[Mark Suszko]

Performing all the parts in front of a blue or green cloth would have helped you immensely, as you could chromakey each layer. Shooting so that the camera is locked down and the three positions don’t overlap would have made this super-simple to do with the crop tool.

[Mark Suszko]

The faces of the letters can be altered using the distort tool. Then make the sides using a drawn mask and textures/gradients.

[Mark Suszko]

What’s the resolution of the mountain layer, as opposed to the project and the other elements?

[Mark Suszko]

Manfrotto DOES make a longer plate for that head. It might help, if only to add mass and make a shelf to hold balance weight (slightly joking here; I have used rolls of gaffer tape as balance weights before)

If you need that much spring tension, for a camera that light, it suggests to me you’re too far out of balance. The “lens” mark might refer to the imaginary vertical plane where the lens attaches to the camera, I can’t really tell from my limited perspective. Does your plate or the “wedge” for the quick release have a row of screw holes along the underside? If so, that’s a rough way to set the balance point, by moving the attach point forwards or back, then the part that slides to adjust may not need as much of a range…. think of it like those old fashioned weighing scales in the doctor’s office, with the weights that slide along a long bar until it balances.. .

If you are using any attached cables, make sure their weight isn’t dragging the camera up or down.

Do you have mounting holes on the top of the camera or the top carrying handle, for things like adding a light or mic mount? Those might be places to sling a small counter-weight, usually we try to use something that has some utility to it, like a mic bracket, a light bracket, a holder for a wireless mic receiver, a breakout monitor… if you have to add weight, it should at least do some kind of work for the free ride. 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

The latest upgrades to Prem Pro tout the ability to collaborate on a project over a shared drive. Using proxy footage, this should work for you. You might explore using the H.265 codec, which Adobe just announced compatibility for; it’s the same quality as h.264/Mpeg4, but half the file size.

The more usual way these are done, when you lack the bandwidth, is to overnight-ship a drive with a clone of all the original footage. Once each end of the pipe has the same raw material, you’re only exchanging project files and EDLs, which are much smaller and easier to exchange daily or hourly via net.

[Mark Suszko]

This is like the problem the Motion Picture Academy & movie studios have with showing “screeners” to critics or Oscars voters, without getting the movie pirated. The last “solution” I had heard of for them was to put a DVD or blu ray in a portable
“clamshell” video player with built-in screen, superglue the lid shut and disable the video output connectors, then have a live courier hand-deliver and accompany the player, sitting in the room with the viewer and taking it back immediately after the film was done.

I can’t think of a similar way to do that with an ipad, except to program a password-protected server and add some programming that blocks sending a stream after one viewing. If the audience has a chance to watch the tablet, unsupervised, they could capture it with a camera phone and there goes your “exclusive”. So, this is really a human factors problem, more than a tech problem.

Good Luck, Mister Phelps!

[Mark Suszko]

That Vari-zoom looks pretty good – be sure to read up on how to adjust the overall speed – there’s usually a knob or screw pot somewhere…

If your pan head came with the telescoping arm, telescope that bad boy to make it as long as possible. If you don’t have one of those, put it on your wish list, along with the longer version of the mounting plate from Manfrotto.

Best of luck and do let us know your progress!

[Mark Suszko]

I’m interested in applying this kind of thing to keying situations to eliminate hand roto and hanging green screens out on locations.

[Mark Suszko]

” the camera is already pretty small (about 3 pounds with the Rode) and the tripod is rated to hold up to 16.5 pounds.”

That’s very light – no wonder you have problems. My camera alone weighs more than your camera and tripod, combined. I think a heavier-duty tripod and pan head could be beneficial, for the inertial damping. It’s also not clear to me that you have an actual fluid-head pan head, or just a spring-tension/friction head – that’s kind of important.

As to checking the balance on the rig, it’s not complicated: you loosen the locks and let go and see if it wants to tip up or down. There should be an adjustment on the camera plate/pan head interface for positioning forward and back. In some systems, this is a knob that, when loosened, allows the entire assembly to slide a bit forwards or backwards on the plate, until everything balances. Less-sophisticated/cheaper systems offer a row of screw mounting holes on the underside of the plate, where the “wedge” attaches to the quick-release on the pan head. You can do a gross adjustment there, by picking the next screw hole forwards or backwards and re-locating the wedge. If you can get close to perfect balance, you can theoretically let the thing go and it will stay put, even with the locks off. That’s the ideal. You might need to add a heavier battery pack on the back, or attach a little bean-bag or lead weight of some kind under the front, to get to “perfect”. In some cases, one might get a piece of sheet metal from a home center, drill the appropriate screw holes in it, and sandwich that in-between the wedge and the plate, to both add some mass, and a place to attach accessories.

You can get a 4K go-pro knockoff these days for between $45 and $70. Once you get this for your b-roll and wide shot covers, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.

[Mark Suszko]

He’s right. One option I might suggest is to make the spot 45 seconds long, then add a 15 second fake ident or PSA “bumper” to it. Fulfills the 60 seconds but looks like a 45 and a 15.