[Nick Griffin]

Ditto Mark & TT. Do you live somewhere without sales tax? In addition to insurance how about accounting & legal fees? Salaries until you start getting paid jobs actually paid? Auto and mileage costs? There are MANY, MANY, MANY more things to consider than equipment.

[Nick Griffin]

Lots of effects packages have a “bad TV” filter. Boris Continuum Complete is the first that comes to mind AND I believe you can buy parts of the whole package individually. But, before you do you can check it out with their 14 day trial.

Also Artbeats used to have a series of bad TV loops, but I don’t recall that any of them would simulate a vertical hold roll. You’d take thier looped footage into a top layer, apply AFX effects and experiment with different transfer modes to get the right amount of effect and underlying original image.

[Nick Griffin]

In the BCC 9 AVX folder (on a Mac) where do they go? I can’t see them when they’re just in that folder and everything else there is a folder.

Thanx!

[Nick Griffin]

AND… will the EFX stay the same or do they need to be re-installed too?

Thanx!

[Nick Griffin]

[Todd Terry] ” An interview is a conversation, a flowing living thing where one answer might completely derail all your subsequent planned questions and spark a set of completely new ones.”

That’s exactly how I work and I do several of these a year. AND… the first few questions are just to get the interviewee talking. Then a conversation. Be sure to begin with a) stating that your voice is never heard, b) explaining that because it will be heavily edited there will be a lot of redundancy in the questions and, c) explaining that because it will be edited things like “as I said before” and the like can’t be used because in the edit we may or may not have heard something before.

Now, the real problem. You said 94?? That’s going to be tough and yes will probably take more than 3 hours. A LOT more. You’re going to burn a LOT of tape/disk space/ drive space.

I have a few people in Europe who, by trade, are engineers and think that they are helping by providing questions. Ask for TOPICS, not specific questions. And ten pages? People who’ve never worked with interviews and interview footage tend to have little to no idea how the process works and what can and can’t realistically be done.

I think Mark’s idea of putting the questions on cards is, as usual, very smart. But be sure to use big enough, dark enough type on big enough cards so that a 94 year old can READ them.

Good luck. I believe that we all think you’re going to need it.

[Nick Griffin]

Tough one. In my experience people like this try to push the limits on the assumption that they’ll get more than if they’re reasonable, even if they don’t get as much as they claim they are owed. Unfortunately it frequently works out that they do get more and this just reinforces the bad behavior.

I’m sorry to say that your best defense again two lawyers is to bring in your own. Have him or her repeat and stress your very generous discounted offer, have him or her refer them to the specifics in the contract they signed and, if your lawyer agrees, lastly make it plain that they will be held responsible for any negative postings that come from them.

All in all this sounds like a money loser for you. Sorry.

BTW – you might ask around quietly to see if they’re pulling any similar sh*t with the florist, catering company, etc. If so perhaps you’ll have strength in numbers.

[Nick Griffin]

And just for future reference, not that it will do a thing to fix the current situation, Ty Ford (who you already know) does excellent sound recording for a wide variety of production environments.

[Nick Griffin]

WOW, do I feel your pain, Steve! Certainly makes “Errors & Omissions” insurance seem like a tiny expense, but if you had it I’m doubting that it would cover your sub-contractor’s mistake.

Is it at all possible for the client to let you do a re-shoot or was this an event that can’t be repeated? If it’s a piece with actors you could bring them in for ADR.

Huge sympathies on this one. Keep us posted.

[Nick Griffin]

If the phone is not in the shot just position the mic near the speaker and adjust volume of the phone to the gain of the mic. If the phone IS in the shot you can probably position a small omni lav mic behind or to the side of the phone so it won’t be visible but still pick-up the speaker effectively.

The big issue here (hear, sorry bad pun) is to not overdrive the mic or its pre-amp input. Another issue that may or may not be a problem is having the phone mic also pic-up the speaker, who I assume will also be mic’d. For that the simplest way is to record to two separate channels and duck the opposite one in post when the other one is the primary side of the conversation.

One other tool, if you don’t need to show a phone, is an external phone box like the Gentner. These are what talk radio uses for establishing the best balance between the caller and the on-mic host.

Hope this helps. You may want to consider re-asking the question on the audio COW, too.

[Nick Griffin]

I might as well say this before anyone else does: You should have this covered in your original proposal/contract/letter of agreement. That’s a much safer way to maintain happy client expectations.