[Mark Suszko]

At 19, he’s reached the age of majority and might even already be living out on his own, away from home and any support from parent or family. That would put a very different complexion on the matter.

While guys that young can live very cheaply and can survive almost indefinitely on Ramen, Mountain Dew, Halo 3 and not much else, I find it doubtful he can make it completely on a video career at that age as a raw beginner without some extraordinary niche skills. Which he may even have, we just don’t know enough to tell at this point.

Working for oneself, one has to charge more because they are also in charge of their own medical care, insurance, pension plan, etc. To forgo those expenses happens a lot, but is very foolish and risky to do. This means it is even MORE tough at his age because he can be undercut by his school buddy working out of Mom’s basement, free food and rent, with an academic discount version of FCP or PPro. So we need to be a little circumspect in what to suggest until we know more about his life situation.

Shooting ENG for local TV stations does not pay very well any more, about the same as burger-flipping wages, but he should visit those stations and see about a staff or freelance gig there. Usually if they need anybody at all, they need extra help covering fringe stuff… local school sports, seasonal work, or staking-out 4-hour-long city council meetings in the hopes a fistfight breaks out. Also nobody likes having to work weekends or the early-morning shifts, so he could try for those dog-watch slots as a way to build up credits, getting late-night fires and car crashes, that sort of thing. The smaller the market, the less fussy they are about hiring, and the less they pay, but small markets are usually also cheaper to live in than large ones. And the station may provide the gear or an allowance for using his own.

One of the better gigs for a single man of that age I think would be to get with a mobile production truck, particularly sports trucks or concert production trucks where he’d do IMAG camerawork and production scutwork. The plusses to that life are making a lot of contacts in a short time and lots of OJT skill-building. The downside is daily travel and crummy motel rooms or sleeping in your car sometimes. Like I said, it’s a young man’s game, not for somebody with a lot of roots or ties.

Another way to go that keeps you in one place would be to work for a local hotel as their on-call Av tech. Taping meetings, helping set up projectors and PA systems, etc. gets you an “in” with their in-house events coordinator for things like video of wedding receptions or other parties. This kind of job leaves room for a second job doing something that’s got flexible hours like food service or maintenance/cleanup crew work. The gigs combined would make someone enough to live on and put a little bit away for the future. If you can get a loan to buy some Presidential styled speech prompters, you might be able to make some very good money working thru the hotels catering to business speakers.

Same with renting out a piece of gear to others in your production community: if there are a lot of indie moviemaker types locally, don’t compete with the gold rush prospectors, make a buck selling them their pans… maybe rent out a nice dolly and jib arm, or a van full of grip gear, lights, etc. Become the local source for that one oddball, seldom-needed piece of gear it makes no sense for any single person to own.

Another great way to make money these days is to own an HD deck or two: of all the components of an editing suite, the DECKS are now the most expensive and hard to get. If you have a digibeta deck and etc. available, you can keep it booked around the clock serving all the indie types who only need it for output to stations and festivals. One guy made a fabulous living doing nothing but hooking up editors to deck owners like a matchmaker. Or realtor:-) Of course, you’re going to have to invest money to make money in such a scheme. You’ll need a solid business plan and probably co-signers and insurance coverage.

I made a modest living in my college and early post-college years shooting depositions and things for law firms, I got referrals thru a stills photographer I’d worked for who specialized in forensic work. These days I think you could still do that work, but the stakes have changed since the wilder early days when I did it in the eighties. Nowadays you’ll have more competition and most of them have a certification from some national group like LEVA, WEVA or similar. Once you get past that part, though, it is kind of cool to sit there babysitting a locked-down camera and just changing tapes every two hours for fifty or a hundred an hour or whatever the rate is today. These days that job also requires more gear to do it competently.

Are you at all religious? You could offer your services to your local Church or Synagogue or I guess, Mosque. Even doing that work for free may not be so bad a thing, as it gets you a lot of contacts in the faith community, so you’re naturally the first person they think of when they want to shoot a wedding, for example. In that way a non-paying gig you do for the karma leads to paying gigs. And some big churches DO pay for weekly staff positions.

I think trying to make and sell commercials locally is the least likely to work for the kid, unless he’s already working for the local cable company’s production department. The local cableco’s give away production services when you make the time buy, so no local business is really going to give an unproven 19-year-old kid a lot of business when, even if they DO let HIM make the spot, they still have to go to the sales department of the cableco to get it aired. He’d actually do better working in the cable co’s sales office selling airtime and then helping along with the “creative” as he goes, working his way into the job he really wants while making a living being close to it.

In the wedding biz, the common path is to apprentice oneself to an established bigger operator first, getting paid training and building skills and contacts. One-man-band startups are common, but have an uphill battle competing on price against the folks with a history of good product already behind them. When I did weddings, I went for a niche market and I did $250 weddings, single-camera, no editing except edit-in-camera by careful shot composition. The top end of my local area was already over-served on the high-end packages, no way I was able to compete with them. My market was young folks just starting out who could not afford bigger, more elaborate shoots, but wanted a step above Uncle Lester’s home movies. I had a sweet deal on camera rentals and so almost all that $250 was pure profit to me, for about 4 hours’ time, and was good enough as a source of “pin money” for my hobbies while my Monday-Friday job went to family expenses. But you have to understand I knew $200 was not a rate that anybody could make a living on, I wasn’t TRYING to make a living on it, just beer and model airplane money:-) As I got older and kids came along, more and more of that money went into the family expenses or for taking my hard-working wife out to dinners or whatnot. But at that low rate, I eventually gave it up because I valued the free time on my weekends being a husband and father more than the extra cash. I’m sure that was the right choice for me at my age. I used the last of my wedding video profits to set up a teleprompter rental service and it did very well, and it was easy: all my clients were locals I knew well, the gear was simple enough I never had to accompany it out: just show up to my door, give me a check, take this box, see you Monday. Thing more than paid for itself, also paid for this computer I’m writing on:-) And I still get my weekends free.

One piece of non-business-specific advice I’ll give to anybody under 21: backseat lovin’ is overrated and until you get to about 25, a car is not your key to real freedom, it is an anchor that enslaves you, a gaping maw that must be fed by all your meager income, leaving you little to save for your future or spend on your present. If at 16 you can avoid buying a car until you’re 25, and instead put the equivalent gas and loans and insurance money for the car into any kind of investment portfolio or a bank savings C.D. -you will learn at 25 what REAL freedom is.

Thus endeth the lesson.

[Mark Suszko]

Mike, that’s hysterical. Reminds me of a time when I was in a contract dispute with a guy in Chicago, which I think you’ll grant is a fairly big city. At one point the guy says he’s going to sic his lawyer on me and names the lawyer. I laughed and said “I don’t think your lawyer is going to take the case to the judge, your lawyer is my cousin”.

As far as these clients go, I agree you only benefit from comparison shoppers, as long as you make a good product at fair price that works for you.

I had a client once brought someone else’s work to the office and asked us to evaluate it. In some businesses, this can get pretty catty; every dentist I ever had did nothing but trash the work of the guy that worked on my teeth before him.

Anyway, the client tape was pretty bad. Badly mic’ed, video levels all over the place and badly exposed, timing and execution of the edits was crummy and sloppy. Not knowing who had done it, I pointed out the most obvious flaws by saying what I’d have done differently, trying to be as diplomatic as possible. No telling if the client themselves had done this at home and were trying to get some positive critiques on the DL. Imagine how telling the client THEY stink would go over!

Then the client asked me what my estimate of the dollar value of the work on that tape was. I was hesitant to name a figure that way, because such things are subjective and situational, so the client told me what they’d paid this person, to see my reaction. At that point diplomacy went out the window as I told them flat-out I thought they’d been overcharged by about 100 percent.

They were on contract to us and I told the client I was sorry they’d spent the money before reaching out to us, because we could have done a much better product for essentially no charge but the tape stock.

I offered to do a repair job on the junk they brought in, but they had nothing but a VHS, no higher-quality masters, so there wasn’t a lot I could do except color-correct it and trim some cuts. We concluded together that was throwing good money after bad, even at our “free” rate, and that a new program from scratch was a better bet.

Of course this person takes my words back to their office to use as a weapon against the person that authorized the tape. We didn’t see that client back for a while. But they did come back eventually. I think after a management shakeup.

I think being honest and never lying about things that can be checked anyway is the best policy, getting you the grudging respect of the right kind of people; even if you can’t make them happy *today*, they know you’re ready to do your best for them some time in the future.

[Mark Suszko]

If the SD tape is a letterbox in a 4:3 that’s kind of bad for me and my needs, because it artificially shrinks the picture that much more. In my case for this project its all going to be talking heads in closeup. I dunno if I’d prefer the SD tape result to be the letterbox or an anmorphic wide, edge to edge; while that’s more work, I could at least “center-punch” that in an edit/transfer to obtain a full-screen 4:3 SD without appreciable loss. Maybe the new Sony is a better “magic bullet” for the particular problem I have?

Thanks for the input, please keep the ideas coming.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

What I’m gleaning from the PDF of the manual is, I can shoot in HD to the P2 cards, then auto-dub to the internal tape drive where I get a down-converted 16:9 SD Dv25 signal. Is that letterboxed on the Mini Dv tape then? Or anaglyph?

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

Three Musketeers Bar got it’s name from being made with three types of filling: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry nugat. Some time in the mists of ancient history, they dropped the strawberry component for reasons unknown, but kept the name.

Comedians will tell you, universally, the funniest candybar name is Zagnut. I like Zagnut bars. I LOVE their old commercial, which has the feel of a Stan Freeberg work., dunno if it was his but has his flavor on it. Description:
Two executives are touring a candy plant, discussing the new candy they are going to market. They go on about how great the bar tastes, as they reveal that they were using a newfangled computer to help pick the best name for the product. The head suit asks what the computer came up with. The junior exec proudly exclaims; “ZAGNUT!”.

The Head Suit goes ballistic, saying this is the stupidest name for a candybar he’s ever heard of and that nobody in their right mind is going to buy a candybar called Zagnut, no matter HOW good it tastes.

By this time, the tour has arrived at the shipping and packing department, where we see the situation is a fait accompli’, as the infinitely huge warehouse is already brimming with cases and palletloads of candy all branded “ZAGNUT”.

The Head Suit sighs resignedly and says something like, “oh hell, might as well give it a try”.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

Well you’re asking a lot for nothing, but here are some suggestions, there are other ways to go as well.

You can use this piece of software:

https://www.adobe.com/products/visualcommunicator/

with a windows laptop that has firewire and USB and a camcorder that has firewire and USB and a microphone input for better sound options (Canon ZR 800 I believe has this, about $150 at Walmart)

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/478924-REG/Canon_1880B001_ZR800_Mini_DV_Camcorder.html

to do some simple chromakey work. The neat part of this software for educators is that it also includes slides and graphics as well as even a teleprompter function for reading long scripts into the camera. There will be a bit of a learning curve in using it, and it may not be able to do every feature “live” but only nearly so. Meaning you’ll shoot onthe green screen but won’t immediately see the substituted background until the computer renders a finished movie a few minutes to an hour later. Depends on the length of the shots and the power of the computer. Earlier versions of this product were made by Serious Magic inc. before Adobe bought them, and you might be able to find used older versions at a deep discount on ebay or the like.

In the pro world we obviously use much more expensive and sophisticated hardware and software, what I’m describing to you is certainly on the “low end” of what’s out there, and when you play with the low end stuff stuff you have to make certain compromises and work-arounds.

To really be able to do it live, efficiently, usually the expedient way is to use an actual camera switcher that has the keying built in. The very cheapest one I know of that might be able to do this is an Edirol from B&H photo-video in NYC for 999 bucks brand new:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/307324-REG/Edirol_Roland_V4_V_4_Four_Channel_Video.html

You might be able to find comparable or better switchers cheaper than this on ebay, perhaps a Panasonic or Videonics, but unless you are knowledgeble in such gear, or have a video friend who knows what to look for and look OUT for, likely you’ll end up with a bad deal.

Assuming you have a switcher like the one above, you will need at least one camera to shoot the green screen, and an external source for the background image to be fed into the second channel. That could be a laptop, a VCR with pre-recorded images, a 30-dollar DVD player with a premade DVD or cd of source images, or even a cheap digital camera pre-loaded with the images and using it’s video output cable to feed the switcher. Though those tend to time-out and go into sleep mode after five minutes just sitting.

You can chromakey with most any material and any color, but you make things easier if you use a very saturated and flat, matte colored green cloth. Lighting the cloth EVENLY is the single most important thing about chromakeying. One cheap way to do this is to shoot outdoors and use the full sun, but wind can be a problem. You have to keep the backdrop far enough behind the actors so that no shadows fall across it and no gree is reflected onto the actors. My rule of thumb is at least double the height of the tallest person to be shot.

Indoors, you will need to use soft lighting on the green screen. The cheapest thing there would be flourescent tube shop lights from a home center, or halogen work lights shining thru sheets of proper photographer’s diffusion material or as a cheap alternative, baker’s parchment(high temp resistance). The cloth must be lit evenly from edge to edge with no hot spots and no dark spots, or the effect becomes hard to make cleanly.

A good source for inexpensive but wide chromakey cloth is rosebrand in NYC:

https://www.rosebrand.com/product169/122-Celtic-Cloth-IFR.aspx?tid=2&info=chromakey

You can find a bright lime green cloth at walmart or a sewing store that will work, but you’ll have to sew it into wider pieces, plus come up with stands or ladders and pipe to hang it from. Gets to be kind of a big clumsy deal. An ideal cloth would be like the material in your car’s headliner. Fuzzy enough to not reflect, stretchy enough to un wrinkle. I have successfully keyed on everything from the expensive $60 a bucket Rosco paint to $50 photographer’s paper rolls to green and blue plastic picnic table runners with a matte finish from the Dollar Store. Pro materials are faster and easier to work with and control, plus give optimal results, so they cost more.

You might want to do some more research into techniques before plunging ahead. Google these sources:

videouniverity
DV.com forums
Wilkipedia

for more on chromakeying in the field. I have done stuff like this for school tour groups many times and it is always great fun for all. The kids use the camera and switcher to put their heads on each other’s or the teacher’s bodies or onto tape of dancing puppets, we shoot from above looking down with cloth on the floor as they stand on one foot and pretend to be flying or in zero gee. Make them giants or teeny tiny figures perched on a shoulder or in a hand, make clones that talk to each other… Stuff like that. Good times.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

A marketing guy would charge the same price, make the bar the same length but narrower, and call the new smaller bar “lower-calorie diet size”. People will rationalize that since it’s a diet version, they can get away with eating two instead of one, same as they do now with Halloween “fun size”. Marketing guy retires to a tropical island.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

Alan, can you take a minute to give me some more details on how you use it? If you work at CNN, I’m guessing you are using it more to receive things from the outside, like VNR packages submitted by various industries, commercial interests, or governments? What kind of stuff do you get the most of thru this system? How hard or easy is it to use? Are you paying anything for the stuff or is it all paid for from the sender’s end? What’s your workflow like?

Sorry for the blizzard of questions, but I need user opinions to help me research if this is a good way to go for our own needs.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

Local TV stations will take whatever format you have for news if the footage is exclusive and hot, like a plane crash or some horrible thing. Though they do have everyday preferences, you can find out by calling the engineering or traffic departments at each station to ask what they prefer.

More common formats vary depending on the part of the country but the old grandad format that refuses to die, BetacamSP still works in many places, just because the Big Stick outside goes digital next year does not mean the amortized analog stuff in the plant all magically gets replaced right away. Stations tend to hold on to gear and formats until the very last possible second, in order to avoid costs.

DVCPro or DVCAM will work, consumer DV plays back in either of those two I just mentioned and they play back each other’s Dv25 formats, so if that’s, again, you know, something newsworthy that you shot, they’ll break out the converter cables and transfer it.

HDV and ADHVC-XYZ formats, IMO have not made a huge penetration in anything but the very smallest cheapest stations yet: you’ll likely have to bring a deck to play it out.

Surprisingly, many if not all stations now will take it on DVD, even if they don’t advertise that.

Worst case, they’ll play your DVD thru a 30-dollar Walmart special into their server or in-house system and then use it however they want. Better case; they’d rip the files instead of suffer more A/D conversion losses, but that depends on the size and budget of the market and how much time they want to spend diddling with mpeg file re-authoring. If you have the time to save the video as data on a data DVD, it would be nice to offer them the choice of either.

My sense of the market is that digibeta is kind of losing steam as expensive and harder to get and is more for commercials, movies, and actual pre-recorded programming on cable and broadcast networks than news.

An up and coming method is to forget format as it were, and subscribe to a service like the newsmarket or pathfire to take your video in any format and convert it to a pushed stream that goes to newsrooms and engineering rooms at the stations everywhere at once, for them to use or not as they see fit. Sort of like a turbo version of you tube but for broadcasters. These services charge the senders but provide the stations with free viewer stations and servers. I see a lot of VNR business going this way.

And you can still blast the nation coast to coast, live, using a satellite window: bought in 15-minute increments, the stations can pull down your message for under a grand. You have to first notify them with faxes, calls, and emails, so there’s some organizing, scheduling and legwork involved. This method is very useful and popular if you have a celeb or a technical expert in high demand for a breaking story, to be interviewed by news stations over a large area: they take turns calling in questions to a central studio where your guy sits in front of a camera and takes the calls via earpiece. Your one person can do custom one on ones with many stations in just 15 to 30 minutes.

Choice of distribution channel is very dependent on your budget, what you wanna send, how long it is, when, and who to.
If your question is, “what format should I use if I want to work as a news stringer?” I think you should survey your market area and copy whatever they use.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

On the mac side, you would want to consider the screen grabbing product from Ambrosia, it’s really popular and works similarly to Camtesia.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”