[Mark Suszko]

I would say it depends on what the client wants, plus sometimes its not just about a simple question, but comments, conversations, opinions, and the like also. Bill, while you are correct in your description of captioning questions, that technique is less handy when you’re trying to cover things in terms of a Socratic give-and-take.

For some situations, captioning a question works fine, for others, the audience will think you’re doing it because you couldn’t get decent audio. If you can grab the audience on their own tracks, you can bring that up just when you need it, and keep the overall noise level down.

Such matters of audio policy are best discussed with the clients beforehand.

[Mark Suszko]

Anybody that knows me is having a good laugh at your “modesty” reference.:-)

The way our gear works at my shop, we stick to two hours for DVD’s as well. I tried using a slower 4-hour rate on the Panasonic DvD recorders we have, but got into problems with customer player compatibility and the compression just destroyed he quality on what are often very shaky graphics to begin with, when you’re using powerpoint as the source.

If anything, on a purely time for hours basis, the $6k you bid may actually be low. You need to know before you talk to anybody about a project, what your true costs of business are and what your hourly and day rate needs to be, just to break even as well as to make a profit.

Then take a long look at what kind of time goes into those six complete hours. If you plan to do a lot of editing to polish them up, your profits to hours ratio goes lower, though the finished quality will be better. This is one reason that for big all-day lectures it can sometimes be a better deal overall to live-switch a multicam feed and just be more or less done with it at the end of the day. Costs more up front but saves time. Six-plus hours of raw tape can equal six hours of digitizing, twelve hours of editing, plus the time you took to shoot it and whatever time it takes you to dub it off. Be sure that whatever you decide to charge that you are billing for ALL the work you’re going to do.

[Mark Suszko]

Nope, just prolific;-) If I’m so smart, why ain’t I rich?

People define success differently. I wish I could define it from a restored ’68 Mustang, overlooking my island getaway and the 22 foot sailboat tied up next to it. I’m only ever going to see that as a comp, when I get skilled at using Adobe Photoshop and After Effects:-P

It still amazes me I’ve been just making a day to day living at it and feeding and raising a family this long, doing something I’d be doing for free as a hobby, if I wasn’t getting paid. While I’m far from rich, I ain’t diggin’ ditches either. I make a difference in my own small way and some days that’s enough.

And don’t make me out as smarter than I am: I’m sure there are plenty of other guys and gals here that use the same knowledge and techniques, I didn’t pioneer anything new, I just took the time to write it down for you. You would have figured out something similar eventually on your own, I’m sure. I’m just passing on things other people have taught me or that I’ve picked up along the way by experience or observation of others. One way I pay those folks back for teaching me something is to pass it on to someone else, like yourself. That’s what I love about this site, we’re all here helping each other out and building the biggest do-it-yourself textbook ever. I learn much more here than I have taught anyone else. I’m the one that should thank all of YOU.

[Mark Suszko]

I didn’t mean to write a whole article, but I like to get it right and complete. So get a fresh cup of something and settle in.

The big secret to a good single-cam lecture gig?

Advance preparation and a plan in your head. It’s always nice to be the editor as well as the shooter because the editor half of you won’t give the shooter half any peace until you get enough coverage. But if you know how you’re going to edit later, the shooter knows what shots he can ignore as well.

For a single-cam powerpoint-driven lecture, the first thing I try to do/know is: Can I get the actual slides on a disk, preferably ahead of time.

If they’ve been promised, but not delivered, I show up extra-early to the event, when the speaker is just arriving and setting up. I will plant the camera directly in front of the screen in the best possible place, with the iris set for best viewing of the slides, and have the speaker click thru them all, one second per slide. That’s all I need, I can freeze frame them and extend their duration in post in a couple ways. When I use my dvcpro model 700 camera, it has a video input and can be used as a recording deck with a simple menu switch, so I can bring a pocket sized 99 dollar scan converter and do grabs to tape direct from the laptop’s VGA port, if I need to. Again, pretape one-second grabs of each slide. Also, 1 gig USB memory sticks and a handful of blank CD ROMS are DIRT cheap and easy to bring along in the camera bag or a keychain for copying the slides off. Either copy the whole presentation or quickly open Powerpoint and export>all slides> jpegs to a folder you already have prepared in your USB memory stick.

Knowing I have the slides on disk or pre-captured before the event, I now don’t have to worry so much about exposing for the screen. I can position, light, and expose for the speaker and any audience participation needs first.

I like to position the camera about 45 degrees off center, to the opposite side of the screen, so I have the choices of a single tight shot on the speaker alone, a medium with the speaker and maybe half the slide behind one shoulder, (with enough visible to be able to tell which slide it is) a wide shot with full-body of speaker and screen.

Because I got there early, I spend every last possible second before the show starts getting cut-aways of people in the audience in singles, trios, and bunches. If I can get behind the speaker at the podium to grab an over-the-shoulder with them in foreground and some audience in background, that’s a great cover shot you can use any time because you can’t see the mouth moving. You need a solid six seconds, minimum, of any cover shot you take, preferably more, but at least six. Slam-zoom to get them, tape them, and get out again. Try a couple rack focuses of foreground audience to background audience, to be artsy. Audience cutaways are best caught early when they look the most fresh and alert, and before they can escape when the lights dim…

Show begins, and I’ve already been rolling for ten minutes or so worth of cutaways…

Now assume for a second that for some reason you can’t pre-tape the slides, can’t get there fast enough, spent all your time fixing an audio or lighting problem and its too late.. whatever….. or, you don’t think you can get them afterwards because the presenter is a jerk or they have to catch a plane, or you do, etc.

This is what I do.

Disengage the servo zoom and put zoom on manual.

(“Luke, you’ve switched off your targeting computer, what’s wrong???” “Nothing, I’m all right…“)

Pre-set your focus for the speaker, note the setting. Same for the screen. Shoot the first slide for a few seconds full frame. Snap-zoom out super-fast to slide and speaker. Hold that shot. Speaker hits next slide. Figure he’s going to go about a minute on it. Hold the new 2-shot and listen to him, listen for him to finish a sentence or paragraph leading into the slide. Wait for it…. now, GO! Snap-in to to a tight shot of the entire slide, hold steady and count off six seconds…and snap back out to either a tight single of the speaker, the 2- shot, or a wide shot. Back home, after you clean the womp-rat skins, you’ll freeze and extend that tight shot and pull it back on either side of the cut to cover and extend over as much of the shot as you need. You can then pick when and where you copy/paste>drop it in again if the speaker stays on the same slide a long time. You can even find time for a fast audience cut-away with this technique covering for you. When you get comfortable shooting this way, you can start thinking like a live director; always think ahead to what your next shot needs to be, and be ready to SNAP to it.

What I try very hard to do is establish a subconscious visual rhythm to the work. I really listen to the presenter. Not just the content, but the vocal inflections that hint at summation statements. As each new concept or “chapter” comes up, I get the full-frame title slide for it, a paragraph of intro in CU of the speaker, followed by a wider shot that retains the slide, so you the viewer can keep your place, and I the editor can find the right cutaway later. Then finish with more closeups of the speaker. Because I can grab and extend slides later, or use the copy from the disk, I want to mostly shoot the speaker, and only enough of the projector screen to keep me oriented later in post, where I have much more control.

So we build up the repeating beats like that until the slides are all done. If you fast-forward a tape of my shoot/edit, you can see the repeating pattern of shots and count the “chapters” going by, and find a particular chapter very quickly. I believe a viewer gets a feeling of continuity out of watching a show cut this way, as well.

Best of all, your finished product will look like a live-switched 2-or-3-cam show of all cuts, not the more amateurish tromboning, nausea-inducing zoom-in-zoom-out junk people expect.

Audio-wise, I consult the speaker ahead of time to see if they are an immoveable podium-clutcher or a walk-and-talk duck-shooting-gallery target. I then usually put a wireless lav on them anyway, as well as plant a boundary mic or dynamic omni stick mic on the podium, because I am a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy, and because Murphy finds a harder time of it the more backups you have going.

The boundary mic sits on a spare, cut-down rubber mouse pad, so as not to pick up thumps and creaks. I feed these two mics to a Shure 4-channel mixer, strapped or gaffer-taped to my tripod in easy reach with one hand. The mixer goes to channel one, I leave the camera’s shotgun wide open on channel two. I monitor the audio the whole time. Spare tape and a peanut-butter-flavored Power Bar is in my shirt pocket, a bottle of water in my coat pocket, the camera is on AC with a spare 3-hour brick at my feet. Bladder is empty, I’m wearing comfy shoes and we’re good to go for hours.

I dare you to stop me. 🙂

For times when there is no room on the podium for my table stand, I made a cute inexpensive gadget from two Radio Shack mic clamps attached end to end. This little fella will hold my wireless stick mic clamped to the camera grab handle while shooting ENG off the shoulder, but it can also piggy-back my mic to a gooseneck or other table stand or floor stand, or even the side of the podium where there is NO stand. Costs about $20 to make, if you buy the clamps at Shack… seen the same thing for double that, online.

My biggest wild card to deal with is usually the hotel house audio. The house PA in most places I’ve worked is abysmal; I’ve never had the luxury of working in posh hotels with real AV in-house help. It is typically a hardwired, hands-off, no-changes-allowed, padlocked setup, and nobody from the hotel can EVER be found to answer questions about it or modify it beyond turning the power on or off. It’s a toss-up if there is a feed to tap from it, usually not. If it does have a tap, you’ll find the output buzzes and hums like a swarm of killer bees, and whichever impedance you are using, damn if it’s not the other. What to do?

Be over-prepared, of course. And always be thinking of work-arounds.

Sometimes I’ll sacrifice the mixer and use it inline between the hotel PA mic and the wall, getting my tap that way. Sometimes I’ll use a y-adaptor with XLR’s. Sometimes I’ll gaffer tape the two stick mics together, theirs and mine, so wherever they go, I go. Sometimes I’ll use the lav that way, gaffing it to the stick mic from the hotel PA, hidden from camera shot, slightly less bulky. I have a box full of Radio Shack audio adaptors and plugs, gender-changing adaptors, and an adjustable in-line attenuating pad in an XLR shell, to bring line levels down to mic. One time we had to lav mic a speaker cabinet… it’s war, you sometimes just have to improvise. Whatever it takes to get good sound.

Particularly with these lectures, the sound is of primary importance, more than anything else. They’ll forgive bad shots if the audio is good, but nobody will watch it if the audio is bad. In my kit, on general principle, regardless of the job, I always have two omni/cardioid stick mics with stands, one or two lavs (one phantom, one self-powered), a nice PZM, and two Lectrosonics wireless sets. Plus several sets of Canare brand or Starquad XLR cable in lengths of ten, twenty and fifty feet…

If I can’t get one useable audio track with all that… …fire me.

…Or admit it can’t be got by mortal man.

All that junk and more goes into a large mechanic’s satchel that looks like it belongs to Felix the Cat. It’s my video “Bag of Holding”. Last time I weighed it, it was around 35 pounds, sometimes it’s more. After hauling it around all day I’m sore, but I’m never sorry.

Because I’m as prepared for anything as a one-man-band can be, and fortune favors the prepared.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

Lecture attendees are very used to filling out sign-in sheets. Just add another sheet that’s a release form. Or put a sign on the door saying by entering you agree to be taped, and have the presenter repeat that information before she begins. If there are people that want to attend but not be on camera, you can put them in one designated corner that doesn’t get shot.

One of those strategies should work, I should think.

As to audio, you could have an assistant with a hand-held directional shotgun point it at people that speak, from one diagonal corner of the room. Works in a room of fifty people or less, needs fast hands on the mixer to ride the gain or you get too much noise along with the speakers. A field of PZM mics mounted on low ceilings could cover a pretty wide area unobtrusively, but also introduce noise.

I often use the planted hardwired mic stand for questions in a situation like this, but you need to plant enough of them to make it easy to get up and go to one, or people quit trying, then they try to shout from their chairs and that doesn’t work well at all.. you must stop everything and insist they go to a mic, make a pest of yourself about it… Plus, the speaker at the front of the room MUST enforce the rules by not responding to people unless they go to the mic. A side benefit of the mic stand approach is you can light just that spot and leave more of the room relatively dark. Good if you’re economizing on lighting, and makes the rest of the people there feel less singled-out…

I have also seen assistants run around with a wireless handheld to people that stand up. They can also be used to sort of pre-screen the questions in a whisper and decide on the fly if it is an appropriate time to ask that Question, or if it is a rehash of something already covered, or to be covered later in the show. Good for keeping things moving on schedule.

[Mark Suszko]

Even crazier than that, in some promotional pictures of pro wrestlers I’ve seen lately, the bare-chested men in their wrestling garb have their nipples airbrushed out.

The MEN!

What is wrong with people today?!?!

[Mark Suszko]

Regarding PPT, you have several options. Dedicate a camera to shooting it off the screen, take the disk with the presentation on it and export the slides as jpegs instead of bitmaps, use a free download of Microsoft producer to make PPT export as an AVI file, use Camtasia or similar screen grabber, or buy or rent a scan converter and hook it to the computer vga port between the port and the projector or monitor.

With the scan converter, you could run that into a deck with an audio tap from your camera, and you get an iso track of just the slide show in perfect synch with the live presentation, so you can edit back and froth with it like it was another camera in post. The scan converter and camtasia will also grab any movements she makes with the mouse pointer, and any animated builds or transition effects the presentation has. Exporting stills does not, so if the transitions or builds are important to the client, you’d have to re-create them in the NLE application. Camtasia has a lot of satisfied fans, but it may not be for everyone. I’m not sure I would want to try to load and run it live during the client’s presentation, for example. It may use up too many processor resources, and hard drive space to store the massive video files it creates. Not great on some laptops.

You get what you pay for with scan converters. I own a 99-dollar one that works okay for the most basic powerpoint and screen grabs, but for serious work I would not bother with a unit under a thousand bucks. We use a Scan-Do Pro here that cost six gees brand new, it is awesome, but other brands in that price range are good too. Don’t panic, you can often rent one of those expensive ones for a day for maybe fifty to a hundred bucks, depending where you live.

[Mark Suszko]

While there are techniques to make the one camera look like two or more, and we can cover that in another discussion, a job like this can benefit from two cameras. You get two more channels of backup audio, for one thing. Don’t neglect getting absolutely perfect audio for these things, it is even more vital than a good picture! You get continuity and a cover shot while you change tapes and batteries on each camera. You get audience cut-aways and reactions, and much more dynamic shot control of the speaker: you can punctuate her dialog by cutting to closeups, for example. You can avoid a lot of tromboning in and out for zooms, or having to cover that with slide closeups, if you have the second camera to go to. You can get better audience participation shots if there is Q&A.

You can adjust iris independently to get the best picture of the room and the best picture of the powerpoint screen.

That last may not be a big issue if you are adding the powerpoints back in during post from a CD copy, but still, being able to read or see the screen properly in a camera shot helps orient you to which slide you are going to see whan that slide comes up full. Subtle but effective.

If you can afford to add in the cost of the rental, and bill her, I’d go for it, as it will add a lot more professional look. If she say no, come back here and we can talk more about how to pull it off best as you can with just the one camera. I do this a lot.

[Mark Suszko]

You have a host of problems going on here. It’s a cluster.
I don’t even know what to tackle first.

Money: how do you bill? A revolving fund? Some kind of media account? Even if you are doing this for “free” within a university’s accounting system, you should be keeping a “virtual bill” of the hours and other expenses going into each project. With that, you can show the equivalent value of what you’ve done, had they taken the project outside. Its also a way to control all the freebies: You can tell each client they only get x amount virtual dollar value of service a month, beyond that point, if they want priority service, they have to pay real dollars for it, because they are offsetting every other customer’s work. “Look, we’ve done the equivalent of three thousand worth of work on this for you, we’ve used up your allotted virtual budget for this quarter, we’ll pick it up for free again next quarter, unless you want to pay real money to jump the line and inconvenience all the other customers.” Bill in installments, use progress payments, and never release the final product until they pay for it. You are running things backwards, doing and-redoing work until THEY decide to pay you. That would never work in the commercial world. You might invite the marketing folks to explore that fact by taking a project outside the ivy covered walls just once.

Script and review/approvals: this sure sounds like you don’t have a structured system for the production process in place. You are running around doing what some marketing goof asks of you, hap-hazardly, and they may not even know what they are doing. People that are good at press releases may not always have equal skills at producing videos. Successful productions need an experienced producer using proven methods within a systematic approach. Roles have to be defined. You can’t just keep trying stuff waiting for the marketing guy to say: I’ll know it when I see it”.

The right way to go is to first do a needs assessment and research to define fully what the client wants; the message, the look, the style, how we measure if it works. You then codify that in a formal specification document and get them to sign off on it. Nobody can later say that this is not what was asked for. The next step is to do a creative treatment with accompanying storyboards, think of it as a blueprint of the project and how it will look and sound, without actually writing scripted dialog yet. You get the clients to sign off on this, if they reject it, go thru another treatment process until you get it signed-off. Everybody must agree on the style and the flow. THEN you do the actual script, and get them to sign off on THAT. Only then do you go out and shoot. Because everything is based off documents they already approved at each step, they really can’t say “this is not what we wanted/agreed to/had in our heads”. They can only complain if you don’t hold up your end regarding the execution of the approved work. If things are not right at any stage, you just go back and fix it on paper, where it doesn’t cost anything.

Let me recommend you get to Amazon and get a used copy of John Morley’s Corporate Scriptwriting book. It has a lot of tips for a guy in your position, even if you are not the scriptwriter.

[Mark Suszko]

If the law was that strict, Ned Holness, AKA Carlos Mencia, would be doing hard time by now.

You need to review the details of Fair Use, as well as to consult a real lawyer. If your question is; can you use brand names like “Hooked On Phonics” in dialogue for your film, the answer is “it depends”. Context is everything.

George Carlin can say that line in a comedy routine and get away with it as Fair Use. A straight documentary may have a harder time legally, saying the same thing, but OTOH may be able to get away with showing a cleared clip of Carlin saying it. THAT’s confusing!:-)

There was a case in a recent theatrical movie where a sub-plot was that the bad guys were illegally tearing down rain forest land, and Caterpillar sued the film because the construction equipment in the shot showed their brand name. I think it may have been a remake of “George of the Jungle”.

I believe the judge threw out Cat’s claim in that case, partly because the movie was not about Caterpillar being a mean company destroying the rainforest, the equipment was just background props used in a few minutes of a fictional movie, and they were not the focus of the movie. Some people confuse product placement deals with other image rights issues. Unless you know why a logo in a shot has been blurred-out, you should not try to guess why, you could very well guess wrong. I don’t profess to be an authority on this, even an expert can have a hard time with it because it is such a murky area of the law. You really need a lawyer’s opinion on it.