[Paulo Jan]

I did try to use toComp(), but it was giving me nonsensical figures, I don’t know why. But Walter’s solution is much better, and more insightful to boot. So thanks!

[Paulo Jan]

Thanks for the tip. I’ll have a listen to some of the episodes in that podcast.

As for other resources, I have been looking around, and found a couple of courses that others might be interested in:

Music business fundamentals: https://www.coursera.org/learn/music-business-foundations

The business of film: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/business-of-film (this one is british, so some of the discussion, from what I’ve seen so far, is heavily UK-centric, specifically talking about funding sources in the british industry).

[Paulo Jan]

[Bob Zelin] “. You are obviously more than happy to PAY for a course (including an MBA course) on “how to make it in business”. You don’t want a course in “how to use FCP X” or “how to use an Arri Alexa” or “how to light a scene for a chroma key”. You want a course on “how do I get business”. “

…and I just reread your post now and noticed this part, and I feel the need to further clarify: at no moment I asked in my original question “how do I get business”, or “how do I make it in business”. I know better than to ask that. What I asked, specifically, was about how does the business side of things work. In other words, as I mentioned in my previous post: deals, contracts, rights, what are the players, what their roles are. It’s the kind of practical information that, I think, many people could benefit from.

[Paulo Jan]

Thanks, Bob. I got a laugh out of this. And some insight too.

Anyway, I thought I should perhaps explain myself better. I get the drift of what you are saying, which is basically: “don’t be such an Organization Kid, and go and strike out on your own”, but I still think that, in such an established business, there are things that can be taught, instead of having to be relearned again and again by everyone who starts. For example: what’s the standard way royalties are divided in a music recording contract? Or, in your example: does the TV network get the rights of the show in perpetuity, or only for a set number of years? And what about the DVD rights? And if the show has a song by a friend of the protagonist, how do we compensate him? And if the show is a hit and the TV channel decides to put out a music CD for the soundtrack, do they have to negotiate later with the musician again?

I can go out and make a bunch of phone calls, but when I finally meet with the TV executive, I’d like to know as much as possible about how they usually work, if only to avoid being suckered. History is full of artists that have been cheated by unscrupulous managers, after all.

Also, there’s the… let’s call it “cultural issue”. Every industry has its own culture and its own jargon. Let’s say you are lighting a scene and you tell an assistant: “bring me two redheads”. If he just stares blankly at you, what does it tell you about him? I do know a few business people (in unrelated fields), and if there’s something that they always tell you is that appearances are fundamental: a wrong word in the wrong moment can be a disaster. If you go to a meeting with a TV executive, he starts talking about “residuals” or “360 contracts” and you go “uh??”… there goes your chances.

Anyway, things are never easy and nobody is going to guarantee you success in a silver platter, but if you go into the battle with your homework done, at least you’ll stand a better chance.

[Paulo Jan]

*sigh*… It’s been too long since I’ve done serious editing, if I’ve forgotten something as basic as Match Frame. Thanks a lot; that’s exactly what I was looking for.

[Paulo Jan]

Actually, I believe that’s pretty much what I need. Thanks!!

(I had read about startTime in the docs, but didn’t really understand what it meant when it talked about “start time of the layer”…)

[Paulo Jan]

That depends on how big the SSD is… 🙂

Moving the cache there is definitely a no-brainer. As for the rest, it depends on whether you do much video editing or just compositing/design/VFX work. Traditionally, the advice for video editing has been to put your footage in a different drive (a RAID if possible) than the main system drive… but if your SSD isn’t big enough, maybe that isn’t feasible. If you don’t handle that much footage, though, putting your video files in the SSD is also a good idea.

[Paulo Jan]

Wow, thanks. Actually, I was just wondering how to access the keyframes at all; I didn’t realize that you could do that just by its index. Just a question: why do you start the for loop with 1 instead of 0? I’ve just had a quick glance at Adobe’s scripting guide and didn’t find any reference to that.

[Paulo Jan]

The basics, time and value. (I realize now that this is a more complicated issue than I had first thought, since a keyframe can also have a lot of other attributes: hold or not, interpolation… but the ones I need in my case are just those).

[Paulo Jan]

Interesting. How would you do that? Would it imply going shot by shot in every instance where there could be banding and intervene manually? (Because I’m not talking about the cases where you can already see the banding in AE or Resolve; I’m talking about a “preventive” measure, when you have to export your nice, clean images to a highly compressed codec like H264).