[Todd Terry]

[Rick Wise] “…the cost and time became prohibitive and we have spiked the piece.”

Dammit!… I was seriously looking forward to reading that. Grrr.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hi John…

Thanks for the (good) tips… unfortunately those are mostly the things I’ve tried already.

Changing my instruments isn’t really an option right now. I’d love to have a truck full of Joker-Bugs, but at $6500 a piece (or thereabouts, the last time I checked), I can’t afford to get any more at the moment. I think the 1200s that I have must not pulse that hot when they strike as I have never had any problem with them on a 15amp breaker as long as nothing else big is on the same circuit. The Joker alone is usually not a worry.

Seems that most of the buildings that I run into aren’t wired anywhere near the way they are supposed to be. That includes my own facilitiy, where I swear the electricians must have been drunk when they built the place. In one section of my building I have FIVE quad boxes on one 15amp breaker… in another, there are SEVEN four-bangers on one. Our wardrobe/prop storage room is on the same breaker as the lobby, even though they are a great distance from each other and even on different floors. And it’s not some retrofitted nightmare, it was a brand-new building when we moved in. Sadly it seems to be just about par for the course, at least at the places we go.

We do always ask on location where the breaker or fuse box is… but 9 times out of 10 they just look at us blankly as if we had asked them to explain the pythagorean theorem. When we do find it, breakers are hardly ever labeled, and most of these locations are working businesses still in action so we can’t really start flippin’ them to see what’s what. Even on the semi-rare occasions that we do rent an entire facility as a shoot location (church or school or restaurant or whatever) there is still somebody invariably there trying to do some work, usually on a computer.

Ok, now I’ve moved into whining mode. Sorry about that, it’s just frustrating.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Ummmm…. yeah, the director and DP should have worked that out.

I don’t have any advice on the greenscreen front, but want to make sure they area aware that when shooting miniatures (which is basically what this is, shooting something to make it appear larger than it really is) requires requires adjusting the frame rate for a moving object to appear natural. Basically, the more larger-than-real-life the subject, the more the camera must be overcranked. I believe there are percentage formulas in the ASC handbook.

Just thought… know what would be a fun way to do this? Do it practical with forced perspective!

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well, I have an answer Rick (although I don’t have an answer to that “turning SD into HD” voodoo)…

I had to run down to the studio for something so I opened up Ultra2 and gave it a look. Even though we have a not-so-knew copy of the stand-alone Version 2 on that standard-def NLE, apparently it will handle HD.

I didn’t try to key or even import anything, just quickly looked at the preferences and output options… which go up to 10-bit HD 4:4:4 1920×1080.

I will say that I am pleasantly surprised at that.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hey Rick…

Not sure… we actually do precious little keying (I pretty much try to avoid it when I can)…

The CS3 version will handle HD of course, but as for the stand-alone, I don’t know. Our stand-alone version is in a standard-def-only suite, so the issue has never come up in there. I’ll have the editor try importing an HD clip into it on Monday.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well I can give a first-hand account to add to what Rick said…

We have CS3 in a couple of our suites, but an older suite is still running Primiere Pro 6 (it’s a Canopus Storm2 and can’t be upgraded farther), so that machine does have the little stand-alone version of Ultra2… which was installed before Adobe absorbed it.

I’d say it does indeed work pretty well. Now, it doesn’t work nearly as flawlessly or one-click easily as their demo would show… it helps if you start with a much better and more evenly-lit greenscreen than in their demos (but one should be doing that anyway), and usually takes a bit more tweaking than in their demos as well, but the results are usually pretty darn good.

You are not going to get great Ultimatte-quality keys of flyaway hairs or glass or smoke with Ultra2, but for most applications we have found it more than adequate.

We were doing an industrial film for a corporate client once… it was a location shoot in Las Vegas. Our on-screen host for some reason at the last minute was unable to make the trip… so on location we just shot background plates, and had someone stand in just for placement and lighting reference. Since we had that, back here in Alabama we were able to re-create the lighting accurately on the talent, now shot on greenscreen. While I didn’t think the keys were absolutely 100% perfect, they were clean enough with Ultra2 that the client didn’t know that the talent hadn’t gone on location with us.

Actually, it’s nice to know that you can still get the stand-alone version… I wasn’t aware of that.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

We use QuickBooks Pro, and it works very well and serves our needs. It is overkill (does things that we don’t need), but then again we are not talking about something wildly expensive compared to other software that we use, so it’s not that big a deal.

To be honest, I never touch it myself so I would be lost trying, but our GM is pretty proficient at it although he said there was a little bit of a learning curve. I know he does have to call our CPA on semi-rare occasions to ask exactly how to input something or where something goes. We did pay their yearly support fee for a while (unlimited telephone support), but always found they didn’t know much more than he did (and usually lead to him grumbling about outsourced overseas tech support).

And from what I hear, Brendan is right about the Mac version. We are an all-PC house, but my best friend is a MacHead and in his particlar small business after a couple years of frustration he did the same thing… bought a PC just for accounting to run QuickBooks.

I think QuickBooks Pro is probably far from perfect… but it’s probably about the best solution available.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Mark Suszko] “Studies and my field experience confirm that all-caps is an inferior way to present text for prompting.”

That could be, I won’t argue with it.

Old habits die hard… in one of my previous previous lives (before I was a wanna-be movie director and before before I was a wanna-be actor) I was in the news biz.

Back when I was wearing my newscaster hat… all caps were the norm for all scripts and prompter copy (and actually I was just directing promos at a television station this morning, and all their scripts and prompter copy was all caps… I don’t know if that is still universal). I simply got used to it fast, and even though I haven’t been on the news in 17 years (and refuse to wear suits anymore) now I can still read an all-caps prompter with my eyes closed (quite a feat!).

To me, it’s just easier to read… but that’s just me, because of what I’m used to. In our particular case it also means fewer words per line at a given font size, so that’s an advantage at least at our place.

I’d say try it both ways, you might have much better luck with one than the other.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hi Bruce…

I’ve been surprised at how well the average Joe off the street can be at prompter reading… not always, but pretty darn often.

I’ve never had any problem with shifty eyes… and I think size is the key. We use what is I belive must be the smallest prompter around… it only has about a 7″ or maybe 8″ screen. It’s little, but I have not had any talent have trouble reading it… and the smaller it is, the less eye shifty, of course.

I also use the biggest typesize (in Arial Black, bold, always ALL CAPS) that the prompter software will take. That limits the prompter to three, maybe four words per line….so that the talent is basically reading down, not across.

I also try to keep some distance between the talent and the camera, unless specific direction dictates otherwise.

Interestingly enough, I can use my little prompter as-is with my 35mm, 50mm, and 80mm primes… but my 18mm prime has a face that is much much too large to fit inside the prompter hood. When we use that, I have a bracket that just mounts the prompter monitor directly below the lens. Since the lens is pretty darn wide, you can’t tell at all that the talent is not looking dead center even though they are reading the monitor a couple of inches below.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Agreed… I can’t really imagine a business that purely specializes in compression making it.

I would imagine that production companies or post houses that are not equipped or capable of doing their own compression easily in house would be very few and far between. I’ve never heard of one.

I’m not saying that there would never be clients, but considering the plan to “… invest in some high powered equipment, even create a ‘compression farm’ of computers” would require a lot more business to pay for itself than I can see happening.

The chief problem is that although encoding/compressing/converting video is not something the average Joe on street knows anything about… it is within the scope and ability of every production company I’ve ever dealt with…. and I personally know none that consider that more than a very minor part of their business.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade or quash any dreams… but I agree with the other posters, I don’t see how it could work… unless there is some unknown compression-needing non-do-it-yourselfer client base out there that I’m unaware of.

T2

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