[Mark Suszko]

FAST used to be such a hybrid system, but is no longer available AFAIK.

Another way to do this is to take an existing linear suite and replace one record deck with a Tektronics Profile Digital Disk Recorder (DDR). This gives you the layering capability of D-2’s with pe-read, coupled with the speed of linear, and the ability to clone any shot losslessly for infinite ABCD>>etc roll effects.

I feel bittersweet about this idea; we wanted very much to do this in our one-inch bay, but the prices for the profiles were obscene: we could have afforded to buy a complete new NLE room for the cost of the Profile…. and we did.

BTW, Toasters are better than ever: we eventually added a VT4 to our linear room instead of the Profile. It comes with it’s own NLE system, DVD production tools, CG, DVE, paint, animation…. quite a lot there for your dollar. Not quite as samless integration as the profile, but way cheaper.

[Mark Suszko]

“Flex: the World of Orthopedics”
“Around the bends: news from the world of orthopedics”
“Dem Bones”
“Medicine in Motion”
“The Human machine”

[Mark Suszko]

It’s irritating when some guy calls you up to cuss you out because you didn’t know his facility takes their dubs with the audio only on channel two and blank space on audio one. This was not on the spec sheet for the job. I ask the guy why he needs it that way. Says it’s for his automation system, which inserts a tone on the unused channel.

But then it comes out that he’s not using our dub directly anyhow: he’s dubbing to another format from our dub. I quietly point out that if that’s the case, isn’t it simply a case of him flipping one switch on the deck to assign the channel, or move one patch on his router/patchbay to put the audio wherever he darn well needs it.

Long pause on other end of phone line.

“I’ll get back to you. (CLICK)”.
“You’re welcome”.

We are in a service business, and your clients should expect that you will catch their little mistakes and fix them as a matter of course. How and if you reveal the extent of your help is up to you, but if it’s really driving you nuts, put a notation on the billing statement along the lines of: “levels on client supplied element were out of spec, corrected at n/c.” This makes you the hero, and leaves a subtle paper trail you can point to over time , that you are giving value-added service. If you like, you can figure how much extra time the fixes cost you, and increment your bill a little to cover it. Call it a “stupid tax”.

Or, you can diplomatically ask to come over to their facility on a courtesy call to look over their system and see if you can’t help re-calibrate their audio metering or their scopes so their output comes out better. This way you are turning a negative into a strong positive and really selling your service over a competitor’s.

[Mark Suszko]

If you do this more than once a week, you get into a case of diminishing returns. Don’t forget to bill extra for the overtime: billing straight time after 12 hours on, with six to go, makes no sense.

Driving tired after such a gig is a really bad idea, better if you grab two-three hours on a couch at the shop than climb into a car in the dead of night with impaired driving. I got my one scare long ago: after dropping a date off at her house, driving tired, I started driving West on the tollway from the edge of Chicago, heading home, 30 miles away. I blinked my eyes for just a second, I swear, and next thing I knew, I found I was parked at the passenger drop-off at O’Hare International, just idling. I had lost active consciousness and in a hypnotic kind of state, followed the tail-lights of a cab in front of me all the way to the airport, a 20-mile detour. YIPE!

I’ve done plenty of late night double-shift edits, and I find past a certain point, I lose too much efficiency and start making dumb mistakes that cost even MORE time. It’s like it takes 99 percent of the energy to get the last 1 percent done… I would have the hardest time setting up a clean dub of the master, or I’d get a system crash, and restore to the wrong version of a program, or lose track of a file… back in the linear tape days, there was one time I erased the one-inch master by mistake when nearly done, by being too tired to remember to set an out-point when adding a simple insert of an updated slate to the front of a finished piece. “MAN that seems like more than 10-seconds – OH #$@%#!!!” It was making me nuts.

It also does take a toll on your family life and interpersonal relationships. One of the things that has helped me is to be a little more conservative when predicting the amount of hours for a job. I know from experience that, if there are no problems, a certain job should take about six hours, but I’ll book for eight or even 12, carrying over to the next day. I would not bill for the unused pad hours, of course. Too often, I have pushed myself to late hours to be the hero and get something done on deadline, then, anticipating a rest break, something comes up, work or family related, requiring MORE of my time, and now I’m going into the new job at less than optimal efficiency, punchy, irritable.

By giving myself more of a pad, those unpredictable things that pop up don’t endanger the deadline as badly. We tend to want to be the hero, to be Star Trek’s Scotty that always comes thru in the clinch, but sometimes that’s not the best thing for the good of the project or the people we love. No video is worth your life to finish, remember to think past the immediate deadline, long-term.

[Mark Suszko]

“Flex: the World of Orthopedics”
“Around the bends: news from the world of orthopedics”
“Dem Bones”
“Medicine in Motion”
“The Human machine”

[Mark Suszko]

I don’ think would try a lot of shakey-cam stuff or whip pans on the old folks, no matter what. It’s all about the context defining what’s apropriate. i do have an idea of you want to jazz it up a little…

You can make things more kinetic thru multiple cuts where objects in the field of view have been shifted, like jump cuts. Every time the eye and brain detct a discontinuity, they force more attention, so as to evaluate what is new in the scene. This style of shooting should e a little easier on your encoding, because it’s all straight cuts without motion, so you need fewer of those B frames or whatever they’re called.

How do you use this technique with the older people? You set up a locked-off camera looking at a lot of layered depth in the shot: things in the foreground, the background, and in-between. Then you move the subject around that set and have them static in one area for a number of questions, and another area for some more, etc. This can be edited with slow dissolves between the re-positions for a different feel than the hard cuts. If you shoot a “plate” of that set without anyone in it, you can do some very emotionally-charged dissolve type appearances and disappearances within the set.

I used this technique on a highway road safety spot a year or two back. Interviewed a woman who’d been hit by speeding/sloppy drivers while she was a construction zone flagger. We went to the cemetery where her brother was buried: he’s been killed by a speeding and careless driver in a work zone.

I set up the wide shot using a high angle, psuedo-crane shot created by clamping a hi-hat to a 10-foot stepladder. I pre-set the focus to make sure when she was very close, she’d be sharp, and I had a lot of DOF so she was sharp all thru the scene.

I had her walk into the shot from about 200 feet out wearing a wireless and just talking extemporaneously about and to her dead brother about the folks left behind, how they were getting along in his abscence. It was lucky for us that using this shooting/editing technique, we didn’t reuire long, perfect master takes or repeatability in what was said, because the poor lady broke down anumber of times going over the pain of the loss. We all had to take breaks here and there. As long as the camera never moved, none of that mattered.

I then posed her in various spots within the frame, sometimes breaking the rule of thirds on purpose. Some of he time she was just standing there looking up at the lens, or at the grave, sometimes she was speaking as well. In each zone of the shot, we asked a couple interview questions and had her tell the guy’s story, and also pitch out a few tag lines. Talk, move her, talk some more. Finished with a plate shot, as described earlier, so she could de-materialize out of the shot of the headstone, leavng him behind, alone.

The rest of the job was just picking and choosing clips and audio in the edit room and rapidly dissolving her pop-ups in various areas of the scene, with music and Foley. She gave us a wealth of emotionally heavy material to work with; I could have done multiple spots or even a 15-minute mini-doc with what we gathered in that hour. The finished product came out quite honest and arresting, I thought, considering we just threw it together in an hour’s time, with no special rigs or grip gear other than a reflector and the ladder.

So maybe you can do something like this with your seniors. One of the side benefits of it is it really opens up possibilities for you to move voiceover and on-camera speech clips around, to tighten-up narratives that tend to ramble… oops. like I’m doing!;-)

Let us know how your gig goes.

[Mark Suszko]

I read that same article, and I disagreed with it. Certain ‘forms’ in how we shoot have evolved over time because they plain WORK. While you *can* face them right into the camera, it gives a different effect than taping someone looking *past* the lens to someone off-camera. Choice of which way to go should depend greatly on the content and subtext of the material.

I was shooting a politician for some news interviews, and some bad advisor had left the politician with the wrong concept that they should ALWAYS look right into the lens, so we had a lot of awkward-looking footage where the pol was looking at someone asking the question to them, then ignoring that person and turning to the lens to deliver the answer. They had been told looking into the lens somehow made them more honest looking, but all it did was accentuate a very awkward, creepy artificiality to the responses. Especially when they did this during talk show interviews. After we played back some of the footage, this stopped and we went back to doing it the customary way.

It’s one thing for a spokesperson to address the audience directly thru the lens. Or an actor, playing a role. When it is for testimonial or interview footage, I think it looks bad to address the lens.

In this vein, I REALLY hate the T.D. Waterhouse spots with Sam Waterston, where a cutaway second or third camera shoots him from the side while he’s looking into the lens of the primary camera and pitching, acting like he doesn’t know the camera is looking at him from the profile. What this angle does is convey a “behind the scenes” look to the footage, but in doing so, it destroys the illusion that this was ever a true and direct communication with the audience. This cutaway look started to get popularized on MTV coverage and VJ stand-ups some time back. It was used a LOT in promos for network news reporters and anchors, showing the behind the scenes view to give a sense of special access, of being part of the production team, or something. It barely works IMO for that kind of promo. It takes a certain knack to pull this look off and it needs to be done in an appropriate context, and places I see it used now have completely ignored said context, and are using it for a “look” that’s supposed to be ‘edgy’ or something, but it just distracts instead.

It’s like using altogether the wrong spices and condiments on a meal, just to change things up, but not considering that hot dogs may not actually taste good done in chocolate syrup instead of mustard.

I’m from Chicago, where it’s sacriledge to put ketchup on your hot dog, and I feel the same way about unmotivated use of the wrong eyelines in these shots.

[Mark Suszko]

Jack, you started this thread, but I never got a link from you, so have not seen anything yet.

Saw the samurai piece, very nice, nothing to apologize for, it was executed very well in every regard. Wish I got to work on stuff that fun and cool.

The one spot in it that may have not been as powerful as it could be, and this is truly a minor nitpick, was the moment they stop fighting and realization dawns. I think in hindsight, what I might have done differently there was, let one show he’s gotten a small, bleeding scratch/cut from a near-miss; then let the other one recognize it and let the triumph on his face turn to concern because he’s realizing he cares for the guy and cant go on wioth this to it’s inevitable conclusion… and then it goes on as before from there. Because the way you have it now, the motivation for their stopping is not all that clear.

“It made me so ashamed, I tried to commit Sudoku.”
😉

[Mark Suszko]

I watched the pilot episodes of “The American Inventor” this week, where they did a lot of white limbo shots that were grabbed in a hurry on location with what looked like a cheaper DV camera. Not very impressive, overly harsh.

One of the tricks I have heard of is not to use white paper, but a light gray, then you have a little more latitude in the intentional over-exposure before everything clips into oblivion. I would use soft box lighting on the talent, get as much separation from the backdrop as practical, and maybe dial down the detail control just a little on the camera, perhaps even add a light mist filter.

I will try my own advice next month: I have to shoot an entire spot with three people standing side by side, full-body shots, in white limbo, and this week I’m playing/experimenting with two ways of executing it: chromakeying them so I can composite a backdrop with maximum control in post, or shooting using a real light gray/white roll of photog’s paper, doing most of the work “in camera”, and reducing the postproduction workload.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, you can throw some shutter effects on the footage, you can ramp the speed up and down, from overcranked to uber-slow on thepoint of contact. See Guy Ritchie’s films, he’s known for this technique. You can play with the audio, make it a silent fight with specific sound effects leaking thru a muzzy background din as punctuation.

You can throw in flash frames of white at impacts or alongside cuts to new angles. You can shake the frame of POV shots in post to make them seem more realistic. You could go back and shoot more cutaways, more footwork, the corner men, ref, judges, crowd reactions, etc. You can cut-away to some internal visual monologue in the protagonist’s head, flashbacks to family, to childhood trauma’s, etc. When you add layers of context, you add psychological weight to the punches, so when they connect, it’s not just a simple meat to meat contact, but a symbolic blow against everything and everyone the character is fighting.

I saw a fun technique where after the gloved fist connects to a ribcage, it cuts to an x-ray shot of the bones bending and cracking for just a second. Effective scenes like that were in the movie “Cinderella Man” and “The Rundown” (which I didn’t think I would enjoy, but really did). You can also look at what they did in “Fight Club”… just don’t talk about it…:-)