[Todd Terry]

Well Trent… got a little bit of a tall order there… not a lot of money to spend, plus a lot of features some of which are more likely on higher-end cameras.

That, and sounds like you need to dip into that same budget pool to buy all of your support equipment as well.

If I were you, I’d hit eBay and look for a gently used Canon XLH1. This was a $10K camera just a few years ago, and you can find them for peanuts now. This was a GREAT camera, I used it as my principal camera for almost five years. In fact, even though we’ve retired it in favor of the C300, I still have the H1 sitting on a shelf. I can’t bear to part with it because they re-sell for very little now on the used market, and I can’t bear the thought of losing $8K on the deal. Although that is very good news for someone wanting to buy one now.

Downsides… it’s a tape acquisition format, and it’s HDV, not “full HD” (though I tell ya, you’ll never know the difference). But in my opinion they are small prices to pay for the incredible image quality and features. It has pretty much all of your requirements, and a lot more.

I really can’t say enough good things about the H1, at the time I was using it, it was my favorite camera ever. It’s still right up there. And it’s ten times the camera compared to anything you can buy new for the same money.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well, understand that I’m not putting pencil or paper to it or anything… and I’ll admit that I don’t know your skill level or the degree of “polish” that these videos require… but at first blush it sounds to me that this is awfully cheap work for something high-end (assuming it is, or is expected to be).

And I’ll note that even at your rate of $78/hr (which is quite a bargain basement rate), if your guesstimate at 102 minutes of finished video is accurate, that’s well well below your previous past experiences of $300-600 per finished minute. In fact, it’s little more than half of the low end of that range… it’s only about $183 per finished minute based on 239 billable hours.

I’d say first you need some more fact gathering… knowing things like how the raw video is delivered, what format, condition, and all that jazz would weigh greatly my personal bidding for it.

And obviously you don’t know how easy these people will be to work for, what kind of state you’ll be given things in or how clear the directions are. It could be easy as pie, or a giant pain in the rear to figure out what they need. And I wouldn’t assume anything… one of the biggest pain-in-the-butt things I ever worked on also had an “Emmy-winning writer.” And he was pretty much the main source of all the confusion, troubles, and general disarray (and was a pretty bad writer, to boot).

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Alex Stanton] ” I had thought to charge the potential client looking to do something similar closer to the 15k range per episode. “

Well, certainly you can do a $15K video, and do a very nice job, something to be proud of. We do those every day.

You just can’t do that video for $15K.

There’s tons of pre-prod in that, good bit of post-prod, not to mention the fairly sizable crew and quite a few expensive toys that went into it. There’s probably easily a quarter million dollars of camera, lighting, and camera support gear there alone. And possibly a lot more than that, depending on exactly what they were shooting and lighting with.

When a potential client asks me how much something costs, my usual smartass answer is “How long is a road? Just depends on where you want to go, and what kind of scenery you’d like along the way.” But what I really want to say is “Well, how much ya got?” This is one of those cases, though… if you have a maximum ceiling, then back into what you can spend, and give the client the most/best you can for that money.

Don’t give away the farm, though… remember it’s not just equipment to pay for, crew to pay, and all those hard costs… but your time is valuable and has a costs too, and there will be probably many many hours of it (at whatever rate your time is worth). That’s the first thing a lot of people neglect, since it’s just your time and that technically doesn’t cost anything. But it does. Unless this is just a hobby which you do for free… which I’m assuming it isn’t.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Patrick Ortman] “Now the big question is, what’s Canon gonna unveil tomorrow at NAB?”

Well hopefully not something that’s going to make me regret having bought the C300PL. I don’t need one of those “Why didn’t I wait??” moments.

I doubt that will happen, though… I love the C300 so much.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Nice.

The push-to-focus feature won’t help me, because I shoot the PL version of the C300 and manual focus only… but the “Shifting Display Location” during magnification will be SUPER helpful. I will use that literally every day… in fact I’ve been wishing I could do that all along, but had no idea it was on the horizon.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I’ve heard of that show, but had never seen it… watched a couple of minutes of it, and scrolled through some of the rest. It’s pretty good (and my era of music).

That’s a big enough project that’d it take some real time, maybe a few hours, to sit down and really budget it correctly…

But since you asked for a “guess”…

Just completely pulling some numbers out of my ear without even remotely putting pencil to paper… my completely wild guesstimate would be something in the $50-100K neighborhood.

That’s just based on the length, production values, the toys that I can tell would take to shoot it (in addition to the ones I could actually see)…

Cheaper if you shot multiple episodes in a single day.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well you’re right, that really is apples and oranges.

Probably most glaringly and important… definition. The T2i will give you a high-def image. The XL2 is old school standard definition, no more.

That might not make any difference for DVDs, which are by definition standard-def… but HD videos look great on YouTube and with the XL2 you’ll be limited to the 480 maximum YouTube resolution… the T2i will also give you the 720 and 1080 YouTube options.

I’m a little surprised you find the T2i a lot easier to use than the XL2. Most people struggle a bit when trying to use DSLRs for video (just not what they were ergonomically and systemically designed to do), whereas the whole XL series (XL1, XL2, XLH1) is pretty much child’s play to use. But… if you are more comfortable with the T2i, then you are.

Just from the definition standpoint, between those two and no other choices I’d probably go with the T2i. And use an external mic, or double system sound with something like a Zoom audio recorder. Never ever use the T2i’s internal mic for absolutely anything other than reference audio for syncing. It’s just awful (just like the built-in mic on any DSLR). And besides, even with a good mic, placing it on the camera is often just about the worst place you could choose to put it.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well, I didn’t intend to respond for fear of sounding snarky, but now I will try to answer…

I wasn’t at all intending to be disparaging of your setup, which is I think the way it was received… not at all. I applaud your ingenuity in solving a problem.

My only real point is, that you ARE adjusting the dynamic balance when you move that counterweight, by definition that’s what that is. After re-looking at your rig it appears that you have no additional counterweight at the bottom, where is where a lot of people make that adjustment. Since you have no weights there with your particular setup, then adjusting it at the top makes perfect sense.

I’m REAL familiar with that. I don’t have that problem with any lenses, but when I shoot 35mm film just the movement of the filmstock from the front of the magazine to the back is enough to require frequent and constant fore-aft adjustment. So I end up doing exactly the same thing that you do. Thankfully it’s pretty easy, the stage on my Steadicam has a little inching knob that you turn which moves the baseplate a bit forward and backward in the stage so it’s not too hard, and in practicality is doing exactly the same thing you are when moving the weight. But yes, it is a constant battle, and I’m glad you have found am easy way to solve it.

What some people don’t realize though, is that many cameras will have an additional issue. Move the weights like on your rig (or the stage on mine) to compensate for the lens going out will only work if your camera’s lens mount is in the same EXACT left-to-right axis as the dead-center balance point of the camera. Strangely, most are not… most are a little left or right. That’s compounded by the fact that the center balance point of most cameras isn’t dead-center left-to-right either…things like viewfinders and handgrips make them heavier on one side or the other. That off-center lens becomes an issue because when the lens goes in and out but not exactly on the center axis, it not only affects the fore-aft adjustment you have to make (the “pitch” in aeronautical terms), but also the side-to-side balancing (the “roll”). Luckily your camera must be pretty dead-center balanced, which helps make it easy. That’s just a word of warning to people whose cameras don’t have a dead-center lens… while your setup will work, it might also require side-to-side adjustment as well on those cameras.

I’ll stick what I say about wide lenses though. Even the top Steadicam guys stick pretty wide. One of the best Steadicam operators in the world, Guy Norman Bee (he did all the Steadicam work on E.R. and a zillion other things) says he will almost never use a lens longer than 35mm, and never use one longer than 50mm, and then only if he has to. I’m personally most comfortable Steadicamming with an 18mm or a 28mm. I think the reasoning is really evident in the YouTube clip above… the wide shots are great, but the telephoto shots obviously have a much harder time with it and float a great deal more than I think most people would be happy with. Usually the solution is to stick with a short lens but just move in a lot closer to the action.

But again, applauding your solution. Making something work is the goal.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well, you asked what format to shoot in… but really, you have two different questions, what to shoot in, and what to deliver in… which might be two completely different things.

First, for shooting… it depends on what you want it to look like. If you want a more cinematic or filmic feel, then you’d likely want to shoot 24p. If you want a more instant “video-y” look (such as for news footage), then you’d probably choose 60i.

However, completely irrespective of what you shoot in, at least in the US you’d want to deliver in 60i for broadcast. That’s going to be a pretty much without-fail rule.

To cover all your bases, you should probably deliver the same project in three formats, 1080, 720, and NTSC (either letterboxed or centerpunched).

It’s must like here where we produce mostly broadcast commercials. Almost invariably we shoot in 24p (and usually produce in 24p as well). But one of the last steps before delivery is to take the final 24p master and convert it to a 60i master for broadcast.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I have to say, I might be missing something but I’m not 100% sure what this does, other than rebalancing the rig just like you’d normally have to do with any stabilizer when making a lens change… but hey, if it works for you, then it works!

Normally this is not much of an issue, because you’ll rarely find Steadicam operators that use long-lens or zoomed-in shots at all, since Steadicam shots tend to work much better with shorter lenses (as evidence by the YouTube sample, the wide-lens shots were much much smoother than the long-lens shots).

Also, most cine zooms (if you choose to use a zoom) are internally-zooming lenses that don’t radically affect the balance. But if you’re stuck with using an externally-zooming lens that does, it’s good that you’ve come up with a solution.

T2

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