Todd Terry
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Heya…
Since you are very familiar with the XL1, and only have about $2500 to spend… maybe you should just get another XL1.
There are a LOT of people out there like me: XLH1 users who still have an XL1 (or 1s or 2, with very few hours on the heads) laying around that they don’t use anymore, and they are all over eBay where people are practically giving them away. You could consider the XL1 a “temporary” camera to use for a while until the biz gets off the ground… and then move up to something like the XLH1 later (which would be a natural graduation, since you know the XL series).
I’ll buy used film cameras all day, but usually shy away from used electronic cameras… however the XL1 was SUCH a good camera and you can get them SO cheaply now it would probably be a pretty good and safe gamble.
Heck, you would probably have a fair bit of money left over from your $2500 to put toward a grip, support, lighting or sound package.
Todd
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Hi Tim….
Hope you have good luck with that, just go in knowing that the TV News graphic nut can be a very difficult one to crack.
We are right in the middle of working on new stuff for a CBS station right now.
Most all broadcast stations (especially network affiliates) have consultants (there are 3 or 4 major consultants in the country) and the consultants have a great deal to do with the “look” of a station. That’s why you can go from one city to the next and find a station that “looks” like one from back home. They are very carefully designed and consistent. For example, in a particular city there will be one station consulted by Frank Magid and Associates. That station will be called “Eyewitness News” and have a certain look. Go to another city 500 miles away, and whattya know, there is a station called “Eyewitness News” that looks just like the other…and guess what, they are a Magid station.
In addition, to futher tweak their looks stations employ big design firms who specialize in creating looks for stations. Most of them belong to the BDA (Broadcast Designers Association). They create everything from sets, to logo design, to on-air graphics, to fleet graphics, to out-of-station advertising.
After a “look” is designed, individual applications for it are usually created by graphic artists within an individual station.
All of that makes it hard for an individual. That’s not to discourage you though, it can be done. As I said, we are doing some of that work right now. The local CBS station hired one of the big broadcast design firms, HothausCreative in Dallas, to redesign everything for them. They did, and did a great job… but we were brought in to help finish some of the individual pieces that were needed, since there were soooo many of them.
I don’t want to be the “voice of doom” or discourage you from pursuing this… just know going in that for an individual to go into a television station in a mid-sized or larger market and sell the a graphics package would be very unusual. What you might do is pursue them as a client to help create indivual pieces for special needs they have that are based on their existing look.
Todd
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I too would think you are probably being underpaid.
There are a lot of factors that we don’t know… what your city is, what the cost of living is there and what a typical editor makes in that area.
Secondly, what kind of work and what kind of productions does this advertising agency produce? Is it high-end (productions with budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars), or low-end (few hundred-dollar car spots)? Or somewhere in the middle? Most in-house agency-produced stuff is midrange (low stuff goes to TV stations, high-end stuff goes to outside production companies), so for the moment I will operate on that assumption….
If it is midrange stuff, I’d say you are being underpaid. If it is high-end stuff, AND/or you really are the best he has ever worked with AND you really do have a kickass reel… then I would say you are being grossly underpaid.
A lot of it has to do with experience level: someone who is fresh out of school is not going to make as much as someone who has been doing it for a long time even IF the rookie is as good or better than the veteran. Not fair, but that’s just how it is.
Plus there is the old rule of supply and demand. Say if you were to leave, can the guy replace you with someone as good (or… good ENOUGH) for the same $30K? If so, your bargaining position is weak… but if he can’t, your bargaining position is strong. Just depends on what is happening in your market… you should be able to investigate that a little.
Plus plus… how much is he spending on other stuff to support video production? Do you work in a suite that cost him tens of thousands of bucks?… or a couple thousand?
Plus plus plus… can you find out why your predecessor who was making twice your salary left? Maybe the boss couldn’t afford him anymore.
Just as a comparison, we are in a mid-sized city in the Southeast. We are an independent production company but we chiefly work for agencies doing commericials… I’d say the budget for a typical :30 spot is somewhere in the $5-$10K range. My senior editor is the best that I could hope to find, VERY fast, and a whiz at Premiere Pro, FCP, After Effects and Discreet Combustion. He doesn’t shoot, but I sometimes use him on location as crew (sound or grip). I pay him about 50% more than you are making. I could probably find someone in probably the $25-30K neighborhood, but the guy I have is the very best and I pay him what it takes to keep him happy, make him part of the team, and to keep him from looking elsewhere. I basically pay him well because he is indispensible.
If you are indispensible to your boss (or can make yourself so), then you should be comfortable in asking for a raise, even if his purse strings are tight. He can only say no.
Todd
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Again, not to rain on your parade, but there really aren’t any.
Sadly, ALL small camcorders are going to have about the same DoF, which is almost infinite. If that weren’t true, there wouldn’t be so many people trying to develop cheaper versions of the fairly-expensive DoF lens converters. Sorry.
Depth of field probably has 98% to do with image size, and 2% to do with the lens itself. The only real thing that lenses have to do with controling DoF is the longer the lens and the more “wide open” it is will make the DoF shallower. There is a “maximum” of how shallow the DoF can be, and that is purely a function of the image size.
Unfortunately ALL the small off-the-shelf camcorders have tiny 1/3″ sensors… and except for a lens converter there is simply no way to get true shallow DoF with them. The principals of optics simply won’t let you.
If you MUST use that setup, the best you can do is always make sure you are using the longest (most telephoto) lens possible. Put yourself as far away from the talent as practical, and zoom in to frame (this may not give you the perfect frame composition you want and may visually “compress” the scene too much, but will give the shallowest DoF). Then, make sure the lens is as “wide open” as possible. Start with the very biggest f-stop and use ND filters to stop it down instead of the iris.
Sometimes you can “fake” shallow depths of field in post production. If you have a foreground subject that is not moving (or not moving very much), you can mask out that subject with a very soft-edge matte so that you can keep the subject sharp and then blur the background a little. If you have a moving subject though it can get very tedious with a lot of rotoscoping and track-matting.
Sorry there’s no easy answer for this problem. If there was, I would have been using it years ago.
T2
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“Shooting the monitor” is an interesting idea, never really thought of that. That’s kinda like when shooting film and using a “smart slate” that displays the timecode of the sound recorder.
On the occasions that we do multi-camera, even though our cameras will TC jam with each other we generally do something much more basic that has worked in the industry for the better part of a century now: clapper sticks.
I’ve never done this, but when it’s impractical to slate scenes with clapper (say it’s an event, or logistically hard to get someone into frame with a slate) I know that some people have fired a photo strobe at the scene, and used the flash as a sync mark.
Todd
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Well…
ABSOLUTELY get the mic off the camera, and get it as close to the talent as possible… boom pole or whatever.
The keys are: the mic itself, the position of the mic, and the skill of the oeprator.
Unfortunately in the budget range we are talking about you can probably get something servicable but you can’t get anything really great (you do get what you pay for)… but depending on your needs you can probably make it work (one that is really good enough for professional use is probably going to start somewhere in the thousand buck range; I use the Sennheiser MKH416, and it sounds fantastic). You said the AT mics you used before “worked pretty well”… if pretty-well is good enough, then the ones you were looking at might be ok… IF you use them right.
If you have to use something inexpensive, the key is then placement. Again, don’t put it on the camera… if you do, interiors will get a very hollow echo-y sound… exteriors will have too much ambient noise to hear the talent.
Put the shotgun on a pole. You don’t have to buy a thousand dollar Neumann boom. Go to Home Depot or Lowe’s and buy a $10 painters pole. There’s a guy on eBay who sells a little connector (I have a couple) that will convert the screw end of a painter’s pole to a convetional 5/8” mic thread for about $14, if I remember correctly.
If you can afford it, a shock mount is also a very good thing, as is a foam windscreen for shooting outdoors. If it is more than a little windy outside you will also need a “monkey fur” windjammer cover for the mic.
Have the boom operator practice placement, and practice following talent. Following moving talent (and dialog bouncing back and forth between talent) is a lot more difficult that some people might think. The mic should generally be above and in front of the talent, pointing at them. If talent can reach up and touch the mic, it’s in about the right spot. And a lot of people think the mic should point at someone’s head… but in reality you’ll get the best sound if the mic is pointing at their lower neck or upper chest.
Hope this helps,
Todd -
Sadly, there really isn’t a way to get great shallow DoF with a small off the shelf stock camcorder. The chips are just too small.
It’s really just physics/optics… the greater the image size, the shallower the depth of field can be. That’s why 35mm film generally has much shallower DoF than 16mm film…because the image area on the negative is almost five times as big. Big HD camcorders with 2/3″ chips can do it a little better, but even then a 2/3″ chip is about the same size as a 16mm film frame, so even those cameras can’t give really shallow DoFs except with long lenses.
If you are going to use that camera, the best bet is to use a depth-of-field converter in front of it and put real superspeed (so you can shoot wide open) lenses in front of it.
We use the P+S Technik Mini35 converter, and it works like a dream. We have almost stopped shooting film, it works so well. Unfortunately it is rather pricey at about $10K, and a decent set of superspeed primes is going to start somewhere in the $15K neighborhood. But there are much cheaper options. Someone in this thread linked the Redrock Micro converter, which basically does the same thing. It is just not quite as professional a unit as the P+S Technik, and it has some drawbacks (such as the image you record is upside down, which must be flipped back in post prodution), but it still does the job.
If you are an occassional shooter who needs shallow DoF, you could go with the Redrock converter and put still-camera SLR lenses (I’d recommend Nikkors) on it… you could put the package together for a couple thousand bucks or so.
If you are a hard-core everyday shooter doing higher-end projects I’d consider investing in the P+S Technik converter and really good primes. We’ve been doing it that way for about a year and it’s absolutely the best investment we’ve ever made.
Hope that helps,
Todd -
Hey Nick…
I was pretty excited to hear about that Panny monitor (have been looking for something more affordable) and was glad to see it was about $2500 less than the same size Astro… but looked at the specs and it’s 1024×768 and 4:3.
The 17″ model is even less expensive AND true 16:9… just wish it was a little smaller.
How in particular do you use BT-LH900 with HD? I’m assuming it has a 16:9 mode… are there black bars at the top and bottom (which unfortunately also significantly reduces the line count…grrrr)? Is there a “center cut” crop option?
Man oh man, I wish somone would come out with a more affordable small 1080 16:9 TTF. I imagine in a year or so they’ll be plentiful, but it sure would be nice to have a couple more now.
And I totally agree with you… a good AC with a tape measure is the only for-sure way to focus… being primarily a 35mm film shooter I usually instinctively do that… but unfortunately when shooting HD I’ve found in our particular world I can do that only about 80% of the time in practicality. I’d love to save my nickles for an Accuscene 1080 viewfinder, but just can’t make myself justify the cost (and I can’t rent one on a per-use basis because the viewfinder has to be fairly significantly modified for my particular camera rig). Sigh… nothing good is ever easy (and rarely cheap).
Todd
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>>something small, handheld, battery powered…
Well, if you are wanting an HD monitor with those specs, I believe you are presently limited to the Astro monitors, unless there is something else out there that I don’t know about (and I’m sure hoping there is).
A year from now the market will probably (and hopefully) be much much different, but right now if you want to go small AND handheld AND battery powered, there’s just not that many companies making them in HD.
You didn’t really say if you NEED an HD monitor or if an SD monitor will do. Personally, if I am shooting HD then my monitor pretty much needs to be HD as well… it’s so easy for focus to get soft and not realize it if you are relying on the viewfinder or a SD monitor. But if you just want to check framing, see what your camera op is doing, etc., then an SD monitor is probably fine. For that purpose we use the ultracheap little Varizoom monitors when shooting 4:3… I think they are less than $500 complete with a camera mount, battery, charger, and hood. They use a little proprietary 7.5 volt battery (looks like a consumer camcorder battery), but that really goes through a little converter on the back of the monitor that gooses the voltage up to 12v, which is what the monitor itself actually takes. You can bypass that converter and run it staight off the bricks that power the cameras, which is much more conventient. If we are shooting 16:9 instead of 4:3 we use the same setup, but swap out the TTF screen with one made by Lilliput (I think it is actually made for in-car DVD players, headrest installation etc.).
Both options work fine if I want to just “see what’s happening,” but I don’t trust either one to judge focus. Then again, when we shoot HD we use cinema lenses with a P+S Technik depth of field converter, so sometimes I’m dealing with depths of field that can be as shallow as a couple of inches deep or so. With video lenses and a greater DoF, then focus checking might not be such an issue and the SD monitors might work fine (as long as it is either a 16:9 monitor or is a 4:3 monitor that has a 16:9 mode).
Todd
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Well, I’ve never used one of the “professional” units… but as they are pretty darn expensive we built our own homemade version and it works like a charm….
It was made out of 12″ aluminum cake pan, and various flourescent electronic parts so that it is both flicker-free and dimmable down to about 50%. We buy plain ol’ cheap circular tubes from Home Depot which are readily available in various color temperatures.
I haven’t used it for any exteriors, but I suspect it wouldn’t be bright enough to do much good. It works great for interiors though, especially at about 5-6 feet or closer. Sometimes I will light a scene so it looks as good as possible, then add the ring just as a “beauty light” to give talent a bit of a punch and give a nice eye sparkle.
The only downside to it I have found is that I cannot use it with any talent that wears eyeglasses… the circular reflections look very weird indeed. You can also get the circular reflections in plain naked eyeballs in extreme EXTREME closeups, but it is usually not much of a problem.
Todd