[Todd Terry]

[Chris Blair] “But we still preach that clients are hiring us for our knowledge, our expertise, our efficiency on planning an executing shoots, and our abilities to tell stories and communicate.”

Yup.

My biz partner (who is our GM) makes this analogy to our clients and potential ones, and I think it’s a good one in this day of throwaway cameras and cheap editing software….

Go around to people’s houses… friends, family, whomever… and you’ll notice that a lot of people have pianos in the living room. A lot of them.

But there are very few concert pianists.

My personal variation to that is that anyone can buy the piano wrench, but not many people can tune one.

Here we just strive to play the piano as best we can. If a client is happy with hearing a first-year student bang out four bars of “Frère Jacques” on the keyboard over and over… there’s not much changing his mind.

We try to stick with clients whom appreciate the concert.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[James Fortier] “I still do have one big concern using the Canon though, the very subpar viewfinder”

Well… yes and no. The viewfinder is bad. But it’s not sub-par. In fact, it is “par for the course.” That is, every single HDV camera has a low-resolution viewfinder (and pretty much every full-size HD camera, too). In fact, the Canon’s is about as good as most, better than some.

The sad bottom line is, if you are shooting HD a camera’s viewfinder can’t really be relied on for focus, no matter what the camera. The resolution line count for most any viewfinder (or flip-out screen) is pitifully pitifully low. Consider the finder great for framing and for composition, but for focus… not so much.

Some, like the Canon, have focusing aids that help quite a bit (the Canon’s finder has center magnification and edge-finding features), but still, they aren’t great especially for critical focus, and most especially if you use a DoF converter (that’s why we focus by distance when using primes, either with a tape measure or a Stanley FatMax laser tape).

Unless you want to spring for the AccuScene viewfinder (the one that’s on the Panavision Genesis, and a cheaper version that’s on the RED ONE), there’s hardly such a thing as a really great viewfinder. And the AccuScene would be quite a bit more expensive than the camera itself. Quite a bit.

A real external HD monitor is really a must-have. Here’s another problem though… many times the monitor that people use isn’t much better than the viewfinder. Especially a lot of the little (7″-ish) TTF LCD monitors you see in the lower price range (some Marshalls, Varizooms, etc.), say they are HD… but that really only means they can accept an HD signal. They aren’t displaying anywhere near HD. Sometimes they aren’t even displaying standard def in full resolution. Always be sure to look at the specs and check the resolution. Some of these so-called HD monitors are only displaying 300-400 lines or so. What can look like razor-sharp focus in the monitor may turn out to be quite soft indeed when you get it back in the edit suite.

Unfortunately most of the real HD monitors that are small enough for on-camera usage aren’t cheap. You’re looking at $6K for the little industry-standard Astro. For about half that or so you can get a good Panasonic. The least expensive “real” HD monitor that I know of is the new 9″ one from SmallHD which comes in at about $800… but it is a 720 monitor, not a 1080. I haven’t talked with anyone who has used it yet.

So… if you don’t use the Canon, that’s fine…. but don’t chose another camera because of the H1’s “bad” viewfinder. They’re all bad.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Our clients aren’t all “dream clients”…. but fortunately none of them are real “nightmare clients.” At least not any more. We learned our lessons and tried to weed those out a long time ago.

We do have one “dream client” that stands out. They are a financial institution (not a “bank,” they’ll be quick to tell you), and have a large marketing department… basically an in-house agency with probably a dozen or so employees in the department. However, they trust us to help them determine what they need in way of broadcast advertising, and we always concept their television commercial campaigns as well as write and produce them.

I’d say the things that make them a “dream clients” include… the fact that they are not “stuffy,” which is odd for both a financial client and one that is a multi-billion dollar company to boot. They love creative ideas (even crazy way-out-there ideas), have a really fun staff, have us produce lots and lots of projects for them, love our work, trust us implicitly, barely even ask what a commercial project’s budget might be (“Just whatever it takes, we want it to be good”), come to shoots but only to observe (never hear a peep out of them), never come to edit sessions until there is a darn-near -polished cut to see, and literally start hounding us for invoices as soon as I yell my customary “Thank you for the day, people!” so they can get the check in the works.

I wish I had a bunch more just like them.

Sadly, we just have the one that gets marks that high… but fortunately a bunch of others aren’t too far behind.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Genius.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Disgusting. Talk about a sweatshop.

It’s almost the video equivalent of children in India making soccer balls for 5¢ an hour. Ok, not nearly as tragic as that, but sad nonetheless.

And apparently out of the $200 that Christian Muñoz-Donoso will make for producing ten videos in a day… he’s also having to pay an assistant.

I couldn’t read past page two, corporate greed is too nauseating. I come from a mindset where you regard people as your most valuable resource. I’m our company’s Creative Director… but I’m also the president and principal shareholder. Usually I’m the corporation’s highest-paid employee… but not always. Some months I’m the least-paid. Everyone else gets it first. I may not be a good businessman (fortunately my junior partner is), but I’d rather be a good person.

Slave-masters get no respect from me.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well, sure, you can attach most any LCD screen to the H1.

You did, though, say viewfinder. If you are talking about a real put-your-peeper-up-to-the-eyecup viewfinder, you are not going to find one much bigger… the H1’s viewfinder is just about the biggest viewfinder around.

As for LCDs, just about any LCD screen will work, from one of the cheap ones like a little Marshall or Varizoom at a few hundred dollars, up to the industry standard Astro, coming in at about $6000. Or something in the middle, like one of several Panasonics.

You can feed a monitor via your camera’s composite, component, S-video, or HD-SDI outputs… depending on whatever monitor you choose will take.

Keep in mind that a lot of the lower priced small LCDs (and some of the upper priced ones) say they are HD monitors, but look at the specs carefully, especially the resolution or line count. Most of them are actually quite low resolution (standard def or even less), they will just take an HD signal. They are fine for framing, not so useful for focusing.

The best put-your-eye-to-the-cup finder going is the AccuScene… but you said you were “not looking to spend thousands on a screen”… and that finder is going to be substantially more expensive than your camera itself.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

You should be able to achieve some acceptable slow-mo with the gear you have. Not super-great-absolutely-flawless… but pretty decent and depending on your needs, it might be more than sufficient. I have done it with your camera’s big brother, the XLH1 (which is electronically basically the same camera).

For a project that is shot in 24p (Canon’s 24f), yes, shoot all the slow-mo sequences at 60i. The 60i footage can be slow-mo’ed to 40% and it looks quite good and intercuts very well with regular motion 24p footage. (60 x 40% = 24)

In that scenario, each field of your 60i footage becomes one frame of your 24p movie. Obviously, you have a bit of resolution loss since each frame is only made up of one field. It’s not too bad, though… as I said results can be quite decent. Especially if your finished product happens to be for NTSC release (say, DVD), and you shoot natively at 1080, you will have zero perceptible resolution loss.

The biggest mistake people make when shooting for slow-mo is shutter speed. Shooting at 24p, the normal or default shutter speed is 1/48th of a second. Shooting at 60i, the normal or default shutter speed is 1/60th of a second. But think about shooting real film slow-mo, which is overcranking… ergo the shutter speed is much higher. So… when shooting video for slow-mo, crank up the shutter speed. Usually something in the 1/120th to 1/180th neighborhood looks about right. If you don’t do that, each frame will have way too much motion blur in it, and when you slow the footage down in editing it definitely won’t look right.

If you need to slow-mo even more than 40%, you will need to use one of the frame interpolation plug-ins to create the missing frames. In those cases, crank up the shutter speed even more when shooting.

If you have just a bit of slow-mo work to do, that should be fine. If you have a substantial amount to do, then you might consider a camera that will legitimately overcrank. My vote is the Panavision Phantom 35HD 🙂

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I always use the former Motion Picture Laboratories (now known as Encore Media) in Nashville. They’ve done tons of 35mm for me and a little bit of 16mm too.

Great folks, good rates, attention to detail, and old fashioned southern charm.

They are only about two hours north of me, so I generally would FedEx film out in the evening to them, then zip up there the next day to babysit the transfer. But I have friends all over the country who just ship film to them and get an unsupervised transfer… and all have been happy with them.

Their senior colorist John Buchanon can play the daVinci like a piano.

encorenashville.com

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Nick Griffin] “we had a client who actually thought that in the studio we had records (vinyl) of announcers saying individual words.”

Actually Nick when I was in college at the student radio station (10 watts!) we did have a big set of vinyl “production elements” records with a booming cheesy voice-of-God announcer with lots of reverb saying endless words and phrases…. “That’s great!,” “Fantastic!,” “But wait!,” “And the sale ends Saturday!,” “Now hold on!,” “Starting Monday!,” “For two weeks only,” “Now’s the time!,” “Today!,” “But we’re just getting started!” and on and on and on. There were probably thousands of phrases.

There were also a couple of records in the set with a cheesy chorus of vocalists singing disc jockey’s names… “Now heeeere’s Dan,” “Now heeeere’s Art,” “Now heeeere’s Don,” with several hundred names.

I never heard them used, and the records were considered ancient even back then. Boy I wish I had them today though…. if just for grins.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Clever. Reminds me of a pretty funny SNL skit of a few years ago. It was the “Stockies,” the equivalent of the Academy Awards for stock footage.

The nominees were:

*Pharmacist’s hands counting pills in tray

*Woman in park smoking

*The lower half of fat people walking away from the camera

I don’t remember who won. Ahhh, the old “news days”…

We have one particular commercial client whose scripts will call for some very very specific action, but when we get into pre-prod for the shoot he will invariably say “Oh can’t you just use stock footage?” Like it just appears.

T2

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