[Mark Suszko]

Put yourself in the position of the blurb writer for TVguide or IMDB, or yourself, needing to describe the movie to someone in the elevator, and you only have one floor left before your stop. That will give you the idea for what are the most essential facts to get out about the film in a trailer. Structure your choices of clips around that narrative thread, minding the warnings you’ve already been given earlier. I think trailers give away too much these days: I can tell by looking at them if the movie is going to tank, almost with perfect accuracy, because the editors today give away too much of the plot.

Don’t make the mistake of putting every one of your very best shots in the trailer, or you will lose too much surprise in the final audience, while raising unmeetable expectations. You need to communicate:

The Genre (comedy, drama, horror, etc.
The protagonist, particularly if a recognizeable name.
The very basics of the plot, up to the major plot complication, leaving it a question as to how the hero gets out/wins/ etc. If it’s a story where everybody knows the ending going in, like titanic, king kong, the St/ Valentine’s Day Massacre, Ray Charles, etc. you don’t cover that in a trailer so much as the new, different hook you have for the “untold” part of the story.

Wanna see some awesome trailer work? Look for the re-edited trailers for West Side Story, Jaws, and the Shining on YouTube. ####### brilliant.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks for hanging in there with me for my adventure today. As we got to the wire and time to load out, the transfer process into the mac via firewire still was not smooth. I could not get enough confidence in the transfer process to commit to card recording, so I wimped out and shot to tape tonight. Turned out that was going to have to be the case anyway: the many actors we had were not 100 percent perfect on their line memorizations, and we just ate up tape on take after take, not daring to stop rolling in case they got it right by accident. DV tape is cheap, dirt cheap. What’s expensive is tape left blank when you get back home. I was too chicken about coming home with vapor on those cards, or, not being able to unload them before they had to hit the fedex pickup window and cost me another day’s rental. It’s just something I will have to get over, with more practice, I guess.

I realize the P2 workflow is very different from what I’m used to, more like film rolls, and that if you have the presence of mind, and a good familarity with the camera, you certainly can keep deleting and recording over bad or useless clips to maintain space on the cards for just the good takes. But I gotta tell ya, shooting, directing, gaffing, monitoring the audio, keeping script continuity and the shot sheets, even with five guys helping me today, I could not find the time to manage the card storage like that and stay on schedule, had I committed tot he cards, and with only 2 8 gigger cards, and no way to offload clips on location, I would just have been out of luck. With tape, I don’t have to worry about it. I suppose if I had a big external drive, I could say the same thing. This camera certainly makes a pretty picture, but for me, I still prefer burning miles of tape, even bad takes sometimes give you something useful in post, I never want to throw anything away before the edit, I’m a packrat that way. Bring on the cheaper, bigger capacity cards, maybe I’ll adapt a little faster:-)

[Mark Suszko]

New cable, no difference. Oh, and Radio Shack are bandits, but you knew that.

[Mark Suszko]

I suspecta bad firewire cable, will grab a new one while I get a burger and a pez dispenser full of antacids. Looking at the folder that came up witht he first successful import, the audio file was empty. I just now got the thing to be recognized again, after some massaging of the cable connector (hence my suspiction the cable is bad), but while the generic drive icon is there, and the camera says it’s hooked up, the new test footage with sound I just shot is not being found by Import>p2 dialog in FCP. Clicking on the drive icon for the camera shows allt he right foldes are there, but empty. yet, using in-camera playback mode, it’s there.

???

More after lunch, thanks for hanging in there with me on this.

[Mark Suszko]

Nope, so I went back to camera menus and changed a few things around, recorded a fresh clip with good sound for sure. It plays back in the camera fine, with sound.

Now I just tried to replicate the exact sequence of actions that made the camera show up on the desktop for the first time, and again, I got bupkis. This is very upsetting. Working one time out of ten tries is bad for my blood pressure!:-) I am wondering if it’s a bad firewire cable tot he camera. I’ll tell you one hting, for my first intotduction to P2 workflow, color me unimpressed so far. It’s not idiot-proof enough for me yet, obviously!

[Mark Suszko]

Maybe that was it, because I tried unplugging the AJA IO, rebooting with the firewire cable connected to the front and the camera already powered-up and in 1394 device mode, where it was reading “1394 disconnect”. I then sighed, pulled the cable off the front of the mac, put it in one more time, and after a minute or so YES! got a generic new drive icon on the decktop, and I opened up FCP and selected import>P2, and there are my test clips! Yay! I clicked on just the first clip I shot and dragged it to the timeline, but audio did not accompany it. What’s the best way to bring everything into FCP timeline and bin all together, audio with video?

[Mark Suszko]

Will try right now and report back.

[Mark Suszko]

Do you think the AJA IO has anything to do with this? I don’t think it should, since the mac should be able to recognize any kind of thing you plug into the firewire port, even if it’s just to say hello, there is a new firewire device on here, I don’t know what it is, what do you wanna do with it? It is not even getting that far in detecting the camera. Data transfer, drag and drop to the tower’s drives, or FCP import, I’m not picky, but I GOTTA get one or the other soon or I’m sunk!

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, I did that first thing. I’m not clear which 1394 mode this is supposed to be in. I tried it under the “host” setting and the “device” setting. In HOST mode I get the menu with the options Copy to HDD, format HDD Property and setup. The menu cursor will only go to the setup yes/no option, not to any of the others. Selecting yes or no seems not to make a difference, it’s like the menu is locked somehow.

[Mark Suszko]

My rule for supers is, you have to be able to read it aloud, twice, at a reasonable speed.