[Mark Suszko]

Sorry to keep needling about this, but don’t tell me you have synch rights, mechanical rights, and an okay from the arranger and the orchestra and their publisher for you to record a playback of their recording of their arrangement of Elgar’s music. If you went and got that clearance, I’ll eat a bug.

Same for the Anthem; if it was a recorded Anthem being played out of speakers, you did not get the rights to that recording of it. I will bet a Krispy kreme you didn’t.

Will someone complain and sue you? Not likely, I’ll agree, but certainly not impossible. ASCAP once very publicly ran a mom and pop corner bar out of business for playing Springsteen 45’s on the jukebox without paying a license.

Schools and school districts, true or not, are considered fat, rich targets for nuisance lawsuits of every kind, and I’m surprised their lawyers have not commented on any of this to you or the administrator. Were they even consulted? Just trying to keep your head down and hope nobody sues is not a responsible strategy.

But it’s also an ethical issue for the person making the DVD’s, as well as a business one. It’s unlikely, but *possible* that if the rights holders from the music company wanted to, they could sue you for your profit, gear, your house (if that’s where your studio is), any assets involved in your production. The odds of that are close to zero, but they DO exist.

You have legal alternatives, you can buy needle-drop versions of “pomp” and the Anthem. You could even contact the rights-holders for the actual records played at the event. it may be they give youy a free passs or a very low fee, just because you played by the rules. granted, running down the rights is often a hard job.

Going ahead and using the music without rights is an active, conscious choice. Size of the project or small amount of profit is no protection. Assuming you can piggy-back off someone else’s rights to the material is not wise, as their license doesn’t cover the same things your video does.

Am I being chicken little about this? Obsessive? overly-persnickety? Maybe.

Well, I reacted to a blanket statement that was technically false. What you do with the information is up to you. The law stinks, but it is the law; work to change it if you don’t like it.

[Mark Suszko]

Tony, I said a *couple* of passes, meaning two. I put the limit at ten, and my experience has been that that’s conservative. I did poke fun at the REAL cheapskates I know that run them 50 to 100 passes until the tape looks more like leader, and has so many layers of label stickers on it you can’t load it into a deck anymore. But I don’t think re-using clean, striped, one-pass stock for distribution is a bad thing at all, especially if the distribution copies are never coming back.

Your point about keeping the heads and tape path immaculate is well-taken, though. As is the fact that among all our expendables, tape is the cheapest thing… until you come back with it blank, that is:-)Nothing more useless than runway behind you, altitude above you, and returning with un-used tape stock.

[Mark Suszko]

“And the band plays the music, we are OK.”
Aanarav Sareen

“No, you’re not. You are just gambling no one will care.”
Mark Suszko

[Mark Suszko]

OK, I had looked at the Channel Storm in more depth, and you are stuck with one DV input only, can’t handle two live DV streams coming in, so it’s more useful for a single camera mixing in powerpoints.

I found this Edirol switcher on the B&H web site:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=359583&is=REG&addedTroughType=categoryNavigation

for under a grand. It’s nothing fancy, 4 composite/s-video analog inputs, cuts, fades, and keys. You would set your mac laptop video-out to mirror mode display, (you might need to add a scan converter at this point, unles the laptop has s-video-out, but you can get a scan converter under 100 bucks) then you could build rapid CG thirds and other titles in Apple’s Keynote, Powerpoint (ugh), even Livetype, if you did a little pre-rendering. Bring in the laptop and use a luminance key to make your supers.

Switcher output would be analog; you could run that into a digital recorder of your choice, perhaps a $300 DV camcorder with analog pass-thru. It’s a bit of a kludge, but it’s realtime and live, and if you already have the laptop, it’s under a grand.

There used to be a mac flavoerd CG program called Comet CG, I think it must be defunct now.

Good luck with your project.

[Mark Suszko]

Step one: look questioner in the eye squarely, without blinking.

Step two: Lie.

Step three: collect money from client.

I believe this is true in over 90 percent of these cases.

[Mark Suszko]

ChannelStorm LiveChannel. Google it. Costs about a grand.

[Mark Suszko]

Beta SP gets a little “better” after the first few passes, whch burnishes and knocks off any loose bits of dirt or whatever. I would say they are easily good for 10 passes, if you take good care of them, and may go longer, depending how much you baby them. It’s a rugged format. There’s a station I know that’s so notorious for recycling beta stock, all their footage looks like it’s shot in a blizzard. They seem to do a lot of live shots in order to avoid having to play tape, which invariably has wrinkles and dropouts. After 60-100 passes, it *may* be time to think about getting fresh stock, guys:-)And head cleaning is not an optional service.

Be sure to use a quality bulk eraser, or stripe the tape end to end if you don’t want older images to suddenly pop up in, before, or after a paying client’s programming. They hate seeing that, as they tend to expect fresh stock is used each time.

[Mark Suszko]

In my day, the colleges all had special arrangements with the TV stations and ad agencies for internships. Have you tried the school’s department head putting in a word for you? Or their vocational counseling department? If the internship is not for pay, it should at least be worth academic credit.

When I was in college, the ONLY interns the agencies and stations would take were from the colleges and university video/media programs; the school weeded out the weak and undisciplined, and sent you to your internship job with at least some rudimentary skills and knowledge, and then it was up to the student to get as much real-world education out of the experience as he or she could.

I tell this story a lot, so those who’ve heard it, forgive me.

I interned in Chicago, and our TV class had internship openings at the big O&O network flagship stations and also ad agencies like J.Walter Thompson.

I didn’t get one of those, I got an internship out in the suburbs at a Continental Cablevision studio not far from home. Turned out to be the best possible choice.

Comes the end of the year, we’re all gathered around to share out internship experiences. The other kids that had gone to work at the prestige places all had the same story. They were so proud they got to work with Bill Kurtis or Walter Jacobsen or whomever, and had a nice letter of recommendation and maybe even a scheduled interview somewhere for a job. But when the teacher asked about their portfolio or reels, the answers all boiled down to the same thing: due to union regs, they had never touched any gear all summer, hadn’t shot anything, edited anything. They were experts at xeroxing, handling phones, making a damn fine cup of coffee. They had impressive contacts and no marktable skills. The ad agency interns were much the same story: they were always name dropping famous people they were working next to, but none of them ever actually did anything meaningful on any accounts. They were pure observers.

Comes my turn for show and tell. I was a line producer handling everything for the Wednesday edition of a daily PM Magazine type show on the cable outlet. I was finding, interviewing and shooting tape of my own guests, writing scripts and prompter copy, assistant directing and producing during the live tapings, editing segments, driving and working on the remote truck, shooting live sports and entertainment, all while performing reporting and on-camera stand-up segment presenter duties for other producers. I basically got to try or do every video job except touch the holy head-end dish controls. I had a reel with several hours worth of examples of my work. I had a list of gear I was qualified to operate as long as my arm. I knew how to improvise in the field and get the shot. I was a point-and-shoot missile, ready to launch at anything you needed done right and on time, and I was 21. It was a very good year:-)

I had no fancy reference letters. I could not name-drop companies or personalities. I still can’t make a decent cup of coffee. But I have made a living making television of some sort for about 25 years now, got a wife and three kids, house, car, too many bills, not enough pay, a few minor local awards, but I have made what I consider a successful career out of this. And I feel a lot of it I owe to that no-status but very useful internship.

[Mark Suszko]

American Cinema Editors, an exclusive honor society of recognized editing professionals.

Other terminology can be looked up in the film terms glossay at IMDB.com

[Mark Suszko]

I feel to really grasp editing, it is good to start out with a little linear experience, even if it’s cuts-only.

A dyed-in-the-wool film editor will tell you, NLE’s are nothing new, because film has been cut that way since…always: the NLE get’s it’s “bins” from the actual bins film editors used to use to hold individual trims or clips (that were held to an overhead rope or wire with clothes pins or clips), and that film editors often worked in a non-linear flow, first on one section of the film, then back or forward to another. The multi-reel flatbeds were the precursors to your NLE stacked timelines. It’s only gotten more efficient by becoming digital.

That said, Avid and FCP are more alike than not, and Avid’s grip on Hollywood is and has been slipping steadily, as FCP and other systems have matured, they all approach the same point on the horizon. You can configure an FCP system today to use the identical keyboard shortcuts and hot keys as an Avid, or premiere, or Autodesk, etc, to work essentially the same, you can (with some work) transfer EDL’s and metadata between the systems, though this is not yet as smooth and seamless as it could be. Really, the key concepts of NLE systems are the same in all brands and makes. Some are stronger in certain areas than others is all. For example, Avid still seems to have a better grip on file structure and databases. FCP may be better in terms of user interface between modal and non-modal. Since every person editing is different, they all tend to prefer a system based on their own needs and styles. The common thread between all of these is *HOW* we cut and why.

The people likely to get hired first would have experience on all the popular systems, but if I was hiring, I’d look at their actual skills, their reel, and hire based on what they do with the system they know best: if they were good editors, but not familiar with my “house” system, I’d likely still hire them and give them some time to transfer their skills over. You are hiring what’s between their ears, not what’s under their fingers, that only takes a credit card to attain. I’d much rather hire a guy/gal who knows how and why to cut something a certain way, than a person who knows what key to press but not what goes behind that. Hell, NASA trained monkeys to press buttons in a space capsule and get a result, but did the monkeys really understand what they were doing?

Isn’t this why the forum is called the Art of the Edit? Artist first, technician second. You can always make a technician out of an artist, but you can’t always get the reverse to work.