[Ryan Mast]

Ha! That’s funny. A local college contacted me, too, to see if my company would be interested in hosting interns. I did at least go meet with them, totally upfront about who I am and what we are — completely student owned and operated. Because I don’t have a bachelors or a masters, we’re ineligible to host students for academic credit, but their office is going to keep us on file for students that just want more work experience.

[Ryan Mast]

Hi Clint,

There may also be a requirement from the school that their supervisor have at least a bachelor’s degree, perhaps even a masters. But of course, there’s nothing to stop you from offering internships to interested students for work experience, not necessarily school credit — it at least looks good on a resume, and it’s a lot less hassle for everyone involved…

If you’re interested in attracting more interns, and if you haven’t been approached yet by local schools to provide internships, it might be worth an hour or two to call/email around to the career centers and Comm department secretaries & heads at local colleges. They often keep a list of local companies that offer internships for credit or experience — you could probably easily get added to the list.

As a college student… please be nice to the interns. We can run a very long time on free food, cool new things to do, and some kind words.

[Ryan Mast]

Yeah, that’s definitely possible. Though it’s probably better to adjust the speed of the video clip, not the CD audio — if you change the speed of the CD clip, that will change the pitch of the song and you’ll lose quality. It’d be weird. Also, the band might not have performed at an exactly consistent tempo, so even if the beginning and end are synced, the middle might be off. Or it might work perfectly — play with it, I’m sure you’ll find something that works!

[Ryan Mast]

Hi Lawrence,

When the band performed, did they play live, or did they play along with the track? If they played with the track, you should be able to sync it at the beginning (or middle, or end, or whatever) and the rest should be fine.

If they played live (without a metronome or click track), you’ll just have to sync sections to the track as you go — every time you cut to a new angle, check the sync. It’s not a big deal, don’t worry. I personally usually look for downbeats — or anything else with a noticeable, unique spike in audio or waveform. Put a marker on the spike. Find the same point in the song on the other clips, and mark their spikes. It’s less confusing if you try to find it in a noticeable part of the song, e.g., right before the chorus. If you’ve got snapping on, you can stack your clips on top of each other, and drag them so the markers snap together. For a subjective check, pan your song track left and the video/audio right. Keep nudging the tracks until they sound in sync. Does that help at all with what you need to do?

Good luck! I’d love to see your finished video when you’re done…

[Ryan Mast]

Hi Ryan,

I’m in a similar situation — student, trying to run a business while in school. Seriously dude, it’s worth it to organize as an LLC and get general liability insurance. I posted about 7 or 8 months ago about what I should do to improve my business and such, and that was one of the big things that the pros at the COW recommended.

I don’t know what personal liability insurance polices look like — you may be right about it, that it only covers what you directly do. The policy that I got for my business covers my actions, and anything or anyone that is in my possession, care, or control. For example, I break a rental camera, someone breaks my camera, I drop a camera on someone’s head and they sue me, or one of my people does any of the above, the insurance will (theoretically) cover it. It’s not expensive — if you have $10,000 of gear, you can afford annual insurance payments. Take an hour this week and call insurance brokers in your area to get quotes, so you know what to save for.

Even if you’re working on your own, it might be a valuable learning experience to go through the process of creating an LLC and getting insurance, learn what’s involved, and figure it out. Even if you end up working as an employee of someone else and you discontinue your own business, it may make you a better employee if you are knowledgeable about business/insurance/legal stuff.

At the very least, having your own insurance policy may make you less nervous about going out for a shoot. Or keep you from having a heart attack when you accidentally break something. Been there, done that, was very, very thankful that the COW members advised me to get insurance. Thanks, guys!

Bruce and Bill, what is required to show proof of insurance? Do you send them the whole policy (pages and pages)? Is there a statement you get from your provider/broker? Does it suffice to get a PDF of it and email it, or are you always faxing papers?

[Ryan Mast]

iMovie is very limited with speed changes, but Final Cut / Motion are much more flexible. Did you try it in Final Cut yet? Are you working with film or video? Video is relatively easy – select the clip and choose Speed from the Modify menu. Type in the final duration that you want, and turn off “Frame Blending.”

To smooth it out, to make it not look so stuttery, you may want to turn on Motion Blur in the motion tab. I’d recommend starting with 50% and 8 samples, and adjust to taste.

[Ryan Mast]

Use it to pay interns. I’ve gotten a lot of useful stuff that way…

Don’t know if you have a FreeCycle list in your area — where do you work from? But that’s another great way to get rid of stuff.

[Ryan Mast]

Try going to Disk Utility and seeing if they show up there. Occasionally, a drive will show up in System Profiler or Disk Utility, but the volume won’t “mount” automatically. If the volume appears in Disk Utility greyed out, click on it, and click the “Mount” button on the top of the window.

Or it could be another issue, like the drive getting disconnected prematurely, and fsck is fixing it before mounting it. If you let the computer and the drive sit for, say, an hour, will the volumes eventually show up?

[Ryan Mast]

Any other options, like using a flashframe or cutting away to something else? Cheap cover, but it works.

Here’s what I do:
Slide auto-scale down to 0. How much was it scaling initially? If it’s less than 105%, don’t worry about it. The smoothcammed clip will USUALLY drift back into the center of the screen by the end of the edit, so you can cleanly cut to the unsmoothcammed clip. However, if you need to cover black edges by scaling, still leave auto-scale off, but zoom in with the scale slider in the motion tab in your first clip. Then punch that same number into your second clip, and you can keyframe a scale out to 100% in your second clip, if you’d like. It depends on your footage — in my experience, scaling using motion instead of the auto-scale in SmoothCam usually matches two clips of the same shot a little better. Maybe add a soft wipe if you need to cover a little drift. Soft wipe or some other gradient-based transition is a little better than a cross dissolve in this case usually, if both clips are a pixel or two off — if you cross portions of the image at a time instead of all at once, the eye doesn’t notice it as readily, make sense? You already saw what cross-dissolving the whole image at once looks like.

YMMV. It depends on the footage and how SmoothCam is acting. Good luck.

In other news, turning auto-scale off and turning Translation, Rotation, and Scale all the way up on really bad footage can produce some interesting effects. I put this together for fun, just to see how much I could abuse it…

[Ryan Mast]

Sweet, thanks a lot! It’s something I should probably start planning and saving up for…