[Mark Suszko]

I guess the relative reputation of the media that covers your work also has something to do with it. The advertising spiral strategy can get tired if overplayed. I long ago stopped reading POST magazine because instead of any kind of discussion about editing theory, practice, or technique, it was all about what company merged with what company this week, the shop owner’s socializing, two or three glamor shots of a newly remodeled edit room that concentrated on the kitschy themed decor and not the equipment, or some huge file photos from a film or TV special’s standard press kit with a tiny article that at first seemed to claim XYZ company did this whole movie… then you read further and it turns out they did something very very distantly related to the blockbuster movie, like cater one of the ADR sessions for the “making of” DVD bonus track.

Many of the larger ads in it were placed suspiciously close to the articles about the same company, and the ads worked at hyping expectations to unrealistic levels. It seemed like everybody was taking way more credit for everything than they deserved, and promising way more than they could truly deliver, and I got disillusioned by the whole thing and never renewed that magazine.

[Mark Suszko]

It’s a chicken-and-egg proposition. When a company or individual gets a really neat high-profile or award-winning project, they flog the heck out of it in industry related magazines, on their web site, etc. Then people looking to hire see that and say “well, I want that guy, or a reasonable facsimile”. And “that guy” gets a bunch of new calls and inquiries. he becomes more in demand, and that feeds more demand, since there must be something to his mojo. The loop feeds on itself. If you can’t get That Guy, then you start looking for anybody that looks similar. So you tend to see a lot of trends in demo reels and advertising from season to season, it’s mimmickry of whatever is hot right now.

So my mantra is that doing the work is advertising the work; that a superior product and word of mouth from satisfied customers beats any other method. I’ve worked twenty-odd years for a very small production outfit that has never had to advertise it’s services: it has to sometimes turn work away because the pipeline is full of repeat customers and clients that saw or heard about what we’d done for another customer. Granted, for a lot of them, we were the only game in town, but a number of them had the opportunity to go to an outside competitor and usually stuck with us or returned after not being as satisfied.

[Mark Suszko]

Interesting point. I wonder what they do for the ones used in all-day 24/7 applications like digital signage? Maybe they don’t use a plasma for those but an LCD instead.

[Mark Suszko]

Yeah, as far as I know (which isn’t much) the plasma screen has no way to discern the orientation of the signal nor any way to automatically turn it on it’s side to fit. You have to choose the way that happens, either thru some real-time frame-bending technology like the kind they use for high-tech staging… or by gaming the system by pre-rotating the source and scaling it to fit during the shoot or post. I’m thinking the guys in the live-stage forum here on the cow would have some better ideas about this. They use some very advanced toys in their multiscreen work.

[Mark Suszko]

You mean, like a wide-screen plasma Tv set on one end to be in a vertical-oriented “portrait mode” versus normal “landscape mode”? I have seen articles in DV and other mags where a project was shot end-to-end with the cameras on their side, to capture as large a frame as possible which is then DVE’d and scaled to the portrait orientation.

If you were to shoot in High-res HD, you could shoot and compose your graphics “normally”, then rotate and scale everything in the composite to fit the destination “portrait” plasma and still look pretty sharp. I’m not any kind of expert on this but I imagine you’d want to shoot this in a non-interlaced format.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, camtasia does not output live,it’s a recorder, so if you are wanting a shot of the two people on the set with the laptop output blown up on a monitor alongside them, you’d have to fake that in post. That adds time to the project. If you could record live, you’d save a lot of time.

The way to do it live that works for me is a quality scan converter attached to the laptop: this works in real time, so you can take the scan converter output thrua D/A and IMAG it to the on-set monitor as well as time it and feed it into a switcher as if it were it’s own camera shot. That would look really slick, and save hours in the edit.

Yes, you could do this same thing with the direct s-out of the laptop if it has that, but the converter lets you scale and proportion the image to fit TV safe title area, and reduce flicker, as well as blow the image up to high maginification for some of the really tiny details you want to show clearly.

I always personally endorse the scan-do line from Communications Specialties, having used them a lot, but there are plenty of other brands out there that can work as well. The good ones are several grand, so for a one-time or infrequent user, you’d want to look at renting it instead of a purchase.

[Mark Suszko]

I think he means he needs a relay trip from the Toaster to activate the tally remotely so the operator knows when he’s hot. I’m not sure this camera he’s talking about has an external tally input.

[Mark Suszko]

I would first ask you if you really *need* the small footprint and portability of the laptop, or is this a vanity thing.

Because pound for pound you get more for your editing dollar, mac OR PC, using a tower based system. You get faster processors, easier upgrades, more screen real estate, more and better drive options… I am not dissing laptops per se, just saying they are the better choice if you have to be very mobile, going different places to edit, perhaps testing composites and greenscreen comps live on-set for instant feedback.

If you are a corporate guy that never leaves the cubicle, and all the tape comes to you, the laptop makes less sense except as a way for the boss to make you take work home with you at night and on weekends.

[Mark Suszko]

Hi, sorry to be so long responding, was on the road shooting. Yes, prefs have been killed and redone. Ran Apple Disk Repair tool to evaluate the drives and there’s nothing mechanically wrong, we should have near a half-terabyte free. We did find a few obviously corrupted files, like a 4-minute audio narration recording that claimed to be 20 gigs large. They told me they got Error 34, I can’t tell you if it had a minus sign ahead of it, what is the difference between them?

Thanks for the scratch folder tips so far, we’ll give that a try.
We bought Applecare for FCP video pros but they have been less than helpful, saying “FCP4.5 is no longer supported, call us back when you want help with 5.0, seeya.” I thought that was a poor way for Apple to behave considering we had just paid them that week for another year’s worth of said Applecare and like Adam Sandler said in The Wedding Singer: “Again, an item that you might have mentioned YESTERDAY”.

Didn’t mean to turn this into an Applecare rant, sorry. But wanted to point out you folks were more help than they were, and you didn’t cost some $700.

We’re buying 5.0 upgrades for the 2 seats of 4.5 today, perhaps this whole problem will be moot when we take these two ‘droids to Anchorhead and have their memories flushed… Before the new FCP 5 disks arrive though, I’ll try re-doing the scratch disks your way to see if it makes a difference.

Thanks again.

[Mark Suszko]

What you suggested in the original post will work too, and you can do it in Motion, Shake, Combustion, Boris or AE. Just do one treatment right up to the point the arm covers the logo, then save settings and do the same setup again a few frames later when it’s revealed again. The chromakey trick is a good one: if the logo is one color, you could chromakey out just the area of the logo instead of an entire shirt. You could also use Motion to grab area of shirt that is blank and motion-track it over the logo with a soft edge and this would also look better than a plain blur.

The real old fashioned way to do the trick is to just lay two identical tracks ina sandwich, blur one, and then set a soft edge wipe to reveal the blur layer below.