Nick Griffin
Forum Replies Created
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[Harry Benson] “Am I out of line in my thinking?”
Not really, but…
As Walter points out, it’s more a case of your employer mis-handling this than being in the wrong. From the perspective that this isn’t how they’d handle one of the freelancers you are correct. But if they had begun by asking if you would do this for X and putting it up front that their cut would be Y, it wouldn’t feel as much like a “pimped out” arrangement. Likely they just wanted to avoid the taxes and additional withholding issues.
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Best of luck, Grin. Sounds like you may have a good match. For a little over a year I’ve looked for a good path for my business to grow to the next level and have yet to find that logical combination. Then again I’m tough to “live with.” Just ask my wife.
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I have to say that this plan for getting started with just a few components is much safer and more reasonable than what had previously been discussed. However I think you and your company are better served by starting with a camera which can do much of the professional stuff and won’t need to be one of the first things replaced should this effort get more serious.
Others will, no doubt, have other opinions, but my advice is to start with a Canon XL-2. Reasons in its favor are the numerous pro features: Interchangeable lens, Balanced XLR audio inputs, real time code, time lapse, variable shutter speeds including clear scan and more. The XL-2 is a LOT of camera for the money and widely available so it’s heavily discounted. To bring the price down further you might also look into this camera on the used market, ie.- eBay, used departments at B&H, Calumet, Adorama, etc. Just be sure to make low hours of usage a prime consideration.
Besides a camera and NLE software you will need / must have a tripod (again used is a good way to save money), one or more lights and an off-camera microphone. I recommend that one of the simplest and least expensive forms of lighting is a Lowell Tota-light that you can kick into the ceiling, thereby raising the light level of the entire room while still appearing like conventional lighting. A large sheet of white tagboard (available at any art supply store) can be used as an inexpensive reflector to open up shadow areas — something which will be very important on close-ups.
The off-camera mic is needed for decent quality on anything except ambient/room sound. If your subjects (kids) will tolerate it a lav mic clipped 9 to 12″ from their mouths will produce excellent sound quality. If there are multiple kids consider a handheld omni-directional mic either held over top of or placed within the scene.
Now come to think of it, you should try Mark’s original suggestion of using an experienced pro, if only for the first few of these video projects. You could learn a whole bunch from observing and be more likely to have a better video product at both the beginning of the process and down the road.
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Actually, the equipment issue is one of the things that’s kept me with a home office. I want all of my stuff available all the time — nights, weekends, 6am, etc and the thought of having to schlep drives between home and office or rely on a VPN for video and graphics is less than appealing. But that’s me. Being snowed in for what’s coming up on a week has also meant that having everything available has kept work going on as usual.
The real issue becomes one of… (No, I don’t know where your mother is.)… working from home with all of the… (Can I put up the shelf later, please? Can’t you see I’m working?)… distractions. That’s what door locks are for. All the more reason that a dedicated and physically removed work area is essential.
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There are a WHOLE bunch of us telecommuting in the Mid-Atlantic area today. Some areas in Maryland have just exceeded the previous record of 62.5 inches of snow. This morning the local government enacted “Phase 3 Snow Emergency Plan” which makes it illegal to drive for anything other than Police, Fire & Emergency vehicles. And there’s more snow to come. At least we still have electricity and internet service.
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[Chris Blair] “We can’t get people to dim the lights when they play their prized marketing video to a room of 300 people. We can’t get them to have the sound system turned on when they play that training DVD…”
[Chris Blair] “I’d be willing to bet the preponderance of Cow members are very much like our company in terms of size and function.”
Not that I wouldn’t love to get a 3D project, and hope to at some point, but I have to say ditto to Chris. In fact, here’s something very similar I wrote here on the COW about making the transition to HD:
[Nick Griffin] “Our work is typically shown on computer screens, conference room projectors and over the net. This logically had me in a mindset of “What’s the rush to produce in 1920 x 1080 if it’s going to be viewed in 640 x 480 — or less?” In fact, last summer the owner of one of the factories where we were shooting a safety video gave the discussion an unintentionally humorous twist. He asked if what we were shooting would be available in High Def. When I asked him how he might use the program with his employees his reply was “Oh we’d show it on the TV in the lunchroom.” The 20 year old set connected to a VHS player.”
These days we shoot everything in HD, some is edited in HD, but 90+% ends up down-sampled to SD or, in the case of the web, less. Hell, many of the people we work for think anything 16×9 is HD, regardless of size. And as to the A/V companies, fuhgetaboutdit. The difference in price they want to project HD rather than SD left one of our clients asking “Why would we pay an extra $20,000 or more for something most people won’t notice?”
Eventually this may change. Eventually something may come along for us that will truly benefit from 3D. But in the mid-market and, in our case the world of B2B/industrials, eventually is still a ways off.
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[Mark Suszko] “Technically”
Yes, kind of. The technology is the same but the camera deck and the desktop drive won’t play a consumer Blu-Ray and a consumer Blue-Ray won’t go into the XDCam drives. Remember the short-lived DVD-ROM disks, circa 1999? If you took the shell off you had a type of DVD, but you couldn’t put a regular DVD into the drive, first because it needed the shell to fit and second because it was a different format from a standard DVD. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
(At least that’s my understanding of the difference between Blu-Ray and XDCam. No doubt there are others here who know far more than I do.)
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Harrumph. Posted my response before seeing Mike’s.
It’s not Seagate or any other specific brand of drive that fails, it’s ALL drives… eventually. Drives are still rated in MTBF hours. That’s “Mean Time Between Failure” – the AVERAGE time at which they will lose data integrity. In other words HALF fail before that number of hours and half fail after. As far as I know no company has yet to develop a hard drive which will NEVER fail.
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Sorry for harping on a subject discussed by me before, but…
While it’s still necessary to archive final shows and graphic elements, the simple choice for us was to go XDCam instead of P2 or one of the other card-based forms of recording. For about $21 apiece we have 23gig / 1 hr+ camera original disks sitting on the shelf. To me this seems like a major advantage.
As to archiving with hard drives, which we do for some things, it’s important to remember that drives fail. And, I believe, that drives which sit un-used for long periods of time, tend to fail more than ones which are occasionally spun up. So for data which is truly valuable (especially to a client who is trusting you to maintain said data) it’s probably best to have it backed up to more than one hard drive.
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Do tell, Uncle Tim. What constitutes a 3D capable set. (And please tell me I already have one of them.)