[Mark Suszko]

In another thread I said I believe the trend nowadays for mid to low level companies is to outsource everything. That’s good for you.
There’s lots of opportunity but it is all in a small circle, is the problem. And yes, you will be competing to a point with “Bob” in accounting, who has a Pinnacle card on his spreadsheet computer, some shareware NLE app, and a Dv camcorder with no mic, lights or tripod. but the kind of jobs “Bob” can get from his boss are almost never high-stakes enough to warrant a level of pay worth your time anyhow.

The bulk of the good jobs are based on referrals and repeat business with established “known quantities”, which is a barrier to you. The people hiring for these things are risk-averse, and you have an uphill slog convincing them they are right to risk their job and company money on your performance. They will also use the asymmetrical nature of your business relationship to try and grind you down on your price, while raising expectations unreasonably.

Typically how someone like you might break into this is to first get sub-contracted for a part of a job being done by someone else, someone bigger perhaps, who is swamped and needs added temporary capacity. You’d want to get on as a shooter or editor for one of the more established people doing this in your area. You can make contacts thru the local gear rental places as well as by attending local association meetings and the like.

Otherwise you’ll be competing at a disadvantage against established guys. In that arena your only likely clients are businesses who have never done anything like this before at all.

This is not the kind of job, I feel, where you can go door-to-door cold-calling, saying; “Hi, I’d like to make your next training or marketing video!” Unless you’re well-briefed on the company and their needs and wants and resources, you have little to offer to sell yourself to them, from their POV.

I do feel though that if you don’t mind concentrating on a narrow field, you can get a foot in the door.

What I’m getting at is, if you get familiar enough with one particular industry, meet and befriend the people in it, you eventually develop the right contacts to get hired for a lot of projects.

Let’s say you love hang gliding. You can map out a strategy of going to the fly-ins and conventions and association meetings shooting stuff “on spec” and showing it and making contacts, all the time dropping the hint about what you do.

Comes the day the guy at ABC Rogallo wings wants to make a dog and pony show video for a sales booth, he’s likely to first check his mental Rolodex for people he knows and trusts that he could work with. At that point, you can flog yourself as a producer; the intermediary that understands and connects what they want with what the technology can deliver, and mediates that process for them.

For a very reasonable sum;-)

[Mark Suszko]

The type of coax you use is important for this to work using composite video. The better cable with less resistance also costs a lot more. You will probably need to add a video distribution amplifier to boost the signal strength.

Other folks use twisted-pair telephone line, which is cheap and easy to lay down, with video baluns.

It could be possible to stream it from place to place using a high-bandwidth internet connection.

Wireless adds complications and lots of chances for interference; I would use that as a last resort.

What you are doing is technically called an IMAG setup. The live and stage events forum is full of guys who specialize in this, so i would re-ask your question over there.

[Mark Suszko]

The thing about clients taking their projects on in-house has always been cyclical. If they know what they are doing, it can work out, but the trend I see is more and more outsourcing everything, particularly but not exclusively post. Particularly as the cost of the computer gear drops while the complexity of learning it and mastering it creatively increases.

I get asked pretty regularly by some of my clients, and other business people about what it would take for them to do for themselves what we do for them. They get so comforable working with us, they take on this “how hard can it really be?” mentality. Like you might after watching too many home-fix-it and renovation shows in a row, then driving past a Home Depot on a Saturday. Which is why plumbers and electricians make such tremendous weekend overtime money:-)

They try to commoditize the creativity like they do the hardware, but these guys often fall into the trap of thinking if they buy a copy of all the hardware and software we have in our shop, they will automatically be as competent as us, only cheaper. This has not proven to be the case for most. After wasting all the time and money, they still come back to us to fix or re-do their in-house projects.

First off I ask them what business they are IN. Are they in the widget business, or the video business? Do their sales guys take flying lessons and build a Lancair, or just buy an airline ticket to the sales call destination? Grow and pulp their own trees, or buy the paper at Office Max? If they only make a video a couple times a year, hiring full-time onsite staff and laying out the capital for a studio and everything is a waste, when they can have it just when needed by outsourcing. I see most corporate places in the middle and lower end going to just a guy with a phone being their “video production department”, acting as in-house coordinator for all the out-of-house functions. This is just how everything is going on the biz world.

In my job, I work for a sort of hybrid insource/outsource: we’re an internal agency, but we serve all the other clients as if we were their personal facility. Because they almost never all need something at the same time, they time-share access to our services and expertise, but don’t have to share a lot of the expenses. It’s the most cost-effective system they can have.

[Mark Suszko]

Be sure to read the fine print too: on the Iki page it says not all outputs are enabled on all models, the plugs may be connected to nothing inside. make sure the one you have or get has the DV output actually functional before you make a commitment.

[Mark Suszko]

Domo Origato!:-)

[Mark Suszko]

How about a sequence of a drywaller fixing a man-shaped hole in a wall, obviously some guy had been thrown into it with superhuman force… while he says something about how Don’s Dojo has been very good for his drywall business… third time this month already…

[Mark Suszko]

If they are wanting to stress self-improvement type things over chop-saki flailing, you could go for allegorical, symbolic things. One example:

Closeup: pair of hands working with a sheet of paper, showing how delicate, flexible, etc. it is. Voiceover talks about the mental discipline of martial arts training, combined with the physical poise, inner strength and flexibility you gain, creates a more fully-developed person with the ability to respond to challenges and stresses and overcome them…in life…in buisness… in interpersonal relationships….. While we hear all this, the hands have rolled the paper into a tight cylinder that is shown supporting a very heavy weight like a bowling ball, or alternately, the paper cylinder is shown punching itself into an orange or watermenlon or whatever. You finish with more voiceover, saying something like…

“Join us and discover your true inner potential, be able to do things you never thought you could do…be yourself, plus so much more, at Don’s Dojo”

…maybe at this point you unwrap the paper tube to show it now has the Dojo’s logo on it, add CG supers, and out.

You could also go the route of shaping the paper into origami structures and shooting that in closeup. You’d need to find a good paper artist, but have them make up origami symbols for boss, job, kids, career, what-have-you, and maybe a paper samurai that defeats all these things.

You could also go comical. Shooting an everyday kind of scene, some little thing goes wrong, like something gets dropped or knocked into the air, and one of the otherwise ordinary-looking people in the scene does a slow-mo miraculous save/intercept of the object, while bamboo flute notes play in the soundtrack. It all happens in a time-dilated wink of an eye, and you play around with if the rest even notice it or not. Can be funny either way. Maybe a couple guys playing office trashcan hoops with balls of crumpled paper, and one guy, our dojo student, in the corner seems to not be noticing, he’s reading a report or typing or something, but when the paperwad goes off course and heads towards him, he plucks it out of the air without even looking at it, flicks it around behind his back, where it makes a perfect basket…. in the office two doors down. He goes back to business without skipping a beat. The other guys grumble, “Ninjas are such a drag!”

(lower third ID for Dojo)
“Be yourself, only more, at Don’s Dojo”

How about a quick montage of various adult or near-adult bullies, all with bruises, shiners, and bandages, looking into the camera, saying: “I was just teasing a little, he didn;t have to break my arm” “That was an over-reaction, all the others just gave me the money” “I didn’t know he could DO that”…
Cut to: over-the-shoulder shot of cops knocking on front door of residence, door opens as we reverse-cut to faces of cops looking forward, then down in puzzlement. Cut to: 7-year-old in karate gi answering the door, who smiles, guiltily. Go to graphics tag.

So you can do a lot of other things than the standard shots. Depends on the theme you want to convey. I thought of these in five minutes, I’m sure you can come up with more if you apply some lateral thinking.

[Mark Suszko]

Good catch, Rob, I forgot “Preview is your friend”! PHONE connectors, not Phono(graph), which are the little plugs with the castle-tower-shaped rim you use to plug in home stereo speakers with:-P Maybe better to say quarter-inch patch cord plugs for audio?:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Sorry for the typos, that’s DVRack, for the PC laptops, made by Serious Magic, and “Scopebox” made for mac laptops. Scenalyzer is more of a freeware/shareware solution on the PC laptop side, but it has a lot of capability as well.

Your other alternative is to add a scan converter to the Sony output, that would feed into your DVC Pro deck but there you’re looking at around six grand for something of the quality suitable for medical-grade work, while last time I looked the Scopebox and DVRack were around a grand or less, if you already have a laptop.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, you could take the Dv out of the Sony box with a firewire cable right into your laptop and record it as DV, then make WMV type conversions later if needed. This alone will boost your quality. They just came out with a piece of software for the mac laptops that does most of what you can do on the PC laptops with DVC Rack or Scenealyzer.

The mac version is called Scopebox, and while brand new looks pretty good. Lets you record Dv straight to the laptop hard drive for editing. I don;t know if it will carry in any audio unless the camcorder or other device had a mic input, so you’d have to record the sound separately then marry them in your NLE system.