[Todd Terry]

[Bill Davis] ” I were to pay myself based on line-item markups – there would be a hidden INCENTIVE or me to increase the budget for their production. “

That’s not the case here. There are no hidden incentives. I think the incentives are pretty blatant, we don’t try to hide them at all…ha. I believe most of our clients know we make a lot more profit on a $35,000 job than a $3,500 job and the bigger a production we can talk them into then the more profit we make, and they’re ok with that. That’s certainly not unique to our type of biz.

But if that works for Bill, certainly keep doing it that way.

I think in the end it’s all the same. Surely Bill is charging more for his producer’s fee on a gig that has a huge budget and 100 different line items than on a simple low-budget job with only a couple of items… because that big one is far more trouble and requires a lot more of his time and talent. He’s just separating it out differently.

It’s all just how you present it on paper… although I have to say I’ve never (until now) seen nor heard of it done the way Bill and Ned do. But the fact that they do do it just proves the point that someone is doing it that way.

Whatever works.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Ok Patrick I’ve glanced through the manual, it looks like a pretty full-featured camera.

I’ll backtrack a little bit on some of my “always go all manual” preaching. If the auto-face detection (page 50) works well, then it might be something you’d want to leave on. You’ll just have to play with it and test it to see how it works.

Your flip out finder might be good enough after all. I didn’t realize this camera has “peaking” and “magnification” focus assist tools (pages 48 and 49). I have both of these on my C300PL and they actually do work VERY well, especially the peaking feature. Check to see if these are good enough and workable tools for you, if so you might get away with not having to invest in an expensive monitor (although having a monitor is really nice, and I still highly recommend having one).

One of your problems with the noise has been the gain has been getting too high when shooting in full auto. That means that unbeknownst to you your gain might be creeping up as high as 24 dB… that’s REALLY high and no doubt would give you pretty grainy/noisy video. The good news though is that even in auto modes you can “throttle” the gain so that it doesn’t go any higher than some pre-determined setting that you assign. Learn about the “Automatic Gain Control” on page 53. It will bear some testing, you’ll probably find that you never want it to go above +6 or so to keep the picture noise free.

You’re going to want to make sure the shutter speed isn’t affected in an effort to adjust for exposure. Do this by keeping the shutter speed setting to “off” (page 53) and that will lock the shutter at a “normal” speed.

If you do auto exposure, you’ll want to do this with auto iris ONLY. See page 57 on how to set this.

You’ll normally want your light metering set to “standard” for regular day-to-day work, but with your well-lit talent on your black limbo background you might find that the “spot” setting gives you better results (page 58).

After you get those things all set, you might still find that your exposure is consistently too bright or too dark. If that’s the case, you can use the “AE Shift Control” (also page 58) to adjust +/- and “cheat” the exposure either up or down a bit to get it exactly as you like.

This might seem complicated but once you are really familiar with all these features and what they do (and why) I think it will be much easier and eventually become second nature.

Again, I almost can’t believe I’d ever advise someone to use anything other than full manual everything, but you have some special circumstances all the way around… everything from your physical capabilities to your somewhat-difficult talent/lighting situation to even the shear length of your interviews… so in this case I think some of the auto features could be helpful. Remember I said SOME. Learn what those various features and settings can do and resist the urge to ever go “full auto”… and I think you’ll come up with something you will be happy with.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hey Pat thanks for the link I will give the manual a look when I get an opp…

As for the monitors, I didn’t see any of those three that I’d consider ideal. The problem is so many of those little TTF monitors say they are HD when they really aren’t… they’ll only take in an HD signal, but they are only actually displaying more or less standard-def resolution. Click on the “specs” tab for each of those and you’ll see that the vertical resolution on the first two is only 480 lines. Now the third one is a little better but it has the benefit of pixel-to-pixel mode. That means if you push a button on it the picture blows up to actual HD size, and you see the center of the screen but at full resolution. I don’t know what your physical capabilities or limitations are, but if that’s something you can handle that monitor could be very workable for focusing. Another problem with small TTF monitors is that very few even exist in full 1080 resolution, period. The most you can usually find in the little (7-inch or so) ones is 720… but that’s a whole lot better than those “pretenders” that only show 480 lines.

As for zebras, if you see zebra stripes you’ll only be overexposing if your stripes are set to 100%. If they are set to, say, 65 or 70 percent, then the moment you start seeing a hint of stripes on a subject’s forehead or nose then your exposure is pretty good. I don’t know if that particular camera model has setable zebras or not… the manual should tell you, and how to set them if so.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hey Patrick if you can give me a little more time when I’m in the studio sometime I can download your camera manual and maybe give you some more specific how-to advice, but for now some quick comments…

Ok, first, wow, I didn’t know you were talking about interviews that were hours long. Yes, you might certainly have to make exposure adjustments as well as focus and framing adjustments periodically. I’m sure no one is sitting there for a continuous stretch that long… so you have to break that up and maybe sort of think about it as “scenes”… even though they all look the same. Any time there is a change… the lighting changes, someone moves, you all decide on a bathroom break, the talent needs to get a drink, whatever… think of that as a scene, and every scene will probably have to have focus, framing and exposure adjusted. I don’t think there is much way around that.

The little flip screens on most cameras are ok for exposure and framing, but most are not good for focus… the resolution is just too low. Something might look razor sharp in them, but in actuality when viewed at full 1080 an image can be soft. That’s the same problem with the little monitor you linked to… that size would be very convenient to mount on your chair, but its resolution is quite low. Look at the technical specs, it’s only 480 lines… so again something could look sharp on it but it actually quite soft on the big screen. There is a cheaper/better route, but might not be as convenient. For something in the neighborhood of 100 bucks you can pick up a small monitor in the TV department of Best Buy, Target, HHGregg, or any store like that, that will be at least 720 lines and good enough for focusing. Unfortunately though those are still going to be physically at least twice the size or more of the little IndiPRO monitor, so it might be harder to mount conveniently to your wheelchair, if not impossible. The little monitors from SmallHD are true HD monitors and would be convenient for your to mount and use (and run on battery power), but they are going to be twice the price of the one you linked to, or more… although they do crop up on eBay now and then for good prices. This one is going to be a juggling act of how much you want to spend vs. what works well. Not a real easy and obvious solution.

The zebra function might be useful depending on how controllable the settings are on your particular camera. If the zebras are permanently set at 100% or 90% or whatever, then no, they are not useful. But if your camera will let you custom set the zebra level at something lower (like about 70%) then it might be helpful. Personally I never use zebras at all.

You asked “Could I get away with auto gain?” Noooo. In your case gain is the LAST thing you’d want to auto. That’s what is causing your noise. Always shoot in a mode where gain is manual. As for turning the gain up, with your black background (which will have a tendency to show noise) I’d personally never jack the gain up at all, unless I really had to.

As for priorities, you’ll be wanting an auto mode that only adjusts the iris, and locks the gain and shutter speed. I’ll try to look at your manual when I get an opportunity and see if I can give some better advice… it might take me a day or two to get to that though.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Rarely does a post like this come along that is so exactly and precisely up my alley.

I’m not the world’s greatest commercial director (although I do think I’m pretty good at it), but I am very prolific. over the past 20 years I don’t know how many commercials I’ve directed (who keeps up with that?), but it’s well well up in the thousands. So this is the exact issue I deal with all the time.

In your case, Simon, the issue is not learning how to think like a commercial director… it’s learning how to think like a commercial editor, as that is completely the key to commercial directing. The usual “rules of editing” that we normally think of applying to narrative scenes go right out the window for commercials, and you have to direct and shoot accordingly.

While there are always exceptions, these days commercial editing is typically very fast paced. Watch good national spots and do a set-up count. It’s not at all unusual for a :30 national commercial to have 25 or 30 shots in it. But they don’t seem too crammed full or fast-paced because great editing (following great directing) can make those flow so well that viewers don’t even realize how fast the cuts are or how many shots are in there. After a spot runs on TV sometime, ask someone who was watching with you “How many shots were in that commercial.” They might say “Ummm… I dunno… eight?”… when actually it was 18…or more. That three-second establishing shot you mentioned rarely exists in the commercial world. Today it’s more like a 20 or 36-frame establishing shot, if one exists at all… which often it doesn’t.

Watching commercials has changed the language of film that our brains accept. Locations can just be hinted at without and establishing or master shot. Action can be compressed like crazy… you can cut from a hand opening a refrigerator door to a closeup of milk being poured in a glass and no one misses all that “in between” action that you are used to seeing in a narrative film. As long as it visually flows, edits like that work.

There are still plenty of those establishing shots, but as I said often they don’t exist at all. Look for them…. that shot of two guys playing ping pong? Hmmm… I thought they were in a basement rec-room. Nope, it doesn’t show that… heck it doesn’t even show the table, the long-lens shots didn’t reveal where they were at all, we just assumed it. This is actually a real beauty and advantage of commercial production…. we can often make a viewer think we are somewhere that we are not, just by simulating a few bits and pieces of a set without revealing the whole location at all.

So as I said, when directing a commercial think like the editor. Usually before I start directing a spot I have the whole thing completely edited already in my head, and those are the exact shots I get. If I’m going to be editing it myself (which I do maybe a quarter of the time), it’s easy to get what I want. Usually my editor Joey cuts the spots I direct, but he has worked for me for almost a decade and knows exactly how I shoot and I know exactly how he edits and it’s pretty easy for me to get him exactly the coverage he needs.

I don’t overshoot. I usually shoot exactly what I need and little else. This makes our shoots go quite fast. The only (rare) downside to that is if we are sitting in an edit session and an agency person asks to see a different setup or angle. Sorry, but that doesn’t exist. It does also force the creative decision a bit… you’ll always get the director’s cut, because that’s the only cut there can be. I’m not quite as hard-and-fast about that as I’m making out, but I do usually try to shoot exactly the cut that’s in my head, and not a lot more.

It’s of great benefit to sit down some time and watch an hour or two’s worth of good national commercials back-to-back (hit YouTube) and really watch them with an editor’s eye… what cuts work, what don’t, shot style, shot pace. You might be surprised at how many of the usual film rules have changed.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well Pat, I think your lighting situation is more controllable than you think. When you are lucky enough to be shooting on stage in your fully-controllable studio setting there is no real forseeable reason to ever have to fidget with the exposure once you have set it correctly for a particular interviewee. I mean, it could happen (maybe you’re using a close softbox as a key and the talent decides in mid-sentence to move two feet closer to the instrument… or you have a bulb blow in a fixture), but usually that’s going to be a “set it and forget it” type of situation. If it looks perfect when you set it, it should hold throughout the interview.

The same is true for most of your location interviews, even if you can’t block out all the ambient light. Lighting is typically not going to change enough that that’s much of a real concern. It could be, if interviews were hours long so that changing exterior lighting becomes a factor, or you have a lot of natural window light that keeps shifting from cloudy to full sunlight… but it doesn’t sound like that’s your situation. Again, if it looks perfect when you start, it should look pretty much like that when you finish your interview.

I was anti-auto-anything in my previous answer to you… but in light of your physical challenges this might be a case when auto focus works well for you… if you are shooting with longer lenses or a wide-open iris you might get a depth of field shallow enough that an interviewee leaning forward or backward even just a bit gives you a soft image. If you or an assistant can’t manually pull focus to keep your subject’s eyeballs razor sharp, then this might be a case when I’d break my “no auto” rule and try autofocus. That’s not what was causing your previous problems of exposure and noise, though.

Those were caused by two things… the camera interpreting what it saw as proper exposure incorrectly, and high gain.

Your black background is playing hell with the autoexposure, and overexposing the talent. This can be fixed with going full manual on exposure. If you must rely on autoexposure, most cameras have a +/- adjustment that will tweak what the camera senses as “correct” up or down. You can use this to refine your autoexposure and get your talent looking good.

The video noise you see (which will be more evident over black) is likely being caused by your gain being too high… which in turn is caused by your auto exposure mode set to what is probably not the best choice. If the camera senses there is not enough light, it is going to do one of three things (or a combination of these): It will either open the lens iris more, or it will slow the shutter speed, or it will increase the gain. It all depends on the auto mode you have selected. An “aperture priority” mode, for example, fixes your f/stop at whatever you have selected and adjusts shutter and gain to compensate. A “shutter priority” mode fixes the shutter speed and adjusts the iris and gain instead. If you must auto expose, you need to be careful about which thing the camera is adjusting. You generally don’t want it to mess with your shutter speed… a “normal” shutter is one over twice the frame rate (ergo, for 24p the normal speed is 1/48th of a second). Faster or slower than that and you get problems. You also don’t want it to jack up your gain or you can get video noise. In your situation, ideally you’d like to lock the shutter speed and the gain and allow the camera to auto expose only by opening and closing the lens iris. No doubt your camera can do this (most can), but I can’t tell you specifically how to make these settings. This will be one of those times to actually dig out the camera manual.

Good luck… I don’t think you will find this all that hard once you figure out how to do it the first time… all the rest will be easy.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I personally would never put my “markup” as an actual line item… our profit is built into the various other things that we charge our clients for.

Now, I’m speaking as a production company. Maybe it would be different if I was personally hired just as a producer… which the client would see as a single warm body hired to gather together all the bits and pieces and people needed to create what they want and expects me to charge them a flat (or percentage) producing fee and bill everything else at cost…, but I sure wouldn’t want to have to do it that way.

To me, it should be irrelevant to a client what a particular item costs me, the real (and only) issue is what I charge them for that service… which is not only the actual cost but also my time, trouble and effort to make that happen.

Case in point… a recent commercial campaign used several actors we had to bring in. We offered (and paid) a dayrate of $1K to each of our actors. But we charged the client more than that thousand bucks each, obviously. Our invoice to them just reflected what we were charging the client for that talent… it made no mention of what we were paying the talent ourselves plus what we tacked on top of that as our “markup.” What the talent cost us is irrelevant, and frankly none of their business. And it’s not like we’re pulling a fast one… the client is well aware that we are not a charity or a not-for-profit (although sometimes it does feel that way) and expects us to make money when working for them.

I bought a box of wood screws at Home Depot today. The price on the box just said $5.50. I have no clue what Home Depot paid for that box, but I’m sure it wasn’t $5.50. They don’t tell me, and I don’t expect them to. The only number I need to know is what they are charging me.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Awesome stuff, and great find, Rick…

David really knows his stuff… this is well worth the hour investment to watch it.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Not to try to sound smug or all high-and-mighty, but a “real” cinematographer would rarely if ever use auto anything. Most high-end cine cameras don’t even have any auto modes at all… you have to do everything manually, and it definitely gets the best results.

Your case is a perfect example of how auto functions are just causing you problems.

Some auto functions can be useful in, say, documentary or run-n-gun situations where you don’t really have much choice… but in a completely controlled situation like an interview there’s no reason to use them at all.

Focus manually, and expose manually. I’m betting you have your subject on a dark or limbo background and thus your camera is overexposing, probably by jacking up the gain (depending on which auto setting you have on), which is introducing the noise.

Shooting manual will fix that. Best to have a good monitor as well so you can really see what you are doing.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Bob Cole] “Lowel is pretty good about keeping spare parts in stock.”

Because they have to.

Ooooo!… that was just for Suszko.

T2

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