[Mark Suszko]

I always liked Peter Thomas’ voice too, it was the voice of PBS/ NOVA for quite a while, it seemed, and anything you use that voice on gets an instant boost of credibility. I remember a pop song that sampled a chunk of him narrating a documentary on the Vietnam war, long before sampling like that was very common. The song was called, I think, “Nineteen”, based on the sample words which were something about the average age of an American soldier in Vietnam. Have looked for the song a few times online, have not yet found it.

[Mark Suszko]

I usually refer to myself as that. For one thing, videographer is gender-neutral, which can be handy in this day and age.

It is also classier sounding than “Mister camera-guy”, which I get from civilians a lot and hate. I also have a great respect for people that shoot actual film, and I do not want to be one of those guys that tries to steal the cachet of film work by referring to my videotaping as “filming”. When people refer to “filming” something around me, I say “Film is something on my kitchen counter tops”. I’m trying to be self-deprecating about the topic because I feel too many folks go the other way to claim to be something they are not.

Videographer is a perfectly good term. To me It only means a photographer working with video. News guys usually just call each other “photogs”, but I always felt that was a little imprecise and catch-all unless stills was your thing.

[Mark Suszko]

If you are asking for predictions, mine is this:

We will see another revolution in video codecs, one that will allow decent, lossless, full quality viewing and audio over dialup connections. Not if, only when.

Some possible outcomes from this:
Severe depression of rates in the near term for satellite uplinks and microwave hops. Your big or medium-sized ENG vans become some guy in a Hyudai finding a landline or wifi connection nearby to make his live shots with.

To fight the loss of uplink business, uplink services use the same compression to jam more signals onto one transponder and drop the price to a ridiculous level. But it still can’t compete with a landline network on certain levels.

When the data becomes this cheap to move around easily, everything becomes commoditized, especially in news. Your field footage takes no more time to flash to a cubicle in Mumbai than it does to go across town, and so your packages might be edited by a guy or gal several time zones away, cheaper than you are willing to work for. Large projects get assigned to teams that may be physically far apart. Overall, rates for editors and other console jockeys will drop closer to minimum wage thanks to global pressure and competition.

Shooters will still do about the same as now, maybe better, because they can send their footage live from the field to any market at any distance. Look for quick phone negotiations and auction-type bidding for hot, topical, freelance stringer footage, even as it is being shot.

When storage becomes so cheap, and compression so good, you begin to see a possible world where nothing ever need be erased. As that sea of information gets deeper exponentially, markets and services for swimming into it to retrieve a meaning will grow.

[Mark Suszko]

To clip to the barn doors, you can use the venerable C-47, aka a wooden clothes pin with a metal spring, which can handle the heat and not transfer it to your fingers or gels, or all-metal “bulldog” or “binder clips”, which will burn your fingers if handled hot without a glove. In a pinch, alligator clips or even paper clips can be used, but the point of the diffusion is to get it out ahead of the bulb a ways to make the point source bigger and thus softer, and also allow cooling air flow up the back side.

I was brought up using tough spun and I like it because it is so durable and heat resistant, being essentially spun glass cloth, lasts forever. It also doesn’t rattle, crinkle, or make noise in wind. Other guys like to use tough frost or tough opal, or rolux: each gives a different quality of diffusion. You should go to the Rosco site or a local supplier and get one of their swatchbooks. They contain thumb-sized samples of every gel and etc. they make, with specs. The “tough” prefix refers to extra heat resistance, but note it does not mean heat-PROOF. Grab the swatchbook and a penlight flashlight. Shine the penlight thru the samples and see how they vary in their diffusion and transmission properties.

The minimum things I always have a sheet of in the kit for each light are tough spun and a square of black cinefoil, as well as color correcting gels for flourescent and daylight plus RGB primary color gels. The cinefoil can be used like barndoors, flags, or a snoot to control spill, or punch a few random holes thru it with a pencil and use it as a quick kookaloris, even in concert with a color gel. One of my fave techniques.

I have heard of home movie makers using plastic translucent shower curtains as DIY diffusion, but these will melt spectacularly if lit too close, they tend to cut the light output too much, and are a pain to hang. Plus the new plastic smell is funky:-) This is best used against a big window that’s out of shot, or overhead in a butterfly frame I think.

If you have extra light stands, mic stands, or a flexible length of gooseneck with clamps on either end to clamp to the redheads’ own stand, you could also bounce your redhead off a sheet of foam core or simple foil-covered cardboard as a reflector, makes a fine soft light indoors, though not very controllable. Crinkle up the foil into a ball before uncrinkling it and gluing it to the cardboard with elmers polyurethane glue or 3M 77 spray, to make micro sized breakup patterns in the surface like peening marks. This takes the harshest hot spots out of the reflector board. Should work great at about 45 degrees to one side and about 2 times the widest dimension of the board as a starting place. Then adjust to taste. A gold or bronze-colored reflector board looks awesome on non-caucasian skin types. Brings out the translucence of the outer layers of skin with an opalescent quality.

So you see, you can do a lot with a little, if you add some time, ingenuity and technique.

[Mark Suszko]

Maybe you should “pre-break” the zoom on all the cameras, force the kids to actually move the camera in and out:-)

The kind of conversations that the kids and teacher should have in class are along the lines of:

“That video sucked”.

“Why?”

“I dunno, I just didn’t like it”.

“You can like it or not like it, that’s up to you, but in here we have to back up a statement like that with some reasons. So… What was it about the video that you didn’t like?”

“It was stupid.”

“Stupid how?”

“Well….. the logic of the story was not internally consistent. It’s like they started making one idea, then went to something else halfway through. The guy sets up this premise but then never gets back to it. He wanted pretty obviously to finish with the one big visual joke at the end, but didn’t lay down the setup for it to pay off. And the joke shot makes everything that he did up to that point irrelevant in the story. His continuity is all over the place. Sometimes he’s holding the mic, other times not, and there’s no reason. Actors changed the direction they face in the middle of the conversations without a connecting shot between them, so it looks like there is supposed to be time passing between the lines but it doesn’t read like that when you watch it. There is no real second act, he’s just killing some time there with the stock footage. The handheld footage is too shakey and framed bad. The song he used has that one line in the lyric that works for the walking-away shot, but I know that song, and the rest of that song is like the total opposite of what he’s trying to say, so that whole part doesn’t work for me.”

“I see. Pretty good analysis for one quick viewing. You were paying attention when we talked about the line of action and when and when not to break that rule, or how to get away with breaking it.

Let’s talk about how we could make this better, or at least, differently… Susan, do you have an idea about the narrative structure?”

[Mark Suszko]

I got my first taste of video production in junior high in the 70’s using reel to reel black and white EIAJ porta packs and insert-editing machine-to-machine without a controller, using a grease pencil to mark the tape, a stopwatch to help back-time the pre-rolls, fast hands and a big pot of coffee. And I loved it. Got some more hands-on with super-8 stop-motion in an art class, and live-switched B&W multicam in high school.

The Hitachi cameras used a long rod that went thru the camera body to control the zoom, with a knob on the end to roll focus and we thought this was light years ahead of older tech like lens turrets. Some bonehead kid would hang his carbon-mic headset on the extended zoom rod and put a bend in it and then the zoom was useless for live shots for the rest of the year. Soon as I graduated, the school closed down the TV studio because they couldn’t keep up with the “high” technology and expense for so small a class size.

I loved every bit of it, particularly when I made school reports and dramatic inperpretations of short stories for class credit. It did give me a running start at what eventually became my career. But for the great majority of my classmates, I think it was just a diversion to avoid shop class, chorus, or Spanish classes. The majority of students that took the course never followed up on it, I think aprtly becasue the stress was always on the mechanics and getting experience for a future tech job they didn’t want, and not on storytelling. I think the stress on a vocational aspect in K-12 is misguided for most. Save that for college when people get a little better idea of who they are and what they want to do. An arts-related orientation would be better IMO.

Nowadays of course the technology is radically different. But two things that I see remain constant all this time:

Learning by doing, about how to interpret media, to analyze the message.

And how to make your own message, how to structure a story and tell it with maximum effect.

The technology is the part that often attracts the most attention and effort and funding and yet, to my way of thinking, that’s really the smallest, most misused, most disposable part of teaching TV or more broadly, media, in the K-12 range.

You really can’t effectively teach enough in a K-12 tech class in an hour, three days a week, to be the equivalent of a vocational school and get these kids summer jobs at an editing or production house. Not while meeting all the other mandates of modern NCLB education.

TV stations are so heavily automated and getting more so every day, that there is going to be quite an oversupply of available people for the jobs that are left for some time. I have an obsolete school book from the early 90’s meant for high school student guidance counselors that points out the kind of jobs there are in production. The book is a bit outdated and concentrates on the local TV station jobs that don’t necessarily require college. Many of the jobs listed there no longer exist.

I think the focus should be less on seeking jobs that may or may not be there by the time the kids are ready for the workforce, and more on an arts oriented curriculum of self-expression and interpretation/analysis skills, because those are of universal utility to any student for a better, smarter life. These kids are going to tell their stories on YouTube more often than network air. We should be showing them how to tell the story, and not locking into any particular technology that’s only going to get obsoleted before they graduate anyway. We need to show them how to see what’s being shown them with a critical eye, to be able to separate commercial and political agendas from the message.

When my daughter was in fourth grade last year, shecame home from technology class all eager to show her “A” graded Powerpoint project on Albert Einstein. Of course she was nine, so you’d expect it was full of every possible unmotivated wipe, DVE move, flying bullet point, and sound effect the program could provide. I’m used to that, I have full grown adult clients that sometimes do the same thing:-)

But I watch her A-graded report on Einstein, with the bad MIDI music and flying bullet points. Never once does it mention he was a physicist. No mention of the theory of relativity, E=MC squared, the atomic bomb. It was about as deep a bio as one on her pet parakeet. If I was her teacher, I would have probably given it a “D”.

Okay, she was only nine, and I’m asking too much maybe. But what’s galling me is, the way “technology” like powerpoint and by extension, video production is being taught is all wrong.

So what would I consider “right”?

Teaching about how editing shapes a story, the choice of shots to convey or change meaning. How to structure a beginning, middle, and end. Before anybody touches a computer or camera, I’d teach them the bare fundamentals of scripting. I’d have them order and re-order things on a strip of index cards. I’d have them storyboard, any way they could, either with pencils and paper or using windows paint or something more sophisticated. I’d play different commercials, news pieces and short films for them, with he sound on and off, slow mo at times, and teach them to dissect the choices of shots, effects, sound, to see how the story is being told and to see what’s behind that. We’d practice journalistic news shooting and recording oral history, learning how to ask good interview questions and how to tell the 5 W’s effectively.

I’d give them very simple assignments like shooting a children’s story like the three little pigs, first, straight interptetation in traditional style, then to re-write it or try and tell it from a different perspective or use it as allegory. As a music video. As a noir. As a fake documentary. We’d get a little taste of these differnet forms and genres, with some hands-on. We’d build a visual vocabulary.

The hardware would be kept simple: SD DV camcorders with external mic inputs, and simple computers with extra storage for each kid provided on external firewire drives. Enough cameras that there would be spares to account for breakage or for use in multicam projects near the end of the term. At any one time half the kids would be shooting, the other half editing or writing or other production steps. I’d put a premium on the proper use of tripods, lights, mics. On shot composition and framing. On learning to direct talent and a crew, which is a universal life skill anyway. I WOULD pop for a greenscreen stage and software, because it is a time, travel, and money saver that allows the kids to have any sets or locations they want, right in the classroom studio. If they can justify the useage in their script. It’s also just plain fun, which you gotta have too:-)

We’d have DVD burners and duplicators so the kids have a take-home product and cheap backup archive. We’d have the best of the class shoot and edit some school assembly or similar event. every kid would have to rotate thru every job some time during the term, from grips to director.

Kids that were inspired by that course could then aim for more detailed work in upper grades/ high school/college. Or just pursue things outside of school as they wished, or thru an after-school AV production club.

Oh, and I’d ban power point:-)

[Mark Suszko]

For interviews, I almost always go with a diffused softbox now instead of hard lighting. Can you mount a speed ring to the redheads and hang a Chimera on at least one of them? If pressed for cash, you can make something similar with a few hours and ingenuity. Just might not be as east to set up, take down, and use. A buddy showed me one he made using the lathe in his home shop to drill angled holes into a block of aluminum. He sticks fiberglass rods from a kite store into these and they tension the four corners of a sheet of white ripstop nylon kite cloth with pockets sewn into the corners. Choice of the fabric can be tricky, ideally you want something heat tolerant. You can use a large sheet of tough spun and be pretty safe.

I have for years made a variation On Bill Holshevnikoff’s foam core light box for studio work using a 1K with barn doors, binder clips, foam core, tough spun, and a little gaffer tape. Thing never gets warm even after being on for hours, but you have to make it right using the proper angles and mounting technique. Only takes about ten minutes or less to do, one of mine lasted five years. You can slit the tape and fold it up for travel without hurting anything. Used these a lot before we got our Rifa lights.

[Mark Suszko]

I am always an advocate for not buying gear that’s cheaper to rent only as needed. If you use it enough that rentals would cost more than the item, then buying might make sense.

[Mark Suszko]

It could be she was just surveying other suppliers to get multiple bids and you were never really a consideration. Or she just had a fight with her current supplier and, still steaming, went looking for a replacement. Or she’s burned thru the local talent and has to now cast a wider net.

I’m pretty sure I know what kind of program this is, sight unseen. Saw one last night on one of my cable systems’ LO channels, the one reserved for paid informercials.

Initial concept was not bad, actually. It was a Thanksgiving-themed infotainment show where the hosts visited with a couple sponsoring local businesses to show viewers what was available to ease their holiday entertaining and cooking. So they hit up the local old fashioned market, talking to the owner about holiday family traditions, his long history in the community (since the 30’s), how to buy a turkey, and mentioning his specials, then off to a local restaurant (more plugging) that cooked the turkey for them, (lots of kitchen talk on recipes and suggested side dishes and premade desserts available locally) and “served” it for the final segment at a home decorating business that handles everything from designing dinner table settings to redecorating your house for company and even setting up and decorating your Christmas tree, etc. So you pool a variety of such local service companies into a half hour “tour” video, they all chip in a small amount of cash and services and leverage off advertising each other’s services. Not so bad. Could even be modestly profitable.

Being local cable, the execution was of course horrible.

With three and four people in the shot, they were all sharing one or two lavs or a single lav and a camera mounted shotgun, so all the audio was horrible.

The whole thing was shot live single camera on location.

While the lighting was not bad, the camerawork was: no cut-aways, just a lot of tromboning zooms in and out, reallll slooowwwly, as the conversation rambled on between people.
Painful to watch.

The best way to have done this would have been Wargo’s little portable 2-cam with live switcher unit he mentioned. Even if the second camera was just a wide locked-down cover shot, it would have allowed the other camera to snap around to single shots and 2-shots and detail shots of products being mentioned in the show and really brought some life and pep and apro look to the show. And preserved isos for fixing any live mistakes quickly in an NLE without having to do the whole thing from scratch.

It would even have been possible to fake 2 cams by just taking the time to shoot close-up cutaways of things like the turkey and the place settings and the xmas trees being talked about afterwards, etc. and dropping them in over the master tape in a cuts-only linear edit. This is an area where such “antique” editing systems still can make a lot of practical sense since they don’t need to digitize. Or a 2-cam shoot with the switching faked in post on an NLE.

But it was obvious the cable company was not wanting to budget more than an hour for post, or did not have multiple cams to shoot with. Hell, they didn’t even have enough mics for everyone!

Back to crazy lady now: her program is very likely a similar Local Origination type deal like this turkey above, or it is a lecture session to one camera, scripture interpretation, poetry reading, something like that, which is why she expects little post work because she wants it all done live in one take.

I thought your bid to her was more than fair, perhaps even a bit lowball. But if she is going to want to limit your technical setup to sngle-cam live one-take crap, just to save a few bucks, this is never going to lead to work you’d be proud to put your name on, or that will actually meet her own goals, and she’s also likely to stiff you unless you put her on a cash on delivery basis. It is good to know your hourly rate, but for a project and client like this you should probably be talking day rate for the shoot and hourly for the post work, quoting a minimum number estimate of hours on the post.

I would say it can’t hurt to try it one time as long as it is cash basis on delivery. If nothing else it might be good practice if you have nothing else going on. But I too am as skeptical of this woman as the other posters.

[Mark Suszko]

You might want to ask inthe live& Stage forum as well. But first, have answers ready for these questions:

What are you playing it out of and how?
What kind of program is it, and in what format?
What kind of projector make and model?
Does it play anything else okay or is the output uniformly the same no matter what is played on it thru any input?
What connectors on the source and projector are you using?
Are all the proper terminators um, terminated?
How long is the distance from source to projector?
Are the projector bulb or bulbs plural working and not old?
Do you know if the original video source is calibrated, i.e. the color bars peak at 100 IRE units and the black level is at 7.5 IRE?

If that previous sentence made zero sense to you, we may have a bigger problem.

If for example you are using the preset zero level black levels for Japan instead of 7.5 US your video is already going to be “crushed”, i.e. overly dark, coming out of the source. If you made the video using uncalibrated decks and monitors, there is no telling how over bright or too dim the original material is even if it “looks ok” on the monitor you used while editing.

If the video is okay on multiple other playback screens, just very dim on the projector, I suspect an unterminated signal path or mis-set menus on the projector.