Todd Terry
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
-
Well, seems to me that it could be easy, or could be difficult… largely dependent on the length of the videos…
Obviously the easiest solution is to feed the one big monitor from one source (I suppose DVD or Blu-Ray or HD-DVD)… and the presentation is pre-produced with the show already split into the four quadrants…. rather than feeding from four sources and using some kind of quad splitter.
That’s easy breezy if all four of the videos are exactly the same length.
If the four videos are of DIFFERENT lengths… that’s where you could run into some trouble. Then you would have to produce one big looping video, the length of which would be the lowest common denominator of all the videos.
Say video “A” is 5:00, video “B” is 2:30, video “C” is 10:00, and video “D” is 12:30. Then, in that fairly simple fictional case, you would have a “master” looping video that is 50:00 long… video quadrant “A” would show 10 times, “B” would show 20 times, “C” would show 5 times, and “D” would show 4 times.
That would work with videos that are fairly “rounded off” times… if you have videos that are 2:13, 9:42, 12:05 and 3:27… you’d have to come up with an alternate method (probably four sources with a quad splitter) because in practicality you could never produce a master where they would all come out evenly.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
Not a dumb question at all…
I think most (although maybe not all) Frezzis use a standard 4-pin XLR connector for power.
In that case, to power with with an A-B brick via the powertap on the goldmount, you’d need this patch cable…
Or… make your own cable or wire your Frezzi light directly using this….
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/69226-REG/Anton_Bauer_PTOE_PowerTap_Open_End_Cable.html
Hope this helps…
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
I couldn’t really say, but don’t know why it wouldn’t.
Can’t give you a difinitive answer for two reasons, firstly we are a PremirePro house only and I can’t speak for Avid or FCP… but more importantly, the product has not been realeased yet.
You might check the specs on the Convergent-Design website, or ask em about it in the C-D forum here on the COW.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
[titohawaii] ” i take it i have to go to some storage media other than the DV tape which would have dv compression.”
Yep, exactly… basically the HD-SDI output is the full HD signal BEFORE it is compressed to HDV for recording onto the MiniDV tape.
So yes, while shooting you must record to an external source… either straight into your computer, onto some kind of external hard drive, into a full HD videotape recorder… or the easiest solution probably would be to record into the “Flash XDR” recorder that Convergent-Design is releasing soon (I think it’s due in the first quarter of 2008).
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
There can be some add-on sources of vignetting (as Don said, especially when the lens is at its widest)…
They can include things like a matte box… or stacking on too many screw-on filters so that they stick out too far.
One of the challenges is that viewfinders often overscan a bit and you can’t see the problems until later.
It’s funny, you often see a lot of “clipped corners” video on television commercials. You won’t notice it on a regular tubed television (CRT) because of the slight overscan… but they show up when viewed full-frame on an LCD or plasma television or on a computer monitor (or on a CRT that underscans).
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
I’ve never actually used them, but we produced television commercials for a national chain called “Embroid Me” (yes, terrible name) who does just that.
I know they have several hundred locations, maybe one is near you. As I said we’ve never actually used them, but our art director did create a whole bunch of fake logos for fake companies and they then took that artwork and created logoed shirts for use as props in the commercial. They looked pretty good.
Find them at https://embroidme.com
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
Well both the CMOS sensors and the CDDs in all the Canon line are quite excellent, really… and give great results. I don’t believe you are going to see any appreciable image quality difference that you can attribute to the sensors.
A lot of the “picture quality” difference is going to come down to the glass. The higher-end the camera in that line, the better the lens. The little HV20 has a pretty good lens, considering it’s price… but you have to realize that with the HV20 the entire camera costs far less then the lens alone just two clicks up in the Canon chain, the XLH1… and the XHA1 will fall some where in between.
You can only have so much expectations from the built-in lens on a sub-$1000 palmcorder camera. But, that being said, the HV20 is still pretty darn amazing for the price (ahh… if only it had a full manual mode).
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
In actuality (and here’s a couple of years’ worth of Tort and Contract Law coming back after 20+ years to haunt me)… all a contract needs to be a legal valid and binding contract are two things: 1) an “offer,” and 2) “acceptance.”
If I tell Bob that I’m willing to sell him my old klunker used truck for $1000, and he says “I’ll take it,” we then have a binding contract. I can no longer say “Hmmm, now that I think about it, it’s really worth $1500,” or “Actually, I’ve changed my mind, I want to keep it,” because we already have an “offer” and an “acceptance.” It is a contract.
A verbal/handshake contract is absolutely totally without-a-doubt 100% completely legal and binding… just as if they were written in granite.
Courts find handshake agreements valid everyday.
HOWEVER…
Of course in court the difficulty comes in proving the terms of the handshake agreement. And barring the inclusion of witnesses to the agreement, it easily escalates into an unprovable “he said / she said” affair.
Get it in writing. Witnesses aren’t a bad idea either.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
This is another shining example of why contracts are so important.
We mostly produce television commercials, and our contracts always include verbage stating that the client owns the final production to air/broadcast/distribute as they wish, but that is all they retain ownership of. We retain the ownership of all raw footage.
To take it a step further, our contracts stipulate that while the client owns the final production, they only own it as a whole and do not own rights to the elements that make it up; i.e., they can’t take it and cut it up, reedit it, or use its footage elsewhere.
That stems from on incident where we saw some of our footage on the air, taken from inside one of the commercials that we produced to make a different commercial. The biggest problem there was that the footage contained several actors, all hired by us for the original production only. Additional agreements with those actors and their agents would have been required for that footage to be used. The client either didn’t know this, or didn’t care. They do now.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
[Nick Griffin] “Far more often than not that means Don’t do business with car dealers.”
Sadly, that is often true, unfortunately they tend to be not a very honest sort (I say that as a grandson of a looooong-time Chevy dealer, although a very honest one).
We actually do LOADS of car dealer commercials. No, they never “make the reel,” but they sure do pay the bills and come around each and every month, regular as clockwork (around the middle of the month, when all the manufacturers release their deals and incentives for the month).
I’ve never been burned by a car dealer, even once… BUT, I’ve always done it this way: we have never ever worked directly for a dealer, we have always worked for their advertising agencies. Ergo, it’s not the dealer that owes me money, it’s the agency. And they are all very long-time clients of ours (with many other clients, not just car dealers) so they tend to keep us paid. My theory has always been that if a dealship did not have an advertising agency in place, they weren’t serious enough about advertising for me to fool with.
Unfortunately one agency buddy of mine (fortunately not a client of mine) is still owed more than $100K from a deadbeat car dealer (and is in the process of suing him).
I have also found that the higher-end the car, the more stingy the management is. Our Honda client has no problem with shoveling wheelbarrow loads of cash out for production, never even asking in advance what something is gonna cost… whereas the Porsche dealer grumbles at anything over a couple thousand bucks. Not just those two, I have several examples of that (Chevy/Ford/Isuzu/Chrysler vs. Lexus/BMW/LandRover/Jaguar).
On a side note, the cheaper the car, the better the running footage reels are too. The Buick reel looks like it was shot by Spielberg. The BMW reel?… looks like my mother shot it (no disrespect to my mom intended).
As for YOUR financial woes, we are fortunate to have only had two bad debts in 11 years of production… but once when a difficult client owed us money (a small amount, maybe a grand) it was easy beans for our attorney to just fire off a letter, with the copy of the lawsuit he intended to file (which of course he never had to). I think he charged us $150 or so for it… and it got us paid promptly. I’m not so sure that I agree with the opinion that yours is too small amount to get litigious about… it’s your money, you worked for it, and deserve it.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com