Scott Sheriff
Forum Replies Created
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[Tim Wilson] “People like Bob and me were no different than these punks today. We worked for zero, and worked our way up to peanuts, and worked that way for YEARS. In a way, its kind of cool that kids are using 5D cameras to fight for their scraps. I used a $10,000 camera to compete with $100,000 cameras, and my competitors came after me with DV cameras that cost $1000.”
I disagree that the 3/4, UVW and used 1″ based low budget post houses of the late 80’s were the same as what is happening today.
In terms of the dollar at the time, that gear cost a lot more. In todays dollars, that 10K camera would be about double. There were no new 600 dollar fluid head tripods. A used set of sticks and a crap fluid head would still set you back about 4K in todays dollars. So even the cheapest gear at the time was much more expensive in comparison to the wage it earned you. So in looking at the gear of the day, wages and rates, you would have much more skin in the game then todays noobs. Probably on the order of four to ten times as much.
I worked at a big market O & O station that did commercial production. When were over booked, we farmed out the low end commercials to a couple of guys that left to do this very thing. One big difference is there would be no way we would accept from them, the kind of crap the noobs turn out today. Example, even if you were shooting with a 10K camera, I’ll bet you still lit your set. I’m sure you took proper audio, used the sticks, shot cut-aways, etc. In other words, even at that level, you still had to conform to the standards of the time. Now, we have a class of workers that shun standards and try to make those that have some out to be the boogy-man. So even in the era of when the 3/4 mom and pop post houses started chipping away at the big guys, there was an expectation of what most refer to as “production values”.
The last thing I would say is there wasn’t a million of you, like there is now.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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Note that the company doing the ‘hiring’ is not primarily engaged in the production business. Also that there is no reference to salary, or salary range. And of course it’s on Craigslist.
Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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Andy,
Hey, I feel your pain.
There are defiantly those in the biz, that think the goose that lays the golden egg can never die and all the noobs are not hurting their business. I’m glad for them, and happy they have plenty of work. I just hope they don’t spend every dollar they make. Because I remember the days when every big city in America had several of these huge shoot and post facilities, with lobbies filled with awards. That was in addition to the local TV stations also doing the same. And now they are as dead as the dinosaurs. Killed by the noobs that came in and undercut their rate.
And yes, there are people still doing quality work for clients that want quality, but those jobs are in the minority. Perhaps if we try, we can change that. Or not.
I think one possible approach is to shun the low quality jack-offs, and try to move in a different crowd if possible. That crowd is quality crowd.
And by low quality, I’m talking specifically about morons that do things like insist on shooting 1080 24p with the ubiquitous 5D II, to get the ‘film look’, even though their dog shampoo spot is playing on the web at 320×240. Then at the same time, they’ll light their set with a couple of 20 dollar work lights they bought at Home Depot. That is if they bother to light at all. They’ll shoot long focal lengths hand-held with the camera is set to “auto-everything”. Take audio with a 60 dollar shotgun mic gaffed to the camera, and have more money tied up in Red Rock and Zucato then they do in the camera or support gear, because it looks cool. These are the same folks that are trolling the forums with all this smack talk about being an ‘artist’ (LOL), or brag about what great glass they have. And then in their next post, ask about “the best plugin for this effect” (posting a clip of some no-name groups new music video) or how to fix blown out shots, or hollow sounding audio because they don’t have a clue. Thats because they think slathering cheesy FX plugins, and shooting 1080 is all it really takes.
Nine times out of ten, they are also the same people that are posting with a deadline tomorrow, having a hundred different problems with basic concepts like keeping their audio in sync because they can’t be bothered to understand something as basic as frame rates, or how they are going to fix the jelly look from the CMOS sensor camera every time they make some huge camera move. Hey, they’re artists, they can’t be bothered to RTFM.
This is the world we find our self in with the 5D, and Final Cut X for $300. A world in which any trust fund baby with 2 grand is now in the video and film biz.
Any of this sound all too familiar?
What to do??? Here are a couple of thoughts.
First, don’t be that guy! I know your not, but never give in. Even if other well know contributors say “it’s just the way it is these days”, “there’s nothing you can do about it”, or my favorite the proverbial “new paradigm”.
Wrong.
There should be a stigma on this type of work, and we have been far too tolerant, for far too long, and it is coming back to haunt us in the form of low rates, and clients that except shite work for those low rates.
Second, let them rot. Only post help responses for other like minded individuals that deserve help, and let these johnny come lately types twist in the wind. Don’t work with them or for them on gigs. Don’t hang with them at meetings and UG. They are dead weight dragging the rest of us down.
Third, if you’re on a gig, and the client thinks using the sticks and proper lighting is overkill, because the last guy didn’t do that, fire the client and move on if you can’t educate them. Let them have the 20-something artist, and find better clients. Some day they will figure out why these guys are only charging ten bucks an hour to shoot and post their stuff.
Well, just a few thoughts. I’m sure this will push some peoples buttons. Oh, well. If it does, you’re probably the person I’m talking about.
Done ranting…for now.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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Striping (not stripping-there is no pole or dollar bills involved) lays down continuous control track (CT) and timecode(TC). This procedure is also called blacking. This is almost always done with a minute of bars, followed by switching to black until the tape runs out.
This is so you can do insert editing. Insert edits are either A or V and the CT and TC are not altered. Insert edits are clean on both ends, and can lay any combination of A1/A2//V tracks.
When you assemble, the deck has to preroll (back up) onto some existing CT and TC. If none exists, you have to crash record some onto the tape. Then it rolls forward and syncs to that existing material, and continues to the edit point and starts laying down fresh CT, TC plus A and V. It is the same as a crash recording, but the in-point is clean and controlled, but the out point is not and is dirty. You can not select what tracks to use on an assemble, it’s all, or nothing. So you can not do a selective edit in the middle of exiting materiel using an assemble edit, since it is an over-record that breaks the control track and TC on the out. Color frame accuracy is also an issue on assemble edits, and it is shear luck if you try to do a match frame edit using assemble, and the edit doesn’t shift.[Shawn Hyper] “the tape, the deck has no reference to adjust its motor speed,”
The record (or playback) deck is not free running as it may appear.
The simplest explanation is:
There are electro-mechanical circuits called the drum tach and the capstan tach in tape machines. They are part of a servo-feedback loop that monitors the video head drum rotation speed and tape path speed in comparison to the genlock or house master black reference that is input to the recording machine. This (genlock) is also the same signal that keeps the H and SC phase in sync with other machines, cameras, the TC generator and the switcher so you can do wipes and dissolves etc. There is also the sync pulse of the recording signal itself. They (the tach signals) lock to the control track of the previous recording, and then provide many fast kicks to the drum and capstan motors so that they continue run at a speed that will accurately lay down the recording signal. There are also some machines that can keep the drum and tape path speed in spec without any external reference besides the input recording signal because they have on board high quality time base references, but usually only on a crash recording, or recording from something stable like a camera. Even then, it is better to have a master external reference, and almost mandatory when doing edits on tape with any degree of accuracy. Start/stop edits generated by camera are usually low quality, and you have to roll off some tape to get up to ‘speed’ before shooting anything important.
Despite all the work that goes into this, it is never perfect due to tape stretch, sticktion (where the moving tape actually sticks to part of the tape path for a micro second) and mechanical wear on parts, so there is a device on the output of tape machines called the time base corrector or TBC. The TBC is essentially a type of buffer that cleans up any minor mechanical generated timing issues, and outputting a signal that is clean and stable like what comes out of something entirely electronic like the Chyron, or camera.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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Over a year ago I wrote about the industry going the way of neighborhood print shops and such a couple of months before apple rolled out X and killed FCS.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1128096#1128132
This was in response to many threads over the previous year that were pining for lower cost simpler tools (as if FCS wasn’t cheap enough or easy enough to use), plus the gradual acceptance, and even justification of low production values as being the new norm.
When I started, a day in the linear online bay would run you about 4K. Now we have a literally millions of freshly minted DP’s and editors that are happy to get ten bucks an hour, or a day rate comparable to working at a fast food restaurant. This is because their total invest in equipment is nothing. Their investment in seat time learning their craft is also nothing, so they charge nothing, and for the most part the customer has little in the way of expectations and receives nothing.
So now, thanks to all those that have helped, nourished and encouraged this low quality behavior, when you show up with a real camera, tripod, lights and finish your work on a system with things like proper monitoring or storage and expect a real wage for your efforts your called a snob, or a Luddite.https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/17/871478#871545
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/17/871440#871524Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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[Christian Janson] “I open a project work with it for 20 – 30 min then all of a suddenly it crashes.”
Will it crash if its just sitting there open, or are you doing something specific when it crashes?
What version of FCP?
What changes have you recently made to your system?
When did it start doing this? What had you done prior to this happening?
Prores media, did it start out prores, or was it converted?
What is different about your laptop, from your desktop?
Where is your media located?
The devil is in the details. It is hard to diagnose these things without a very specific description of what you are doing, when it went bad and such since you are sitting in front of your machine and we are not. Sometimes it could be something recently incorporated into a project, or it could be a cascade failure of user errors that have built up over time.Since you trashed your prefs, you should also try doing repair permissions.
Here’s some other general troubleshooting ideas:A piece of corrupt media
nesting
the project file is too big
the project file is corrupt
too many sequences in a project
system drive too full
capture scratch drive too full
capture scratch on usb drive
using the system drive as the capture scratch drive
a plugin that is corrupt
system or FCP update improperly done in the past
recently installed software
hardware failure
hard drive going to sleep, or any type of energy saver mode
screen saverScott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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There are a bunch of things it could be. Could you give more specifics on whats going on, and what you have tried?
Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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I want to follow up my last post with this:
The OP originally said
[Stephen Pickering] “I was recently asked to produce a 4 minute marketing video for an acquaintance of mine at a national company.”In this case, the OP is not the idea originator, the client is. Stephen was asked to produce, or render a service.
Had Stephen gone to the client and pitched the idea from scratch, or had done a video on spec, then I think he would have a stronger case for being the person that has control over the rights.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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[Rich Rubasch] “Hmmm…disagree with Scott. He is the recording studio AND the artist. I think it is plausible to ask for the contract.”
I have no problem with contracts. In fact, I encourage their use.
I disagree with the idea that production should be licensed like music, which is something totally different.
I think the dividing line is going to be based on risk.
If you completely produce a video from scratch on spec, and the entire thing is your idea, your money, your risk, then you have a product that you can sell any way you want. That is a product, not a service like production.
On the other hand if any part of this comes from the client, you are back to being a service provider. I think trying to straddle the fence and do a little of both is a train wreck waiting to happen.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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In case you haven’t read any of my posts, you need know I’m no fan of X.
In this forum you will find a small cluster of fans who will no doubt extoll the virtues of of movie hero, and talk about how they use it on project after project with excellent results. All of which is subjective to say the least.
If you are asking if you should stick with tried and true software like FCP, which is a suite of applications that cover several disciplines, and translates easily to most other proven editing platforms or go with movie hero which is essentially imovie on steroids, just look at jobs posted in the year and a month that X has been around paying careful attention to the rate offered for FCP, Avid, Premier editors vs editors who know X.
If you do that you will find the real answer to your question.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair