[Mark Suszko]

De, I HAVE seen “real” Powerpoint artist’s work, and you are right about everything you said. The real deal ones I saw basically used PP as merely the playback mechanism; their slides were all composed in Photoshop using proper design principles of color, font, proportion, etc. and were breathtaking in their clean, sharp beauty. No canned clip art, everything custom made in PS or Illustrator or Corel paint.

I have also seen clients take a set of such slides and start glopping their own cra- um “contributions” over the top of them, the old “pearls before swine” syndrome. Repurposing a custom presentation on their own without understanding or respecting the design principles behind the originals. That’s the world too many of us get to see, instead of your aquaintences.

The upper-echelon True Artists you describe are not often seen in my neck of the woods; I’m sure it’s because they have more than enough work already and don’t need to advertise. We need more like them in the world.

Because each masterpiece they turn out is outnumbered by absolute dreck, 50 to 1.

[Mark Suszko]

Here’s the problem you created for yourself: you have now set up an expectation with this client as to what level of work you do for what amount of money. Good luck raising your bid on the next one; they are gonna likely grind on you to keep working at the lower rate you established going in, even as the projects get more elaborate and creative.

Per-finished-minute rates that actually work out as a fair range for a particular project, do so ONLY by coincidence, IMO. NEVER use them.

Estimate the hours for doing all phases of a project, add up your costs, throw in profit and a slight fudge factor for unanticipated events, and from all that, generate an hourly and day rate that at least hits that minimum number that makes it all worth doing. You will use the figure to create a day rate and an overall estimate on the project you can live with.

Express the deal to the client as x amount of hours to a limit of Y amount hours, beyond which requires approving a new deal,and you are going to charge additional, and that you will discount X amount if you finish early. Typically, you structure the deal in thirds; one third (or however much you need to pay the rentals and assistants first) up front, one third when production wraps or you hit the first screeing of the edit, and the final third on completion and delivery of the finished dubs. This protects them and you: gives them control of costs and ability to kill the project without losing all the money, and it allows you to at least break even, should this ever occur.

The quote should express that they get one free round of change orders after viewing the first cut, taking x number of hours maximum, that they pay for additional changes after this, plus fixing things that are their fault, like them giving you somebody’s name or title wrong, and that you eat the cost of fixing what YOU do wrong, like typos you made in the CG when they gave you the right spelling. Establish up front if this is a work for hire or not, and who owns the finished master and source tapes. These will eliminate the bulk of problem areas for such productions.

You might consider adding a clause that holds you harmless for legal probs and puts the onus on them to get any legal clearances taken care of for things like music rights.

All of THAT will get you more in the ballpark, and getting paid more than the fry cook at McDonald’s. Charging a per-finished-minute fee, you might find yourself actually LOSING money on the videos over doing something else like cooking those fries. That’s not a sustainable business model.

[Mark Suszko]

NO, NO, NO!
Please re-read this thread.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks!

[Mark Suszko]

Well now, THAT’s customer service!!!:-)

We got G film presets V2.1 and associated filters when the system was purchased (knowing someday we’d actually need to use them and that day is today), hadn’t touched them until now. This problem first occurred when I wanted to apply the Warm Diffusion combination to the anamorphic video. Some of the filters go nuts, some don’t, I’ll have to stick around after hours (someone else is on the system now) and try them all if you want a detailed list of the problem ones, or maybe you want to take this off to private email.

G, are you telling me I should do everything in 8-bit? What is going on is, I’m trying to match up the anamorphic DV25 footage from the Panasonic DVC Pro 610 to look as similar as possible to the film-look we are getting out of the Panasonic HVX-200, shooting 1080i, 30P, with letterbox and their “cine-d” setting. I got close the other night after a couple hours with the effect explorer, but keep running into this bug, whatever it is.

[Mark Suszko]

Bingo. And?

[Mark Suszko]

With green screen, the backlight used for spill suppression would be magenta, amber backlight is used with BLUE screen. You’re picking the color farthest opposite on the color wheel from the key color. Depending on the software used, a colored backlight for spill suppression hurts rather than helps, i.e. for Ultimatte it is a bad choice generally, because Ultimatte works on a different principle. There are chromakeyers in Motion too, don’t forget. They have their own spill suppressors.

One thing green screening outside has going for it is, if the green screen and talent catches the sun at the same angle, everything is going to stay more or less evenly-lit, but if you have any clouds, you’re hosed. Also, the sun continually moves so if you shoot for any length of time you get continuity errors.

Even lighting is “key”. Also, separate your talent from the green screen by their body height plus two feet, to reduce the risk of spill contamination as well as shadows hitting the screen. If you don’t have a scope on the set (and you should when keying) the next best cheat is to activate camera zebra bars and use them to see if zebras set at something like 60 IRE appear evenly across the screen. Correct until they do. I light the screen first, then turn it off and light the talent according to what is needed to match the backgrounds to be inserted, i.e. make sure the light is motivated and from the same direction, etc. Then turn on both lighting sets and make final tweaks if they interact at all.

I find a little reduction in the detail setting helps especially when shooting 4:1:1 DV.

A friend told me of the horrible problems he had when he shot the green elements in a different frame rate and codec than the rest of the program. Don’t mix 24-frame and 30- frame in the keying project for example. The cross-conversions really take down overall quality.

[Mark Suszko]

I highly reccomend the fine folks at digital heaven:

https://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/fcplugins/dh_retrotv.php

This should be what you’re looking for. Many of their plug-ins are very cheap or free.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks everyone for the quick answers, I finally found the manual on my own about the time it was posted here, but the Shane Ross blog site made for a perfect pocket quickstart guide, which is what I was hoping to give to the cameraman. A big time manual-reader, he is not, so that blog version is perfect for him. Thanks, everybody.

[Mark Suszko]

Specifically, the Panasonic AJ-PCS060 Store, need a quickstart guide somewhere. Anybody?