[Walter Soyka]

I didn’t mean to come across as overly optimistic; I think that Ron’s response is really accurate. I really did intend my comment as a step 6 after the rest to try to change the relationship and preserve part of the billing, versus allowing the relationship to end entirely at the end of the training.

Training is hard, and you’ll have to walk a tightrope in managing your client’s expectations about what their newly-minted “video professionals” will be able to deliver. You can’t transfer years of production experience in a week of training, and the first few in-house productions will show it. That’s a testament to the value you were providing as a video production vendor, but it’s a challenge to the value you’ll provide as a trainer and consultant.

As for billing, what are you expected to deliver — or what are you trying to sell? Are you showing up and walking them through production? Are you providing written materials (like checklists and standard operating procedures)? Video recordings of your training so they can continue to educate new hires (this might be an opportunity to sell one last production, or to retain the rights and re-sell elsewhere)? What will the client expect after training is done when they have additional questions or run into new problems? What sort of access and availability will they expect?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

I might add a step 6: continue the relationship.

It takes a long time to get a video department up and running from scratch, and you could transform your training gig into a longer-term consulting relationship.

You may also be able to continue providing video services for overflow work and projects that are beyond their in-house capabilities.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Nick,

I’m facing a problem similar to yours; I’ve currently got a nearline NAS for immediate live project backup only and I’m thinking about adding an LTO-4 for archival. I’d be curious to hear about what you’ve done and how it’s working out.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Nico Jones] “I was just wondering if anyone had any suggestions of effects in AE that might be used to contribute to an overall look for the greenscreen band members?”

In general, I’d try to integrate the the green-screened talent into the virtual set, which would most likely mean NOT stylizing them separately from the background. Once that compositing is done, you can grade the whole, integrated scene; otherwise, you run the risk of the production looking like it was green-screened.

[Nico Jones] “Any advice like ‘x is a good effect when combined with y, because it gives you a look that’s a bit z’ would be fantastic. I’d like to keep it in AE if possible, but I do have MB looks… “

This is going to be a tough question to answer, because it’s the reverse of the way most of us work. We start with knowing that we want look Z, knowing that we have footage W (which itself was shot with Z in mind), and then using X and Y as the bridge from W to Z.

What’s the creative? You mentioned Tron, so I’ve immediately thought of glowing grids and flat planes. Do you see more to it than that? What do you plan on having the band doing in the environment?

If you’re doing all the conceptual work yourself, you might start with a mood board, then develop a storyboard, then start doing your After Effects work.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Check out the Scale Comp script — you might find it helpful.

File > Scripts > DemoPalette.jsx > Scale Comp

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

The frame rate is really 23.976, not 23.98; if you are interpreting footage at 23.98 and outputting 23.976, I’d expect weird things to happen every now and then.

If you are in fact using 23.976 already, you might also try purging your caches.

Does the frame in question look correct if you use Composition > Save frame as… > File? If so, you might try rendering to an image sequence and simply replacing that frame if necessary.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Agreed that if there’s footage at 720p, you should stay 720p — that wasn’t clear to me the first time around.

I’d also stay away from computer-based playback, and recommend a standalone player instead, like Blu-ray, a compact flash player, or maybe one of those Western Digital media players. Simple, reliable playback is critical. Most of my work is in live events, and we always use two players with a switcher; one main player, and one backup in case the primary fails. This is standard operating procedure for all media types, including Beta, DVCAM, DVD, computer playback, DDR, etc. You don’t want a simple equipment failure to ruin your event.

As a rule, I don’t trust client computers for playback; they may not have the right software, codecs, or drivers; they may have the wrong power manager settings, they may have the wrong screen saver settings, they may have software that will pop up and steal focus from full-screen video, etc.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Mike Susol] “Will 1920 x 1080 be a lot slower to work with in AE vs. 720 x 480”

HD is slower to work in than SD; an HD frame has 6 times as many pixels as an SD frame. How much slower depends on the complexity of your project, but you can always preview at reduced resolution to keep your workflow fast.

I agree with Michael that it’s worth doing at 1920×1080 for flexibility, though. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Drew Jensen] “Hey guys, this is a desperate call to my fellow mac users. At my work, we are contemplating switching to mac for video editing (Mac Pro). The IT guys basically are saying over my dead body, so I need good reasons of why we should move to mac.”

If you have good reasons for switching to Final Cut, then that’s all you need; I love HP workstations, but their machines don’t run FCP.

Some companies (like yours) try to have their existing IT departments manage their edit systems, too. This puts production in a tough spot, because even truly great IT departments lack the domain-specific knowledge and experience necessary for supporting video systems. Ideally, IT should have no more input into your edit system purchase than they do your camera purchase — but good luck convincing anyone of that.

I know some folks from in-house production departments who have managed to get around IT’s “help” by classifying their edit systems as special equipment instead of computers; the downside of this approach might include no network or Internet access on your edit systems, though.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

If you want to use a ProRes workflow, maybe look at an AJA Ki Pro for capture instead of a laptop? There’s a forum here about it, too.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events