[Mark Suszko]

Neither.

Well, I like a monopod for quickly moving to a new spot and taking fixed shots that are very stable. Monopods also let you take high-angle psuedo-jib shots if the camera is small. If you put enough weight near the bottom of one, it also acts like a fairly good motion stabilizer due to pendulum effect.

But for following kids around in activities, from medium to closeup distances, I like the Manfrotto Fig Rig. Better yet, the imitation one I made from a used bike rim and some welded steel. lower priced:-)

With the small handicam-form-factor camcorders, this is an awesome way to shoot while in motion. Mine cost me maybe ten bucks, the bike rim was free from the junk pile behind the bike shop, I think it was around 23 inches. I snipped off the spokes and lost the hub, sanded off the rust and had a friend spot weld perforated steel angle iron from ace hardware onto that. Tidied it up with black pipe wrap insulating foam and tie wraps. The grip and comfotrt is amazing, as is the stability and ability to effortlessly point and rotate under complete control. It’s all in the leverage and where the ring lets you put that leverage. It helps a lot that when I use this rig it’s with the intent of running the lens wide and not telephoto, moving the body and camera physically instead of zooming.

Try this, if it doesn’t make you feel too wierd. Stop by the bike or auto accessory aisles of Walmart or similar. Pick up a spare 20-23-inch or so bike wheel/tire , or one of the automobile steering wheel covers in that section of the store. Holding at the 9 and 3 o’clock positions, or just below there, hold the thing out in front of you and feel how it is to control it in height, pitch, and roll.

[Mark Suszko]

Well I guess I’m a contrarian, because I’m still on dial-up and I hate the long waits for download and slow navigation of those mime-compliant things you’re talking about. I put up with the one emailed to me from the COW because it’s not too frequent and generally has content of interest. AND, you use “permission marketing”, where you first ask and/or I have to make a specific request to get that email, it doesn’t just get sent to me willy-nilly. That’s an important distinction, I feel. Frankly, I’d prefer a straight text version with links, the pretty graphics attached to my COW special updates don’t ever really influence me to read anything. I read the headline and make my read/no-read decision. I subscribe to a number of pure email lists, not because of their fancy ascii art:-) but because of specific content and the timeliness of the delivery. Extraneous visual eye candy just ticks me off. I expect and even look for eye candy on web pages but hate it in my email.

If people want the content bad enough, it doesn’t matter how lo-fi the delivery method. I have seen this again and again in my dealings with video clients. They will bring in the most god-awfully produced junk for me to work with (and try to clean up), stuff with horrible powerpoint slides, and home camcorder stuff shot handheld with no lights and onbard mic, and the audience STILL eats it up because the actual content is something they really are hungry for. It is at once depressing but also fascinating. There are still people out in the hinterlands that like getting their religious sermon programming on cardboard LP records and audiocassette tapes. (indeed, an industry article I read said the biggest market for cassette blanks now was mail-order religion and get-rich-quick business seminar programming, as well as a somewhat smaller market for audiobooks on tape)

In the case of the people on the list for festival updates, you gotta wonder if they care more for eye candy and fun graphics or just the specific text info. The narrower the niche audience and the better the writing, the less glitz you need or want, is my opinion.

Content isn’t king; it’s a dictatorship. 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

I think Ron’t got probably the best suggestion on this. If that service is still too much money, perhaps you could use LISTSERV and just not enable all the 2-way features but instead use the front-end of that for you mass mailer.

[Mark Suszko]

Is dubbing just to alter the timecode strictly necessary? Can’t you just apply a correction factor to the in points after you determine the offset?

Are you using an edit controller or going deck-to-deck, like the analog beta SP decks could?

[Mark Suszko]

This thread should be turned into an article, there is a lot of useful information in it.

What about being on a retainer?

[Mark Suszko]

Agree with what’s been said so far. Definitely you need a cohesive brand identity and marketing strategy. It comprises color and form for the logo and all your matching on-air graphics, as well as verbal “hooks”, slogans, audio cues, etc.

Every ident, lower third, and voiced intro/wrap needs to have the “magic phrase” in it, whatever your strategy team decides you are. Be it “channel 13 Heartland News”,”Green Thirteen” “Local Thirteen NewsNOW”, “Livethirteen”,”thirteenFirst”, or whatever. A simple, easy to recognize and CONSISTENT logo is in all the graphics, on your mic flags, on your trucks, and is reinforced with the marketing catchphrase, whatever that winds up being.

The consumer advocate and problem-solver type pieces that are usually saved for sweeps periods need to be used more often, to get your air staff and visible crews out in the community as living billboards, and cross-promoted on radio, the web, and in print media. Yes, before you say it, I’ll agree this can be obnoxious… if done sloppily and inconsistently. But this is how you build that brand awareness, with consistent impressions, over and over.

First have internal discussions and come to some consensus over what your specialty is, what’s unique to your place, and how to encapsulate that in a slogan. Then work with a graphic designer to use color and form and proportions to reinforce that image and slogan. Every channel in my market can be identified just by the predominant color in their graphics packages and logos. You may like or hate their logos but they are distinctive and memorable. Lately, some of them have been making their graphics overly-busy, and I think that loses the audience.

[Mark Suszko]

What HARPO and the BBC use is a modular system called “Schedu-All”. You can buy just the components you want or the whole suite, they talk to each other, so for example the facility scheduling suite and the library/assets tracking suite talk to the billing suite and automate a lot of the busywork of running a facility. The library module was particularly atractive: generates bar codes for every element then tracks them in and out of the library, while keeping a tab running for editing use and billing, even tracking copyright info. If you want to take a certain tape out, the computer will automatically flag it as unavailable if it is also going to be in use in an edit suite that day… and tell you when and where you can get it later. It will tell you who took it out last and when, so you know where to look if it’s still somehow been checked back in but is not where it is supposed to be. We looked at this setup some time ago for our operation, but the folks upstairs balked at the stiff price and they just stayed with a basic spreadsheet type system. The costs may be easier to bear if you just buy the module(s) you need and work your way up to the full system. Last I looked at this was a couple years back, so I don;t have recent info on price.

[Mark Suszko]

The disadvantage of the LED is that they are WICKED expensive, and not large or very “punchy”, I’d consider them useful only for really close-up ENG type work. Also I’m not sure they are quite perfected in terms of color.

A halogen with a quality dimmer is to my mind a more flexible tool in the near term in that you can crank it up to hit something more distant or dial it down to just the amount of fill you need. My typical choices would be an Anton Baur or a Frezzi. Until those Litepanels come down in cost, I’m sticking with what I know works. The Antons combined with their newest battery system get remarkable duration, since modern camcorders are so thifty on power. You cna help that along with good power management practices and of course, keeping spares around to switch over. With practice, you can do that swap in seven seconds or so.

[Mark Suszko]

If memory serves, Certron was a house brand of tape sold at Radio Shack. My guess is it was cheap Mexican reloads, that is, the ends of rolls from larger ones at big tape loading companies, sold off to maquladoras on the border where they assemble the blank tapes you find in the dollar discount store. The most infamous brand of this kind of stuff to me was Tozai. I must have 20 or more of those Tozai and Certron in my basement archives from the 80’s and 90’s, but all I used them for was recording Tv shows. This was a cheap brand of tape and is probably breaking down now.

Time base corrector will help, as long as there is no malfunction of the tape inside the shell itself. You *could* perform some surgery and transplant the tape and hubs into a new shell. Before going that drastic, do an extra-thorough cleaning of the tape player’s heads, pinch rollers, the entire tape path, guides, etc. because the lubricants of this tape are probably shot from poor storage. Thus you get dropouts from bits of oxide flaking off and taking the signal with it, as well as gunk building up and grabbing at the tape thus disrupting synch. If the users were not pros, they might also have changed recording speeds a time or two to get more stuff on one cassette.

Try using a pro level S-VHS deck as the feeder, with the comb filters and automatic compensators turned on.

[Mark Suszko]

Well a lot of wedding/event guys swear by Vegas on the PC.

Of course, with a new dual-boot capable mac, you really can run any darn thing you care to, though in the short term there may not be all the drivers and etc. written for every version of every app.

My own feeling is to stick with what you have and master it even more. The system that’s best is the system you are most comfortable with and that you are most trained on. That will always beat any other “superior” hardware, because the tool is the lesser half of the combination. It’s not the hardware, nor the software, it’s your “wetware”. i.e. what’s between your ears, that’s the most important element.