[Mark Suszko]

Yes, there are software providers out there that have a system that lets you author training with multiple-choice questions that it automatically grades, and if you want to do it, you can set it up so that they are looped back to the relevant sections for review and re-test, or to a more detailed explanation, if they mess up a quiz. Tyically they use text an static illustrations, but they could add video clips if needed.

I saw a demo of this once a couple years ago, it was as easy to use as powerpoint, with a somewhat similar interface. I’m sorry I didn’t keep the info on it now, I can’t remember the name of the product or company. We didn’t need it at the time and such stuff was the baliwick of another department anyway. But it’s best feature was self-scoring and tabulation. I think it was all probably coded in visual basic, tying into a spreadsheet.

Try to Google “custom interactive training software” and it should come up in the first couple pages of hits. Having such software makes more sense than contracting out each new test.

When you think about it, this kind of app is the same as the branching menus of a DVD, only a little more detailed. You can also do this directly in Powerpoint with a little patience: you add buttons to the multiple-choice questions on a slide, and then you link each button to a new powerpoint page with the result, and from there, a link back tot he questions or to the next question slide, plus an escape to start or finish. The whole thing can then translate to HTML with a click in powerpoint’s authoring environment. Yes, you can do these things in powerpoint!

I once did a demo of this, for a proposed interactive exhibit, because I lacked HTML programming skills: I called it “the advent calendar”, because like those, it basically has many little windows that popped open on a master image. They liked it enough to hand it off to a programmer who knew web design tools and coded it as HTML. Worked well.

The concept was a cut-away of a house you navigated to see what energy-saving strategies can be applied to each room.

I had a cut-away illustration of a house with multiple rooms, and each room had hot buttons made for it using powerpoint to take you to an alternate page which was a duplicate of the main illustration except for the “revealed” feature. Rollovers were also enabled, as well as sound files to narrate the links out loud, for anyone with trouble reading or seeing. I basically used about 20 near-identical pages, each one with one special difference called out. The links then just navigated you to the version appropriate for the message. Plus each one had the entire page set as a button: if you clicked anywhere, it would take you back to the master image. I also was able to set a time limit to each page that would re-set to the default opening page/slide if no click happened for 15 seconds, this was to re-set if people just walked away from the display.

For simple quizzes of say 20 questions or less, this powerpoint approach may be the most cost-effective route. The downsides are the complexity goes up big-time, exponentially, as the number of questions and possible responses increase, and you’d pretty much have to re-do the thing from scratch for each change in the test or subject. At athat point you’re probably better off coding it in HTML, java, flash, etc.

The advent calendar house was a display but the format I used is the same for running a quiz. I did a shorter quiz once called “You be the judge” that played three AVI files of show-cows in windows, then you made a choice by clicking the window you preferred, to take you to an “answer” page. That one was “What the judges look for when judging cattle in the 4-H competition”. The concept was for city folks to play judge and learn what characteristics score highest on the cow, hog, etc. Then they try to out-guess the judges’ decision in awarding the blue ribbon. If you get it wrong or are stumped, it branches to other avi files like a day in the life of a 4-H kid raising a competition animal, or the judge himself describing each item that’s scored, and what to look for. Makes city folks appreciate what they see at a state fair. It never got past the proof of concept stage though, wish I could finish that some day…

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve only ever played with a small Matthews jib on a doorway dolly. I think about twelve feet is what it goes up to, yet it is small enough to carry in a van when broken down. Sturdy sucker, no flex, carries a full size betacam. For something lighter, maybe the cobracrane, there are like a million people selling jibs these days, most of them I think are pretty flimsy though.

If you get the right kind of dolly for it, you can dispense with track and just set the wheels for the curve you want. Very flexible.

[Mark Suszko]

ITVA, which is now called MCA I think, takes annual surveys of people’s jobs in corporate A/V and breaks down average annual salaries in a report that is available in full to members, and some of that info is put out in dribs and drabs thru the year in articles in their magazine. My subscription lapsed I guess, don’t get AV/V mag anymore, or they changed the name and I’m not recognizing it anymore.

Shout-out to Ron L: these kinds of questions seem to come up a lot, and it might be a neat thing if the Cow offered a confidential poll on things like this and published the results from time to time, perhaps inyour magazine, nudge-nudge. You are already set up to take the data from us members. Just strip the personal data, and publish the job title, average amounts, highest and lowest, maybe something about the georgraphic region or market size. You can ask for it using ranges instead of specific amounts.Abstracts of that data might be useful for your advertisers to use.

Other questions I’d put on such a survey would include:

What make NLE do you use and how many?
What compositor do you use, if any?
What format do you take in and
What format do you put out?
What’s the number-one item on your wish list ?

[Mark Suszko]

$800? For tweaking, encoding and AUTHORING 50 pieces of tape into TWO separate DVD’s in three days?

You have to be freaking kidding me.

Assuming each student’s piece is no more than three minutes, that makes a 2&1/2-hour DVD. Two of them, actually, you said. Even assuming you automate the authoring by using something like iDVD and it’s built-in templates, this is still going to take quite a lot of time. You also don’t say who’s paying for the raw materials either.

A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation tells me you’re making less than $21 an hour for this. Maybe way less, since I’m assuming ten-hour workdays without any breaks for meals or even the restroom, and who knows how much time it may take to tweak some of the entries for levels and etc…

Figure your hours and your rate, then you can base a flat fee on that and give the flat figure to the client, but I am not a fan of the flat fee on projects that have creative variables, as it almost always undershoots or overshoots. If you undershoot, you lose money or have to beg the client for more, and this is always a bad and unprofessional proposition to be in. If you overshoot, by a sufficiently large amount, you’re never going to get called again, or will never get the initial bid. The flat fee should only be considered a baseline, with the understanding it can go under, but likely will go over by some percentage.

Flat fees are okay for mechanical things like straight dub making. I think for creative projects they are dangerous.

Most of all I think you are selling yourself cheap for 800 bucks; I can get that much for four hours work or less just shooting a wedding on a Saturday or editing one spot for an afternoon.

[Mark Suszko]

AE is the most commonly used one out there in terms of sheer numbers. I think every editor should haev some level of compositing skill, and you can pick one of the various choices out there, AE being one of the most popular.

If your question is about what skillsets make me the most flexible and marketable tot eh widest number of employers, then I think you answered your own question fromt he start. A person could (and many Do) make a career entirely out of mastering A.E. alone. Not everyone is going to have or need to have the same depth of skill in it to get their jobs done, but it can solve a LOT of editing problems such as those where you have to create shots that were not there originally.

And in these days of faster-cheaper, most employers prefer “renaissance people” with a greater group of skills. If you can demonstrate that you can build good graphics, sweeten audio, and put together some basic composites like greenscreens and DVE moves, or motion-track footage to stabilize it, or add-in some set extensions or fiddle with the colors, you’re likely to get hired over someone who is good at only one of those things. Stands to reason.

Yes, there are always exceptions. You hire Walter Murch for his cutting eye; making him fritter time away building composites or rotoscoping mattes is a waste of his talent and expensive, productive time.

But I’d say 90 percent or more of the editing jobs out there are not cutting major motion pictures, but more pedestrian things, with smaller budgets. And darned tootin’ an editor who also has AE or other compositing skills is going to get more work.

[Mark Suszko]

I think your friend is right on this one.

[Mark Suszko]

Walter Murch agrees with you. In one of his books he even talks about making a fake miniature theater with seat rows and all, in front of a monitor, to give him a sense of scale. It is true that due to parrellax, your brain percieves the same motion on a small versus large screen as a change in velocity. A variation on this is why water wave scenes and other model effects have to be shot overcranked to give the right sense of time and scale.

[Mark Suszko]

I think I have a better example. “Rope”. Where the idea is the whole movie is one continuous shot, only it couldn’t be, because the film reels weren’t long enough, so Hitchcock had an actor walk in front of the camera creating a natural wipe. Cutting on the pass, you are tricked into thinking it is still a continuous shot.

Speilberg and his editor used this technique a lot in a particular scene in “Jaws”. The scene is Brody, uncomfortably sitting on the beach; the mayor has coerced him into allowing swimming on a beach that almost certainly has a shark nearby. He watches the bathers in the water intently, his gaze flitting from one false alarm to another. Other bathers are walking thru the shot continuously. Each pass is a wipe/cut and as they reveal the new scene, it’s a closer and closer shot of Brody. It really ratchets up the anxiety and tension for the arrival of the actual shark.

[Mark Suszko]

Flat rate will always mea you either overcharge or undercharge and neither is good. Stick to an hourly rate with perhaps a minimum base rate.

[Mark Suszko]

My guess is they wanted to re-do your spot without calling you in.