[Mark Suszko]

If you don’t have Avid or FCP at home, try to get yourself at least the express versions or an academic version, and start building more skills and a reel from whatever you can get your hands on. For an exercise, take the same footage and re-cut it so each version conveys a different emotion while using the same shots. Anything to keep in practice and get an eye and ear for how to cut creatively. Then when somebody calls in sick, you’ll be the hero.

[Mark Suszko]

I think Marty in that referenced piece is talking out of his, um, hat on a lot of that article, sounds as naieve as some of the people he’s complaining about.

I do think this is a bad time in general to get into the video business, especially on the low, entry-level end. The drop in prices for the new editing systems and cameras makes it reminiscent of the desktop publishing boom, where a lot of relatively untrained people got into the graphics business because of lowered barriers to entry, and made a lot of cheap, bad product, (I got eighty fonts in this thing, let’s see if I can use ’em ALL!!!) as well as depressing pay scales and profits across the board. But you can find examples of that in almost any industry, historically speaking. In the case of DTP, the market corrected itself and most of the bad ones went out of business. The guys and gals who were true craftspeople with excellent skills just picked up and learned the new tools and continued to do well, maybe doing it a little less expensively by going digital. Some of the money saved went into profit, some went into surviving on a smaller margin.

In video I think it’s the same these days; everybody and their cousin is an events/wedding/school play documenter, or that other inaccurate name I can’t stand, an “Indie film maker”, i.e. an effete, self-deluded shmuck with a camera, a dream, an attitude and not much else. (Not that they ALL are that way, mind you, but a lot of people that are clueless are buying $1k-$3K camcorders and expecting that alone will give them fame and fortune).

The low end of the business is beyond saturated: schools keep pumping out graduates from com arts programs promising them dynamic, fulfilling and profitable work as deejays and news anchors, except their curricula are often based on outdated models of the industry, which is so very heavily oriented into automation now, that there just are not as many flesh and bone people jobs out there, either in front of or behind the cameras. Due to consolidation and degregulation (thanks for nothing, Mike Powell) a mega-corp like Clear Channel chains 100 stations all listening to one deejay pretending yo be from (click) (YOURtown). TV networks are folding all the master control ops for several stations into one fully automated main base, so one master control operator actually runs the output of five or more stations for everything including the local news in each station’s market. All to reduce H.R. costs. It’s insane. People wanting to break into local area production have to join or compete with the local cable company that gives away production free when you buy the air time. Even if the resulting spots are awful, businesses take that deal every time. Meanwhile, the internet has democratized production and again lowered the bar so anyone can make their own video. YouTube shows you the occasional flashes of brilliance, but you have to wade thru a LOT of really, really BAD stuff to find the gems.

So, that’s the bad news.

On the upside, there are niches where you can still make a comfortable living in some form of video work. The high end of the business is doing great in terms of the need for hyper-skilled artisans to do compositing, animation, etc. for commercials as well as productions and fast net connections mean the work can be done almost anywhere, from Washington to Woomera. Corporate work has changed from an in-house model to an all-outsourced basis, bringing in freelancers and teams to work on specific projects and then disappear until the next call, but there is still plenty of corporate work going on. You just can’t expect a lot of it to be a cushy in-house fully-vested-with-benefits job anymore; you’re more likely to live like a gypsy freelancer, maybe with a small collection of regular clients, but still on an outsourced basis. And always driven by price competition.

Other niches that people can still make a good living in might include forensic work for lawyers, or specialty work that leverages one of your other interests like underwater photography, aerials, nature photography, architectural, scientific and technical/industrial imaging, medical programming, both for docs and consumers. Any area where you must be a camera operator “plus” something else to do the job right.

There’s always work for writers and producers, but this is exceptionally competitive work, and hard to break into without inside contacts or a track record.

While I won’t call them “indie”, private documentarians can find some lucrative niche markets in coming years. One thing more net bandwidth brings us is the ability to aggregate financially meaningful-sized communities of very specific fans of “something”. At the point where all those people connect and mingle, you have an opportunity to create a niche product they’ll buy. Videos on how to tune your ricer, how to care for your spaniel-doodle, whatever.

I’m of a conflicted mind when it comes to the subject of high-def being good or bad for work. The main thing hi-def does at this point in our history is, it creates a financial and perceptual borderline between percieved “high-end” and “low-end” product. Everybody with big bucks to spend seems to insist on hi-def for everything, regardless of the practical considerations. The price of the HD cameras and more especially, the decks, means it’s a new financial barrier to keep out the “rif-raff” bottom-feeders and charge clients a premium for “quality”, but for how long that holds is anybody’s guess. Broadcast is supposed to go all-digital in two years, but digital does not necessarily mean hi-def. In any case you will see lots of standard-def stuff simply upconverted at the transmitter for some time after the transition from analog.

Numerous folks touted digital broadcast as creating vast new markets for content. That model remains to be proven, IMO, beyond some super-exotic limited-penetration nature documentary type stuff. You can take a lovely HD channel’s bandwith and carve it up into maybe six SD sub-channels, creating six times as much room to sell advertising on and to feed with new material. My guess is most stations will like that idea. But that also represents an increase in infrastructure and programming costs that’s the antithesis of what the stations and network chains seek right now. As I mentioned earlier, they want to do ever more with less. So I don’t feel digital, of itself, is necessarily a “gravy train’ for anybody.

I think certain things done in HD will be very profitable, but not for all that many folks.

That leaves the web to break into. Well, where’s the revenue model, apart from the porn industry? YouTube is popular NOW because it’s free: as soon as they start asking you for even token micro-payments to view something, millions will dump it, never to return. They’ll go to pirated torrent copies instead.

So, I guess I really don’t know where everything is headed, if I did, I’d be writing this from a private beach in the Dutch Antilles. The likeliest overall trends I see are further depression of the prices we can charge, a glut of competitors, a diffuse, hard to define market, sprinkled with niche opportunities for the hyper-specialized.

Sorry for the essay-length response, but it’s a big question posed by the original poster. If anyone has an answer, tell me: I’d like to know as well!;-)

[Mark Suszko]

Also not wanting to beat-up on the O.P. but I’ve had these conversations a lot over the years with people who have gotten just a little “taste” of corporate video and decide to create an instant in-house operation. What I ask them is this:

Do your sales staff all take flying lessons and buy or rent their own plane to make their business trips? Or do they order up a commecial flight ticket from a travel agent and just GO there? Do they build a car or call Hertz? Cut down trees, make the paper, etc. or just buy office supplies at Staples?

What business is your company IN? If you are not in the video business, why go outside your area of competency, when there are experts waiting for your call? It almost never makes sense for a company to re-invent the wheel and create an in-house studio and etc. these days when the people gear and locations can all be contracted for just the time they are needed. Granted, there are always exceptions, but generally this holds for small thru medium-sized companies. You are in the TRAINING business, NOT the video business.

If you go ahead and try to roll your own with these road shows, you will inevitably be disappointed with the results, at least the first few times you do it. Always look at the rate of return for what effort and expense you are putting into a project like this. You will always be on solid ground if the numbers are on your side, don’t be afraid to tell the boss his idea is a potential money-loser, that’s part of the job. Much worse all-around to just be a yes-man and then have to really work hard yet have to explain sub-par results that don’t meet the boss’s expectations later. The bosses typically really don’t have a clue what goes into doing this job right. TV is magic: you push a button and there it is, fully formed.

That’s why an outside expert is so useful in these cases. Concentrate on makignthe best training presentation you can, and hire an experienced video person/company to tech it. You save money by not wasting it.

“The cheapskates always end up paying twice”

[Mark Suszko]

Best bet is to get the presiding official to order them all off at the start of the event, and to promise to eject people who “forget”. You could add RF chokes to all the audio lines, I’m assuming you already have properly shielded and balanced audio everywhere, so there’s little more that can be done, unless you go to shotgun mics or PZM’s from farther away. And that’s no panacea.

[Mark Suszko]

The main point of IMAG is the MAG. You don’t switch the same for IMAG as you do for sit-down screen viewing on TV or whatever. The primary point is the best close-up detail of the main talent, for the benefit of the people not in the front row.

Not that you can’t get artsy at times, but you have to keep the two styles distinct, so following my philosophy, you would not need to feed the really wide shots to IMAG for live switch, particularly if you will ISO everything or most things and re-cut a home version later.

What I sense is a desire to reduce the workload for the future re-edit by getting as much done in the IMAG up front as you can get away with. That’s cheating one audience or the other, IMO. Do the best IMAG job you can at the time, while protecting a better post edit.

[Mark Suszko]

You should definitely rent a “fly-away” live switching/ IMAG package to do this right. Just buying an old switcher on your own is not nearly enough. You’d lack the peripheral gear to feed it properly.

You might want to look into renting a Video Toaster for this job if the fly-away package is too much money.

The nice thing about a toaster is, it’s a swiss army knife of a unit that will stabilze your camera and other sources, color-correct them, and add a lot of fun effects, a nice CG that may be a better deal than the external laptop or PC graphics source you were going to use. It can play the DVD’s thrut he switcher as well.

The bad thing about the toaster is, it’s all-in one nature. If it has a bad day, you have no work-around.

As far as mac-based switching the only product I’m aware of is the Channel Storm LiveChannel, designed to work on a mac laptop, but you’ve got too many cameras going for this thousand-dollar program.

[Mark Suszko]

If they want it bad enough, there are plenty of ways to get it no matter what you try.

One popular low-tech method that helps is to superimpose a large, partially-transparent logo “bug” or a time code window right across the middle of the frame, or in a corner but so big that cropping it out leaves an unusable shot. Watermarking the video like this renders it unusable for any commercial purpose but leave it visible enough for a client to make a determination about the program content.

When they start demanding a “clean” copy, you demand the money up-front:-)

[Mark Suszko]

I’m sure Tektronix has some free guides online, did you see those yet?

[Mark Suszko]

Well I like the Art Of The Edit moniker, but I still work with a Discreet Edit*6 most every day, when not on FCP or linear, so I’m torn:-)

Basically what you’re asking is to shut down the Edit* forum as it’s own entity. For selfish reasons I like the ability to go to a specific platform-oriented area with a specific platform-oriented question when I’m in dire need and on deadline. Just like if I was stumped by an Avid problem, I’d want to go first to the Avid group to get the fastest, most direct answer. Same for FCP questions. I’d go to an FCP named forum first.

I’m sure I could ask an FCP or Edit or more obscure system question in this forum and get answers, but probably not as complete or as fast, and I’d probably get a couple side suggestions or comments that were less on-topic.

So for that kind of selfish reason, I’d say let the Edit*ors stay as they are, as long as they feel willing to hang there and be available. God knows they are more help to me than Autodiscreet is!
😛

[Mark Suszko]

I’m going to repeat a bit of what I commented on at the juice site about this. First of all, the major theme of the piece is dead-on.

Now, About dance recitals.

They are a special case when it comes to the shoot. Most people’s first instinct is to shoot this kind of frenetic and MTV-like with lots of cut-aways and changes of angle, tromboning zooms and dutch tilts etc. as they are used to seeing in commerical television and music videos, etc.

The dance teachers and dancers really don’t like this at ALL, and here’s why:

What they are doing on stage is all about moving their bodies thru a space, defining that space with relative position, timing, and movement. If you go swish-panning and tracking them in tight to medium shots and various groupings all across the stage, you take away the “frame” within which they compose and display their art.

This is somewhat similar to the concept in architectural design involving “negative space”. You see a building with a very large section devoted to an atrium, and the rubes and pencil-pushers say “look at the ‘wasted’ space”. They don’t “get” that the empty space DEFINES and balances the solid space; it’s a partnership, a balance. You see this also in well-designed graphics: a balance of empty or “white” space and the actual text subject. Bad graphics usually mangle or eat up all the white space on screen and lack any aesthetic balance or harmony.

One more example; a stage play with multiple characters in a scene. This was designed to be seen live by human eyes, and so every action and reaction and position or change of position of the actors, the props, the lights in the scene has been deliberately planned out with a purpose: to drive your attention on cue from here to there, to THERE, with the option of you keeping your focus where YOU think it’s important, according to the writer, director, and casts’s hard work. But you’re perceiving the whole of the performance, not just a narow slice of one aspect of it.

When you start shooting closeups of just one or two stage characters, excluding the actions and reactions of the others in the scene, you are fundamentally tampering with the overall balance of the performance and it’s meanings. You’ve consciously taken over narrative control, in a setting where that was the whole point.

Our business evolved from 1890’s era shooting of a wide locked-down master shot of a stage play in audience POV, to one where the camera and editing are powerful players in controlling and shaping the narrative in their own right, and this is when film (and TV) became their own distinct medium of expression. Trying to shoot a medium in the wrong “mode” makes for boring, unsuccessful viewing. Shooting dance recitals like a 30-second commercial is WRONG for this reason.

Back to our dance recital:

If you spend time on face closeups of the dancers, the all-important footwork they’ve spent weeks or months mastering is lost to view. So, in one sense, that guy in the story that locked down a wide shot wasn’t completely “wrong”. He was maybe lazy or careless in his execution, because you can still cut to multiple cameras and do “fun” video things in this context, with care, yet remain true to the concept of preserving the “frame”. A great example is when just two dancers are working opposite ends of the stage. One wide shot to hold them both is too far back to show any meaningful detail, so in such a a case, a side-angle rack focus shot or a front-based soft-edged split screen or half-lap dissolve that puts one in the distance and one in relative close-up as they both do the same move, bridges this gap without going too far with altering the spatial relationships.

It’s a fine line to walk, but that’s the creative challenge to let the dance communicate on it’s terms and if not to enhance, at least not to degrade that communicaiton, which is thousands of years older than our young medium.