[Mark Suszko]

Well there are two separate sets of questions to be asked, after the number one question: “how much money we talkin’ ’bout?”

Set one has questions all about the needs analysis: what the customer wants and needs to convey, to what audience, in what manner, with what kind of creative approach, on what schedule and within what budget, with what kind of measurement of success, etc. From those kinds of questions we derive a creative treatment and a script (and a real budget and schedule) and maybe storyboards, so the production arm has a guide for what to do and what it is supposed to look like.

The second set of questions is practical stuff for the director and crew: details of the locations, breakdown of shots, their lighting situation, where are the windows and where does the sun come up, power needs, heating/cooling needs, food, i.e. craft services, props, sets, costumes, the acoustics, logistical items like where to park, how to find the location, travel expenses, special needs, how to get in and out(security), bathrooms, electrical power, places to change, makeup, places to meet/prepare, crowd control and security, insurance, permits, payroll, union stuff, clearances, releases, legal bric a brac, etc etc etc.

For lots of great leading questions from the set one category, I recommend the latest new edition of John Morley’s “Scripwriting for High-Impact Videos.” Just came out this week. Even if you don’t write the scripts, this book has a lot of great information to organize the project. Used copies of the first edition are also on Amazon. No, I don’t get a sales commission, but I should 😉

The other guys and gals here can contribute questions to ask for the list of questions in category two, I’m sure.

One other thing: IMO, If you can, you should probably be sending out an experienced production person to sit-in with the sales person at these meetings, unless the sales person is well-versed in production methods. The tech person can sit passively like a fly onthe wall, and just take notes to share later, but their perspectivecan really help the salesman not just win a sale, but prevent him from to over-promising or missing important factors that will bear on the final budget, timeline, and profit.

[Mark Suszko]

What’s done is done, but what might have helped convince your “prince of darkness” to lighten up a mite in the shooting would have been to bring in some test footage before the actual shoot and show the magic of what can be done with simple transfer modes and layering of blend modes. Not that you’d necessarily have done those for the movie, but to get across just what’s possible in post IF you can give enough level and detail for the editor and colorist to work from, and count on them to take your dark vision the final ten percent…

As to putting a calibration guide on the front, we have that already, its called SMPTE bars. We don’t have to like it, but the bars are our guiding star, which we ignore at our peril.

That said…

I had some analog video long ago that was given to me all messed up for levels, and there was not a lot I could do but proc-amp the heck out of it, by which time the program no longer bore any relationship to house bars. So I did the only thing I could do: I fudged the bars, in such a way that if you brought the bars back into the proper levels by scope, the video would also look as decent as it could and be “legal”.

When people brought in elements with questionable pedigree, I’d line the tape up via the bars first, but then play and sample along it’s length every ten minutes or so, looking for the true peaks and the true blacks. Then I’d set that tape up using those points and forget about the bars, because they actually had no relationship to the tape. They’d been added-on afterwards.

This is a problem we see lots more of now with cheap NLE systems and DV camcorder users. They’ll add on system bars from an NLE that may or may not have any connection to the images shot on the tape. For them bars are just another kind of slate. Now that more and more people shoot without even tape, I don’t know what we’re really using as our “guiding star”, anymore. I mean I’d like samples of chip charts shot thru the same lens, to me that’s actually going to be more use than bars generated from the NLE. But you’re lucky if people bring their own white cards out to balance on these days, asking them t bring a MacBeth tester out is futile generally.\

But it sure could have helped THIS project, methinks.

[Mark Suszko]

Maybe you can find something out on firebrand.com

[Mark Suszko]

We used to be big fans of “Mr. Bumpy” and his “Bump in the night” show when the kids were tiny tots. For those that don’t know, the premise is that he’s a friendly version of the imaginary monster under the kid’s bed, kind of a party-hearty Beetlejuice kind of thing. You can likely find clips on youtube or copies on Amazon.

My 15-year-old has gone bonkers for stop-motion this year, I think he’s been sneaking looks at “Robot Chicken” at a friend’s house (we don’t let him watch it at home, the mature themes can be a little risque’). Anyhow, he has been trying to use iPhoto and a digital stills camera to stop-mo his Gundam space robots in elaborate battle scenes. That was really tedious in terms of method and results. We recently bought him a great little program from Boinx called iStopmotion for the mac, as a reward for improved grades.

Has all the features you need, onion skinning, time lapse, a blink comparator, frame replacement, etc. plus the higher-priced version includes greenscreen right in the program. Works with (some) webcams, (some)digital stills cams, and most DV camcorders with firewire.

You can import a background movie of somebody walking, for example, and use the onionskinning to match your clay or legos or whatever to the live motion a frame at a time, a poor-man’s version of mo-cap, this gets you very fluid human motion in your animated puppets or whatever.

It also uses the mac’s voice recognition, so you can keep the computer across the room and instead of needing any kind of remote shutter trigger, just say: “shoot” or “Capture two”. and the program hears you and takes the captures for you. That’s pretty awesome.

Basic version is around fifty bucks, the fancy pro vesion around a hundred, which can be used for broadcast-quality stuff, but they offer a free 5-day trial download. The company is called Boinx.

[Mark Suszko]

Well I don’t fit your qualifications for answering the question Del, but I was wondering why you choose to do an SD offline in these days of “plentiful” storage. If you have enough storage I’d just as soon skip an SD offline to save some time, cut as much as possible in one session, just to get the timings and key scenes down, just cuts and dissolves, then go back on subsequent days to do sessions concentrating on the graphics moves and etc. and from time to time as things get refined, purge unneeded footage if space needs required it in a consolidation session. So I’m curious about you workflow.

Heck, I’m curious about EVERYBODY’S work flow, since my shop is just starting to dangle its toes in the HD end of the pool.

[Mark Suszko]

You darned tease!

[Mark Suszko]

Not much to add this time, but I thought these videos would kind of help bring some humorous dimension to the conversation. Beware, some of the dialog is rather salty, and may not be suitable for the open office or those people easily offended, but the videos have a lot of truth in them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrxg2N97ucA

and the sequel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ0BlQc59jA&feature=related

and this one to finish the package…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZjF5OtgAPI&feature=related

[Mark Suszko]

Bob, I have 22-plus years of broadcast TV experience, shooting, directing, editing, producing, and writing news, VNR’s, commercials and PSA’s as well as live and taped teleconferences. I don’t have anything Emmy-worthy IMO but have often placed tops in more local broadcast spot competitions, back when I entered them. My little podunk shop is not even a blip to LA or New York, but we regularly feed live satellite interviews from our studios to the Sunday morning talk shows on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox and MSNBC, among others. Last week I sent off archival footage to Nightline (they requested BetacamSp though I could have sent them dcvpro25 or mpeg 2 on DVD) and to two other national shows produced out of New York and Chicago. They all still wanted betaSP too.

That’s all just by way of introduction, so you know that you don’t have to teach me how to suck eggs, as the old expression goes. I cut my teeth editing EIAJ reel to reel, machine to machine, with just a grease pencil, a stopwatch and a pot of coffee, I remember quad tape, and I now cut on Discreet and FCP. I think I still remember how to do a flange-back adjustment. My first camera used for work was so old it had tail fins (okay a heat sink, those TK’s ran very hot, but still it was OLD. So old the serial number was in Roman Numerals) I used to hand-hold “Handy-Looky” 79’s with no shoulder pad, the weight offset by a bandolier of lead-acid cells and a portable umatic deck on shoulder strap… and I knew how to adjust a Conrac so the bars looked right, without using a scope…(though I DO know how to read a scope and WFM). This week I’m authoring interactive DVD’s, building Lightwave animated virtual sets, and testing codecs for web videos.

And I feel I am just beginning to learn this business.

I don’t pretend to be smarter or more experienced than anyone else here, but I kind of took a slight offense at your all-caps castigation and verbal beat-down, which is how you came off just now. Some people come off crustier in text than they do in real life, and I want you to know I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here. But maybe you might want to widen your perspective a wee bit, now that I’ve presented my meager bona-fides as prelude to my opinions.

With half of my clients over the years being broadcast stations and cable company head-ends, I spent last summer polling my customers on their formats. They are all now accepting SD DVD’s instead of tape, that only took three years since the previous survey results, and I’m down to making maybe three beta dubs per run of 50 spots. I made my last Type C 0ne-Inch spot reel dub sometime early last year.

Where I agree with you and the general consensus is, station management is first off about the dollar, all tech and operational decisions flow from that. If they could put a wheeled dolly on our one-inch I’m sure they’d sent it out as a field recorder, just because it’s already paid for.:-)

Where I don’t perfectly align with your perspective is in the area of what you’re describing as management’s deliberate creating of tech and economic barriers to entry from us “low-level” bottom-feeders. I think this case may be overstated. I don’t know what Discovery Channel QC Engineer ran over your dog, but you should lighten up a little bit.

I also wanted to point out you kind of oversimplified your version of my argument regarding adopting BluRay decks over HD tape decks. I didn’t imply or declare they were or would be the only way to go, at every level. I did say that they would make a lot of sense for prosumer and small-market broadcast and industrial/government/corporate. Because it works for those “lower levels” as well as consumers, using essentially the exact same platform, this has great potential to be adopted by default as an interchange/archival/physical distribution method that works at every level of the chain. Even by “high end” broadcast.

I predict news and commercial spots will be where this format makes the first broadcast inroads, due to economy. What Discovery and PBS eventually decide, I couldn’t say. Except to point out that much of what Discovery and PBS shows can carry footage from cruddy old newsreels, kinescopes, and home movies, all bumped-up to a new final format. So content still allows us to forgive the format it comes on.

And as far as commercials, well, show me a single station manager that would tell an advertiser: “Oh, no, we can’t Possibly take your ad buy money, your HD content commercials are on bluray and we only take tape, please take your business to the other channel across town or come back when you have it on HD tape.” You can’t and you know it. Just a way to say not all format decisions are technology based or standards-derived.

And that’s about all I wanted to say about that.

Be well.

[Mark Suszko]

PBS standards are legendary for strictness. I would say they make a great standard to shoot for in general, but the interpretation of some of those standards has at times been a point of friction.

As to what a future standard format might look like, I don’t think there will be one any more for aquisition. But for physical media distribution and a shelvable archive, I have high hopes for BluRay now that the wars are over. My logic runs like this:

The members of the Bluray consortium are even now beginning to flood the market with drives and (relatively cheap) stand-alone players and by next year, recorders as well. The Bluray media is already comparable in price to tape formats we’re familiar with, and supplier competition to dominate the market is going to put pressure on those prices to drop further. Already any kind of DVD is way cheaper to store and to mail than a tape cassette like a betaSP or digital betacam, etc. If I’m one of the guys with the green eyeshades and you show me an HD tape deck that’s $25k and a BluRay deck that’s under $1k, and you tell me they both put out essentially the same HD picture, what do you think the purchase decision is going to be? BluRay dubber robots are already in the field and only cost three grand for a Bravo primera version that can kick out a hundred dubs in one or two hours, unattended. This is a very powerful concept. What I’m anxiously awating is for Apple to get it together and offer Bluray on FCP and burner drives for the mac, to catch up with Adobe. They just have to, or they are going to get left behind. I expect, no, I COUNT on an announcement by macworld or next NAB.

The result of this massive Blue invasion is, we’ll have a base of compatible players out there in industry and the consumer’s home and schools and festivals that can play one common HD format, from bedrooms to boardrooms to breakrooms to broadcast ops rooms. Alternatives like shipping removeable/returnable raid drive modules are non-starters, like old fashioned returnable glass milk bottle delivery, compared to the ultimate familiarity and simplicity of: “Put disk in slot, play video, put on shelf to store”. No petabyte raids or sans to feed and tweak. Unless you WANT to feed it into one, of course, then keep the hard copy offsite as backup.

Virtual FTP type delivery is of course an even better deal, and a major wave of the future, IMO, but there will always be cases, particularly in smaller markets, prosumer, indie and industrial, where you need at some point to have the HD program in your hands in a self-archiving, self-shipping format. Blueray durability has been proven with very dramatic demos, (including a belt sander I’m told) we won’t know about longevity for a while yet, but I don’t think lasting ten years is too wild a bet to make.

By then perhaps a holographic format will have taken over, or quantum foam, or something equally exotic, I can’t know. It could be as some producer/directors have claimed, that BluRay is the last physical format we’ll see and everything will be virtual in the future. But old fashioned paper books and safety film stock are still with us, and will be for some time yet. Umatic was born about the same time as Sgt. Pepper was released, and some of those decks are still working today. We have one such old soldier creakily cranking out old archival footage from the 80’s and 90’s that we’re dubbing over to SD DVD-R’s right now. When those umatic tapes are all converted and shredded, we’ll start on the one-inch reels. May take a year or two, we had a lot of tape. The nice thing is that as things get “flattened” to disk, we recover massive amounts of reclaimed shelf space in the library so we can hold more in less volume.

I don’t pick Bluray for any reason except that the combination of an affordable home-user base of stand-alone players, as well as affordable updated drives for home and office computers, makes the potential number of playable places so large, it has the best chance of becoming the next “betaSP” of interchange and archival until those other brave new formats come and upset the applecart again. By which time I will be safely retired, I hope:-) Seriously though; on a cost basis, on a basis of widest possible compatibility both in consumer and industrial spheres, I dont see what else looks as good as BluRay right now. I don’t say you need to shoot on it, but when you have to deliver on a hardware format, this looks very good to me as an HD “standard you can store”, without anything more complicated than a shelf and a sharpie.

[Mark Suszko]

I agree that there are many possible roads and each one takes you someplace good, depending on the person and how hard they apply themselves.

That said, I tend to not favor purely vocational type tech schools. While some are quite good, I feel their grads tend to get pigeon-holed into just one job and it may get difficult to branch out from that and advance a true career, versus a string of one-note jobs.

Stats show that today’s kids will grow to have an average of four or five different careers in their working lifetime. Not jobs, CAREERS. So locking in to one career too deeply, too early, may create a case of overspecialization that makes it hard for you to adapt later.

I suggest that to get some of that hands-on experience early, he should definitely try one of the many short 1 to 6 week production workshops offered around the country, but then in the fall, take a standard 4-year liberal arts & sciences curriculum at whatever university he can afford, (state or private), with a major in Communications and a minor in something like Business.

This I feel produces an educated, thinking, reasoning, and adaptable person who is well-rounded, and the business minor will be useful as well, inside a media production career or outside of it. It sure would have helped ME in retrospect. The early but brief hands-on before college starts will give him a head start against his classmates, but I think a summer’s worth of that is good enough for him and you to see if this is truly where he wants to go. Beats flaking around on vacation or working a dead-end Mcjob. He should also check into his local comunity access Tv station right away and get into productions there no matter what else. Its essentially free, very hands-on, and teaches you to work in a team. A summer of that and he can teach the “lab” part of freshman production class.

He will want to apply for every internship and practicum program the university’s com department has, also see if the sports teams need any cameramen and editors for games and practices. Some of these com arts internships are restricted to upperclassmen while the newer students get their background training and critical thinking/appreciation skills. You might want to pick the schools to apply towards by the strength of their com departments and what ties they have to the local production and advertising communities for their internships. The contacts made alone can open many doors. (But only if you back up that near-blank first resume with some actual skills and a demo reel).

While all this is going on, the kid should search his soul regarding what he likes to do for fun and what aspects of the trade he enjoys the most, after having sampled as many various positions as possible in things like the student radio station and Tv studio. Find a niche he can exploit and market, be it skate or surf videos, animals, aerials, sports, underwater, high-speed, time-lapse, animation, tabletop, or anything related to some particular sport or hobby. Everybody can shoot news; but the list of experts in say dive videos, golf, etc. is considerably smaller, thus you can make a better living with less competition if you can find a niche to exploit.

If he decides for example that compositing is his talent, he should be working away on independant study and practice with that on his own time, every weekend and holiday, using whatever resources he can afford to make demo material. The objective there would be to create samples for a reel and a web site, and build up general skills without getting too tied down to any one platform (though you can never go wrong learning the hell out of photoshop and aftereffects). By the time he’s a junior, he should be getting small time gigs on weekends working his magic for local bands and the like, and entering pieces in competitions. By senior year then, he’ll be using the university program to network his job and career searches from.

As others have said, the schooling is more than a reciept of dues paid: you don’t automatically fall into a dream job the day after senior graduation. You have to fight for it every step of the way; squeeze your teachers and professors like a bunch of grapes to get all their knowledge, apply and test what you’re learning in active self-directed experimentation, most of which will suck and never be shown to anyone but mom and dad.

What comes out of that process is somebody who can become a success at whatever they turn their hand to.