them moving in a better direction.

For more on why you should hate powerpoint as much as I do, wiki or google the terms powerpoint and Ed Tufte. For a real hoot, google the search terms “Powerpoint” + “Gettysburg Address”, and see what evil can be done when the way the technology is applied is a mis-fit for the message.