[Mark Suszko]

Secret Service is a part of Treasury Department, unless I have that backwards. That’s why you ask them.

I had a pitch once for a PSA shoot that required a car full of paper money, like, the passengers were in the car and money apparantly was filling the car up to their armpits, with stray bills blowing about in the interior and falling out the windows in a loose scattered trail behind. We would have put in a large sheet of cardboard in there with them like a tray, surrounding their bodies and reaching to the dashboard and doors, then stacked/piled the money on top of that so an inch-deep layer would look like it was four feet deep. That one would have required massive printing of fake bills, but my work-around was we’d only print one side, slightly oversized, and could modify even that. The video cameras would read it as real-looking, but any eyeball inspection would give it away immediately as fake. Like the Larry David “Curb” episode. The pitch was declined, partly because the budget was too low even for a ream of copier paper and some green toner, but also with concerns about causing disruptions out in the field shooting this without adequate lock-up of the location. With the micro-budget they wanted, I couldn’t give them that.

But it sure would have looked cool….

[Mark Suszko]

I’m joking, but do a wedding for someone in a corporation you want to work for?

On the serious side, start by not calling yourself a wedding guy but an events video producer. If you have contacts at a hotel where you video wedding receptions often, ask them to give you referrals for corporate meetings at the hotel. Some will say no because they have an in-house or full-time contractual account for this already. But maybe they don’t. That could be a big break for you. You could offer to tape seminars and meetings at the hotel, and turn-around fast copies and editing. The next step would be to move up into IMAG gigs for bigger projects/budgets. Then you start marketing yourself as a corporate event producer. From there marketing yourself as available for in-house work would be easier. The funny thing about hotel shoots is, they can often be low-rent, easy-money gigs with one talking head at a podium and some powerpoints, or at the other extreme the can be really plush, multicam high-roller affairs with CEO’s and fancy staging, IMAG, satellite feeds, theatrical effects, etc. needing big crews, fancy gear and costing thousands and thousands.

[Mark Suszko]

Depends on the footage, you say it’s black and white… if there are enough distinct shades of gray in the footage, I would try to use luminance Keying to isolate the one element that needs colorizing. Once you have that matted, you could colorize it directly or put a copy of the matte on another track and then effect it further, keeping all track in synch. This has the appeal of not needeing ANY keyframing or tedious roto work.

It may or may not work in your case, depends completely on the quality and consistency of the footage.

[Mark Suszko]

I ordered re:timer and Twixtor to deal with this, because I wanted to some day do really complicated speed-ramping stuff thru FCP or FCP>Combustion. Either one of those frame-syhnthesizing apps seems to give awesome results, check out the demos.

[Mark Suszko]

I agree with much of the previous posts, esp. about using stop-motion capture. The cheap cameras fake interlometer settings and grab too many frames: you’d do better shooting normally, and speeding up the playback and perhaps introducing some strobing effects.

I did an article a while back in DV mag on different ways to do timelapse; there are clip-on intervalometers for rent for broadcast cameras, one was for betacams and was the size of a pack of cigarettes, but they aren’t too common anymore. If the resolution is not HD-critical, webcams are great for this: Axis makes a webcam that takes decent pics, has a built-in webserver, stores up a bunch of sequentially numbered jpegs then forwards them to your computer, when you just drag them into the timeline, done. This is great for long term projects like construction jobs, long as you can get power and a phone line to the camera.

But to get back to the question, I think the better tool to use is not a camcorder at all, at least not an SD camcorder. A 4 megapixel or better digital stills camera would do this way better, using less power, less accompanying gear, and giving you more resolution, which you can use to add some re-framing, panning and zooming in post if you like. Intervalometers are now pretty common in the better digital stills cams, it’s usually a menu setting.

I think it’s a Panasonic DVC pro 50 camcorder I saw, takes digital stills, lays them to the removeable flash menory card, then whan that’s full, it spins up the tape transport, lays down the grabbed frames to tape, spools down the transport and heads, then blanks the card and continues the process. You could really get a LOT of time lapse on one tape this way!

As to FCP, I’m just a beginner on it, but the latest version of the OS has an automator function on it, I wonder if it couldn’t set a chron action to call up the “Log and capture now” box in FCP, while you feed a free-running source tape or live camera feed into it. You’d probably have to treat the setup as an uncontrolled source.

It’s an interesting problem.

[Mark Suszko]

I downloaded bitvice multiplexer, and it’s looking very good… except it’s acting a little buggy, could be a bad install… the error message is:
“Applescript Error Network file permission error (-5000)” when I first open it, but it seems to actually work despite that error message, more or less. Everything seems to work just like that tutorial link advised, but it hangs on my AIFF file. This is the error message:

Last login: Fri Oct 14 16:08:53 on ttyp2
cd /Users/videouser2/Desktop/BitViceHelper.app/Contents/Resources
./mpginfo /Users/videouser2/Desktop/bitchangetester/Mark\ Practice\ Titles-Sequence\Welcome to Darwin!
1-DVD\ PCM\ Audio.aiff
Video-User2s-Computer:~ videouser2$ cd /Users/videouser2/Desktop/BitViceHelper.app/Contents/Resources
Video-User2s-Computer:~/Desktop/BitViceHelper.app/Contents/Resources videouser2$ ./mpginfo /Users/videouser2/Desktop/bitchangetester/Mark\ Practice\ Titles-Sequence\ 1-DVD\ PCM\ Audio.aiff
Skipped -2 zeroes at start of file
mmm, this file does not start with a pack
/Users/videouser2/Desktop/bitchangetester/Mark Practice Titles-Sequence 1-DVD PCM Audio.aiff is not a valid mpeg file
Video-User2s-Computer:~/Desktop/BitViceHelper.app/Contents/Resources videouser2$

I tried running the AIFF thru a.pack, and trying the muxing again, it seems to like that better, but the finished muxed mpeg has no audio I can hear.

I really feel this is on the edge of working, just need to debug it a little…

Last login: Fri Oct 14 16:08:53 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
cd /Users/videouser2/Desktop/BitViceHelper.app/ConVideo-User2s-Computer:~ videoupp/Contents/Resourcesuser2/Desktop/BitViceHelper.a
Video-User2s-Computer:~/Desktop/BitViceHelper.app/Contents/Resources videouser2$ ./mplex -V -f 8 -O 0 -S 9999 -o /Users/videouser2/Desktop/bit\ me/movie-%d.mpg /Users/videouser2/Desktop/bitchangetester/Mark\ Practice\ Titles-Sequence\ 1-MPEG-2\ 120min\ High\ Quality\ Encode.m2v /Users/videouser2/Desktop/bitchangetester/Mark\ Practice\ Titles-Sequence\ 1-DVD\ PCM\ Audio.aiff; exit
INFO: [mplex] mplex version 2.2.1 ($Date: 2002/04/20 19:08:30 $)
INFO: [mplex] File /Users/videouser2/Desktop/bitchangetester/Mark Practice Titles-Sequence 1-MPEG-2 120min High Quality Encode.m2v looks like an MPEG Video stream.
**ERROR: [mplex] File /Users/videouser2/Desktop/bitchangetester/Mark Practice Titles-Sequence 1-DVD PCM Audio.aiff unrecogniseable!
**ERROR: [mplex] Unrecogniseable file(s)… exiting.
logout
[Process completed]

Any ideas?

[Mark Suszko]

I certainly won’t flame you. Nothing is 100 percent appllicable to every situation. I would like to qualify your example though… because I know many folks who are just as down on Yellow Pages ads.

My opinion is yellow pages ads are more for wedding/event guys, but not the most likely place a corporate person looks to get a video done.

[Mark Suszko]

Hm, the price is right;-) I will give this a try and re-visit the thread with a report when I have something substantive to report. meanwhile, any other suggestions are very welcome, I will continue to check this periodically.

You guys rock.

[Mark Suszko]

I have Compressor 1.2.1. brand new here, and only took 2 years to order and arrive.
Anything I can do with THAT version? Or is an upgrade my only hope?

[Mark Suszko]

“They are very inexpensive and very useful. ”

So am I;-)

No dice, I must dance with the date what brung me. No purchases, no outside help, no other gear available, no money, I work a government job. From the previous post, I now wonder what specific sorenson/QT settings would I want to try? Keeping in mind you have to be patient with me, this is only my third week ever using FCP and my first meaningful encounter with Compressor. Or should I export using FCP’s own dialogs? What recipe of settings?