[Mark Suszko]

Don’t cave on the terms, you very likely dodged a bullet with this out-of-stater. They are probably looking at out of state vendors because they’ve burned everyone IN their state already. Also crossing state lines makes legal recovery that much tougher and potentially twice as expensive if you have to deal with authorities in both states and the delays as they work out their pecking order for the claim.

As far as Net 30 terms and large corporations… I think pretty much every corporation or large organization has an emergency fund or similar fund by another name they can tap for urgent expenses outside the normal 100-year-long payment cycle. They just never advertise that there is one. For example, if a pipe starts leaking on the floor above their main server room at 9 PM Saturday, they are not going to quibble with the plumber asking for payment upon completion of services. One call is made to some boss and that’s all, the in-house accounting boys can thunderdome it at their leisure after the fact. If they need to pay for something for the CEO that’s coming in a few hours, again, they pull out the special credit card or checkbook or whatever it is. As long as it wasn’t spent for bail money or outcall service, it’s going to be approved.

Obviously, the more you’re hurting for money, the harder it is to hold firm on your payment terms, but your only strong position is when they need the product you are holding in your hand and they are on a deadline. It always amazes me the impossible things that suddenly become completely possible (and affordable) when the Big Boss gives the peons a deadline.

Once you let that leverage go, they have accountants and lawyers that could hold you off for months and you have nothing. Less than nothing, after your legal expenses. Net 30 is often a game for them where they pretend they didn’t even GET the bill for the first 30 days. Typical tricks you’ll see are a small typo on the payment paperwork they introduce, that they then discover and claim requires canceling all paperwork in progress and they will insist a brand new invoice then be sent. Which re-sets their payment clock to 30 again. Then they might say invoices are only processed for cutting of checks every 2 weeks and you ALWAYS *just* missed this current window. Then the excuse will be that something has to be counter-signed by Mrs. so-and-so in the Fiscal Obfuscation Office who has just left due to vacation/illness/death in family/elopement/religious retreat/financial guru speaking tour/UFO abduction and probing, etc and will not be back in time for the NEXT 2-week cycle, Etc etc etc. But your stuff is on the top of her in-basket they assure you, and they’ll promise to “walk your papers thru in a jiffy” as soon as the UFO/guru/embalmer/whatever drops her back off. It’s really kind of amusing, their creativity, that is, unless you like to eat.

I repeat the mantra we have seen mentioned here before:
“I am not your bank!”
Stand firm, you cannot be bought for cheap. Let your rivals enjoy dealing with the Net 30 game instead of you.

If you have aleady become sucked into this Net 30 game, one trick I’ve heard of is to address and deliver the outstanding invoice and late payment notice/letter directly to the CEO’s office. Not that they actually care any more about your bill than the person you’ve dealt with up till then, but anything coming DOWN the internal ladder from above has the weight of God behind it, moves at express speed, stamped with date and time it was receieved, and the lower level staff HAVE tor treat everything that comes down from the boss’s office with kid gloves in case the Boss follows up with a question about it. It tends to evaporate a lot of the B.S. games the lower levels play.

[Mark Suszko]

All good advice so far. I would caution you that writing the narration first often leads to very lazy production and editing. You might get something good, usually it’s at least “workmanlike”, but often it can turn to “radio with pictures” if the images are just picked to go along with what is being said. I have had to work on many a project like that and it is about as fun as patching asphalt roads. You just want it to be over, as an editor and a viewer. It is really hard to achieve greatness using the fill-the-holes-method. Because you’re filling holes, not building narrative structures or creating a synthesis from lesser elements.

In the ENG world, it is very common to write the story and narration first and then cover it with video cuts to match, but that style is applied to short 90-second or less pieces generally, and done under deadline pressure. it’s expedient and can be very clear and prosaic, in a Joe Friday kind of way. What you want for anything longer is to maximize the creative synergy you get when sometimes the image deliberately clashes with narration. Or when the images pick up and show what the narration is leaving unsaid.

When something is edited well, you should be able to understand it by just looking at the video or just listening to the audio, alone. But when they are used together, they should each reinforce the other to generate a much more powerful effect. That’s what they pay us for.

I was on a long distance drive one time with a buddy and I popped a cassette into the dashboard. I had taped the soundtrack of the Jimmy Stewart/Henry Fonda Western comedy; “The Cheyanne Social Club” off of my VCR, and I played it like it was an audiobook. At first, my friend driving was all like: “what is this $%$%?” I asked him to give it five minutes and then he could choose something else. He didn’t say another word until the tape turned over and I reached to take it out; he stopped me and asked to let it continue. When it was over, he said it was one of the most pleasant things he’d heard in the car for a long time. He could picture the film quite clearly while driving. That’s good writing and great performance, magnified by expert timing and effects/ music in the edit. If the soundtrack alone is so killer, you can imagine how much better it is coupled with pictures. But it wasn’t written as radio drama, with pictures later cut to it. It was composed as a whole from set-piece scenes, with a narrative spine and a three-act structure.

[Mark Suszko]

Have not done one myself. These seem very work and time intensive if you want to do them really well. And if you don’t do them well, they might actually drive customers away instead of attract them.

Some folks who do a lot of these shoot very wide stills with a very high resolution digital still camera, then just throw some panning and zooming moves on a montage of stills and call it done. Fast and economical, don’t know that it really sells all that well. Lighting is certainly easier to do, just a flash and maybe one slave flash to get each room.

Part of what makes those HGTV home improvement shows look so nice is the extensive and careful/artful lighting they do for the “after” shots. There is extensive use of kookaloris and pattern generators, plenty of accent spots and flags used here and there to add subtle drama and focus and make the colors and patterns ‘pop’. That plus they often use jibs to move the camera dramatically. I doubt you can do the same for eight homes a day every day to feed the beast of those repeating-loop real estate shows on local cable sales channels.

For exteriors, a nice high-angle shot works wonders to show the yards and other features while hiding a multitude of sins. If you are doing a lot of this, look into renting or buying or making a version of the “hi-Pod” monopod. (google it)

For a multi-million-dollar property, you can get aerials done using kites, RC choppers or tethered robotic camera balloons or you can shoot stills and use a photogrammetric modeller to create a 3-d model you can rotate in space and virtually inspect from all angles.

[Mark Suszko]

I like the looks you can get with the Nattress plugins, but also check out a very nice quick tutorial at Digital Juice’s DJTV web site on blending modes, which illustrates what all those modes do for you. IIRC, he’s even doing it using FCP.

[Mark Suszko]

Wait, so, your software is enabling MORE people than just 1 to have sign-off powers over my work!?!?!

Hope you have a remote starter on your car, Marco:-)
Seriously, if there’s one thing I DON’T need, it’s the ability for more kibitzers to chime in on our projcts:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Shane, I did read that thread but felt my question was just a little different, enough to warrant a re-phrasing. Thanks.

[Mark Suszko]

You already have this in Apple Garage Band, open up a track for vocals and check out the audio processor filters you can apply there.

Or drop ten or so bucks at the toy aisle in Walmart or Target for a Darth Vader voce changer toy authorized by ILM:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Take the money you would spend on this course, buy some stock footage yourself, or shoot some spec spots or hire a good cameraman for the day to get you enough raw material. (If you’re really not a shooter, and that’s okay, pay someone to shoot some nice stuff for you, & be sure they sign over the rights to you.)Then cut and re-cut demos and samples until you have mastered the platform and the storytelling on your own. That’s really what any formal course is going to make you do anyway, just on their schedule and they’ll be charging you…

A class teaches a lot but it can’t teach you how to develop your timing, your rythm, your visual flow, your own evolved personal style. The things people choose to hire an editor for. It can only give you examples to imitate. While even master artists first learn by copying other masters, they don’t become masters until they advance past the imitation stage into creativity and innovation. That’s why I suggest fewer technical how-to-push-the-button courses and more Liberal Arts type courses. Music, art history, photography, painting, sculpture, dance, literature… Our job is very interdisciplinary.

Use some of your money to buy and read used books on editing and visual design, spend a lot of time here and elsewhere online sifting thru all the great free tutorials. Watch a lot of different great movies and commercials on DVD and study the editing with and without the sound on, with and without the commentary tracks. Try grabbing footage from those films and re-cutting sequences at home for personal fun. (look at youtube for inspiration in the killer examples of re-cut trailers for The Shining, JAWS, and West Side Story). Check out the Director’s DVD’s by Gondry, Cunningham, and Spike Jonez at the local rental store or netflix them. Gondry’s 2-disc set I found really inspired me to look at things in new ways.

Finally, while I love being a generalist, beyond the generalist skillset, pick one particular area of editing and/or compositing and concentrate on perfecting your skill to your own satisfaction. Whether it’s sports montages, news, multilingual looping and dialog replacement, motion graphics, comedic timing, music video, quirky animation, intense layering, color, greenscreen work or just very artistic yet efficient multicam cutting, find some niche to excel at, and in New York, it will eventually lead to work somewhere.

The demand for such niche specialties is cyclical; you can’t be the best at all of them but the good news is every style or look comes back into fashion for a time on a regular basis. Sooner or later, your specialty will be exactly what everyone is looking for, then you ride that wave for all it’s worth. Sometimes, your personal style explorations will lead to a unique new look and you will be the hottest thing in town for a year until everybody else imitates your look to death. Make the most of that while you can, knowing that it’s fleeting, but that your generalist skills will carry you until the next hot cycle, while you keep growing and exploring. And maybe creating the next thing that everybody imitates.

And buy me an expensive meal when you’re rich and famous:-)

[Mark Suszko]

In a large ballroom:

A guy in the corner or behind the band with a follow-spot and an earpiece, taking your cues as to what to light up when and how hot to hit it. Somewhat expensive unless rented, can hit any spot on the floor but only from one angle. If integrated with the band or Dj lights, might actually be least obtrusive if it doesn’t dwell too long in any one place.

A china globe type lamp, held on a stick by an assistant and on battery power, or a Chimera pancake type light. Good light, but calls attention to itself by odd appearance.

An LED lightpanel or florescent soft light with adjustable output. Relatively unobtrusive. Expensive, and short-range.

As to the “too dark” complaint, you know this old joke?
“Doctor, it hurts when I do this.”
“Then, DON’T DO THAT!”

You might have to rent a camera with better low-light ability if you want to keep it more candid in low levels, or try and boost it in post, accepting grain as the price.

[Mark Suszko]

Where we were on this situation was, we had a ton of stuff in obsolete formats, clogging a too-small storage room and in danger of becoming unplayable and lost. The expedient solution we decided on for the 1-inch, umatic and betaSp footage was to lay it all off to Panasonic realtime DVD recorders using DVD-R in 2-hour mode.

The quantity of tapes we had to deal with was just too great to try and save it to anything “better” (more expensive) like Blue Ray, hard drives, etc. and the quality of these archives was deemed “good enough” by our staff for the forseeable uses of the footage. The throughput using multiple decks and machines has been good so far: a temp is converting entire banker boxes worth of tapes into a shoebox worth of DVD’s weekly. These are easy and cheap to make additional copies from, and the transfers can generally be done by unskilled temp labor once you set the gear up properly.

Further, once encoded as mpeg 2, you can ingest them into an NLE and authoring software and re-purpose as you see fit for DVD, streaming, podcasting, etc. with no further losses to the original. Yes, you are throwing away some quality with a lossy format like Mpeg2. In our case, literally it came down to “so what, the umatic quality wasn’t that great to begin with, and it’s the difference between something or nothing”.

If one was a fanatical purist, they could ingest the best masters uncompressed into the NLE and save them off to DATA DVD, though you’d have to span the program over several disks using DVD-r. of course, while this stores the program material well, it doesn’t give you something immediately USEABLE without more intermediate steps involved to get the thing back to a program stream somebody can watch. I submit that unless we are talking about a handful of programs, you’re never going to find the time and energy to service a large user community with that workflow. Blue ray might hold an entire program on one disk as data, but frankly, the value for money versus quality level decision has to be a unique calculation for every person that faces these circumstances. What works for us my be abhorrent to you. Your mileage will vary.

Still, I would suggest that for the scenario you laid out, getting everything into one useable, archiveable standard format economically is a good start for whatever you want to do afterwards.