[Mark Suszko]

There is no one size fits all rule for this question, so much of it depends on how much effort you want to put into the project, how much you have to work with, the particular features and problems in your footage, how much you want to experiment with alternative cuts, enhancements, etc.

The cynical answer is perhaps that it takes exactly as much time as you have before the deadline. I.E. a lot of folks just keep working at it until they run out of time, the saying goes: “a project is never truly finished, merely abandoned at some point”. In news cutting, you definitely have a short deadline most times, and you just throw things together as best you can in the time alloted and that’s all you can do.

The fastest I have ever cut on a linear system was exactly 2 times real time, that is, it took 2 hours to edit one hour, but that was extremely simplistic A/B cuts-only editing that was only shortening something that was already shot in story order and just needed the excess heads and tails cut off each shot. I have occasionally cut something faster than realtime on my old Discreet Edit* by scrubbing thru the timeline at faster than normal speed, and very quickly slashing thru some dead spots between stuff I needed. I don’t recommend it, but it can be done, if you are pretty familiar with the material as it goes in and you have a good concept of what needs doing ahead of the job.

This would be for example in making instant highlight reels immediately after a live event. I’d be digitizing the footage as it was happening live, then run into the editing room and shorten the thing up right on the timeline with great big straight cuts here and there based on time of day time code and notes I took while live-switching the original feed. If you pace the live shot selections right, you can create a rythm in the shots, so you know for example that every major section of the speech is bracketed by wide shots, like paragraphs in punctuation, so you can scrub thru and mark those in and out in seconds, without even listening to them, just counting the wide cutaways as they fly by in scrub mode.

Many times the editing takes as long as the schedule will permit. Sometimes longer. I think Apaocalypse Now may hold the record for slowest edit; Walter Murch says that on a good day, they made one edit per day. That is, go one at a time thru matching shots for one scene from all the multiple cameras covering that scene, decide on the best performances and best angles, pick a shot, splice it in, review it in the context of what came before and comes after, then approve it, or not, and undo it and try something else. One single cut a day. Oy.

For something that’s relatively linear, like a concert performance, I would synch up all the cameras and play it thru in real time, marking in the cuts on the fly as if using a regular switcher. For a one hour show, the synchronization and first quasi-live pass marking the cuts on the beat might take me two hours, plus an hour of digitizing ingest time for each camera used (this figure will be different if you don’t use tape). So for three cameras on a one hour shoot, that’s five, maybe six hours to the first rough cut, assuming normal breaks for food and etc.

But that’s really just a first step. To make the thing better, I would then go back thru the master and play with dropping in extra cut-aways and b-roll, and sliding around some L-cuts as well as playing with dissolves, superimpositions, PIP, and any other special effects. That could take one or two days.

The I would go thru the whole finish cut again just to tweak the audio, and once more to make sure all the colors and picture levels were good.

So roughly 3 days to a week would be a comfortable schedule for doing this, but if you tell me it has to be ready in a day, I’ll make it ready in a day. It just won’t look the same as it would if I took a week. And if it has to be ready in 4 hours, I can do that, but again, it won’t look the same, nor as good.

[Mark Suszko]

Real credentials come from your local PD and sometimes your sity or state film office. If you work for a service like AP or Reuters, etc. they also supply a pass. In NYC there are several levels of passes, some also give you the right to temporary illegal parking and these are like gold, hard to get.

Depending on the town and circumstances, real credentials can be obtained simply by presenting the desk sarge with a letter from your boss confirming your employment. Other places, you may have to bring a demo reel of say three stories that have made the air at some point, like fire coverage, etc. Still other places have statewide press associations to which you may apply for credentials.

Faking it with photoshopped lookalike badges used to be an option but these days in this new security climate, will likely make more trouble for you than just being honest. Hauling a big*ss betacam on your shoulder used to be a good go-anywhere pass, sometimes still is for low-intensity events, but considering how our pro cams are everyday getting smaller and looking more like consumer cameras, that may not help all that much anymore. Yes, I’ve seen places where just carrying around some XLR cables and a monitor and looking preoccupied would get you past a door. But for places that really matter, not so much anymore. And putting press placards in your vehicle these days doesn’t prevent you from gettign tickets, but it still does advertise to local crackheads that your vehicle is a tasty target for a break-in.

[Mark Suszko]

So I’m pictuting how a potter’s wheel ca be used like a zoetrope, and it seems to be missing some kind of occluder or shutter slits like the zoetrope band uses. Might make a good doco project for Myhtbusters, figuring out how an ancient Persian moviemaker would actually play this animation back properly. I guess the easiest thing to do would be to train yourself to blink rapidly as the bowl turned. Other mechanisms tend quickly to get too mechanically complicated, but I could imagine a slotted or portholed disk at 90 degrees, turning on and driven by the edge of the potter’s wheel, could be made with then-existing technology out of wood or glass or clay or thin beaten metal. Look thru that and you get a shutter effect on the jumping goat. Or a vertical shaft spinning an occluder in front of the bowl would conceal and reveal it, belt-driven from that same potter wheel. Or a duplicate wheel rubbing against it, the pot on that wheel would just be slots and posts like a cage, you’d look thru that to the bowl behind to get the effect.

Tody’s news had another ancient Av tech story in it: an audio recording system that precedes Edison’s by a wide margin, used a diaphragm-driven stylus to trace an audio waveform onto a paper strip coated and blackened with lamp smoke (early carbon paper). This was meant to visualize sound for scientific analysis but they had no way to play it back, so it was only half a system, really. Some audio experts recently found a high quality photo of one of these strips and reconstituted the wave form. Heard a sample online today, it is horrible quality but you CAN make out the French woman’s voice and even some of the words.

What I read in comments about this story was that Lincoln may have had his voice recorded by this French device while it was on a tour. If that recording of Lincoln’s actual voice waveform could be recovered and reconstituted, it would be a priceless artifact, a true “National Treasure”. Maybe the next sequel to the movie could be that.

[Mark Suszko]

Ah, yes, the dreaded: “General Audience” specification. Morley goes into great detail about this in his book. What you might try next time is to act stupid, and ask some leading questions:

“When you say General audience, do you have a lower and upper age limit?

“Would these people be assumed to have what level of education, at a minimum? And what maximum?”

“Are they predominately one particular ehnicity or gender?”

“And roughly what kind of income level are we talking about, in a broad sense?”

You keep whittling away at these “general” specs until you can define the target down to something manageable:

“So, what I hear from you is, we’re aiming for young, single, primarily English-speaking men of any race, living in cities of 50 thousand population and up, between ages 25 and 35, with at least a high school diploma and at least 2 years of college, making between 20 and 50 thousand a year, who like outdoor activities and who rent their current home or apartment, and have a bit of money saved they might want to invest in either a home purchase or another type of investment.”

You now know *something* about whom you want to reach, you now have some basis to start designing the message. That is not a “general” audience we just listed. You just saved a LOT of time and money for the client that might have been blown on creative approaches that would have been wasted on non-qualified target audiences.

[Mark Suszko]

“Post-Production Technical Supervisor”?

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve read that it is very common for a theft from your baggage at the airport to be covered-up by deliberately misrouting your bag, so that by the time it is recovered and returned, the trail is too muddled to know at what point something was taken out.

[Mark Suszko]

You can throw some Jump Backs at it, some techno-thump music, and fancier bulleted graphics builds, but that’s a band-aid solution.

A very common problem I face with my clients is they want one video to do every kind of job: for an employee training video to also be a sales promo or motivational video and also a kind of annual report video for shareholders… when those are all distinct target audiences with conflicting, antithetical needs. They tend to do it from a lack of understanding of media, and from a false concept of economy: that the more “stuff” you cram into one production under a fixed budget, the more you somehow get for your production dollar. Where we would look at the above laundry list and suggest that’s at least three separate scripts and productions, they often want to lump dissimilar things into one job just to get it over with and because there is not enough money to make three good short videos. So we’ll make one cruddy extra-long one!:-P

I tell them the message is like an arrow, and the more topics you add onto it, the broader and flatter the point of the arrow goes until it can’t penetrate a target no matter how hard you pull back the bow(read as “spending money”).

Pare down the message to the essentials. Short is good. Leave them wanting more, not gnawing their leg off to escape. And of course, Know and understand your key audience, respect them, don’t try to tell them what they already know. Don’t lie to them. Involve them.

Something I do with my clients is ask them for five objective, measurable things a viewer should know or think or feel about the main point, after watching the program. Play the first-cut master video for some people in the target audience, with the same educational, social and cultural background as the target audience. Ask them the five questions before and after viewing. If they retain three or more, its a win. If they retain two or less, go back and try again with refinements. If they retain all five, submit the video to an awards contest!

And make sure they understand that if they are not themselves in the target audience, their perception of what is good or effective in a video may not be the best, and that they should lean more on survey data and polling to decide what to greenlight. Otherwise, what you get is, the project was conformed to impress “the Big Guy”, whoever that is, but has little effect onthe actual target audience. It’s much more important to risk the Big Guy not liking the show *personally*, as long as you can show him the objective numbers that the video is doing its proper job on the assigned target audience.

Steps like this kind of validation are not what non-pro’s know anything about when they throw some powerpoint speaker notes into MS word and call it a “script”.

[Mark Suszko]

I am shocked and dismayed to see people injecting their politics here in these forums; besides being highly unprofessonal, it is an incredibly corrosive thing for a site such as this. Trust me, having experienced where such things go, left unchecked, you REALLY don’t want this happening here at the COW. Indeed, I think its a TOS violation and am surprised Ron has not stepped in to mute this before it turns cancerous.

There are SO many other places to have the political knife fights, please don’t bring them here. Right or wrong, you’re all out of line.

[Mark Suszko]

So if I hear this right, the pictures are fine, the sound is okay yet the video somehow stinks. Sounds like a problem I talked about here earlier in the week. The real problem is quite possibly not technical, but structural and narrative. No amount of tumbling DVE cubics or greenscreen wizardry is going to fix that. If their idea of a program is ‘radio with pictures’ they should not be surprised that the video is less effective than desired or expected. It very likely wound up as what someone once described to me this way:
“This is the video nobody watches, by people we never listen to and don’t know, of the manual nobody reads, for the product nobody is buying”.

Unfortunately the rest of us and our industry as a whole then often unfairly get tarred as ineffectual from that one poor example.

I’m guessing this thing was not scripted by a pro, but by someone in the office without scripting experience, who got saddled with it, then that script was given to the techs to execute, and they made it to order.

But like computers, GI=GO. People will spend all kinds of money on expensive HD cameras and cool effects and travel to great locations and even hire expensive actors but rarely, rarely, do they spend significant money on the first, most important step of the videomaking process: a good, well-thought-out script that delivers.

Some projects you just can’t repair except in a superficial way. Bad narrative structure and a lack of a narrative point to make? Well, FCP doesn’t have a button to fix that.

[Mark Suszko]

I think some handy guy in his garage is going to make a killing selling a better firewire cable for these kinds of setups. It should have a 45 or optional 90-degree bend coming out, as we can already do with BNC and XLR audio connectors, so as to lay more flush against the camera, and it should have a tight moisture-and-dust-proof silicone rubber seal around the interface area, better strain relief, and some way to make the connector “lock” in place by expansion/friction, better than desktop firewire cables. You should also be able to order an exact length using an online custom configurator web page, so it can be cut and made to order for your specific setup, without extra loops to get caught up on things. I would buy this in a heartbeat. You hear me, Firestore and Markertek? I want a percentage for the idea:-)