[Mark Suszko]

I don’t know if you listen to a lot of NPR, bu they have a series called “Story Corps”, where they set up sound booths not unlike the old photo booths, and people interview each other for short personal oral histories. The best ones are aired weekly on NPR.

A booth could work well for unattended recording: by confining the area a subjact can move in, you keep them in focus and framed as you want, more or less, without distractions. You could even put a greenscreen in the back and then pop these interviews in over other wedding and reception shots for a nice look. It IS a challenege to light, however, you can make a very nice super-ringlight around the lens using flourescent compact bulbs or even several strings of white Italian style xmas lights, and get a very nice close-up softlight effect for cheap. Lighting the green backing would be a bit harder, but doable if the booth was longer than it is wide…

I remember shooting weddings and trying to get table interviews and the like at the rececption. You have a very narrow window of time where you can hit up people for remarks at their individual tables, and they have had enough time to find their tables, get comfy and maybe have a tongue-loosening drink before being asked to make an improvised speech… You don’t/can’t bug them while they are eating, it’s gross as well as unprofessional… If you wait until they are done or nearly so, other reception events start to unfold, the band starts up, people leave the tables to mingle, and you lose the chance, plus the noise level gets quite high.

Asking them to come out into a hallway works, but you don’t have much control over the look there unless you set up a backdrop and light it and etc. plus nobody wants to go out of the room in case they miss something… and neither should the wedding shooter. Finally, mamy of the best interview subjects are too self-conscious to say anything in a crowd, but WILL open up in a more intimate setting.

So I can see where a booth right in a corner of the reception area makes some sense. Too expensive and to much work for most, but for high-end clients, yes, very much, I can see it…

[Mark Suszko]

To help make my case…

https://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/video-how-not-to-use-powerpoint

[Mark Suszko]

Sorry, but to put the two words “Powerpoint” and “artist” together in the same sentence… I think I just threw up in my mouth a little:-)

My sour attitude comes from never having worked with powerpoint graphics made by a true artist, though.

[Mark Suszko]

Portable modular narration booths in various sizes are available from places like Markertek and Fullcompass. From there, adding modifications to hang a camera and fourescent cool lighting should be trivial.

[Mark Suszko]

I took it to mean a quiet space off to the side of a reception, where you could record a personal message to the newly maried couple, or some anaecdotes or whatever, without feeling too self-conscious and with acceptible audio.

Unless we’re talking a sales table for selling DVD dubs from??? Origina question was kind of vaguely written.

[Mark Suszko]

Alex said what I was goign to say; why not play the HD and run a live conversion to the SD monitors? The best synchro is the one you dont have to do:-) Yes, I suppose there would have to be *some* delay, only you would be able to tell if it was significant. You could, I suppose, add back a delay unit to the HD playback to even it out?

[Mark Suszko]

#1, Get a lawyer.

Seriously, if it was a head clog during recording, that broke free and cleaned up later, what you have is ALL you have, period. By playing the tape on a different unit, you pretty much establish that it was a recording problem and not just a playback problem.

One reason I finally got out of the wedding biz was I was not going to commit to adding the safety redundancy recording gear that would allow me to be 100 percent confident in my product, yet still be affordable to my customer base and make a reasonable margin for my lost weekends.

If you want to continue in the biz, backups are no longer a luxury, IMO, but a necessity, for this kind of “act of God” stuff… Hard drives, external audio recorders, etc, these are not to be considered crutches to fall back on or excuses to allow you to do sloppy work, but as safety backstops when something unforseeable or random just happens to an otherwise well-planned and provisioned shoot. The barn only burns down once, you don’t get re-dos in wedding and event videos. The stress of that took quite a toll on me, and after surviving each event without a failure of this kind, I swore it was not worth continuing for the money I was making… Anybody that does this work for long enough is going to have it happen eventually to them, it’s only a question of when and what your backup strategy is to anticipate and handle it. And budget and charge for it commensurately.

This is one of the reasons the better pros cost more: they make the extra investment to protect the quality of the work and thus their business reputation, which lets them. A cut-rate guy trusts to luck and pockets the extra profit margin. 99 times out of 100, he may get away with it. Not saying YOU are cut-rate, mind you, just making an analogy.

Just as a guess, I’d imagine you had something happened to the mic plug or cord, or that a setting switch line line/mic accidentally got changed temporarily during the shoot, or a battery went down. That you have *some* kind of audio, even if low, may offer a glimmer of hope. You can try stacking many synched copies of the track in the NLE timeline and appying moderate normalization to each of them, to kick up the level. You’ll then probably have to apply downward expansion or other noise gating plug-ins to clean it up from there.

Finally, you will probably have to refund the couple in full, and eat the cost of the fixes. It’s the honorable thing to do, and the only thing to do to try and salvage your reputation.

[Mark Suszko]

Why not just build one locally?

[Mark Suszko]

https://www.funnyordie.com/v1/view_video.php?viewkey=0f637e68c3ebe8b9be74
Those guys will do it for you for $5k.

Seriously, there is no way you gave enough information there to make anything more than a guess. And guesses are not going to help you. Get out the calculator and note pads and start totalling up expenses and rates, it’s the only real way to get a fix on the costs.

What’s the difference between a tar paper roofed shack and a mansion? Both will keep the rain off your head. Why does one cost so much more?

A Ferrari Enzo and a Suzuki Swift will both get you across town at about the same time, if you obey all traffic laws.
Why don’t they cost the same?

Same as your video.

No, union is not “required” for non-broadcast corporate work, usually that’s for broadcast work. But don’t automatically assume you can’t afford union help on a small job. Excellent trained and talented people often save you time and thus money while enhancing the quality of the product, which also makes money.

[Mark Suszko]

You pretty much have it now. We also call them bumpers sometimes.

Not exactly interstitials in the current sense, but an interesting gimmick I’ve seen. I think this was in the credits for Dharma & Greg, but the the producers would put up a flash frame of a whole page of tiny chyron for a split second in the credit roll. If you still-framed it at home, you would get to read some little essay or joke/story or something from the maker of the program aimed directly at the fan base of the show, not unlike a blog posting.

Lately, there are some 30 second spots from General Electric, within which they do kind of a similar thing: right near the end of the spot, before the final logo shot, they drop in five to eight frames of stills that tell an entire story, frame by frame. Almost like subliminal cuts. These only loosely have anything to do with the subject of the spot, but if you take the time to look thru them, they can be amusing. I find it to be an interesting tactic to get people to spend more time looking at your commercial. Sure, it’s only people with OCD, but still…:-) I think it’s a great gimmick to use if say, you’re running a contest and the clues to winning are placed in this way.