[Mark Suszko]

That’s a good and typical trick. Where possible, I’d break up the screen into a letterboxed 1third/ 2 thirds pair of side by side boxes. Put your SD shots of what’s being talked about in a box that takes up one third of the 16:9 screen, and crop the originally 16:9 stuff to take best advantage of the remaining 2/3, and if needed use Del’s trick above to unify everything with a final overlay mask.

You can also shrink the 3:4 stuff smaller, but repeat it in multiple boxes vertically or horizontally or freeform positioned. This depends on the mood and pace of the piece you’re trying to make, of course.

When the 3:4 stuff needs to be full screen in a 16:9 window but looks too jaggedy and blocky when blown-up, make two identical tracks of the video, layer it so the back layer is a half-transparent, blurred, or faded monochrome version filling the whole frame, then put the smaller, sharper full color version over that in a box as big as you can stand, positioned using the Rule of Thirds. The parellel action between the two identical tracks unifies all the motion. Makes it look like something you planned to do all along rather than a last-minute fix to cover mismatched footage.

[Mark Suszko]

When five or more people tell you “danger, don’t do it” about something, you’d better take them at their word.

Your choices are to turn the clients down politely but flatly, counter-offer a way to do it that fits their stated budget, (IF you are personally willing to work on it that way,) or refer them to your competitor.

That last trick will either saddle the competitor with a money-losing, time-eating job, or he will try to lowball it, and the resulting train wreck will send your now-humbled clients back to you, their savior, who, regrettably, must charge even more now to fix the lowball project.

Finally, you would be surprised at the number of hard-limit figures that suddenly magically get revised upwards after you’ve turned them down flat and let them stew in their own juices for a couple days. Their deadlines need not be your deadlines unless you sign on, and remember that as the clock ticks down on their deadline, they are sweating way more bullets than you. They still have a boss to please, even if you’re not taking their assignment. Likewise, maybe it’s better for everyone if they hold off doing something overly ambitious until they can afford to do it RIGHT.

A couple times early in my career, when I was more foolish/fearless/candid and had nobody else to support, I flat out told a few potential clients that their project was a waste of money and time because it was not something that could be helped by making a video, at least, not the kind of video they were asking ME for. I said I would be ashamed to take their money and not deliver something that would actually help them, and that I’d rather have their respect for saying no on principles than their money for being a yes man. Then I lef tthem with a couple of heartfelt suggestions as to alternative methods that would be a better fit for their needs.

A couple times that turned out exactly right, and it was because I had NOT caved in and done a half-fast job before, that they came to me again later to make something “done right”.

[Mark Suszko]

Hard to tell, because I didn’t see the change until a day later than Abe did. If it was part of the marketing campaign, it was a darn strange one.

[Mark Suszko]

“making a film that teaches something and is displayed on some sort of console”

I’ll bet you there’s some money in that.

Care to elaborate a little? What is it you are studying in school?

Matte is right, elementary DVD’s are cheap and easy to make with consumer tools. But don’t get hung up on format right now, think through what the message is first.

[Mark Suszko]

Actually, local time for me, it wasn’t fixed until this morning. But really, is it something to celebrate? If I hadn’t made a pill of myself over this, for this long, how much longer do you think it would have gone unchanged? It was over a month it was out like that, and Promax had three direct messages from me and who knows hoe many from folks here, before somebody (Abe?) stepped up and made it happen.

It does not bode well for the responsiveness of the company or their standards since they lost Charles. I refer back to my Hucks gas station story, earlier in the thread. Postscript to that story, it’s not a Hucks anymore, it lost the franchise and is now a generically branded and owned place.

[Mark Suszko]

If it wasn’t initially shot in 16 x 9, not sure that editing it in that aspect ratio can help much. I wsa getting at the idea to shoot dance in wide aspect to reduce the need for a lot of panning.

Though if you wanted to go for a composite hybrid look, you could put the wide and selected tights in SD side by side in the letterbox, with the wide shot using 2/3 of the screen and the tight being 1/3. In one sense, this may be more true to the audience experience in that the viewer retains the choice of what to focus on from moment to moment. But I don’t think this is really what you want to go after for this particular project, it’s more of the kind of thing you have to plan ahead and deliberately shoot for. It would be too distracting to do all the way thru, IMO unless planned that wayt from the start.

[Mark Suszko]

BTW, if you had Sept. 11th in the pool for them fixing the ProMax ad that incorrectly spells “Simultaneous”, you are not a winner. Shall we double down?:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Never charge a flat rate for these jobs, really, probably for any job.

As far as dance, I’ve done a couple, and what I learned about it was to approach the shoot and the edit very differently than more conventional projects.

Dance is about defining a space with the body and it’s motion. If you shoot too tight and use too many tracking shots, you erase the “frame” of the “picture” they are painting with their movements. Likewise, you may not want to impose compositions or narrative structure that was not part of the original intent. Footwork should always be in the shots. A major giveaway you don’t know what you’re doing is to concentrate on facial closeups or bust shots. Set a frame and let the dancers define the space inside that frame.

Dance is definitely better done with a 16 x 9 frame.

Now this is not to say you can’t ever shoot tighter. Just that you need to be careful and be sure you are not warping the performance, only enhancing it, supporting it. You shoot this stuff really different from a commercial.

[Mark Suszko]

You need to create backdrops and linking pieces. If you can’t get an on-screen narrator, you can throw up some text with a question that the clip then answers. One of my favorite things to do is to create a tableau or scene with real-life objects related to the story, and use a video projector to project the interview clips onto pieces of the “set”. In the case of your project, the most obvious thing might be examining room or surgical suite. Or you could simulate the cluttered desk of a busy doctor with a bunch of file folders, and PIP box the clips into the open folders as “case studies”.

[Mark Suszko]

I do your “trick” number two a lot on my discrete Edit when I want to make weird spped ramping effects without a lot of bother. I have SDI in and out of the deck, so this works pretty well for the few times a year I might need it.