[Mark Suszko]

Just an update, more of a question really, that comes up as I screen the footage today…. How smooth (how many steps or infinite) is the zoom rocker supposed to be for this camera? Because I just couldn’t get as smooth a stop-start to my zooms as I can with my studio cameras or my larger DVCPro25 format full-size camcorders with Fuginon lens. Felt like I only had a choice of avout four speeds on the rocker, instead of the fairly continous band of speeds I’m used to. I was trying for one of those 2-minute zooms, super-slow, so slow you hardly notice it. Couldn’t get the speed slow enough without it just stopping instead. I tried popping it into manual zoom but that was less than satisfactory as well, as it read my hand shakes too well:-). Maybe there’s a menu setting I could have used to adjust the low-end endpoints for activating the zoom rocker?

[Mark Suszko]

Zvi, with respect, to be blunt I think your business plan, such as it is, is a little “embryonic” still. I think you’ve way under-estimated the amount you need to put into this, and don’t yet have a true understanding of all your costs, much less a solid plan for getting buisness. If you jump into this unprepared, you won’t last long, I’m afraid.

The most common error in this business is thinking that buying a camera makes it a working business. The first tools you need are really a phone, email account, and computer. It is about lining up jobs, getting people to front you some money, then the fun creative that pays off the front money and gets you some profit, which you re-invest to grow the business.

As far as equipment, the lights and tripod and mics are all good investments to make as purchases, (particularly used) because they are used every time and don’t go out of style, and retain resale value. My take on camera ownership is, it’s best to rent what you need only when as as you need it. If you only use it once or twice a month, but pay for it every month, you are losing money. Ebay is full of slightly used cameras bought by self-styled “Indie film-makers” who committed to 365 days of payments and depreciation for a camera that got used for only 20 some hours. The camera is a tool, a means, not the end. The end is a finished program you can sell to people.

In the States, we have a number of resources for people with a dream like yourself: SCORE and the Small Business Administration are just two of them. Have you looked around where you live to see if there are any such similar resources avaialable to you? If not, the next best thing is to read up some more on the business of running the business. Amazon.com for used books, maybe a community college type course lcoally, and all the resources of the internet are open to you. I urge you to take advantage of the collected wisdom of people who have done this before you. Build on their success, avoid their mistakes. Best of luck to you.

[Mark Suszko]

It is always a compromise, shooting and cutting for IMAG screens in the venue versus shooting and switching and/or editing for a post version. The compositional needs are very different and often in opposition. If you do the choice of shots and cutting to opitimize the live audience’s IMAG experience, you often get a relatively boring master tape out of that. Running iso records, you can sometimes fix quite a bit of that in post with different timing of cuts and selection of shots, but you are still locked into the IMAG composition/framings you shot with. If you IMAG feed a live cut that’s got a home viewer audience in mind, the live audience is going to be really distracted from the live performance. You will suck life out of the show.

For lighting, you must either vote for and live with covering the show as it actually was, or commit to a customized interpretation of the show geared to the needs of video. Perhaps one compromise you can try is to add some level-raising washes to just the full dress rehearsal. Then you can use just the dress for TV or try and match levels in post later as you intercut between the rehearsal and the actual show. Failing that, you could maybe rent cameras with more control over dynamic range, if the budget allows. If the budget is fixed, then you do the best you can. With today’s cameras, that’s a lot easier to do than in the old tube camera days, if that’s any consolation; you can do great work today that was impossible to attempt even ten years ago.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m married to an artist, so I may be biased:-)

Two points I’d make are:
1)Training is a serious matter and if you want to retain good, sharp artists, you need to keep their skills up to date and you want to formally schedule the training, commit to it as time just for personal development, booked as if the company IS the client… And don’t just train them on what you have in the shop right now, but even let them train on new things you don’t yet have, but might get: when a client comes in asking for something more exotic or out of your normal experience, you will be able to say: “yes, we have a person with expertise on that, we can take at look at this job”. And you’ve expanded your business. Maybe even anticipated a major shift in demand.

So often, if you go with “we’ll get you some training on so-and-so right after the Throckmorton job is done and out the door”, what happens is another job comes in right afterwards, and another, and the trainng keeps getting bumped and bumped, because it’s not considerd “productive”. Like maintenace down-time. This makes the artist, or any worker, dissatisfied, and soon they start sneaking their training in on another project’s time, or they start to look for another job where they can get the training to keep current. If they learn the new skills on their own time and dime, they are not going to feel any loyalty about aplying said new skills to your company projects, instead, they’ll apply the new skills to freelance work outside the daily grind. Good for them, bad for you. To retain the best, you have to invest in them. Yes, you risk making them attractive to competitors that can try to hire them away from you. But this is the cost of doing business at a high level: if you can’t keep them, you don’t deserve them. When you improve them, you can also get away with charging more for them as well. In that sense, training doesn’t cost: it pays. Certainly never paying for training will cost you lost jobs and quality employees.

Point number two: If you are trusting the artists to get the work done, and this is truly “artist” work and not mindless rotoscoping, simple application of stock plug-ins or something, all that really needs to be set is the drop-dead deadline for finished product at each step of client approvals. As long as they always meet that deadline with a high quality product, how they get there and what hours they run to get it is none of my concern. Artists need “head time” to think things thru, they also need time to experiment and make mistakes sometimes. Learning on the client’s time while they sit there is NEVER a positive experience for anybody, avoid it at all costs because you lose much prestige with clients from that, and give them leverage to talk down your rates.

When you see a real artist get something done with apparent ease, you may not fully know the amount of practice, mental work and preparation and strategizing that went on unseen to lead to that quick-looking output. It is impractical to quantize that process on a punch clock, as even when they are not at the office, often they are grinding away on the ideas in their heads. I know that is the case with me on many writing and effects projects. If the artist is in the building an agreed-upon number of total hours, I think that’s all you need. There are programs you can install on the PC (lawyers use them a lot) that let you clock in and out on each of multiple projects as you work on them, recording the hours to a fine line, and generate a billable hours report. But for real “art”, there is no good way to clock the process accurately, because you don’t do it, you LIVE it. Also, clocking the artists with a stopwatch tells them you don’t trust them, and nobody produces their best work under that situation.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks everybody, just got back from the shoot, there were no P2 cards included in the rental when it arrived, so it’s SD DV I’ll be editing with in FCP and the AJA IO can handle that without a problem. I get to try this out again in a couple weeks, hopefully that one will be with the P2 cards. When I get around to it I will run an experiment and compare DVCPro25 footage shot letterboxed, with Nattress filters applied in post, versus the HVX200 downconverted to DV25 using the in-camera cine B setting we used today. I left before The message suggesting 24p came thru to me, so I went ahead and shot 30p today, and it still had enough of that fluttery film-type look to make my customer happy, yet I don’t have to mess with any pull-down issues. I’ll keep checking here periodically to see if there are any more suggestions, thanks and bye for now. It sure looks like a nice camera, for the short time I got to fiddle with it. Hopefully next time I’ll get to push it’s limits a little harder.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks everybody, just got back from the shoot, there were no P2 cards included in the rental when it arrived, so it’s SD DV I’ll be editing with in FCP and the AJA IO can handle that without a problem. I get to try this out again in a couple weeks, hopefully that one will be with the P2 cards. When I get around to it I will run an experiment and compare DVCPro25 footage shot letterboxed, with Nattress filters applied in post, versus the HVX200 downconverted to DV25 using the in-camera cine B setting we used today. I left before The message suggesting 24p came thru to me, so I went ahead and shot 30p today, and it still had enough of that fluttery film-type look to make my customer happy, yet I don’t have to mess with any pull-down issues. I’ll keep checking here periodically to see if there are any more suggestions, thanks and bye for now. It sure looks like a nice camera, for the short time I got to fiddle with it. Hopefully next time I’ll get to push it’s limits a little harder.

[Mark Suszko]

I wasn’t planning on going thru the IO for ingest to FCP, but to use a firewire cable and do a direct data transfer to my scratch drives. Any opinions on how to do that?

[Mark Suszko]

For post, I was expecting to edit natively in HD and then perhaps burn the final output to DVD or data DVD to retain an HD master and distibution dubs as quicktime files for the stations that can actually use spots in HD. You think that’s a plan, or am I off base there?.

But our entire flow at the shop is analog SD. We shoot DVCpro25 and go SDI in/out to FCP via the Aja IO. This HD project is a sort of nonstandard “outside” project, so I’m doing my best to adapt and work with what I have.

My biggest deal right now is mastering a new camera and format in an hour or less. I’ll worry more about the post when and if I get there.

[Mark Suszko]

For the best reason: Because the boss says so:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks for a quick response. The FCP workstation has an AJA IO.