Todd Terry
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
-
We almost always do tablets and phones in exactly the same way, by covering the screens with green.
I’ve been meaning to buy some dummy iPads and iPhones (readily available on eBay or Amazon, and cheap) and paint the screens green just to keep on hand, but haven’t done that.
In the past we have relied on cutting pieces of green paper and putting them on the screens. The last time though, I found this great very thin self-stick green foam at Michael’s craft store. I cut it to size, and stuck it on. It was completely unremovable and ruined a few $30 screen protectors, but the ease of use totally made up for it… it was a good vibrant color, matte finish, worked really well. We have used devices to actually display a color screen before, which sometimes worked well depending on the situation. This last shoot though was an exterior, and there’s no way the screens would have displayed in sunlight good enough for photography. The jpeg compression in this photo makes the screen look a bit mottled here, but in reality it was perfectly smooth and uniform and made for seamless and perfect comping and motion tracking…
I do like reflections… but I don’t want the real reflections. They are uncontrollable, and don’t always reflect what I want. We add our own reflections in post.
These following spots were all done with the stuck-on greenscreens, and reflections added later…
https://fantasticplastic.com/portfolio/news012.html
https://fantasticplastic.com/portfolio/news022.html…except for that one car interior, in that case the tablet displayed a green screen since it would have been harder to light it well using the stuck-on screen.
Since there are a couple of ways of doing this, sometimes it’s trial and error and one method will work better than another completely dependent on the situation.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
We don’t give a client the choice either… when budgeting, every project has a line item “archival.”
It’s a pittance, really, I think we charge $70 or $75… but it’s more than enough to make up for the cost of the drive space and the time to drag to it.
Now… we often don’t invoice for archival, sometimes that charge is hidden somewhere else. I don’t want a client’s project to go corrupt and then ten years from now some cranky guy is yelling at me “But we paid for you to save it!” We archive mostly for ourselves, because those projects will likely come up again. The fastest way to guarantee that a client will call about an old project is to accidently not archive it.
Since we mostly live in the :30 commercial world, our projects aren’t huge, data-wise. I’ll rarely shoot more than 16GB of footage for a single project (maybe twice or three times that, but it’s rare), and a final whole project might be in the 30-100GB range, so it’s not huge. Depending on what they are, I’ve had as many as 50+ projects archived on a single pair of backup drives, so in those cases we were actually making money on archival… although that’s not the goal.
We archive entire projects on mirrored drives, and we archive another copy of all camera raw separately on other drives. We often have need to grab some original raw footage without hunting through an entire archived project, so having another copy of just the raw footage makes that faster.
I’m not sure how other NLEs handle this, but we realized after a while that with our particular editing platform (Adobe Premiere, currently cutting with CS6 in all our suites) that we were saving more than we have to. When you start a new project in Premiere, it automatically generates a folder called “Adobe Premiere Pro Preview Files” in the root of the main project folder. This is where all renders go. If you work on a sizeable project for a long time with tons of tweaks and changes and lots of filters or effects that require rendering, this folder might very well turn out to be by far the biggest chunk of data in your project… and there’s no need at all to keep it. So we blow out the preview files before archival.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
[Mark Suszko] “As to charging less when the thing tuns out to not take as much time as estimated….”
Depends on my mood. We almost always come in under our estimates, which is our goal (it’s just too hard to ask clients for more money when a project goes over budget, so we try to make our estimates generous enough so that doesn’t happen).
It depends on the client. If they are a brand new client and have been a peach, I’ll tend to charge less if the actual work was less than the estimate. If they’ve been a big ol’ pain in the rear, they’re less likely to get that treatment.
The vast majority of our clients are not new, though… most of our work is for the same half-dozen advertising agencies that we’ve worked with for years… so we’re familiar with them all and how their budgets usually pan out. If I come in under an estimate on one job, but remember that their last gig was over (or pushing it), that will help me determine how much of a break to give them… if any.
We just stay flexible on that, or at least try to.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
I can’t swear to the quality or workability of video… but for audio only recording we use Total Recorder, a little desktop app that records on the fly whatever sound the computer is outputting. It’s not free, but if I recall it’s very cheap (actually there is a free or trial version, but it watermarks recorded files with a tone every 30 seconds or so)..
I mention them because they do make a version that does video as well as audio… and if it works half as well as the audio-only version, it’d be more than fine… the audio only version is simple and flawless.
https://www.totalrecorder.com/
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
Yeah, cutting it really close, as the other guys said.
Although mathematically they should be ok… like others have said an HMI draws more current when you strike it than when it’s running… a lot more.
Ergo… if you want to try that, make sure you spark the 1200 first, and then after it gets cooking good (full power, and green glow disappears), turn it down as far as the ballast will allow. Then strike the 575. That will give you less of a total power spike than if you do it the other way around.
HMIs are notorious for needing really clean power… that’d be my biggest concern. When pushing the limits like that, I’d be prepared for one of them going dark if there are any juice fluctuations. I’ve been on many a shoot on locations with dirty power where we’d occasionally lose an instrument. It’s not as big a deal as it used to be since most modern HMIs now are hot re-strike, but one of my older HMIs is not hot re-strike… and an accidental outage means a murderous 20-minute wait if I need to re-strike it. No one needs that.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
While HDR can give some pretty spectacular results in still photography, I’ve always found the few samples I’ve seen in motion footage to be somewhat unsettling… I’ve heard other people say that too.
I’m sure it has it’s place though, maybe in some sort of Frank Miller-esque applications.
I will say though that objects are one thing, people are another. A couple of years ago I saw an HDR test with a person (utilizing two cameras of different exposures with a beamsplitter)… and the results were positively creepy. Even the guy who developed it and did the test admitted that… just uber-unnatural, kinda “Uncanny Valley” territory.
Things sure change.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
Any diagnosis of that effect is just a guess, there are some unknown factors and settings at play…
It definitely is not rolling shutter though. That’s just not what rolling shutter would look like. If that were the case you would not see those interlacing lines, and the props would appear to “bend,” sort of corkscrewing as they turn. Those appear perfectly straight, just interlaced.
A couple of potential culprits… we know you are shooting 29.976, you told us that. You also shot interlaced, that is obvious from the footage. If you put a 29.976 interlaced file on a 29.976 interlaced timeline, it will play back perfectly normal looking on an interlaced CRT monitor, or on a progressive videovideo monitor (such as an LED, LCD or plasma television). But on a progressive computer monitor, you will see those interlacing lines.
BUT… if you put your 29.976 interlaced source footage on a 29.976 progressive timeline, you are likely to see those interlacing lines on any monitor… CRT, interlaced, progressive, whatever.
You’re not seeing in the VLC player because the player’s settings are only showing you a deinterlaced version on playback… i.e., it’s only displaying one field per frame on playback…not both fields.
You can “fix” that in editing as well by deinterlacing so that only one field (either the upper or lower) is being used (various NLE platforms accomplish this is different ways). You won’t see the interlacing then, although you will lose resolution, because only half the fields are being used. It’s a tradeoff.
The way to fix this in the future, unless you want the live-instant-videoy look of 60i, then always shoot progressive… whether it be 24p or 30p. If you do want the live video look (and sometimes you might), then go ahead and shoot 60i… for projects that you know will be seen on a real TV monitor. For projects that will exclusively be viewed on computer monitors, always shooting progressive will give the best results.
Hope this helps.
By the way, unless those props were just winding down (or starting up) and were moving very slowly, you were apparently shooting at a much much higher frame rate than would be considered “normal”… was that intended?
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
I have no idea if the LP mode is an issue. It seems like it might could be a problem in theory… but if so, I don’t think the tape would play at all, not even for a few seconds.
No, there is no such thing as TBC for MiniDV. That’s a digital format, of course… all ones and zeros. Time Base Correction is purely for analog device recording/playback, it doesn’t apply to the digital world.
My only suggestion thus far would be to beg/borrow/steal/buy/rent (ok, don’t steal) another camcorder or deck and try the tape in that. The HV40 should work, but since it doesn’t… well, that’s a mystery.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
Can’t tell you what you are doing wrong, because it would appear that you are doing nothing wrong.
If memory serves, shooting 24p with the XL2 actually records it as plan ol’ NTSC 60i (i.e., while it shoots at 24fps it’s actually recording at 60fps), so you should be good to go, and the HV40 should play it back fine. In fact, the HV40 should play back even true 24p recording (we used to have one, and did just that).
I couldn’t say what your problem is, but I believe you can rule out the “what am I doing wrong” part of the equation. Adding NLE issues to the mix right now is a moot point, they won’t do you any good anyway until you get the tape to play properly, either in that device or another one.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
Hmmmm, hard to say.
We do the “above and beyond” thing all the time. Probably for almost every single project… not very often on the shooting side of things, but usually it comes in the form or more edit time than is billed, or meetings or other admin work that isn’t billed.
We don’t make too much of a fuss about it, or put it on invoices as “n/c” or in any other way.
I think most of our clients know we might occasionally work more than is billed, and most of them appreciate it. To put the give-aways as an invoice line item seems to me to be a possible invitation to open a can of worms, of the “well you did it for free for me last time” variety.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
