[Steve Kownacki]

What specifically are you trying to accomplish? What is the shot? Will it include talent? Is the shot locked off and you can create the effect in post? Can you do this outside and use natural light reflected onto the scene? Or use the shower curtain stretched overhead?

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

HI Thomas
Don’t think there is such a thing as inexpensive gaff tape. Always somewhere between $15-19/roll. Does Markertek ship free? Not sure about B&H. Filmtools does on occasion and that’s when I stock up.

If I can impart some thoughts… Gaff tape, gels, bounce cards, adapters that get lost and all that stuff (expendables) is not an expense to your business but a cost of the job. And sometimes each job has line items for that stuff. The cost of those items is built into your hourly or daily rate. If I shoot a seminar and I know I need 3 rolls of gaff tape, I simply add in $80 for it. Most jobs only need a few feet here and there so my standard rate covers the $1.50 worth of tape that will be used. This stuff is not a donation to your client.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

I’m in the dark too.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

We have an Ultraflex policy from Erie Insurance that covers our gear (Inland Marine) and General Liability. Make sure your agent “gets it” as someone mentioned. Our agent is great – a call or email to them gets rental houses our policy info, or clients & locations get proof of coverage quickly.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

These guys I’ve used for cams & decks although they do monitors too – love ’em. Lots of great info on their site too.
https://www.macievideo.com/index.html

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

We’ve gotten in the habit of making disc images of the finished DVD along with a hard copy on the shelf. Storing that along with the label information makes for quick retrieval. These are stored both on and off-site.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

I’ve responded “no thanks” to a number of similar RFPs over the years. Ridiculous. Worse than working in exchange for getting your name on a credit roll.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

Thanks for the comments… the generator was a joke. This’ll be a 3-day shoot in a hospital. Funny you mention the LEDs, I was wondering about them. I’ll have a decent size crew with 2 PAs so cable pulling won’t be an issue. Will post pix after 3/8/11. To reduce our shoot time on lengthy dialog I’m using 2 cameras and hopefully the actors can get through long reads and all the cutaways & reverse angles will be in one shot. Blocking may be an issue on some takes though – tight hallways.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

Hi David,

Wow, not a whole lot of information available on those cameras. The poor pix I found showed the RF modulator with a single audio jack, but I didn’t find any decent pix of the camera connections. I had a consumer 8mm cam early-90s and I’m thinking it had only 1 channel of mono audio. Not to be confused with a stereo camera taking the “mono” jack then actually sending the same signal as dual mono to each channel.

My first “pro” camera was a Toshiba TSC-200 Hi8 with the 4 channels and I remember not all of that audio was accessible on the Digi8 camera I keep around for the odd transfer.

I’ll dig a up few tapes and see what I can figure out.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

If you could provide model numbers that may help. Back in the day professional 8 millimeter had 4 channels of audio, 2 pcm and 2 afm. 2 of them were modulated into this video track on helical scan and those tracks with not playback on a mono camcorder. See if you can’t find a local source for an EVO Series machine that would have access to all 4 channels.

Steve