[Mike Cohen]

What if you get a wedding-stile photo album – maybe the small kind that holds 3 5×7’s per page in sleeves. Get a DVD holder to stick to the inside of the cover, then fill a few pages of the album with some good video stills – which will be from a different angle than what the stills guy took. Obviously video stills are not great, but your average newlyweds will love the extra shots – get them printed at Costco or Walmart on proper photo paper, they look better than home inkjet.
As for the outside of the mini-album, just the names and date on the spine should do it – or get a tinted cellophane bag to deliver it in – with a few sprigs of dried baby’s breath or someting – the bride will dig it.

That’s my 2 cents.

[Mike Cohen]

his Jazz series was on PBS also – caught it on DVD however, it was excellent.

[Mike Cohen]

The default white balance setting (OFF) on the AB switch tends to be pretty good on the panasonic cameras – it uses the factory setting based upon what filter you are on. Or you could go out to the field the night before and set your A and B WB settings based upon say dusk and night with lights on. Since you start off in daylight, you can also use daylight filter A and B – the filter wheel and WB AB switch talk to each other. You may be able to figure out a set of settings which works – so at the appropriate times of day, you can tell your operators “Switch to filter 1, setting A.” Might take some trial and error, but since only one camera is hot at a time, switching the settings somewhat seamlessly may be possible.

[Mike Cohen]

That’s a cool alternative for single discs.
Does anyone know of an alternative for multi-disc sets?
I recently did a package for a 6-DVD set. I used 2 3-disc amaray style cases. They are quite bulky.
An alternative for us is the thin single cases, but where can you get a custom cardboard sleeve to hold them together (like the Martin Scorsese Jazz series, or numerous other sets).
The ultimate package is the multi-fold, but these have to be very expensive, such as those used for TV Show DVD sets, often 4 discs which are all in one multi-fold unit. Does someone make a multi-fold with clear sleeves for custom slipart – I’d buy that.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

I always burn an ISO using Nero.
I am using Adobe Encore, which spits out an IMG file when it makes a DVD image.
I change the extension from .img to .iso, and burn with Nero to DVD-R.
My particular drive and Nero don’t let me burn slower than 4x using the particular Discmakers DVD-R media, but the results are 95% good, a few coasters.
The only problems I have is Windows Media Player has trouble with the discs, even duplicated ones. But Microsoft causes a lot of problems, so that’s no surprise is it?

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

I agree that the kids I have encountered recently have never heard of color temperature or audio attenuation. It seems they are given VX2000 and PD150 cameras, which produce nice images, but have auto everything. They’re not using textbooks anymore?
I keep my Zetl and Millerson books within arm’s reach to this day.
Handling the gear as someone said is important also.
I have had people come back from a shoot with the AC adapter for the camera thrown in the tripod case – it came back broken, and still there is a shrug from the shooter “I was in a hurry…” etc.
Also, teach people how to shoot handheld. These small DV cameras have such poor balance that hand-holding anything but a wide shot can be dangerous.
A good exercise may be to have the kids come up with a shot list for say a 1 minute narrative – then put the shot lists in a hat and have people shoot one another’s shots – then critique the shots as a group with no names mentioned.
How to read a waveform/vectorscope is probably a good idea as well – I know they don’t teach that in schools these days. My cousin is a bout to graduate from a well known communications school. I love the guy, but when I talk about some of these concepts, he goes glassy eyed.
Good luck. Let us know what you do.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

In the movie Ronin, directed by John Frankenheimer, he uses several of these transitions, not to go from scene to scene only, but also to advance the time within a scene – there is a scene at the end where DeNiro is chasing the bad guys through a crowd – if the scene went in real time, it would be like 20 seconds of moving through the crowd – but they have a person pass in front of the camera, quick dissolve to another person passing in front of the camera like 50 feet ahead, and it looks like the same long camera move.

I recently did a wipe between the last shot of my video and the credits, with the wipe following a woman who walked from left to right – this was a coincidental stroke of luck – also there is a scene in the original Star Wars where Chewbacca leads a wipe to another scene.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

You need to do what everyone else does, selectively capture only the good portions of your tape. You can play the tape, and log the clips you want, then batch digitize, which will control the camera and save separate clips as you have directed. That is how to save disk space. If your clips are small enough, you can back them up to DVD as AVI files, so you can always edit them later.
Or just buy a big hard drive, as they are now very cheap, and keep it on a shelf until you are ready for it.

[Mike Cohen]

Hallelujah – another person with the Encore/WMP problem.

Even with PowerDVD installed, we still have problems with Windows Media Player playback of Encore authored DVDs.

Most people do not have a problem, but some do, including me. Power DVD plays anything.

I now put a note on our packaging “Compatible with most DVD players, and computers with compatible third party DVD playback software.”

It is not ideal, but we are left scratching our heads why this happens.

[Mike Cohen]

maybe try posting the original message, and examples of the two different xml files on a forum which programmers frquent, maybe someone can write a program to make the conversion.