[Ryan Mast]

What’s your specialty? UI design? Marketing? Project management? If you have enough of a grasp of the tech behind your project, you could start by using Rent A Coder to build pieces of the project, and if you find a programmer through that who you really click with, go from there.

I’ve been working part time as a programmer for a web development company while building my own production business. Several clients found us by using Rent A Coder, and now come to our web dev company exclusively because they enjoyed working with us.

Can you give any background on what the nature of the project is, and what kind of tech requirements the project has?

[Ryan Mast]

Hi Julian,

I use the SanDisk Extreme SDHC cards with my HM700:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171378

Really, any class 6 card will work with the camera; a class 10 card will not necessarily work “better,” but it will make offloading footage go faster, provided you have a good card reader. You’ll also need to make sure the HM700’s firmware is upgraded to the most recent version to use the class 10 card, and you’ll need a class 6 card to load the firmware before you can use the class 10 card.

[Ryan Mast]

Hey Lou,

How well does the HM100 footage mesh with the HM700 footage?

[Ryan Mast]

I’d recommend just getting a good spam filter. My various email addresses have been on the web for years, and I funnel them all into a single Gmail account. Out of the ~8,500 spam messages I get a week, occasionally one or two will get through.

[Ryan Mast]

On a related note, do any of you have clauses in your contracts that give you an out if the client expects more out of you than you originally agreed upon? Have you ever dropped a client in the middle of a project?

[Ryan Mast]

Aye. I recently fired my first client, and it was liberating — freed up a lot of mind space. Helped that I had a couple other people from the office listening in for moral support.

However… how do you protect your reputation while dropping a client? What do you do to help prevent them from talking poorly about you afterwards and harming your reputation?

[Ryan Mast]

Can you post a clip?

[Ryan Mast]

Hi Marcia,

Here’s what I normally do for editing music videos. I organize mostly on the timeline, not in bins — but that’s just what works for small-mid size videos for me. YMMV…

Sync all of the performance tracks to the studio audio track. Doesn’t matter how many tracks I have — it’s not a multicam edit.

I watch each of the takes of the song and cull the obviously unusable footage. My timeline looks like this: https://twitpic.com/2jr4g

I watch each take again and start selecting clips that look exceptional, and drag these to a newer track above the other footage. Timeline starts to look like this: https://twitpic.com/2wgqv

Edit story. If there are certain sections that I know are going to be taken up by narrative, lock that in.

Go watch through the performance tracks again and cull more unusable footage, and find any great shots that might’ve been missed on the last pass.

Now start assembling the performance sections. You’ll now have at least some framework of story to edit around and some killer shots you know you want to use. Focus on the feel of the music, which musicians you want to highlight when, etc.

Hope that helps!

[Ryan Mast]

The SanDisk Extreme cards I got were class 10, and apparently my camera shipped with the old firmware (SPL1030 V0107). Had to get a class 6 card to load the firmware update. It’s at V0301 now, and the class 10 cards work fine…

[Ryan Mast]

* Integrate optical flow retiming into FCP.