[Mark Suszko]

Zrb, everybody makes typos now and again, heck, I do, but he has a point in that if English is your first language, making that nunber of mistakes in a simple post makes people discount what skills and knowledge you have to offer. The “Preview Post” button is offered for a reason.

It may not be fair, but folks judge you online based on how articulate your expression is; on how you say it, not just what you say.

We have hassled people here at the COW in the past who post in “L33tsP33k”; (“leet-speak”) the alphanumeric argot/slang of people (mostly teens) who text-message and IM each other via phone a lot, using nonstandard abbreviations and spellings to save time and thumbs. The consensus appears to be that such code-talking is inapropriate in a general forum like this.

If English is not your main language, my apologies, I’m sure I could not do even as well as you if I was trying to post in Spanish or German or whatever.

But it IS an issue: speak online like an eighth grader, get treated as one. That’s just how life is, nothing personal.

To try to get this back on topic, one tip I would offer for pursuing corporate work is not to post letters of inquiry or resume cover letter in Leet-speak, unless the job was working for a game company or cellphone store. And I would err on the conservative side of sartorial selection; dressing below your age just looks lame:-)

[Mark Suszko]

I think the doctor and lawyer examples are at once the best and worst examples you could give. They are both very specialized professions, and you would not expect one lawyer to know everything about intellectual property law, tax law, divorce law, immigration law, etc. Doctors do not al have the same grasp of pediatrics, OBGYN, Gerontology, surgery, psychiatry, etc, that’s why they specialize.

The same with editors and producers; we can be generalists that know a little about a lot of areas, and/or specialists that demonstrate a command over one specific area. For such folks, there is no shame in asking after info outside their area of expertise.

I would not try to lie myself into a gig that was over my head. I think the much more common scenario is, a project is begun under a set of expectations and assumptions that change mid-course, and now the guy editing has to scramble to solve a new problem introduced by a client or circumstances. Say, it turns out a particular shot is not available or beyond repair and deadlines loom with no answers in sight. But you could save the shot with a little 3-d compositing magic, only you have not gotten arund to the tutorial for that feature yet. Or I have been in situations where we’ve bought new software and I have to start working with it the same day. Or we can afford the tool but not the training. That’s common.

If the guy or gal is truly clueless about the most basic concepts, and is expecting to learn on the job, that should be understood by everyone up-front and approved in advance. If it is a case of someone blatantly lying about their credentials then crashing the project, well, they deserve whatever bad fate they get. Something I’ve found in this business, especially since the internet, is the community of people that do what we do is incredibly generous in sharing their skills with others. The COW is a terrific example, but not the only one. Learning is living; never stop asking questions.

[Mark Suszko]

Update:

Editware is still alive, it turns out,
(surprisingly NOT yet bought up by Pinnacle!)
and they sell a doohicky for $600 that will adapt the old output to run on any modern VGA display. So maybe I can put a neat flat-panel LCD on the old 141 and “rice it out” with flames and air dams and neon tubing…:-)

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

[Mark Suszko]

Tongue in cheek answer: make a wedding video for the CEO’s daughter.

My real answer, you’re not going to like.

Wedding clients don’t mind that you do corporate; it makes you look more experienced. But corporate clients don’t have much respect for wedding shooters or even the more PC term, Event Videographers.

When you say corporate, I take that to mean marketing and sales videos, training videos, even commercial spots and web communications. These are all things that require producing, directing, and scripting, whereas (and speaking in generalizations mind you, and not looking to insult the wedding/event guys) the Event video stuff is essentially nonscripted documentation of an event, with some possible improvement imposed thru post-production later. Wedding stuff is “just” shooting, is the perception. Bottom line is they are different skill sets even though they have some things in common. If you want to be taken seriously for corporate work, you’ll need a better demo than your last wedding video. You might say “good camerawork is good camerawork regardless of the subject matter” and you would be right, but that argument does not impress the great unwashed, just us industry people. No, you have to look like what they expect and have exmples that are what the client expects. Just as you would not show up to a corporate job interview in a t-shirt and cutoffs but rather in a suit, even if the daily dress code there is casual.

Even if all you want are shooting gigs with the producing, writing and editing left to someone else. I’ll tell you that those kinds of gigs are reserved for the rarefied air of very big budgets, and the great bulk of corporate work is done by multi-tasking generalists who must handle some or all the functions, not just the camera.

I would say if you want to break into the corporate biz, try to get hired by an established corporate producer on a freelance basis as a shooter first. I found in the beginnings of my career that making contacts thru the broadcast rental houses was one way to find such gigs. Create some short sample demos of marketing videos or Annual Report Summaries for fictitious companies, or do some documentary type work for a charity subject, preferably a charity beloved by the CEO of the company you want to work for. You could use this as a way to get your foot in the door and even if nothing else comes from it, you will have done some good for someone.

Corporate work, especially for training, requires a lot of demonstrated skill in scripting and production, as well as the ability to work and coordinate with a large number of crew and client contacts. If you think it’s just shooting run-and-gun what a guy from the sales department points to with a post-production voiceover, you’re thinking too narrow.

Finally, forget this “free for the experience” cr@p. You’re never going to succeed in business doing it for free, and you’re opening yourself up to get ripped off. Would you let some unproven guy work unsupervised on the brakes of your family car free “for the experience”?

If you do the work, it’s worth getting paid for it, that’s a concept so old it is in the bible. If you want to somehow sweeten the deal to make it easier to hire you and give you a try, suggest something else like free re-dos if they don’t like the master, or offer a 2-step payment plan where you get part up front and part on approval… But I’ll tell you: no company exec is going to respect you unless you bill like you are a serious professional.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks for the scrounging-up of that document, I passed it on to the engineer, though reading it, it says the scan doubler is not for the model 141.

I have restored partial screen functionality using another borrowed ancient monitor… it was no better at first than the others we tried, but then I ran the 141’s VGA output thru our $6,000 Communication Specialties Scan-Do-Pro scan converter/video scaler. Yeah, a 6k scaler to make a 10-dollar junk monitor work… THAT is not a long-term tenable setup!

Using an output setting I think is called “PC 640″, I have *some” of the display (and some garbage alongside) back and readable enough to see the right hand side data and things like duration, and I can guess the rest, enough to finish the current project. Not so surprisingly after all these years of use, I find the hands run the controller well without needing as much reference to the display as one would presume. Then again, most of what I do is cuts, dissolves and fades, can’t even remember the last time this system commanded a wipe.

The original monitor cannot be repaired. Some protection relay in it is clickig like the turn signal of an old man’s Buick Roadmaster. The flyback xformer and all the crt drive electronics are in an encapsulated moduel that’s not repairable. I wish I knew more about this nonstandard display format the 141 uses, and how we could adapt somethign else around here to read it. This system could go another decade as long as there was a monitor that worked.

[Mark Suszko]

It seems to me, you need to be asking the speaker for permission to tape THEM, so the dubs for their personal archive should be done at cost or free, you bill the company that arranged for and paid the gig.

I think the idea of giving them a free or at-cost window dub is a good one: the window across the footage protects you from getting ripped off if they try to mass duplicate the speech, and it can be used to upsell the guy on an editing job later. However, you may have an ethics problem since the speech in that setting may be the intellectual property of the venue, i.e. the corporation owns the rights to it and any further use of it. This is what I would expect to hear, unless the contracts have this sorted out in advance.

[Mark Suszko]

Find the local Historical Society and attend a meeting. Find out what historic preservation projects are currently working in your town. Then you can offer your services making SEVERAL projects: The actual documentary of the subject, a fundraiser tape that asks people to vote for something or contribute to something, and a documentary about the whole process, instructing other organizations how you and the organization went about saving the Old Mill or whatever it is… These pieces can be put on your website as samples of your work to generate more jobs.

[Mark Suszko]

Forgot to mention when applying the gels to the glass with water, squeegee, and hand towel, keep a sharp safety pin on you to pop the occasional air bubble that refuses to get massaged-out by the squeegee. Also buy a pack of single-edge razor blades: they dull fast on a job like this and it’s better to throw the cheap blades away after a pass or two than to mess up a large piece of expensive gel.

Some guys swear by using a little dish soap in the water spritzer. I prefer very clean distilled water and nothing else except a little clear scotch tape along the topmost edge. Others I know of use windex for the whole operation.

[Mark Suszko]

You can buy gels that are neutral-density by themselves (N.D), or one that is also color-correcting daylight to tungsten to match your indoor video lighting. One such without ND is Roscosun 85 and one that’s a little denser, for super-bright locations is Roscosun CTO. The name of the combo filter escapes me at the moment, but google up the Rosco site and you’ll be able to find one; it looks like a dark brown to the eye, but reads correct to the camera if your white balance is set for indoor.

If you had the power and budget to use HMI, you wouldn’t need window gels except for maybe some ND or scrim cloth.

I have been on gigs where we had to treat very large windows, and you have two choices: apply the gel on the outside, typically by stapling and/or gaffing it taughtly to a wooden frame which is then mounted to the outside of the window, or you can apply directly to the glass. That depends on using either electrostatic cling, or very clean glass and a water spritzer and squeegee. With the water method, surface tension is basically holding the gel to the glass, assisted by some clear scotch tape on the edges where the camera can’t see. You cut the gel slightly oversize, then use a razor blade to trim it to the exact dimensions for a look that’s invisible. The entire process takes a long time; be sure to budget for that. If you are careful not to crease it, you can re-use the film many times.

Frame mounting outside needs to take the wind into account: it can rattle and shake the gels and frames like a kite, making audio problems as well as a distracting look.

In your case, mounting direct to the glass is going to be optimal, since you are working right around the window itself on the shots.

One last thing to consider: what is the view out the windows you’ll be working with? That may also require a treatment strategy.

[Mark Suszko]

I HATE trying to make dubs or masters for PBS stations. They have a reputation for finniky standards that makes Tony Shaloub look like a slob:-)

To your issue:

Vertical blanking can be “fixed” on the fly by running the master thru a DVE and cropping/re-sizing.

I personally don’t make a big deal out of making master reels start on the top of the hour, or 2 minutes prior (to make room for tone/bars/ slate, etc.) so actual program starts at 00:00:00, because we use no automation in our plant that would care about that, tapes are manually cued to a 2-pop for manual playback and the counter zeroed accordingly, or they are edited using a linear controller that does not enjoy pre-rolling and back-timing over a :59/:00 time break… but…

If I had to prepare a tape that went outside and they required the time code set up that way, I’d oblige, of course. But these days, tapes are all digitized into a server anyway, at which point their time codes pretty much become moot to my way of thinking. I mean, you can preserve the codes in case you want to re-lay shots into the master from the NLE timeline, but in the ten-plus years I’ve been editing daily on NLE systems I have needed to do that exactly… um… never. You could “fix” the time code issue by making a digital clone of the tape and jamming new code, or using a spare audio track to lay linear time code on and guiding on that. I can see where it is unpopular to have a bunch of tapes in the shop that each need a different setup for time code to play… can lead to mistakes on-air. Particularly drop and non-drop time code conflicts. We started editing in the 80’s using only non-drop, but eventually switched to be more compatible with our broadcast users.

But then again, my work is not as “high-end” as others here. I can imagine sceanarios where that “zero-time on first frame” time code setup would be necessary. I just don’t believe that’s universally “required” anymore. However, if the client sets a standard, you are honor-bound to comply with it, regardless of your SOP.

I got in quite a wrangle with a guy one time because our shop is still mono audio,(what can I say?) and the masters we send out are labeled as such, and 2-track identical mono (the phase was right) was just unacceptable to “mister surround sound” engineer at the other end. Give me a break, it’s a guy at a desk reading a prompter, do I really need to enable the subwoofer channel? 🙂 Another time, a guy took my ear off over the phone because out of a dub run of 200-plus, his one station required a certain track of the umatic dubs to be blank, so he could insert audio pulses into it for his automation playback system. As we talked back and forth, it became clear all he needed to do to make his dub work was flip his audio monitor switch on the feeder deck from channel 1 to channel 2, or move one measly audio patch cord over one space, or do an audio insert over the one unwanted channel, which he needed to do anyway to lay down his pilot tones, but *I* was screwing up his “system” with my “out of spec” dub. We tried hard to make him his “special” dubs from there on out, but the guy on duty for the run didn’t always remember to mute one chanel on one of a dozen decks during a pass, and mark the one unique dub for the one client. So we’d get the screaming thing on the phone about once every six months, till his automation system died and was replaced, and we went to betaSP dubs anyway.

I don’t know what “electronic black” in your reference means except that it is maybe referring to Japanese standard superblack at zero IRE units. If you bump that up to 7.5 for max black, your peaks are going to go over 100, and bringing those down, you lose dynamic range in the image though it’s now “legal”. Doesn’t look good, I’ll admit. The solarized or hot whites (lost detail in digital that goes over limit)can’t be recovered. This tape sounds like the entire edit was badly done or done without setting initial references, then “corrected” by running multiple passes thru proc-amps or whatnot. I will admit to making some of these mistakes myself as a beginner, long ago, though not all of them in any one tape:-)

If the original elements are available, I’d require a remastering. If this is legacy tape that can’t be re-done, best to put it in the Avid and clean up what you can, and bill for it. Sending it back to the guy who messed it up in the first place will just get you the same results over and over.

For FCP, there are some cheap but effective tool plug-ins from Digital Heaven that can repair or heal missing pixels and dropouts on the fly, look them up.

Best of luck with this thing. Let us know how it all ends up.