[Mark Suszko]

Again, I’m not an I.P. lawyer, but I think you may have a problem on the kareoke footage if you also use the sound. Constantine can sing, but to broadcast the video of him singing you’d have to pay for the rights to use the audio of the kareoke version of the song at least, plus synch rights. Probably also for the lyrics of the original song. If this footage was used as b-roll without the sound, no prob, maybe.

As far as NASCAR, well, they may not be quite as tight about things as MLB or the NFL, but still, they might have some problem as well, best to check first.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

PZM boundary-type mics work miracles in these situations. I’d look to hard-wire them intoa couple of “zones” and then mix as appropriate. A really good shotgun can be hand-aimed by a full time guy using a pistol grip and following who talks. These methods would be least intrusive and not require wiring up people. The judge or lawyers may also have an issue with the fact RF mics can be listened to outside the walls of the courtroom remotely. Might want to ask about that up front.

[Mark Suszko]

“It’s not dead; it just smells funny”

We still use betaSP but only rarely shoot on it anymore, only in situations where we have to hand it off raw to someone who specifically needs that format. We’re preserving our remaining decks for editing use and don’t like adding the wear and tear of dub runs to production machines. The postage costs alone are a big factor as well: way cheaper to mail a DVC Pro or DVD. We worked it out that for any of our clients that complained they couldn’t use a DVD, we could BUY them a player and still save money over shipping tape. The disc is also the same price and weight if it holds 15 minutes or 2 hours.

We mostly shoot DVCPro 25 now,
and we have been weaning our clients off of beta dubs for some time now, switching them to DVD-R’s. Oddly enough, we get requests from outfits like CNN, Nightline, etc. all the time and they still ask for beta. Why? Because they don’t ask what else we offier, and mostly, because they have accountants.

And accountants won’t let you replace anything until it is literally on fire and melting. As long as its amortized and still making them a buck, they will run it until it can’t be made to run no more, or the feds declare it illegal. We wring every cent of value out of our gear before we send it to surplus.

We’re currently laying off our umatic legacy tapes to DVD-R, a long process, and there may be better ways but this worked out to be the best option for our unique needs. The one-inches and betas will be next as time permits.

Our strategy going forward is to migrate to HD aquisition and output over the next five years, and to distribute “hard copy” HD content on BluRay. It looks like it will work out much cheaper than a tape-based HD solution, and our analysis of the market is that now the HD DVD format war is over, we’re going to see a huge jump in industrial/prosumer/low-end broadcast use of BluRay because it will be very inexpensive and available via stand-alone players as well as drives in computers. Because of that cross-platform compatibility, to me BluRay looks liek the closest thing to a “standard” we’re going to ever see again in this crazy game. Beta was it for twenty years or so, BluRay will likely be for the next ten, after hwhich, we may be using holographics or quantum foam or some other crazy thing. If it stays a standard for a decade, I’d be happy.

So if we can’t uplink a signal to a client or FTP them the file, we’re planning on handing them a BluRay if they want HD. We’ll likely also archive on it. On paper it works out equal to or cheaper than tape per unit cost and the burners and duplicators are definitely cheaper than HD tape recording decks or masses of cheap hard drives. A Primera Bravo pro capable of BluRay dubbing is only three grand and can kick out a hundred dubs an hour, printed, unattended. Compare that to 18 grand for a USED digibeta deck or 25-odd thousand for an HD deck like a DVCPro100 format. We’ll still probably get a pair of those for in-house production use, as they are also backwards-compatible with our legacy DVCPro 25 gear investment. That’s a huge factor.

We’re leaning towards P2 cameras with external strap-on hard drives to get us cheaper, longer-running HD in the field, and editing in FCP, with burns to BluRay as soon as Apple gets their act together and adds BluRay authoring/burning to FCP/DVDSP. I predict that will happen by next NAB, it simply HAS to.

Again, we’re addressing a particular narrowly defined market and needs, so what we choose to do may not fit your unique situation. But it shows you how we’re thinking about it and what weight we give various factors.

[Mark Suszko]

Typically, it would belong to the station you worked for when you shot it, unless you shot it freelance, even then it might be considered a “work for hire” and owned by them.

I’ve passed up shooting tornado footage as I passed one on the highway because it was happening on company time with company gear and so I wouldn’t be able to sell it. Also, it wasn’t worth risking my life, as well! And seriously, does the world really NEED more tornado footage? Not that badly.

[Mark Suszko]

If they read this site, no:-)

If they don’t, use the language I suggested, or something like it, as a little poke, then leave it be. You are under no compulsion to tell them who else you are or are not working for or when. Think of it as a poker bluff; in this guy’s case, we don’t even know if he’s playing for real yet.

[Mark Suszko]

I would say don’t buy a crummy camera, just because your budget is low; rent a better one. Along with a good light kit and mic. This is business, and it makes no sense to go drop a grand on the camera right away without knowing how much it will be used, or if its the right one. You can rent a much better camera and lighting for the same amount of money than you can afford to buy outright. You also are not paying any depreciation or maintenance on these assets when they are not being used, the accountants should like that.

You also sound unsure of yourself, perhaps inexperienced. It might make sense in that case for the fist gig to hire an experienced cameraman with all his own gear for $400-$1,000 for the first one, and use him not only to get you impressive footage, but to demonstrate how to set up the camera, lights, mic, so you can do it all yourself the next time. In this way your first results are going to impress the bosses the first time out, and they’ll likely support you more for the things you want to get down the road as you build trust and experience.

As to quality for web, IMO whatever you do, it only gets worse on the web, so I would start out with more quality rather than less. Smart lighting to reduce graininess and nose, and proper shot composition, good selection of clean, low-detail, static, non-busy backgrounds, all of these factors help reduce the compression load on the codec and thus improve the look and smoothness of the final compressed output. They are absolutely right that without great sound, the whole thing is a waste of time.

[Mark Suszko]

I agree wholeheartedly. What you’ve done here is supply a script “on spec”. This is done sometimes for theatrical stuff, rarely for advertising, but not really on corporate/industiral/training/marketing.

I agree the most you should pitch them with at first is a treatment, but how would you even DO a good treatment without first taking a meeting and doing a Needs Analysis? Handing over a finshed script this early in the game will usually lead to you losing the gig, because a client with a lack of vision will fixate on one little item in that script, like a piece of dialog, and, rejecting that, he rejects the entire creative approach and you with it. Even if its an easy change to make.

Your writer did the job you asked him/her to do, you need to pay them anyhow. You should also have the script registered with the Guild and copyrighted to protect you if the client decides to steal it verbatim.

I once did a pitch to some appliance store owners for an entire campaign on radio, very comprehensive. It took me two hours of interviewing them and two days of going over the tape transcripts, brainwork and writing to generate the creative approach and treatments and schedules and come back and pitch the entire month-long evolving campaign, after which they said, “nice but not hard-sell enough, we might want to use one or two of the ideas out of it though. If you come back here to buy a washing machine, we’ll give you a break on the price.” I wished them well and never looked back.

They tried to lift a few of my ideas and use them in the eventual hard-sell 3-day on-air campaign they cribbed from my notes, but the radio station drones they gave my work to didn’t have the entire picture of how this was supposed to work, and fumbled the execution quite badly.

I entered my original versions in a local media awards contest and won top prize, go figure. Appliance store folded a month or two later. I figure that was karma.

Let me recommend a book that’s helped a lot of corporate video people, you can find it used on Amazon:
John Morley,
Scriptwriting for high-impact videos
ISBN 0-534-15066-7

Morley is to corporate production what Syd Field is to screenwriters.

[Mark Suszko]

Whatever else you do, do NOT be tempted to drop your rate or adjust your bid downwards. The delay could be for any of a hundred reasons. Just one of those might be that your bid was the only realistic one, and its more money than they planned to spend so they have to scramble to get more assets assigned to the project now. It could also be there’s been a palace coup at their office and everything is in chaos until the new bosses put their, um (edited for content)”imprimatur”, let us say… on the project.

I have had projects where the client’s boss’s office changed hands five times in two years, and nobody was able to pull the trigger to get a 30-second spot finished. Project became an orphan with nobody at the client office to shepherd it. I need some hard drive space and so since i have not heard back from the guy in months I archive the project offline and guess who calls the very next freaking day, as if by magic?
🙂

They could also just be tire-kickers who needed your bid for comparison purposes and never were serious, they already had someone else in mind but had to show three estmates, like you do for insurance company paperwork when your car needs body work.

If you have something likely coming up that will take the scheduled time they would have booked, it is fair and proper to send over another “raise or call” message saying: ” …based on our previous conversations, I had your project penciled-in on the schedule for this coming week, but if you can’t make a hard commitment to the booking, I’m going to have to accept another client for that time and bump your project until later in the month. I wanted to be sure this won’t disrupt your plans, and give you a chance to confirm your prior reservation for the time or to release it, based on your project’s current status”.

Leave that message by email and phone, then hold firm and be patient. If they don’t call back after that, you know it’s a dead deal. If they call back and only want to stall, or haggle on price, you have the fish on the hook. But as others have said, in that case, be exceptionally wary because of the unreliable nature of how they do business. They pay cash up front until they establish an account, and no new work or changes are made until the previous work is signed off and paid in full. That’s just smart business.

[Mark Suszko]

These web-based solutions all work to a greater or lesser extent, but they don’t all exactly stream in real time. What we have found from doing these a couple ways over the years is the stream-viewing audience falls farther and farther behind as the program goes on. When we do 2-hour teleconferences, the folks watching the stream experience a time delay that approaches six minutes by the end of the first hour. This means it is to all intents and purposes useless to try and do full-duplex conversations with multiple sites in real time, because the web folks are six minutes behind when the question first gets asked.

We use a Ku-band satellite transponder with a C-band turn-around in the bird to reach all our target downlink sites for teleconferences. We use an 800 number and an audio bridge with a mix-minus, so callers calling into the show to ask a question do not hear any echo from the satellite delay. That delay is a fraction of a second, and is fairly imperceptible, and never increases. While our callers are waiting on hold to ask their questions, they hear our program feed live, so they don’t miss anything, even if they are making the call outside of the room where they are watching the downlink, (which we encourage as the simplest way to avoid injecting feedback into the audio.) Typically we do not use a back-haul video of any callers from other sites, but it *is* possible to do that. We did it once or twice over the years, decided that was extra expense the audience didn’t really require, and so nowadays, we usually settle for throwing up a still graphic of the caller that was pre-produced, and running their audio under that during their calls, as they interact with the people in our studio. It feels about the same as when the nightly news does an interview with a field correspondent that’s reporting in by phone: you get a graphic with their picture and maybe a map to give a sense of where they are coming from, and throw some graphics up over that as needed.

Satellite is really not always as expensive as you might think, if you can get a fiber line to the teleport and skip needing a truck at the site. One of our clients once ran the numbers on how expensive it was to do training this way, with satellite transmission to downlink sites at libraries and community colleges around the state. What they discovered that on a per-person basis, the 2-hour shows cost less per individual than those folks were paying for their McDonald’s lunches at the downlink sites, with good interactivity in real time. And by using the network of community colleges as downlink sites, their drive distance to go see and participate was a maximum of about thirty minutes from home, no matter where they lived in the state. So it works well for our clients. We send a duplicate of the live output to the web for live streaming, for those places where they just can’t get away to a downlink site, but those viewers are generally passive and not calling in, due to the delay issue.

I do know that the visual quality is superior for our audiences when they go with a downlink as opposed to a stream as well. Your mileage definitely will vary on that depending on the specific software you deploy to stream out things like powerpoints and the like, as well as the bandwidth and other connectivity issues unique to your IT situations. What you decide to use will be a balancing act between costs, perceived value, level of quality, and how effective the project is.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, having the stuff there means you will be able to respond quickly to any sudden instant requests for a taping. Is that something that’s likely to happen a lot?

You doing more shooting does mean less time for editing. But you gain more control over the process creatively.

I like being the shooter, director, and editor all at the same time, because the editor in me will not leave the director and shooter sides alone until we’re all three sure there is enough proper coverage and all the proper optional shots have been taken, the sound is good, etc…

As the writer/producer, I like to see the shooting done exactly the way I envisioned it. But, for standard bust shot sit-down interviews, is it really all that creatively complicated?

Kind of a threadjack, but tangentially related:

I do a lot of training shoots with lecturers talking while running their powerpoint slides. I really don’t consider this the best use of the medium and I die inside a little every time I have to do it, but it puts food on the table.

But while daydreaming a little during a boring bit, I thought about what I could do to streamline the process, and what I would really like is a custom plate on the studio pedestal with two identical cameras on it as close together as possible. I would pre-set the lenses so one is a closeup and one the wider shot. I live switch these things typically to save time but it would be a nice rig to use in things that will be edited later as well, like interviews, because you have everything you need in one take, no need to go back and re-shoot a bit because of a blown line of dialog, and you have two angles to cut with.

In training video lectures I would put the dual cams behind a large 45-degree beamsplitter and prompter screen so the lecturer could just see their PPT slides yet still make perfect eye contact with the cameras. I kind of do this now with two tripods next to each other and staggered cameras but the eyelines are not quite right due to excessive parellax problems, and the ppt monitor is below the lens instead of in front of it. Works okay but could be better.