[Todd Terry]

Good technical suggestions from Chris and Mark… heed them both.

From a stopping-the-problem-before-it-starts standpoint, are you in a position where you can simply tell your subjects “Please don’t wear that.”

We do that all the time.

Obviously when we are shooting, say, a commercial, we have complete control over wardrobe, so it’s not an issue at all.

In the corporate world, it’s a little trickier of course, and you can’t always do this… but many many times we have implored subjects, even CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to simply wear something else. We’ve frequently shot with the very top dog at a $14 billion (yes, billion with a “B”) company who has a penchant for buzzy glen plaid suits… and I won’t hesitate for a second to ask him to wear something else, or take off his jacket, if needed. He makes more every 10 minutes than I do in a year, but my job is to make him look good so I feel free to speak up about it.

I’m showing my age with this story… but in the later years of The Tonight Show there was a period where Johnny Carson would sometimes wear this particular jacket, you’d see it pop up in his “suit rotation” every two or three weeks. It was a very busy black-and-white houndstooth, and it would moire and practically throb and buzz on camera (and imagine this in the old analog days on your 25″ console Magnavox TV). It was terrible. Carson was the king of his show (and pretty much all TV) and was known for being fairly unapproachable, so I always suspected there were just no wardrobe people or even producers brave enough to say “Johnny, don’t wear that, it looks terrible on TV.” But someone should have.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Mark Suszko] “…buy what’s called a “cheese grater plate”… “

Oh god, I do relish the opportunities to correct Mark… they are the perfect combination of fun, satisfying, and rare (unfortunately)…

Actually, the piece of gak he is talking about is called a “cheese plate,” not a “cheese grater plate.” A cheese grater plate would be something that you put in your cheese grater… or put your grater on to catch the cheese. A “cheese plate” is indeed that piece of metal… with holes in it (you know, so that it looks like a piece of Swiss cheese).

That being said (and out of the way), Mark’s advice is right on target. You basically want to attach the prompter to the camera not to the tripod… so that if/when your camera head moves (pans, tilts, whatever) the prompter travels along with it. And yes, as Mark said, a rods system is what you need. There is probably not something off the shelf exactly, you’ll have to cobble it together from the various exact bits and pieces you need. As he said, Zacuto is a great source… their gear tends to be on the expensive side but is really well made.

Now Mark, don’t you feel better? Education is never a waste, you know.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Just a couple of fast things, because I’m under the gun today….

But a couple of things stuck out to me….

[Greg Ball] “because there aren’t any sources available for finding out who is planning a convention at a major hotel.”

Isn’t there? Isn’t there a chamber of commerce group or whatever that knows who is coming to town for what? Most big conventions are planned at least a year in advance (our biggest corp client generally plans big things a couple years out) so that info is out there somewhere. In our city the Convention and Visitors Bureau (which happens to be one block from our studios) knows all that kind of info… who is coming, where things are being held, all that jazz. That info is probably publicly available, and if not then befriending the right inside source would be in order.

[Greg Ball] “My initial thought is to get them to connect with me on LinkedIn.”

Maybe. But does anyone really do that? Personally I’ve yet to figure out the value of LinkedIn. It dumbfounds me that it is in something like the top three social media platforms, I’m on it but have yet to discover its usefulness. I have at least 400 invitations to connect to people sitting in my inbox that I have not answered…and won’t. I have no need to connect with a pharmaceutical salesman in Port Arthur Texas or the IT guy for Amtrak in Boston (which are real invites I’ve received this week, and which is very typical of the invites I get), so they are ignored. I personally just think that the vast majority of invites go into a black hole. But then again I’m an off-the-grid luddite, so who knows.

Just my quick thoughts…

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

What Mark said.

It just depends on what your agreement was with the client in the beginning.

Our clients know going in that our contracts with them specify that they own the finished product as a whole, in that form and can do with it as they wish (which mostly means air it wherever they want, since we mostly produce television commercials)… but they cannot chop it up, reuse any elements for another project, and such. At least not without our permission.

We’ve only had to bust a client for doing that once, and it was just by chance that I saw a shot that I had photographed used in a commercial that was originally from a different commercial we had produced for them. They pleaded ignorance that they weren’t allowed to do that, so I encouraged them to re-visit their original agreement. And I sent them a bill.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Sigh… those kids today, with their rock-n-roll music and Hula Hoops……

(a favorite phrase I break out frequently)

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Yep, and I stand by it.

I can spot something as high as 1/125th a mile away. And it looks awful… to me.

At 24fps anything over 1/60th starts being quite noticeable to me. Once you hit about 1/120th, it doesn’t matter if you go any higher, the juddery look appears about the same.

But plenty of people must be fine with it, otherwise you wouldn’t see narrow shutters so widely used (obviously, on purpose as an aesthetic choice).

But me?… not a fan. At all.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Mark there’s no utilitarian reason for doing it, it’s purely aesthetics. He prefers the more filmic-looking 24fps, even though it’s winding up at 29.97. There’s no technical or editing-based reason it’s better, but it’s not more complicated either.

It’s actually almost exactly the same way I work. Virtually all of my work winds up on the boob tube, at 29.97, of course. But I shoot almost everything at 24 (23.976) because that’s the look I almost always prefer. I shoot at 24, we edit in 24 projects, we give the client 24fps progressive versions to view/approve (on their progressive computers), and when they say “That’s good to go!” when we push the big “GO” button we output files for TV stations at 29.97, interlaced upper field first. There’s nothing more complicated about it by shooting (and editing) at 24fps, and I get the look I want.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

No Chris, I’m not talking about increasing DOF so that the greenscreen is sharp, but that all of the elements that you are trying to key are sharp.

With an extremely shallow depth of field, you might have one person razor sharp but another slightly soft. Or if you are shooting a single headshot in a CU, the subject’s eyes might be sharp, but the subject’s edges (ears, top of hair, shoulders, etc.) might be a little soft. That might the the look you’d want against a practical background, but for compositing you’d be better off with a deeper DOF and hard edges.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well 1/125th is about a 70° shutter, which is quite narrow indeed.

That is, in my opinion, going to give footage that gawd-awful staccato look, which is usually undesirable unless you are, for some reason, intending the footage to have the narrow-shutter look. It can be done well and appropriately (i.e. Saving Private Ryan), or terribly (Gladiator, anything that happens to be Fast and/or Furious or any one of a zillion action movies where it’s used to make things look more, well, “action-y”).

Personally, I hate that look like poison and never shoot with anything other than a 180° shutter unless there is a specific and compelling reason to do so. On rare occasions I might close the shutter a tiny bit for exposre reasons, and when I was shooting a lot of film one my 35mm cameras had a fixed 170° shutter so I was stuck with it… but 99% of the time I shoot with 180°.

Hey, that’s just me, it’s personal aesthetics taste and not an unbreakable rule.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Nah, I’m going to contend that it’s ALL about the f-stop.

I don’t think I’ve ever had any compositing issues because greenscreen footage had motion blur… and I really hate the stacatto look of too-high a shutter speed (and artificial motion blur just looks so, well, artificial). Also Mark said these were interviews he was shooting, which of course are not exactly action scenes. You’d probably see little to no motion blur in a talking head interview.

But I have seen compositing issues frequently because edges weren’t clean/sharp, because depths-of-field were to shallow to keep all screen elements in razor focus.

I’m one that frequently shoots wide open, and with medium-to-longer lenses at f/1.3 or so you can have razor sharp eyeballs but focus quickly falling off so that, say, ears are a bit soft… making a key tougher. In these cases for greenscreen work I force myself to shoot with higher f-stops…. but still always with “normal” shutter speeds (one over twice the frame rate I’m using).

T2

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