[Mark Suszko]

Get to the video store and buy or rent “The Kid Stays In the Picture” and/or “Riding Giants”.

These two films kicked off a revolution in the layered dimensional animation of photoshop stills.

“The Kid Stays In The Picture” is also rollicking good storytelling; watch the first ten minutes and you will HAVE to see the whole thing thru.

[Mark Suszko]

Well the “triangle” discussion happened before you fleshed out what it was you were looking for. I agreee it’s not a sales pitch to clients type of message of itself, because arrogant clients will just say they demand ALL THREE. They may think they get all three, but that’s rare.

To the new point you’re trying to make, you could cite the various scientific studies which show people retain information better when it’s presented visually as well as aurally. Wikipedia and google are your first stop for those.

And you can make a case for messages that are retained better when they engage the audience’s emotions, something video with sound is very good at.

Conversely you could point out how weak video is at conveying a lot of things better suited to text. I have had clients I would like to drill that message in to:-)

If you are trying to define a new market, you can show statistics about video sites such as youtube, which just hit some kind of record large milestone of postings/downloads this week… as well as getting sued for copyright infringment by the guy who shot footage of the Rodney King beating or whatever.

You can show how network Tv viewership this month hit an all-time low, at the same time apple is rolling in money distributing postage-stamp sized video via itunes. You can discuss how the TIVO phenomenon means advertising as we know it has changed forever, and that you know where it’s going next and how to execute it for the new environment.

You really need to kind of define what you’re trying to communicate on this site of yours and to whom; then the good choices for you will be more apparent.

[Mark Suszko]

Yeah, for what you want to do, the dissertation (grin) on editing could be collapsed down to: “the old linear systems were like typing everything out with a typewriter, and if you wanted to remove one paragraph, all the pages after it needed to be retyped after every change, whereas modern NLE’s are the video equivalent of word processors: drag and drop, cut-copy-paste, any changes any time.” Everybody I say that to gets the difference instantly.

I would suggest of the two things I was bloviating upon, the latter bit about actually going thru the research, needs ananylsis and most of all, the Creative Treatment stage is the more important one for your sales-oriented types to understand.

It speaks directly to their job and how well they do it. They will lose repeat business if they are just order takers that write down a few bullet points from a client and hand that to the editor as a “script”. Spots done that way don’t usually work out. Local car spots done by in-house cable operations suffer from this a lot. The sales guy needs to do a lot of listening and ask a lot of questions to determine if what the client is asking for is really what they want, and WHAT THEY NEED. There is a career’s worth of difference between those terms.

Treatments are not just for long theatrical projects or training films; they are useful tools for something as short as spots as well.

[Mark Suszko]

Where I work, we have some nice toys, maybe not the bleeding edge, but adequate. But most of our clients have zero budget or something very small… as in, maybe I can get 10-dollar honorariums and a VHS dub to my actors for a commercial spot, and maybe I can get 50 bucks for a special, vital prop, and that’s it. We work on revolving funds and charge-backs, so I live in a world of “funny money” compared to most of you guys.:-)All the production is billed as a one-time fee, but there is no billing structure to cover things like props or special supplies.

So for us the iron triangle equals we can still make it look good, and we can meet your budget, but we’re going to have to take way more time. Also, we have a LOT of customers in the pipeline, so we have to have a lot of lead time to fill requests for services. If I can’t buy or build standing sets or travel to a real location, I have to fake the locations using greenscreen, Lightwave, Photoshop, etc. and since the money clock’s not ticking on my hours put in, I can take all summer to make a high-end looking spot if I need to.

Other times, something comes in and needs an immediate turnaround. It may realy need some roto work, but they will settle for a soft edge wipe as long as it’s in the fedex guy’s hands by three.

Or the time a client wanted the look of some cel animation for a spot voiced by a kid. I tried to get them to buy us a copy of Toonboom which was like maybe $300 at the time and downloadable online, so I could have been animating in really high quality with preceision control within an hour of the go-ahead. They decided that $300 was too much, but still wanted the animation. So I built some south-park-like characters in a paint application, built several sets of mouth shapes, and built an entire spot in the linear suite, doing stop-motion single-frame linear edits and manipulating the characters with a 1-channel Alladin DVE and Alladin paint, keying in appropriate mouth shapes. Took two-three full days, made my eyes cross, and… they loved it, it ran statewide for years.

I once got a local first place award for a domestic violence spot that cost me less than $20 in props, all closeup tabeltop photography of a stopwatch, some simple switcher effects, with some pretty good theater-of-the-mind audio track work to sell a clearly-thought-out copy idea. I took several days to tweak and perfect the spot best as I could. I beat my rival’s $1000 spot that used location photography, boom shots, and actors dressed as clowns.

[Mark Suszko]

It took me a while to get around to reading the whole thing, I think overall it is a very good effort. Two places I want to make some suggestions about.

1)

I feel you over-simplified your descriptions of linear editing. Feel free to borrow chunks from what I normally use to describe linear and non-linear. I tell clients:

Since videotape was first created, editing between tapes was like assembling a college term paper using only a typewriter, scissors, glue and tape. If you wrote ten full pages of a story, and then needed to move or remove a paragraph or three paragraphs on page five, you left a 3-paragraph-long “hole” that meant you had to re-type every page from where the change occured on page five, all the way to the ending, so everything came out neat again. If you tried cutting and pasting over the paper with other pieces of paper with new words on them, they might or might not fit well, and the change might be objectionably obvious.

You could take the cut-and-pasted sections, make a photocopy of that, taking it down a generation from the original, and save yourself some re-typing, but the copies from page five to ten would not be as crisp as the original typed sheets from page one thru four. This was an “analog” process and referred to as “linear” editing because every shot depended on the length of the shot before it, and all the effects-dependent shots had to be laid down in page 1,2,3,4, etc order…The master tape was “destructively” edited, in that, like the term paper, you had to record over and destroy previous images on the tape to lay down the new changes. Even further back, in film, you actually had to cut up and splice together the film, so you were physically changing the original material, and you couldn’t always go back and undo the damage if you changed your mind. So editing in the analog linear days required a lot more thinking ahead, planning, and weighing the cost of trying something against the value of the result and the budget and deadline. I had clients who would make me set up a sequence of ten or more dissolves, then constantly want to go back later and change something in dissolve number three. They could not understand that all overlapping effects/transition shots (known as A-B shots) leading into and out of that shot needed to be re-recorded each time they made one tiny change. Like with the term paper and typewriter. It took all day to remake those ten dissolves six times, only to wind up exactly the way they were to begin with.

When digital video editing came on the scene, the task changed much as it did for writers switching to word processors. NLE’s are video word processors. Now each piece of video and audio was stored on a hard drive, and the editing commands were just pointers, pointing to the requested data. Like titles of the songs on an audio CD. The process is called non-linear because you don’t have to start editing with the first shot anymore; you can lay down footage from any point in your story, then work forward or backward from there. You can pick up a chunk from the ending and drop it in near the beginning if you wanted. A change at one point no longer demanded everything past that point be re-done. Want to change the speed of a dissolve? You can see the change instantly, fiddle with it all you want, nothing else is affected by the experimentation. This lets you really get things EXACTLY how you want for maximum impact. You can search-and-replace a specific shot like you could a name in an electronic document. You could drag-and drop, cut-copy-and-paste the video and audio files just as the word processor does, and any gaps created by you removing or changing a section automatically filled in. It is non-destructive editing: the original footage is never altered, you are generating a list of clips like the list of songs on your favorite CD and you “edit” by altering the order the list of clips is played in, just as you can shuffle the order the songs are played on the CD, and the songs are never changed, just their play order.

This means you can make many many (too many?) different iterations of a program, a version for every day of the year, and they all retain their original first-generation quality. From a practical standpoint, Nonlinear editing (NLE) lets the editor try more changes, improvements, or refinements in the same time it used to take to make just one version the analog linear way. Or make multiple targeted versions of one commercial spot with different logos or city information, etc. in the time it used to take for just one. As long as the data remains on the system, anything can be changed or updated, without fuss.

Once laid off to tape, and the hard drives erased, the program is now a linear thing again. We can make a change now by sort of scanning the finished document back in as you could with a paper, but we don’t have the same level of creative freedom as we did when all the original elements were on the hard drives. It’s like we transfered the CD to a cassette, and now you have to fast-forward or rewind past the songs you don’t like if you want tot change the playing order. We could not extend the length of a certain shot you like because we only have as many frames of that shot as the master tape does. To make that change, we have to re-digitize the reel with the original shots on it and replace the old shot with original footage that synchronizes with it and now we can extend the shot for you as you like. This kind of work adds time and cost to a project, so you really want to have everything fully approved before you flush the info off the ahrd drives, or you wind up paying more for the re-edit.

Oh, you were waiting for number 2?

2: Writing.

You sort of hint around it, but I think you could do more in this area in tems of detail. The way I present it is; you start with the needs accessment and research: figuring out what the clients says thay want, if what they want is really what they need, what kind of audience you’re trying to reach and with what kind of message. This leads to the next vital step which I think you glossed over: the Creative Treatment stage. Newbie clients think they just type a script from a standing start, like Athena popping out of Zeus’ forehead. No. That almost NEVER works.

You use the information about the audience to figure out what kind of creative approach will reach them with your mesage and be retained and acted upon. Read the recent cow posting about “voice” for more on this, but in capsule form, you don’t talk to the counter crew at McDonald’s the same way you talk to franchise owners. You have to know their age, gender, education, vocabulary and socialization levels, just for starters. Then your creative approach may be to use humor, or dramatization, or testimonials, whatever your research says these people will accept best.

The treatment is NOT a script; it is a blueprint for the script, a description. It describes the actions and the kinds of things that will be said, but not the specific words.

Example: Scene one> Location: warehouse, with pallets and racks visible. Bob tells Joe he’s not stacking the pallets in the approved way. Joe asks what’s wrong with his method. Bob explains the steps of the “A,B,C” method… We didn’t write the dialog yet, or any camera directions but you have a good sense of what happens and in what order, where. A writer can fill this structure in with well-tuned dialog and you have something that will work. Reading a treatment is like being able to take a time machine ahead and see the finished program in mockup form. It is the tool that allows you to get advance approval for the direction the program takes, with no surprises to the guys paying for this. It allows you to figure out budget and scheduling logistics to see if this program can be made within the client’s financial limits.

Clients can easily get hung up on a single word in a finished script and decide the whole creative concept is wrong. Treatments are more mutable than scripts and easier to collaborate over. If they later object to the word, you can alter the word but keep the narrative structure derived from the treatment the same. The best part is there are no surprises in this process; everyone goes ahead and approves this with eyes-open. Changes after this point become VERY costly, so the extra step of writing and approving a treatment actually SAVES you money.

Writing scripts without the treatment process is like trying to hit a pinata, blindfolded. Treatments take the guesswork out of the script. A good writer can blaze through writing a script once the treatment is approved, and now you KNOW it’s going to do the job. You can point at every line in the script, relate it to the treatment, show how it ties into the client’s original needs and the research into the audience. Remember the guy that approves the script may not be it’s target audience, so you have to show him why it will work on the audience even if it doesn’t move him personally.

[Mark Suszko]

The eternal truth, AKA the golden triangle:

“You can have it FAST”
“You can have it CHEAP”
“You can have it QUALITY”

But you only get two… any two, but ONLY two…

[Mark Suszko]

One of the things not often mentioned by these various systems is they have limitations on how many DV sources you can take in thru firewire. I believe on the Sony and the Tricaster, you actually are using analog video inputs off BNC cables, not Firewire. To me, this is not a big deal, as the pictures coming out of the camcorder’s analog spigots look pretty good, and quality BNC cable is WAY cheaper than firewire for long runs like you might use ina theater or club setting. Plus if you want to re-edit later, you have the iso tapes you rolled in each camcorder for that firewire edit. But some people insist on switching actual DV streams in realtime, all the time, for multiple cams, and this might be a deal breaker for such people.
So, just be sure to read the fine print onthe spec sheets and know what you’re getting. I used to suggest ChannelStorm livechannel on ibook for a field switching/recording solution on a budget, until I read the fine print that you could only have one live DV input, the second camera had to be something like a USB webcam. For some folks that’s good enough, for others, it’s not.

B&H catalog shows a stand-alone DV switcher, 4-input, for under a grand from Edirol, I think that’s a subsidiay of the audio gear maker Roland. If that can switch 4 live DV firewire inputs cleanly, without any delays, for under a grand, it’s phenominal.

[Mark Suszko]

Hell, yes, and I STILL do linear, not every day, but a couple times a week. Heck, I will finish today doing some simple cuts-only work inthat suite. Some things are still faster to do tape-to-tape than digitizing first,and the quality is good.

Our linear suite has three beta Sp decks, one DVCPro, one umatic, an S-VHS, Two Sony 1-inches, a grass 200 switcher and VPE 141 controller, which replaced a very sweet-handling but outdated EEECO EMME that had the best jog-shuttle wheel action EVER. And a control board trimmed in cherry wood! For graphics we used a Chyron VP-2, and it was a MAJOR upgrade when we got the single-channel Alladin to do CG and DVE and paint and etc. with. That is still running in there every day. We have a Video toaster 4 standing by to replace the Alladin when the genie no longer want to come out of his lamp. We maxed out the VT4 with a couple nice paint/animation programs, and it has a built-in NLE and DVD authoring as well as mulitchannel DVE which I still have not had time to master.
We have one NLE room for the workhorse Autodiscreet edit*6, and two spanking new FCP seats with identical gear and as many extra plug-ins and whatnot as I could think of. Our first NLE, a very easy to learn Panasonic Postbox, is in semi-retirement as a duplication feeder now. But when thay was new, we were the hot $%$% operation in town, man!;-)

The 1-inch and umatic are for playing back our legacy stuff, we used to ABC-roll to 1-inch masters but now master to the Beta SP or DVC Pro, and we have three NLE edit rooms that get daily workouts, but the linear room is also a live switch control room for studio tapings. It is often still used for the times one of us knows we can do something fater withthetime-worn gear and apps we really know well, than to fuss around with the computers on the NLE.

As far as what you do with the room that’s being retired, I would look at re-racking the best parts into a mobile studio for IMAG and field switching jobs.

[Mark Suszko]

If you know of a link on one of the NASA sites, I want to “ride” the SRB’s all the way to the water:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Well, iphoto on your mac will do an automatic slide show with fades and slight DVE pushes, even set it to a music track from your itunes or another file on the computer. I believe it renders out to a quicktime MOV. That’s as easy to set up as loading all the scans into one file, numbering the photos to make them appear in the order you want, hit a few buttons, done. Now, that won’t vary the timing or anything, the interval, whatever length you tell it to hold each shot, will be the same between all the shots. It is very simple, but fast. And you should be able to drag that into idvd and burn a DVD of the show simply that way too.