[Mark Suszko]

I work in a very similar government video job, and often have to deal with this kind of thing from first-time clients. They however completely understand once we explain things to them, and point out our huge library of cleared music on CD plus SmartSound and Several other music synthesis programs for generating original music. For the type of person who is especially persistent, I often volunteer to find or compose a “sound-alike” tune with a similar chord structure but enough variance to make it a separate and distinctive work. If all those steps fail, usually referring the person to their own agency’s legal affairs office to get a “permission slip” assures they never come back. 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Markertek used to sell these I’m pretty sure, as well as dedicated hand calcs dedicated to timecode math. If you have the reaction time to accurately work a stopwatch to the frames level, well, you’re a better man than me:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Mr. Shackleford, er, Gribble, my sense of the matter is, they don’t really understand branding or have a strategy as such. They are creatively bankrupt and are looking for stimulating ideas from outside. If they like some design of yours, they’ll like as not wag the dog to make it conform to the tail you’ve shown them. Is this a good way to work? Not usually. But if what they do now is that awful, whatever new direction you inspire in them can only help.

I get assignments where the clients just give me a cursory brief and then turn me loose. Sometimes it’s because we have such a well-established working relationship and mutual trust, they say Ii know you can handle this, just use your own judgement and call me to see the approval stage”.

Other times, it is a very inexperienced client with no clue at all, and I prefer in those cases they pretty much abandon the work in my lap and leave things up to me. It’s what I do. Actually I find it quite exciting working this way if the stakes are not too high. I usually come back at them with rough comp pitches for 2-3 ways I’d like to go, and let them pick from those.

As to trying to drag them into more professional creative behavior, well, some folks you can educate, and some you can’t. Don’t beat yourself up over the ones that just don’t “get it”. Save your energy and best efforts for the ones that make the work worth it.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, I just walk the 2 blocks from the office to their local outlet store:-)

BTW, they also sell small trailers in DIY assembly kits for about $150. You can add your own structure to these to make tow-behind housing for your bulkier grip gear or whatever. They are about the right size to tow a sunfish sailboat or 2-man fishing punt on.

[Mark Suszko]

We just use common convertible (vertical/horizontal) dollies from Harbor Freight. We add a plywood deck with some bolts, and then my special “invention”; a simple, empty electrical quad-box, bolted at the base of the unit. These are the aluminum boxes that you attach in a wall to hold light switches or electrical outlets, the bare box is like $2 or something. I bolt this down on a cross member of the cart, between the two smaller castering wheels, and then the feet of a collapsed tripod fit into the upturned “cup” this box makes. A turn or two of bungie cord around the pan head and the top of the dolly handle captures the entire tripod safely in a vertical mode, so you can roll the cart thru doorways with ease, yet it is VERY fast to remove the tripod when you need it in a hurry. A bonus is that it keeps the deck of the cart free for all the other things like cameras, light kit cases, monitors, what-have-you. If you wanted to, you could use more bungie cord lashing and just operate the camera ON the cart, though the pan head bowl adjustment is not readily accessible this way.

Using the 4-gang quad box, you can actually bind TWO tripods in one place on the cart this way, or a tripod and a mic stand, or light stands, etc.

I looked at Magliner carts that are what the fashionable pros on the coasts tend to use, and while these “taco carts” are very nice, we could not afford them on our budget. Also, most of them did not break down compact or light enough for practical use with our minivans. So we went with simple Harbor Freight heavy-duty dollies with removeable handles that can break down into a smaller space. Their wheel track is narrow enough to get thru any doorway. I typically carry 150 to 300 pounds of stuff on these several times a week. With pneumatic tires, they carry a heavy load over any terrain and handle bumps and thresholds with relative ease. We keep a bicycle foot pump in the gear room to top them off about once a year. If you first treat them with slime anti-leak fluid, they’ll never go flat on you.

Portabrace makes an accessory that’s a vertical tripod holder that’s really not much more than an umbrella stand bolted to the magliner cart, and they wanted what I considered an obscene amount of money for that. That’s when I came up with my quad-box tripod cup idea. I figure conservatively outfitting all our carts with this simple modification saved us $400 over the Portabrace deal.

Be sure for best efect, you angle the quad box into a “diamond” position, to maximize the side-by side 2-tripod capability. All three feet of a tripod need not fit in the box for it to do the job, just 1 or 2 feet in the cup hold up the entire tripod quite well for transport.

[Mark Suszko]

Mike, I absolutely love your idea of the various people doing the opening, they should use that straight away, but I have a pet peeve involving your suggestion regarding flag usage. Maybe it’s just me.

Now, I’m not military myself, and the issue is a little different, I suppose, if you are talking regimental/unit flags or whatever, but I personally have a problem with using the Stars and Stripes for props or backgrounds for anything as “common” usage as this. I feel that it should be reserved more for high ceremonial display.

Now, I will admit, if anybody has a legit claim to be able to stand in front of our flag on camera, and wear it on their uniforms with pride, absolutely it’s our wonderful and heroic military men and women, who uphold that flag with their very blood. It’s precisely because of that dedication and devotion and honorable service though, that I hate seeing Old Glory get overused as a prop or backdrop for situations that are more “everyday”. Perhaps I’m making too much of the situation, or not seeing it with the same eyes as others, and I’m willing to be schooled about that. I’d be curious though if anybody else gets “burned-out” on putting the Flag behind anything they want to have seem like it has more “gravitas”. To me, it’s like using the fine china dishes for every casual meal.

I also see many situations where it becomes the default choice to use in a shot, only because of a failure of imagination on the part of the client. I’m compulsive about flag etiquette, always correcting people if they place it on the wrong side of a shot, but I prefer even more if they leave it out when it’s presence is not motivated by the story being told. I work carefully to make sure that everyting I put in my frame has a specific reason and message to be there, and that it contributes to the story being told. If it doesn’t I take it out to reduce clutter.

Am I obscessing or not? 🙂

I think using the Army Service flag might be very appropriate, or maybe making a faded background wallpaper out of the crest/symbol from that flag. But I recoil from using the Stars and Stripes as wallpaper, the same way I don’t like it when someone puts it on a rear pants patch pocket.

That’s me.

[Mark Suszko]

This perhaps is the time of year you try to market Annniversary edits.

“I’ll take your wedding video footage and turn it into an extravaganza!” Re-edit existing footage, add-in updates since the ceremony, turn it into a real documentary, with them being the stars.

[Mark Suszko]

It is not just our industry, and it’s not new.

Let me tell you a quick story about my dad.
He was an engineer, worked for a couple very large corporations, Quaker Oats for about 15 years, Brown & Root for ten or so… Had the kind of job where the description was: “The raw jungle goes in at this end, the finished cardboard boxes need to come out that end, you design and spec out the part in the middle, GO!” He designed a heating system for the largest United hangar at O’Hare, he did pollution control systems for a refinery in Joliet, he even had a small role in designing a production line in Huntsville working on Saturn 5 parts. Showed me leftover blueprints one time, blew my mind.

In the 80’s he was having a hard time due to the many mergers and changes in the paper industry he served. He’d get a job at a place, work really well, thanks to all his hard-earned OTJ experience and training, but always got laid off or let go just before he had enough time in to qualify for the major benefits. Lather, rinse, repeat for a decade, while the companies always replaced him with younger single guys who could afford to work for less, but had much less practical experience. As the employment periods got shorter and he got older, health benefits became hard to come by, and he got less and less regular care. Didn’t help he was an old world stoic about never seeing doctors of course. They found him on a Saturday, he’d had a stroke or heart attack at his desk working overtime, had been down an unknown amount of time before the paramedics were even called. They restarted his heart, but he was already gone and we lost him the second time about 4 days later. About twenty years earlier than anybody should have expected.

So I definitely have an emotional context for this debate.

When I got the job I’ve held now for 20 years, I was the young guy and I had to work with and direct folks who were mostly senior to me. I had to work hard with some to get their respect, but I always gave them mine, and tried hard to never create a situation where they would lose face. I would go out of my way to ask them their opinions and advice where I knew they were strong on knowledge. Eventually, they all came around, because we stressed the teamwork and shared contributions. As I get older, I like working with the interns we get: they question things we take for granted, and in the explaining and training, I get to reconsider the issues being asked about, and sometimes I recognize that some things can be looked at in new ways.

I agree that that same attitude my dad had to fight in the 80’s is behind this trend of treating the workforce shabbily when it comes to pay and working conditions. They want to skip the social contract. It has ever been thus, to one degree or another. They want to exploit your labor, and a fresh generation of inexperienced workers brought up with a sense of entitlement and solipsism seems to think this is okay, that everybody uses everybody and it’s all just a game of who can get the most use out of somebody and get away clean to the next resource. But it’s a zero-sum game, and while playing it can lead to rapid early advancement, it is not a sustainable way to live. When you get old enough to have a stake in things, to have something to lose, you’ll find this becomes an exceptionally harsh kind of life.

[Mark Suszko]

I know you are doing the best you can, considering what you have to work with. The samples are not the worst thing I ever saw (or did) so don’t run yourself down about it, you have “unique” working conditions to say the least. If I could suggest a couple things from looking at the linked video, just my own opinion:

Every stand up you show is pretty much the same locked-down medium shot, just positioned center, left and right… even when the person and gender of the presenter changes, because they are always the same size shot, the cuts feel like jump-cuts and they shouldn’t. Don’t just move them screen left and screen right withotu a plan, but break up the shots by going in tighter to the faces with close-ups for some segments, and use position to nonverbally define function: anchor HERE, segment reporters THERE. If you are a Video Army Of One, this means you either need to get/rig a remote zoom/tilt control, or you have to stop and re-position the shots, or run thru two takes, a wide pass and a closeup pass, then cut between them. You may not always have the luxury of the extra time and drive space, I know. Easy solution would be an assistant to operate the camera for you. Doesn’t have to be skilled, if you have a monitor so you can see what they frame-up, you can talk them in.

Digital Juice clips are very popular. I think though that you should use them more like spices though, and not wall to wall. They are overpowering the shots the way you use them now. But don’t trash them. I might try desaturating them and using the juicer utility to dampen down the color ranges, to strip out some of the layers, or something along those lines. This will also make them look a little more “custom” and not so canned. A side benefit may be your streams will become a little easier to compress if they aren’t as “busy”.

Some of your stories are hard to illustrate because you have maybe just one still of questionable rez to work with. BTDT:-) It will cost you a little time, but the more work you put into those stills, the better. Try putting up multiple copies (like 3) of the same still in various sizes, some with high transparency, then overlapping them and/or doing a simple cut-out in alpha channels around the person’s body and making that a bigger layer on top of the collage. Have your stock shots break the boundaries of the square box you frame them with. It’s a more upscale, fresh, and dynamic look, particularly layered over your swipes or motion elements. If you don’t have photoshop or a paint program to do this with, there are free tools available on the net that will do the same “cut-out” tricks, or a buddy can send you an approved alternative on a CD…

As far as jazzing up the look for the “hep young kids of today”… well, assuming these are mainly seen on laptops with sometimes sketchy connections, you can’t go TOO overboard in making it kinetic.
I would say, take your visual design cues from the video gaming industry, because a lot of your young soldiers are very comfortable with that and like those aesthetics. What that translates into, I dunno, maybe more PIP stuff, perhaps side-bar graphics with data crawls or maps.

I like how you use unit insignia in the stories, I would play this up lots more, perhaps using a faded/blurred version as the background for master graphics so that a viewer would know they are talking about HIS unit even if he just glanced across the room at the screen.

Going back to your use of the Juice elements, I would like to see the composition look “deeper”. Right now your chromakeying over the very hot and big and kinetic juice clips looks flat. Can you add some cast shadow with the keyer you have? Can you make it look deeper, more layered? The available tools and time constrain just how wild you can get. Myself, I would prefer to go more of a limbo virtual set look, more “Matrix limbo” like. Then whatever elements I bring in tend to pop more than if the entire background is continually swirling like the porthole of a clothes dryer. The background is NOT the story. The background should be a subtle way of setting the tone or communicating an attitude. A frame for the story, not competition.

Finally, the news copy always needs to use active language wherever possible. Be relentless in editing the copy down to cut out passive language and unneeded qualifiers.

Best of luck with it.

[Mark Suszko]

Our situation is much like yours. We were umatic linear ABC-roll to one-inch for mastering in the 80’s, beta linear to 1-inch in the early 90’s, then A/B beta to beta until the beginning of this decade, when we also got NLE’s of various makes, but we still do linear editing at least once a week, for some kinds of work, that still makes the best sense for us… Some time about three years back, I fnally sent out our last spot reel on one-inch. Now those impressive air-threading wonders sit silent except to replay or transfer occasional archival material.

We now master to Beta SP or DVC pro, and we have a temp who is playing all our old umatics and betas off in real time onto 2-hour DVD-R’s using one of the few decrepit decks still functioning. We did this to conserve dwindling library shelf space and to archive the really old stuff before we could no longer have the technical means to play it. It is scary to watch three banker boxes full of tapes go in one end of this process on Monday and see a shoebox full of DVD-R’s come out the other end on Friday. As it is, I still got a couple quad tapes that didn’t get transferred in time and are now effectively doorstops. Well, the hubs make nifty hi-tech clock faces, but that’s all…

Yes, if you look in the back of TV Technology or Broadcasting magazine and places like that, there are companies that sell refurbished head assemblies and the other hard-wearing bits to keep your SP deck going. But at some point, you have to look at the ROI and make a jump in technology. Umatic came out roughly the same year as Sgt. Pepper did. I got some betaSP tapes older than our college interns now. Let it die with dignity, it served nobly and with distinction.

I know, the DVD-R’s and MPEG-2 are not as high a quality as we’d like for archival, but for our budget this is the most practical and effective way to go, and a slight compromise in quality due to compression beats having no material to play at all… As far as distribution, we polled a lot of our statewide stations that take our stuff last year, and all but a handful said they now also accept programming on a DVD. At $29 for a player at the local CVS store these days, we could afford to give all our biggest users a free player with our dubs on disk and STILL come out ahead on postage ALONE, never mind the tape stock, over shipping betas or umatics. The cost of a single 2-hour DVD-R dub, a cardboard mailer and postage is something like $3 compared to something like $20 for a 12-minute beta SP in a quality shipper case. That’s $17 a pop that could be spent better elsewhere. Like an Aeron chair for my edit bay:-)

Consider too that many stations are now IT/server-based, or going that way, and if you hand them an analog Beta SP tape, they’re likely just going to play it into their hard drives of whatever old SP machine is still working at THEIR shop, and use the encoded media files for air, not your tape in most cases. Station automation is all trending this way. So it could be that you actually get better air quality just handing them mpeg2 files on a disk that YOU polished and perfected, than trusting their encoding guy, who is probably an underpaid intern or a surly and indifferent old “sparky” near retirement. (no offense meant, just that guys like that probably resent scutwork like analog to digital transfers after working on much bigger things over the years. I think I would.)

One of the big questions for us and other producers these days is how do we affordably get HD programming out to stations? Priced HD decks lately!?!?! And how many differnet format HD decks will you need to service all the clients???

However, you can put HD programming on DVD’s as DATA,or use one of everal HD quality codecs, and you get (comparatively) a very inexpensive way to put stuff out, assuming your stations getting it know what to do with it and have the right IT infrastructure. More IT departments can handle a DVD data disk right now than a Blue Ray or whatever other flavor of the month format HD is coming out on, IMO. So my own conservative opinion is to explore that for short-form stuff like spots and half-hour shows, DVD Data disks or An HD codec. Yeah, you’ll likely have to span across two or more disks for something longer than spot work. I didn’t say it was perfect, I said it was cheap and relatively easy to work with.

We got into the DVD distribution thing in an incremental, experimental fashion, first using stand-alone DVD recorders from Panasonic as drop-in replacements for some of our old S-VHS dubbers, and for archiving off older footage before it was lost completely. We got the models that also have a hard drive in them and moderate DVR capability. This wound up being handy for other things, as having one in the control room gave us the same tivo-like pause and replay while-still-recording capability that home users have. We could also record an archive of the live show in realtime, and store shows or elements that get lots of use in the DVD recorder’s hard drive for quick one-off dubs, playback thru the switcher or to a mass dubbing rack. Setting up repeating loop playbacks is not too hard either; we used to have to male long loops on VHS or S-VHS tape in SLP mode and the quality stank. With DVD’s this is now cake.

Our next step was to get a Bravo Primera Pro DVD duplicating robot: we can drop one of the DVD-R’s from the Panasonic into the Bravo, and walk away to do other things while it spits out 100 tested copies in 90 minutes, with color inkjet printing on them. VERY slick. I would name my next son for this machine.

We standardized on Panasonic’s DVCPro25 soon after it came out, (Would have considered Sony, but they were two years behind on shipping a product at the time) to replace our aging beta SP decks and cameras, and sending out dubs on that format is also very cheap, as is archiving: you get something like half a week’s worth of play hours in the same shelf space one, hour-long, type-c one-inch tape used to take up. While it is only SD, this format is widely compatible on a number of machines, our decks can read DVC pro, DVCAm, and consumer mini-dv. The new HD DVC pro decks are also backwards-compatable to play the legacy Dv25 material. A Dv25 signal also takes up minimal space on hard drives, and since our flow is all SDI in and out for editing, we keep everything looking essentially first-generation. Yes, even umatic may have had better color resolution, but in side by side quality comparisons betwen the DVD and Beta SP, no contest, the disk is better, and will STAY better longer. No worries about mangled, de-magged, or flaking tapes.

We can even directly ingest our DVD’s into our final cut editing systems, with a handy ripper from Square-5. The hardware encoding of the Panasonic stand-alone DVD decks actually is said to be a better quality than encoding using Apple’s Compressor. It is definitely faster, that’s for sure.

Anyway, that’s one perspective from a roughly similar situation to yours, I think you’re just a year or two behind making some of the same choices we were faced with. With luck, you’ll have even more and better options facing you when it’s your turn.