[Todd Terry]

Would love to be helpful, but it’s really impossible to say given the info we know. You know your footage and your client, we don’t.

Is the client a mom-n-pop privately owned company (even with multiple stores)? Or is a Fortune 100 company worth billions? Knowing that would help.

And you say it’s “unique footage that they can’t get anywhere else”… is that really true (such as documentation footage of a one-time real life event)? Or is it just that it would be prohibitively expensive for them to re-create? If one could re-create this footage, what would it cost? A thousand dollars? Ten thousand? A million? We don’t know what it is, so can’t guess at that.

Is this a continuing client that you have and want to maintain a relationship with?… or one you just want to get as much cash out of as you can for a one-time deal?

And lastly how valuable and important does the client think the footage is, and how crucial is it for the message they are trying to get across? Deeper pockets will usually get you more for the footage, but even then there is a stopping point. If, say, Richard Branson needed the footage he could afford any price. But would he? There would get to a point where even he would just say “Nah, it’s not worth that” and do something else. That’s the hardest part to judge.

I realize this is a complete non-answer… but knowing some of those unknowns might help you figure out a decent and fair rate.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[Alan Balch] “Can you think of some thing advantageous about using Bridge instead of the Canon Utility”

No, none.

I don’t think Bridge will even do that.

To me, there’s no better option than “works perfectly,” which is what the XF Utility does.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Looked at “Got Memories” briefly, they do it the older-fashioned film-chain way, rather than a real scanned telecine… which probably partly explains why they are so cheap. They’re not using a million-dollar film scanner. At least their machines have LED lamps though. I’d say they are good enough or better for DVDs for family.

[Jackie Luffy] “you can get a half decent quality capture by just recording off your camera…”

Depends on what you need. If “half decent” is good enough, do it yourself. If not, have it professionally done.

[Jackie Luffy] “Tell me what you guys think!”

I think it’s not going to get cheaper than it is today to have it done in a month or a year or 10 years. And in the meantime the film is not going to be sitting in the cans undeteriorating.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Yes, install the Canon XF Utility software that came with your camera. That does exactly what you need (and that’s what it’s made for).

With it you can back up a card with one click, take the individual .MXF files and merge them, output them, rename them, organize them, do whatever…

I’m not sure why you haven’t installed that already, it doesn’t bear any research and it’s nothing like Bridge… pop the disc in (or download it from Canon), it’s literally a two-minute install and you’re good to go.

You can certainly do it the way you have been, but it means hunting and pecking through nests and nests of individual folders to find each particular clip (and BTW, you only need the large .MXF file that is in each folder if you do it that way, you do not need the other three little files). The XF Utility was made to avoid all of that instantly.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[Jackie Luffy] “I looked at the actual wall with my own eyes the film and I could see the flicker with my own eyes yet on the camera it was perfect”

Don’t worry about that… it’s immaterial. It doesn’t matter what it looks like to your eye, the only thing that matters is what your camera is recording, you only have to make sure that’s what looks good.

Ideally you should be projecting your film at the same frames per second that it was shot. We don’t know what is, and don’t have quite enough info to tell. It could be one of three speeds… old-fashioned standard-8mm film was typically shot at 16fps. MOS Super8 was shot at 18fps. Sound Super8 was shot at 24fps. To get good motion, you need to match that.

You’re seeing the flicker directly from the projector because you turned the speed down. A projector has a tri-blade shutter, which triples the number of images you see so that you don’t see the flicker. However apparently you slowed it down so much that you do see them. You don’t see the flicker in the camera when you get a reasonably close sync with the camera and projector.

[Jackie Luffy] “The picture was pretty poor… Is this normal?”

No, not normal. Well shot film, even ancient standard 8mm, can look suprisingly good.

[Jackie Luffy] “…in reality Vegas should be playing every frame perfectly, but frame by frame I get the ghost image of the previous frame and the current frame molded over each other…”

This is not an anomaly of Vegas, it looks that way because it was shot that way. Your camera and your projector are not sync’d together (nor is there any way to sync them)… ergo, the camera is not perfectly shooting one frame as the projector shows one frame… the camera is catching the projector showing one frame for part of the time, and the next frame for the rest. Starting and stopping the projector my help trick it into better sync (just by luck), but it will never be perfect… and even if it starts perfect, it will quickly drift out. You’ll likely always have some degree of these “double frames,” but also your camera’s slow shutter speed is compounding this problem as well.

Here’s how to do it correctly with the equipment you have…. carefully put the camera back in its case, the projector back in its box, and send the film out to a lab to be professionally telecined. Not trying to be a smartass, but that’s really the only way to do it right. There are several places you can find that will do this (do some Googling), you’ll get your film ultrasonically cleaned, properly telecined (there are even some that will do a “wet gate” transfer to eliminate scratches), and files transferred to harddrive (with a proper 1:1 frame-for-frame transfer). What you don’t want is a transfer on an old-fashioned “film chain”… you want a real scanned telecine…. look for telecine brand names such as “Rank” or “Spirit” in the company specs.

If you play around with your speeds and settings you might eventually get decent results… good enough to, say, put home movies on a DVD to send to grandma. But using a camera to shoot a projected image off a wall is probably never going to give you better than “Ehhhh… well that looks fair” results. If you’re looking for footage good enough for a “real project” then you need to have a professional transfer.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Good question… have some, but honestly don’t know if I’ve ever used them even once. One-third stop is a great deal more “fine tuned” than I usually ever have to do.

I look forward to hearing what those in here who know much more than me have to say… Rick? John?…

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[Barbara Adams] “….10 minutes long with looping. Do you think it is too long? “

We’ll personally I think (and you have to imagine Andy Griffith’s voice saying this) that’s “Waaaaaaay yonder too long.”

I just know I personally have never watched a 10 minute video in a trade show booth, likely never would, nor have ever seen anyone do so.

It’s a shame that you have to have all your monitors running the same show. Your entrance monitor is just going to be getting walk-by or walk-in traffic, I doubt anyone is going to stand there and watch for a length of time… and if they do they are just clogging up either the entrance or the aisle, or both (I run into this on location sets all the time… why do people think they are being out of the way when they are standing in doorways?… that’s the last place I want someone to park themselves). In a perfect world, I’d run a short dynamic loop there, maybe 30 seconds or a minute tops, that can run MOS. Since you have a big booth, those monitors at the back could run longer pieces that tell more of your story, with sound on those, and if you have a comfy sofa or at least nice chairs you’ll get some people parking for a longer period… especially if by then people are tired of walking or standing and/or there’s a convenient candy dish.

Of course that’s a double edged sword. We’ve only done it once, but our company attended a trade show as a vendor once. Since everything about our company has a very retro look, we fully re-created a 60’s-era living room in our booth, with our portfolio stuff playing on the vintage TV (actually a disguised modern monitor). We had a very nice mid-century modern sofa in the booth… one that another vendor from an adjacent booth parked his fat butt on a good fifty percent of the time. Sheesh.

Back to the original question… yeah, I’d keep ’em short short.

And no, Mark, we can never actually work together together… we’d kill each other.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Mark and I wrote virtually exactly the same thing, at the same time.

Of course I blathered on a lot more about it (which is strange, that’s usually Mark’s MO).

OUCH!… just kidding MS.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

These days attention spans are so short, and I’d say especially so at trade shows where people are prone to quickly wander around, the shorter the better.

We’ve done a few trade show videos that were literally 10, 15, even 20 minutes long. I personally thing that’s asinine and a waste of money. All of the trade shows we produced for were pretty high-techy in subject matter… so the crowds were 95% men (or more), waves of nerds (sorry, but true), all there wearing the giveaway tee-shirt they got in their registration packet, carry a bag of swag and watching the videos we produced for only a minute or so before moving on to see if the giveaway keychains and thumbdrives at the next booth were better (unless the videos were loaded with attractive scantily-clad women… which I’ve seen plenty of especially at the “geekier” trade shows). Not to be sexist (or reverse-sexist), but I think a show more geared toward women (or both genders) would have a little more watch time.

My personal opinion is that I would never go more than 2-3 minutes, max. Maybe even shorter.

Also keep in mind that most trade shows are very noisy affairs, you often cannon hear a video presentation well. I’ve seen so many videos running in trade show booths where they eventually just turn the sound down (probably partially because the booth staff has gone insane after hearing it loop for three days). So visual impact is good… and it’s not a bad idea if the piece fairly adequately tells the story (or at least reasonably gives a flavor of it) with no sound up at all.

It’s a bit of the same argument that I have to make with new clients who come here for commercial production. That commercial shouldn’t tell you everything you need to know about the product… just get the phone to ring or walk in the door. Same with the trade show vid… it should just whet the appetite enough to get them interested, and that’s when the company reps in the booth take over for the real sales pitch. That’s what they’re there for.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Are you talking about the equivalent of “sales tax”?

I’m not sure what standard practice is, but we do not charge clients any sales tax for our work (nor pay it). Your mileage may vary in your area so you are definitely doing the right thing by consulting your CPA… but our contention is that we only sell a service, not a product, which is not taxable in our particular city/county/state.

Another production house in our city that has been around a little longer than we have warned me about this many years ago, as they do charge sales tax on dubs and other deliverables. I stood my ground, contending that those tapes and discs and such were mere conveyances of the product, not the product itself, which was untaxable. This other fellow told me that I would eventually get bitten over this practice.

To cover my tracks, I always had a fine-print line printed on every DVD and tape label that said something to the effect of “This videotape remains the property of Fantastic Plastic and must be returned upon request”… thus retaining our ownership of the tape… we never sold the tape, just what was on it. The only downside to that was once a year we would get a gigantic box delivered from some rogue TV station 1000 miles away actually returning dozens of Beta dubs. Of course we expected them to just be thrown away, or recycled. Fortunately dubs are pretty much a thing of the past now (I can’t even remember the last time I turned the Beta racks on), so that’s a non-issue.

Well, a few years ago we had the luck to be triple audited all at once… city, county, and state. When posed with this whole issue, the auditor scratched his head with a “Hmmm, that’s a good question.” I was sweating it a bit, but after a couple of phone calls to the state capitol, he confirmed that, yes, we were doing things right, and should not be taxing our products.

As I said, though, it might be different where you are… if there is indeed a local tax for “digital delivery,” then yes, I would line-item it. Your CPA should know.

(FYI… in our audit we did however get hit with not paying sales tax ourselves on about a bazillion bucks worth of out-of-state purchases going back years… damn you B&H Photo! We’re vigilant about paying that now)

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com