[Mark Suszko]

Bring chocolate!:-)

[Mark Suszko]

College didn’t have much to tell me about *how* to edit, except to put some formal terms to things I was already grasping intuitively just from watching good and bad stuff on TV and in the movies and self-directed reading. In college radio I was a Dj, Producer and finally the GM, and I would do highly produced psa’s and commercials editing between audio cart machines, making Dickie-Goodman-like gag pieces for amusement. You didn’t get to do anything in the TV studio until Junior year, and color TV was reserved for Seniors and grad students. This tended to weed out the uncommitted.

The majority of profs at the time were either horribly out of date with real-world technology, experienced but burned-out pros who were phoning it in, or they were pure theoreticians that barely knew which end of a camera you point, but wanted to rap about D.W. Griffith, McLuhan, Andalusian Dog, and Potemptin for hours. If you wanted to make the most of your expensive tuition, you spent every free moment with friends in the labs doing practicum work, hands-on. And busting your butt on internships. I watched a lot of TV, always have. If something particularly moved me to an emotional response, I would tend to analyze it and deconstruct it until I felt I understood the technique and choices made. I also watched really bad TV, to see what they were doing wrong. Still do. My parents never understood my fascination for the business, even when I explained to them I was driven by the desire to reach into people’s heads and hearts and make them think and feel what I wanted them to think and feel. After years of tempering, I expanded that initial desire to include making people *understand* as well as think and feel.

I think I was born to direct and edit, because we have family audio tapes of me as a 5-year-old performing songs and telling dad where to “cut!” and “fade it out now”. When we were still less than 10 years old, we used a 110 instamatic camera and sometimes Polaroids (when finances allowed) to re-create visually, stories like “Dracula”, kind of like storyboards or comics. Dad shot lots of home movies of us as kids, so that probably reinforced things. I was an early reader, had read unabridged Treasure Island, the Illiad and the Oddessy, Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys by age five. Story telling was a big deal to me from the beginning.

I first learned editing on reel-to-reel audio tape with a splicing block, grease pencil, and tape dispenser as a teenager, and in grade school/junior high 8mm film class, making little 3-minute music videos edited roughly to time out when a wild track on cassette was played alongside it. I think my inspiration for those was The Monkees Tv episodes and Monty Python, which back then was only on it’s second run in the states;-).

In senior high in the 70’s we had a B&W TV studio with half-inch EIAJ reel-to-reel video recorders, and we learned rudimentary cutting by manually marking ins and outs with grease pencils and the mechanical footage counter and a stopwatch.

(Uphill, both ways, in the snow, barefoot:-))

You *were* the edit controller: you manually back-timed the decks using the stopwatch and threw a crossover record “punch-in” switch after timed pre-roll, at the edit point, praying the cut happened on the correct field so you wouldn’t get a glitch and have to try again. We had one very creative guy, did stop-motion animated cartoons like that, I think it drove him insane to spend seven weeks on two minutes, he turned to dope and wound up working at the lumber yard years later, last time I saw him. I made myself some documentaries, some bad comedy skits, and an ill-considered adaptation of a scifi short story, shot multi-take, single-cam, where each camera angle required unspooling the source tape and putting on a new one. In proper Hollywood tradition, the shoot was mostly an excuse to cast this girl I had a crush on, but I was too young to know anything about casting couches or even French kissing, much less anything more;-) It was just a way to be able to talk to her for hours with a good excuse. By the time I got up the nerve to ask her out, she turned to me and showed me an engagement ring from her boyfriend I didn’t know about.:-( That was junior/senior high.*sigh*

I worked a summer job during Sophomore year at VCA Teletronics, boxing and shrink-wrapping Hollywood movies bound for these newfangled video rental stores on betaMAX and VHS. I only got glimpses of the dubbing racks and edit room there, but I swore to myself and the housewives working the line alongside me, I would someday be *making* the programs, not just wrapping them. To this day, I loathe dubbing and shipping for that reason, and avoid that job as much as I can 😉

I did college radio my first two years at Loyola. Then I moved into 3/4 inch shooting, directing, and editing in my college internship job at Continental Cablevision in Elmhurst, Illinois, where I was a line producer, cameraman, writer, and I cut news packages for a PM-Magazine-type show. I remember the edit controller used a joystick that only moved left and right, I think it may have been a Horita, it had a speed control knob on the top that made it look like a gear shift knob, with a teeny little button you had to mash with your thumb to shuttle… that thing hurt like poking yourself on a thorn, every time you shuttled…gave you a blister like a guitar string… I hated that damn thing:-P.

That internship was a great, seminal experience; (Paula Jolene Smith, I thank you for your great teaching and guidance, wherever you are now) my classmates were all working with famous celebs at the Chicago O&O stations, but because of union rules, they never touched any gear except the phone, xerox, and coffee machine, and at term’s end, they had a letter of recommendation from Bill Kurtis or Walter Jacobsen but no actual skills or reels to show for it… While I got practice on everything in the station, including stand-up reporting, editing, remote truck directing, all except the head-end MC spot and dishes, and built a nice demo reel by summer’s end.

For fun, early 80’s I would rent time on a cuts-only VHS system some rich kid owned, it allowed you to do insert editing, which I used to make my own music videos out of existing footage for contests and for fun.

I made some freelance money fresh out of college doing industrial training stuff, again, cut on the VHS system. All the hardship editing on the cranky, primitive technology gave me discipline in shooting, organizing, and editing the footage.

When I got into the job I’ve had now for almost 20 years, they’d just dumped film 2 years previous, and we all learned to edit umatic to quad and 1-inch masters, then later beta to 1-inch A/B/C/ roll with a sweet EECO Emme linear controller, beta to beta A/B roll with a Grass 141, and then NLE’s in the 90’s. Once we had A/B roll editing and frame-accurate timecode editing, I was young and single, and spent lots of spare time in the suite playing and learning, trying to fake DVE and paintbox effects because we didn’t have one. We did lots of music video editing in the 80’s for things like interstitials and crowd warmups for the Prarie State Games, state fair commercials and montages, and the like, and I learned I had a good feel for cutting to the beat or deliberately against it. MTV was really new then, and I spent much time emulating things I saw there, because clients would invariably ask to ape something from MTV for their project at one point or another. I was chided for being “chromakey boy”,that was my main go-to trick for imitating FX we didnt have.

All along, I would screen things for people, watch their reactions, and look for ways to improve based on that, not just their spoken comments. I have gotten plaques and certificates from minor local area awards over the years for some of the stuff I’ve done, but by far the most rewarding thing is watching somebody tear up or jump up and applaud or say “Oh, I GET it now!” – while watching something I cut.

Which is good, because the pay kinda sucks;-)

(OTOH, 20 years on one job is something these days).

[Mark Suszko]

I have to say, the current season doesn’t look as good to me as earlier ones. I see them on a crummy SD set on an analog basic cable setup. The “crispness” is missing from this season’s “look”. The excellent lighting and innovative camera angles, crisp and witty dialog, and staging of the action are all still great, but everything has this down-converted pseudo-film-plugin look to it that disagrees with me.

If they are using 24 p and/or filmlook effects on the footage, I think they are subconsciously sending the wrong message to viewers. Bare old nasty SD at traditional frame rate has a feeling of intimacy and immediacy that, to my mind, really puts me right in there in the kitchen with Alton. The filmic look adds a psychological “distance” to what I view; like movies, it’s cuing me on a subconcious level that this is fictional programming. This has the effect of making me sit back from the TV and disengage somewhat: the whole ting feels more abstract and less immediate now.

Look at Iron Chef on the same network: there you have a mix of the styles: the immediacy of the handheld SD-looking cameras with traditional frame rates, and then look over the background/biographical/documentary segments, those have the filmic, distant quality, a temporal artifact.

Me: I wish Alton would take the show back to at least a 30 fps frame rate, I liked it better then.

[Mark Suszko]

Flashbulb pop done in view of both works well too. And looking at a blow-up of the audio waveform makes it easy to slip and slide until they match.

[Mark Suszko]

Back in the 80’s when editing was linear and puppies were the oldest animal, I would take the amount of footage already shot, and double that tape time plus add one or two hours to figure the minimum for a simple on-line session, one where I was well-prepared with a paper EDL and graphics and etc. all pre-made. From that I could calculate a rate and a markup. It worked ok for a while, but that was strictly for low-end work.

Today the situation is very different, and you’re asking how to budget with almost no known fixed items.

If you are a one-stop shop/one man band, where you are editor, graphic designer, etc. I suppose you could charge the same hourly rate no matter which function you were performing. Figuring how long it takes is like one of those mathematical expressions, where any three points combined, define a plane in space. The area of that plane is final cost. Let’s see if we can define three points. Another version of this is called the “iron triangle” or “golden triangle” : you can have it fast, good, and cheap, but you only get to pick two of these at a time, any two, but ONLY two.

One solid point you can always count on for creating our “plane” is the client will have a “drop-dead” deadline where something must be ready to show the final audience. We can back-track from there to know the maximum number of days available, obviously. Max number of days lets you decide how hard to work on it – will you need to run longer or double shifts? At what rate? Will this job preclude other, ucrative gigs, or is the pace lazy enough you could even work other jobs in-between? Having a delivery “date-certain” lets you look at the calendar and decide where roughly you need progress payments and milestones to happen.

Point two: If footage has alreay been shot, like I did in the 80’s, we can come up with a rate based on the number of hours, with a fudge factor mark-up that depends on the complexity of the job. High-precision compositing or CG animation rendering means more hours per finished hour than straight documentary cutting, so the more demanding job will have a larger percentage added to it. So if we know the amount of footage, or the nature of the footage and a rough running time for the finished product, we have some sense for guessing point 2.

Examples: Single-camera Lecture/speech editing to powerpoint cut-aways? Closer to the 2Xrealtime plus an hour or so figure for post from my youth. Dramatic re-enactments? With real actors? 3x realtime. With company “volunteers”? Six times realtime. Shot simultaneously on 2 cams? Bring the realtime X factor down a bit from six because you are more likely to have usable cut-aways, but then add back some time on the front end for extra time digitizing, plus the cost of more storage. That’s how I work it when trying to get a rough ballpark number. The more professional the talent, the more time is saved in shooting, because scenes are repeatable and consistent, and post time is reduced because you don’t have to work so hard covering errors. Pro talent costs more up front but saves more on the back-end. When I have to use non-pro talent doing dramatic stuff, shooting 2-camera is the only way I can get reliable, consistent takes and cutaways. But I’ve upped the camea rental costs, and may even have to add the cost of a second operator. Now your calculator is grinding away…

Point three: we can work the problem from the available funds side. If they tell you the project cannot exceed x amount, this lets you make a lot of decisions about the technical execution you will throw at this. It’s hard to get clients to commit to a figure up front like this; naturally, when they as “how much?” and you say “how much you got?” they expect if they answer truthfully, you will automatically demand that full amount.

It’s up to you to explain, using the automotive or house-builder analogies, that there are numerous ways a thing can be done, and available budget dictates what kind of special details and features get left in or taken out. A Yugo and a Maybach can both get you across town, and in traffic, both do it at about the same speed. The extra features and details in the Maybach make the difference in the cost. Two houses; each keeps the rain off your head, what makes the difference in size and price? When they understand your strategy on execution depends on a general level of funding, they might open up and tell you what their boss said the not-to-exceed number is. You can then tell them if this is a practical number or not, and what the trade-offs will be at that price level. If they agree, you can work back from that figure.

I find what helps at this stage is to also mention that you will not be demanding full payment up-front: that we usually work these things in three steps, with payment at each progress point. The idea of a refund for unused days is also an atractive concept to mention at this point. I explain to the clients that this gives them the control to stop the project and walk away at any particular stage if they are not happy, or the situation changes, and not be out the full amount of money. They like to feel in control of the project as much as possible; you can’t blame them since you are doing all the work and they are nominally bystanders, and they have to ultimately serve this product up to some boss of theirs.

If there is no script, no script treatment, no footage yet shot, it is just too early to have a meaningful conversation.

You might explain that once there is at least a treatment, you can figure out roughly how many days/hours it will take to shoot, and what extra costs for travel, sets, expendables, staffing, special effects or unique lighting are needed… from the figure of shoot days you can extrapolate the duration post “might” take, barring complications or fixes that may need to happen.

Inexperienced clients want to skip things like creating a treatment and get right to the sexy stuff like saying “roll ’em” and pushing t-bars. I always stress to them that making changes on the piece of paper, before we start *anything*, costs them nothing, indeed, saves them lots of money, but once we commit to shoots and editing, change becomes expensive. You don’t build much of a house without first drawing up the blueprints, after all. The fee for change orders in mid-edit is your insurance policy for not under-bidding the job. Know who signs the checks ultimately at the client’s company, insist that that is the only person who can sign-off a change order. This keeps the project in control.

Otherwise, you may go thru hours or days of (sometimes stupid or wrong) changes to please the fellow sitting on the couch behind your console, only to find out the guy who’s PAYING for all of this never approved that stuff and hates it and won’t pay for it and wants you to put it back the way it was before… for free.

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

[Mark Suszko]

Random thoughts;

Be careful not to over-extend or over-promise right away. It is much harder to overcome the negative buzz from that, than to just be under-utilized. Build credibility slowly and surely. While you may want to evangelize your service to the company people, you don’t want to suggest video is the panacea. I have seen a LOT of bad video so-called “training” in my day, for example, and nothing sours people on using video faster than seeing it used poorly or inappropriately – don’t cheapen the medium, only play to it’s strengths.

I would say, for a first effort, prime the pump by doing some stuff like a piece on the company’s big charity effort, something like a promo for United Way participation. Get together with HR or whoever is in charge of corporate giving. Create a piece that explains the benefits and gives some examples of people/charities helped locally by your employee’s salary deduction/donations. Make it a 15-minute or less piece. Make employee sound bites part of the script. Shoot them at their work areas. This lets you work around the entire company, getting noticed. People seeing you work will get the idea that you are actually an available resource. Nobody wants to be the first victim, but once some else has gone first, jobs should start popping up. At year’s end, make the follow-up video to the campaign kickoff, one that recognizes the employyee for their contributions and celebrates the new record set for corporate giving. It will be a feel-good piece everyone will enjoy, because they are the stars.

The sales people are typically early adopters of in-house video, you might suggest they use it to tape themselves giving their pitches, to see what they look like to customers. Might also use it to tape focus groups of customers or potential customers, to get a better idea of how to meet their needs.

If your company is one where there might occasionally be a face to face with news media, you could offer some personal media relations training for the corporate spokespeople. Practice some nightmare scenarios and teach them grace before the lens. Hit them with the unfair leading and rude and provocative questions. Then if the bad stuff ever happens for real, they will have their wits about them and minimize the bad press while making the best effort at spinning the positive. This is something the folks from legal would probably like to sit-in on.

Our department has never had to advertise, all our clientele is from word-of-mouth, or from people observing us working for others… and we are usually booked up at least six months to a year ahead, with some holes in the schedule here and there for handling sudden surprises…

A concept I endorse is to provide a “virtual Billing” or “value summary” sheet if you don’t actually charge your clients. Make up a bill with local average rates and show them what the free work would have cost them if done outside. This is useful for several reasons, but one of the best ones is, for those clients who can;t seem to finish up and leave you alone, you can show them the hours and virtual cost of the work to date, then tell them you’ve exceeded the allocated aounts for their account for that month, so they’ll just have to wait till next month, or they can pay real dollars to continue the overage at the present time. Come year-end reporting time, you can total up the virtual bills to show the value of service you gave, and what money was potentially saved by doing things in-house.

Typically, though, if you are an internal service, you’ve got them on some kind of revolving fund, in which case the numbers aren’t virtual, they’re real.

[Mark Suszko]

These are very fun indeed, if you have any musical ability at all. If you’ve never taken a piano lesson or whatever, it may be a little harder to get started, unless you have a good sense of rythm and an innate understanding of typical song structures. If you can count out four beats to a measure, and most editors can, you can figure this out. Or look at a pore-built example track, remove and move around soe of thepieces to de-construct it, and you’ll soon get how it works. It’s not unlike multi-track timeline work in a compositing program.

It helps to be a musician, but you certainly don’t need to be a Berklee music school (sp) grad to use these. Apple’s version of this is as easy as playing with legos. Sonicfire is a treat too. You can let the clips click together magnetically and automatically align, or you can freely place them how and where you want, to get certain effects.

Acid has a reputation of being mostly for hip-hop and trance music, because most of the early sample collections were oriented towards that. But that is no longer the case, they have really opened up the genres for the Acid community, and now there is classical, pops, jazz, blues, reggae,new age, all manner of stuff. You can also always import your own clips from other sources, and use them in productions if you have legal clearances.

For simple joy of/ease of use, I’d say Apple Garage Band, Apple Soundtrack and Sonicfire are the best choices. On the PC side, Acid has the advantage of a large user community and many aftermarket resources.

As to the legalities, you’d have to re-check the SWA to be absolutely sure, but all the marketing stuff I’ve seen from Apple says this stuff has been cleared to use how you like, except for the usual rule you can’t re-market the samples themselves as a product, only the songs you make using them.

I think Apple marketing department is missing a bet here by not adding a feature that lets you submit your musical construtions to itunes to sell… Apple could make a percentage off each download and kick back a micro-payment to the creator of the track for each sale… or at least build up credits towards purchase of future Apple products. Like frequent flyer miles. Frequent flyer Miles-Davis, maybe;-)

[Mark Suszko]

I think these are well-considered answers. I would ony add that I think it’s bad form to even discuss the option until the current project is done and you are off the premises.

[Mark Suszko]

Agree Studio Artist can do this effect and many more. You might also check out a filter plug-in called Buzz. Lst time I saw it, it did a very credible job of turning video frames into watercolor paintings, and I think it’s been expanded since then.

[Mark Suszko]

There was a broadcast solution for this, they used to advertise heavily for a time in TV Technology Magazine, but I tuned it out and have not seen it lately: it was set up to make an entire, dynamically configurable control rool monitor wall out of one big plasma screen… or for that matter, any CRT or projector source. Could include the audio VU meters, even title bars over each virtual monitor square to identify the sources, plus digital and/or analog clock displays. It was the shizzle for control rooms or homeland security monitoring rooms, etc. with much higher quality than the security-oriented splitter products. Of course, it would cost more too.

If I remember the name or see the ad again, I’ll update this post. Meanwhile, if you go to the TV technology magazine web site, you might be able to track it down thru their advertiser pages.