Screwed by Panasonic (So tell us Dave, how do you REALLY feel?)

Pardon me while I get off on a little bit of a rant here. There is a lesson here, one that's valuable to every business owner no matter how big or small your company is.

For the past few years our main camera has been the Panasonic SDX-900 DVCPro 50 camcorder. It is, in my humble opinion, the best looking standard-def camera ever made. It has an amazing 24p 16x9 mode with incredible shadow detail. This camera is so good that it had allowed us to put off buying HD camera gear much longer than we thought we would have to. Most of our projects get delivered online or on DVD, and this camera is perfect for delivering top-notch pictures for those circumstances. If we needed to shoot in actual HD we rented a Varicam or CineAlta. (We're in the process of executing our HD upgrades...but that's another blog post!)

Well, as sometimes happens in this biz, we were out in the field and a case fell on the SDX-900's soft bag (while the camera was in it), and the viewfinder snapped off. You can see in this picture where the metal sheared. A little gaffers tape got us through that shoot, and I wasn't all that stressed about the situation. It was an honest accident, and budgeting for repairs is just part of doing business.




I had my favorite repair shop, Contract Video Specialists, email me a parts list, and I put in an order for the replacement part. As you can see in the picture, the broken part is a piece of stamped metal, with a Panasonic logo and some plastic where the tally light shines through. There are no electronics, and Panasonic doesn't make you order the whole viewfinder.

My friend from Contract Video called me back.

"Are you sitting down?" she asked me.

"Yes."

"How much do you think that part costs?" she teased.

Now, having been in this biz for more than a handful of years, I'm used to paying premium prices for parts. It's just something you've got to live with, since you can't comparison shop for these things.

"I dunno...a couple hundred bucks?" I responded, launching us into the High/Low game from The Price is Right.

"Higher..."

"Three Hundred?"

"Higher..."

"Four Hundred?"

"Higher..."

"Five Hundred?"

"Higher..."

"Six Hundred?"

(At this point I'm laughing, because of the absurdity of the situation.)

"Seven Hundred?"

Seven hundred dollars, my friends. That little scrap of stamped metal costs seven hundred dollars. Let's all take a moment and let that sink in. (Hum the Jeopardy theme, if you'd like...)

My friends at Contract Video were apologetic, and sympathetic, and just as shocked as I was. But I had no choice, of course. I needed to part, so Panasonic got my $700.

But here's the thing, and the lesson in this tale. I went into this expecting to pay a premium, expecting to pay much more than the part would be worth in a non-pro-video scenario. Like I said, paying high prices for replacement parts is just a part of doing business, and we budget for it. Up to three hundred dollars and I wouldn't have been shocked. A bit annoyed, perhaps, but not shocked.

But seven hundred bucks? Sorry, folks, we've crossed the line from premium pricing into aggressive profiteering. It's unreasonable, and it's seriously soured my view of Panasonic and my feelings on owning this camera. Just like that, in one quick, silly stroke of greed, Panasonic burned through years of built-up good will they had earned with me. Now, when someone asks me what I think of my Panasonic camera, my stories are tempered with warnings that, yes, the gear is high quality, but be prepared to bend over when it's time to buy parts. (Sorry...that's an image none of us needed...)

By the way, I emailed and snail-mailed Panasonic about this, figuring at the very least someone would want to know how ultimately short-sighted this pricing policy is. Never heard back from them. Which, of course, makes it even worse.

We all have our thresholds when it comes to pricing and customer service. What's yours? Do you have a good feel for what your clients are willing to bear? Is it really worth dinging them for that double-overtime rush charge, or is it sometimes better to be the hero, to come through in the rush situation and earn their loyalty and trust? (It depends on the client, IMHO...)

What do you think?

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Sound FX

As we've mentioned here before, there's an old saying that viewers notice visual images when they are great, but they notice audio only when it's bad. Good audio goes unnoticed, and no one experiences that more than the heroes in sound effect editing, toiling away at their digital workstations, only taking occasional breaks to go to the foley stage to record someone smacking a leather couch with a table tennis paddle.

Proper sound effects can make a huge difference in your productions, and these days, particularly with motion graphics, whooshes and low-end rumbles are practically expected.

Check out this great example I found. It's the Pirate of the Caribbean movie trailer, but with only the Sound Effects track enabled.

You can download the QuickTime movie clip here.

Pretty cool, eh? And there's a lot of subtle stuff going on in there, along with the usual collection of explosions and sword sounds. (My favorite is the swoosh sound at 1:14, as the image fades to black.)

So where do you get your own collection of effects? Well, first of all, Final Cut Studio comes with a hefty collection that often goes overlooked. That's a great place to start. Online, there places like SoundDogs and The Recordist that provide free or very reasonably priced sounds.

Make sure you check the usage agreements, of course.

So what do you think? What are your favorite sources for Sound FX?

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Required Reading - Creating Motion Graphics

Adobe After Affects is an incredibly powerful, incredibly deep program. I've been using it since version 2.0, back in 1994 (still have that COSA dongle around here somewhere...) and have seen it mature in many exciting ways. It's always interesting to me to sit with another AE artist to see how they use the tools, and to compare notes, tips and tricks.

I was recently working on a project with a close friend who's also been using AE since, well, before the internet. We had a bunch of files we'd imported, and I was using the "interpret footage" dialog to set how I wanted AE to handle the clips. Since they were all from the same source, I using "remember interpretation" after setting the first one and then "apply interpretation" to the rest, saving a bunch of time in not having to apply the interpretation rules to each clip.

"Wait...wait..." said my friend. "What did you just do there?" Turns out in his many years of using AE he'd never tried using the "apply interpretation" function. Not for lack of knowledge, to be sure, this guy's got a lot of AE experience. It had just never come up. Somehow he's missed that one, which isn't hard to do with a program as deep as After Effects. This is a great example of why it's fun to sit in with other artists. You never know what you're going to learn.

Speaking of learning from great artists, Chris and Trish Meyer are long time After Effects gurus, well know in the online word for their generosity and willingness to help both new and seasoned AE users. They're accomplished artists, teachers and presenters, and they've written what most consider to be the best book on the market for learning all about After Effects.

The book is called, "Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects," and it's full of valuable information for users at all levels of expertise. If you're starting out this book will help get you on your way, but even if you've been using AE for years you'll surely get your money's worth from the countless tips and tricks peppered throughout the book. Every AE user should have this book on their bookshelf. I can't count the number of times I've been in the midst of some complex AE project and have gone paging through CMG looking for a time saving tip. I used to teach After Effects to the folks at the Washington DC bureau of ABC News, the folks who did Nightline, and Creating Motion Graphics served as our textbook.

Check it out. It's one of the best investments you can make in your After Effects career. They've got some sample chapters available at their web site.

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Sony EX-1 Rolling Shutter Issues

The new Sony EX-1 HD camcorder is the current "hot" camera, providing amazing image quality in a compact, affordable package. It's on my "to buy" list. The camera uses CMOS imagers, rather than the CCD imagers traditionally used in video gear. CMOS has some advantages, like lower power consumption and heat generation, and lack of vertical smear issues.

There are, however, issues with the fact that this camera uses what's known as a "rolling shutter," which can introduce some nasty artifacts.

Barry Green at DVX User has a really informative write-up comparing CCDs to CMOS imagers, along with samples of problematic footage from the EX-1. If you're considering one of these units check out Barry's article to make sure won't get burned by the particular limitations of the EX-1.

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Steadicam Pilot

Not a lot of time to blog today, so I'll leave you with this very entertaining demo video of the Steadicam Pilot. I'm considering getting one of these when I get the Sony EX-1 HD camera.

(I know we've been a bit steadi-heavy this week...I promise more variety next week!)

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Steadicam Blooper

Let me set the scene for you, dear readers...

It's the 2001 Columbia Festival of the Arts, and the "big ticket" for the festival is the performance by a group of Cuban dancers. As you well know, El Presidente Castro doesn't just go about casually letting his subjects travel outside of his dominion, because, dag nab it, seems like every time he does a bunch of them decide to not come back. Driving around in 1950s era cars may seem wonderfully romantic to us, but when it's your only option it gets old in a hurry. Or so I'm told.

At any rate, the dancers were here, and we were hired by their state-side promoter to put together a nice promo video for them. So we shot the live show with multiple cameras, and scheduled a shoot the next day to get steadicam shots on the stage, shots impossible to get during the live show, being that there's a universal law that whenever there's a steadicam operator around he or she automatically upstages anything else going on. I suspect this is due to the seemingly magical qualities of steadicam, making the camera float weightless in space. (It is not, in fact weightless, of course, being tragically unable to defy the laws of physics. "Hey, duuude! Is that thing heavy?" "No, no, not at all...I always sweat like this...")

One of the impressive things about this dance group is that the woman are all fairly uniform in size, and move in graceful, coordinated lines. Kind of like the Rockettes, but with a smoldering sensuality that tempts American camera men to contemplate offering refuge in the good 'ol U.S. of A. via a marriage visa. So it's not entirely surprising that while trying the thread the needle, so to speak, through their intricate patterns, this happened -


Oops.

No one was seriously injured, thank goodness, and due to my razor-sharp negotiating skills an international incident was narrowly avoided. If you step through the video you can see a frame where her ear is pressed up against the lens of the camera. This was a full-sized steadicam, not one of the dinky consumer rigs, and I suspect her bell was ringing for a while after the collision. But she was a good sport, and as a small gesture to make it up to her I've been smuggling her parts of a 1976 Ford Maverick, one piece at a time.

Just another day in the life of yours truly.

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Upgrade Cycles

After Effects 8.02 is now available from Adobe, and it fixes a number of nasty bugs. General Specialist has a nice rundown of what's new.

Should you upgrade right away? Well, my friends, that depends. It's my learned opinion that you should always wait a few days before jumping in and installing the latest update to any application that's mission-critical, particularly if it's a big, shiny, whole-number update full of fancy new features. Let the other foolish mortals find the bugs, I say! And there are sure to be plenty of bugs. Major software packages like After Effects, Photoshop and Final Cut Pro are so vast and complex from a programming point of view that there's really no practical way to make sure that all of the bugs have been squashed. (The cynical part of me submits that it's a lot cheaper, er, easier for software companies to let the users bang on the app for while, especially when it comes to finding small bugs that only reveal themselves under unusual situations. But that's the cynical side of me, who I try to keep locked up in a shed, in the woods, past the river, where no one can find him. See, even there, I've probably said too much, and you've fired up Google maps and are furiously looking for locations with sheds, woods and rivers. It's a good thing I haven't shared where I lock up my paranoid side...)

Ahem. Yes. So.

Obviously, if one of those previously mentioned bugs happens to be a show-stopper for you, then please, by all means, dive in on the upgrade, but be warned that there likely a whole new set of traps hiding in there. They will be found, no doubt, but do you really want to be the one to find them, the night before that critical project is due, when you're already sleep-deprived and conjuring imaginary personality traits locked up in the woods? I think not. So you wait, you see what others have discovered, and you proceed with caution. (And needless to say, back everything up before upgrading! You may even want to keep an off-site backup, say, somewhere in the woods...)

Think about it - every whole-number software release is quickly followed by a point-oh-one version, the version they really meant to ship the first time. ("Oops! Our bad!") And most bug-fix releases are, mercifully, free. There is a special circle of hell reserved for the CEOs of software companies who charge big bucks for paid bug-fix upgrades. You sold me this defective pile of cobbled-together code (which, by the way, I love, and earn a tidy living using, thank you very much!), don't make me hand over more money to get the version that really works. (Wait - did you hear that? Sounded like rusty chains, desperately straining to hold closed the door of a shed, somewhere off in the woods...)

A graphic-designer friend of mine has a policy to keep using the old version of any software package until someone sends her a file that requires the new version. The downside to this is that she risks falling "behind" with the software, scrambling to catch up when someone does, indeed, send a file that requires the new version. The upside is that she often leapfrogs a version of two, saving money, sticking with the tools she's comfortable with. It's an interesting approach, and seems to work for her.

I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. I try to keep up with the capabilities of the latest, greatest tools, but tend not to dive in with the latest versions the moment they are released. Wait a couple of weeks, see who gets arrows in the back, then install the upgrade on a secondary machine for a non-time-sensitive project. Like the machine I keep running in the shed, in the woods, past the river.

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QuickTime 7.4 - Ugh...

QuickTime 7.4 is out, and word on the street is that you should avoid it like the plague, especially if you are running After Effects or Adobe Premier. After Effects renders are failing around the ten minute mark, using a variety of QT codecs. The suspicion is that this is a result of the new DRM system Apple has implemented to enable iTunes movie downloads, but there's nothing official from Apple, yet. (Yet another example of why DRM is evil.)

Remember when QuickTime was aiming to be a universal media container, handling all kinds of content? It was the swiss army knife of media handlers. Seems like recently QT has fallen on hard times, or, perhaps more likely, has become more important to Apple as a delivery mechanism for iTunes content than as a tool for content creators. The disabling of Flash capabilities in QT has caused a world of hurt for developers who depended on this functionality. Some content creators are calling for the development of an open-source, universal media container.

I remember my first Apple CD-ROM drive, which shipped with a bunch of (oooh!) interactive CD titles, including "From Alice to Ocean," the first to use QuickTime. We hosed that CD drive to our Quadra 700, running the Mac version of Video Machine (Yes, there was a Mac version, yes, we were the first in USA to have it, yes, it was ultimately a tragic story, and yes, I will share all of the sordid details in a future blog entry...) and staying up late into the night playing Myst (mapping those damn tunnels!) and, later, Marathon.

QuickTime was amazing back then. It's not going away any time soon, but it sure would be nice to see Apple treat is with a bit more respect and take more care with testing before releasing a version show-stopping bugs for content creators.

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"I Have a Dream..."

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. day! Here in the USA this is one of those in-between holidays, work-wise, where government offices are closed, some businesses are closed, but many are open. Schools are all closed here in Maryland.

Clearly, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is an excellent example of superb oratory skills combined with a dynamic, resonant message. It is universally recognized, etched into the minds of most of the free world. Regardless of your opinion of it, you know it, you recognize it, and on some level you feel it.

It's interesting to me that many have been comparing Obama's recent concession speech to the speaking style of Dr. King. The cadence, the use of repetition of key phrases, the clear message of hope.

There are important lessons to take from succesful speeches like these, independent of their content. As you plan your visual projects remember the importance of cadence, of rhythm, of repetition. Remember that the most powerful connection you can make with your viewer is the emotional connection. Don't just tell them your story, give them a reason to care, to feel it. Don't just tell them what you've got, show them why they need it, convince them they need to care. Do that, and you message is much more powerful.

(Reminds me of the old Vaudeville joke - "The key to success in this business is sincerity - If you can fake that, you've got it made.")

At any rate, aside from that, I've been trying to think if I have any interesting black-history related war-stories to tell. I don't have anything really earth-shattering, other than the fun story of when I was hired to do steadicam for an NAACP convention. They were having an awards show for students from all over the country who had demonstrated achievement in a variety of subjects. Music, math, writing, a bunch of different things. The show was very much like the Oscars in design, and my job was to get the shot of the winners walking from their seats, through the auditorium and up on stage. We had two steadicam ops that day, yours truly and Sheila Smith, a really cool, talented operator from Virginia. It was a really cool event, with a lot of electricity in the air as these kids from all walks of life waited to see if they had won.

At any rate, before the show I'm setting up my rig, getting the camera mounted, securing the cabling, checking everything out, giving my assistant the low-down on what I'll need him to help me with during the live show. Suddenly his face went blank, his jaw dropped, and he muttered, "Lando..."

Sure enough, walking toward us was Billy Dee Williams, one of the hosts of the show. In my mind, of course, he's intergalactic space scoundrel Lando Calrissian. As he approached, I put my hand out, said, "Mr. Williams!" and hoped for the best. Without breaking stride he shook my hand, flashed that winning smile, said, "How ya' doing, fellows?" and kept on going.



My assistant and I took a moment to collect ourselves, exchanged one of those, "Okay, that was one of the geek-cool highlights of our lives" looks, and got back to work.

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AE scripting blog

I have to admit I find expressions and scripting in After Effects somewhat intimidating. Fortunately there are some really nice online resources to get you started. Sometimes having a starting point, even if it's not exactly what you're looking for, can really help, and you can reverse-engineer and modify the expression to suit your own needs.

Anders Sundstedt has a new blog dedicated to scripting in After Effects. There's some very cool stuff there. Check it out!

And these are excellent resources, too -

AE Expressions / Scripts / message board help

Lessons / Expressions / Scripts
Dan Ebberts fount of wisdom

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Bad Weather

Stuck at my local Mall, waiting for the office workers to clear the snowy roads so I can make my way home. In the mean time, thanks to my local Apple store, time to post some thoughts on situations where you find yourself in the midst of inclement weather.

Obviously, if you're a shooter you need to be prepared with rain gear for your camera. I've always been a fan of PortaBrace rain covers - They're tough, well made and come with the best warranty possible. You can even send them a bag or rain cover for a cleaning and "tune up" and they'll check it out and make sure it's up to snuff. For free. Keeping your gear dry isn't something you want to fool around with, so it's worth investing in quality rain protection.

Back when we were producing highlights videos and TV shows for the University of Maryland Terps, I spend many an afternoon in the pouring rain, covering football or lacrosse. The PortaBrace covers never let me down.

A few years ago I was hired to do steadicam for the lighting of the national christmas tree in Washington DC. It's a fun, VIP event, with the president and lot of muckity-mucks in attendance. Barbara Eden, TV's Genie, was cohosting, along with country music legend Roy Clark. I was positioned at the front of the stage, and it was my job to lead in Roy Clark, who was dressed as Santa for the big show. It was a beautiful, snowy night, perfect for the planned festivities. 

President Bush makes his entrance and sits, along with the first lady, safely behind their plexiglass shield. Roy Clark makes his entrance from the back of the audience, and I walk in front of him with the steadicam, backpedaling while my cable puller keeps me out of trouble. This is live TV, going out around the world. My big move goes well, and Roy makes his way up on the stage. I reposition myself to grab reaction shots of the crowd. Suddenly, I realize that something's not right. The crowd has that mixture of horror and amusement that washes over when something unexpected has happened.

Turning back toward the stage, I see that Roy Clark's Santa-pants have fallen down around his ankles. Even worse, he doesn't know it, because he's wearing black leggings underneath to keep warm. So he's going on with his act, thinking that the audience is eating up everything he saying ("Gosh, these old jokes are really killing tonight!") but in fact they are laughing at Mr. Clarks presidential performance, being done sans trousers.

Barbara Eden finally ran up and saved him (funny how no one looks at Roy Clark when Barbara Eden is on stage...). But as much as it pains me to admit it, the best moment of the night went to President Bush. He sauntered up to the mic and said, "Looks like Santa could use a new belt for Christmas..."

Gotta love live TV!

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Backup Strategies

You've got data. Tons of data, more and more each day. The stuff piles up faster than a group of Hazzard County police cars chasing the Duke boys. Media files, project files, graphic files...how do you make sure you don't lose data, especially in the midst of an important project? Trust me...nothing torpedoes your credibility like having to call a client to tell them their project is hosed because your hard drive crashed. Larger clients, in particular, expect you to have data backup plans. It's expected.

So what to do? You're a small shop, perhaps even a one-person operation, and it's simply not cost-effective for you to install a server farm with automated backup, not to mention an I.T. department to keep it all running. But you still want to protect yourself from data loss. You need a backup plan.

Here's what we do at Pixel Workshop. We have a computer on our network thats dedicated to being our file server. Nothing fancy, in fact, it's a Powermac G4, running the standard, non-server version of Mac OS X. On this machine we have an external firewire drive, creatively called "Server Storage." This 400 gig drive contains active project files, and is not a long-term archival area. Copies of stuff we're currently working on goes there. (Video media is not stored here - that stays on the edit suite's local, high speed drives.) We're small enough that we don't need sophisticated check-in/check-out accounting for files. As long as we all communicate it's not hard to keep up with versioning.

Every night at 2am Server Storage gets backed up to a drive (also on the server) called (wait for it!) Server Storage Backup. So far, so good, right? We've got two copies of everything, and it's being backed up automagically. Well, kind of. This kind of thing works pretty well, but it doesn't really protect you against the most dangerous enemy of protecting your files. Yes, friends, I'm talking about (cue the scary music) Operator Error.

You accidentally overwrite a folder, delete some files, or save the wrong version, and your backup software dutifully reproduces your mistake to the backup drive, unless you catch the error before the scheduled backup. Now you're doubly screwed! This has happened to me. It's a sinking feeling to haughtily declare, "No problemo! I have a backup..." only to discover your backup is just as hosed as the original. This is also why I don't rely exclusively on Raid-5 solutions. Yes, you're protected from hardware failure, but it doesn't save your from yourself when it's the middle of the night, you haven't slept in days, and you accidentally overwrite the main project file.

For all these reasons we employ a second backup drive, called "Server Storage Weekend Backup." This drive backs up Server Storage every weekend, in the middle of the night. This backup may not always have the most recent versions of everything, but it's added protection against a catastrophic user error, giving you a few days of leeway, typically.

This system has been running for a couple of years, now, and works very well. It's not perfect, of course. The drives are all in the same physical location, so a fire or flood could wipe them all out. But in terms of protecting the files on active projects, our most important files, it's a good way to provide a couple of layers of protection.

There are other strategies we're considering adding, and this is a constantly-evolving process, usually triggered by inadvertent data loss. Long-term data archival storage is a different subject, for a different post.

In the mean time, chime in an share your backup strategies!

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Macbook Air

A few quick comments are in order, post-Macworld keynote.

The new Macbook Air represents what Apple is best at - cramming a decent (but not earth-shattering) amount of technology into a very desirable package. Looks very interesting for folks who write and browse on the road. It's not a computer I envision many using for editing, given the lack of firewire ports, modest CPU capabilities and lack of a card slot. But that's what this little gem's about, now, is it?

Apple TV gets a lot more interesting with HD capabilities, topping out with 720p images at 24p. The $229 price makes it easier justify as an add-on gadget. Could make for a compelling way to rent HD movies, if they can get the quality high enough. Not something I'm running out to purchase, but I'll be keeping my eye on it for the Bittner HD Home Theater.

I have an iPhone, so I'm looking forward to playing with the new mapping functions.

Oh, one more thing...if you've never watched a Steve Jobs keynote, do yourself a favor and watch the video from Apple. Steve is a really good presenter, and his supporting graphics are always clear and uncluttered. (There's a lot more about Steve's presentation skills at Presentation Zen, my favorite web site for presenters. Tons of good content there.)

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War on a Shoestring Budget

Here's an amazing example of what can be done using modern, low-cost camera gear and digital compositing tools.



There was undoubtedly a tremendous amount of planning that went into this, and it really demonstrates how you don't have to be a huge studio with a mega-budget to do cast-of-thousands scenes. Sometimes the asset you have at your disposal is time. In this case they took a few days to shoot many, many versions of soldiers running across the beach. (I suppose careful viewers could start to wonder why all of the soldiers are the same height...)

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Green Screen headache

We've been shooting a lot of green screen footage lately. One of our clients has a web site with an online coach, and we shoot her in front of green, then send the footage to their Flash artist who keys the footage over whatever background they're currently using on the site.

It's a fairly straight-forward assignment, but I find it's important to be extra careful when I'm shooting green-screen footage (or anything that's going to be used for effects) when the footage is going to be composited by someone else. This is especially true when you don't know what tools they have available. Working in After Effects and being spoiled by how easy it is to pull a nice key using Keylight, you can forget that not every keying tool is so precise and powerful. So be nice, and be sure to send them clean, evenly lit footage.

My online-friend Jonas Hummelstrand has posted an excellent guide for getting great green and bluescreen footage at his blog, General Specialist. Check it out, then come on back here and I'll share with you a silly mistake I recently made while shooting greenscreen.

Okay, so I was recently shooting greenscreen segments for our TripFlix project, using our Panasonic SDX-900 DVCPro 50 camera. Shooting in DVCPro 50 is much better than standard DVCPro (or DV, which is essentially the same codec) because DV50 has twice the data rate (50 mbps vs. 25 mbps) and uses 4:2:2 color sampling, instead of the 4:1:1 sampling of standard DV. More chroma resolution means more information for the keying software to use. (These numbers are becoming fuzzy in the HD world, FYI...but that's a subject for a future post.)

Here's the bone-headed mistake I made. 90% of the time, when shooting with the SDX-900, I have a black stocking net mounted between the lens and the camera body. This is an old camera trick that helps soften the image, and puts a nice glow on the highlights in your image. When you're shooting 24p 16x9, having this net helps give you more of that film look we all seem to covet. Here's an example of what it does for you -
See how that highlight on the wheel has a nice glow, yet the image doesn't have an over-fogged effect? That's what the black net does.

By this point you're probably one step ahead of me, and can figure out what I did to screw up, er, make my greenscreen shot more challenging. Yep, I shot with the net still attached to the camera, and I didn't even realize it until I'd started trying to pull a good key in After Effects.



See the hits on Alex's helmet, and the nice glow they have? Not good for keying, my friends, not good. In fact, it's not just those hits, everything in the image has a subtle glow.

In the end, I spent more time than I normally do in Keylight, tweaking, and I was able to pull a pretty good key. Not my best work (the edges are a tad soft for my liking), but certainly usable.



I learned my lesson, though. Not remembering to take thirty seconds to remove the net cost me a lot of time working with more challenging footage.

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Sounding Squeezed

Here's an interesting article in Rolling Stone on the over-use of compression in modern music recording. Lots of interesting stuff there. This YouTube video illustrates the problem pretty well, too -



So how does all this apply to you and your own productions? Well, compression is a very useful, powerful tool, but as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility.

Simply put, compression is making the dynamic range of your audio smaller, placing it within a compressed space. The louds get softer, the softs get louder, but it's all supposed to happen in a very elastic, dynamic way. Everything adjusts in proportion.

It's a great way to make an interview punch out over background music, or even just to smooth out the dynamic rage of amateur talent, making their speech more clear and easy to hear. In Final Cut Pro I usually use a setting between 2:1 and 3:1, and have even gone up to 4:1 on a few occasions. You need to be careful, because over-use of compression can quickly make your audio sound flat and over processed. I assigned a 2:1 compression preset to a keyboard shortcut as a favorite effect, making it quick and easy to apply to selected audio clips. It's a good starting point for tuning up audio that needs a little more presence. An appropriate amount of compression can make a world of difference. Experiment, and see what works best for you.

(A bit off-topic, here - Why are there virtually no female audiophiles? I've met a handful of women who are audio engineers, but the world of high-end audio, home HiFi enthusiasts, seems to be exclusively male. Women don't seem to obsess over which speakers to buy, or the oxygen content of their audio cables. This is one of the many reasons, as my wife often reminds me, that they are the superior species.)

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Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star

Ah, the classic star field background. Ever since the Tantive IV came screaming by with a Star Destroyer in hot pursuit, I've always had a obsession with space-fantasy, (I got one of these for Christmas when I was a wee lad!) and what I would have given to generate realistic star fields back on my first computer, when I was ten years old!

Star fields are pretty easy to conjure up in Adobe After Effects, but I'm going to share a quick and easy technique for making your star fields really shine!

Okay, first, let's start with a simple composition in After Effects. A single layer with a black solid that's the size of the layer. That's your black deep-space background, where no one can hear you scream. Next, create another solid layer on top of your black layer, this one white. Now, go to Effect:Simulation:CC Star Burst and apply this effect to your black solid. This effect comes with After Effects, and is a good starting point for your star field. With the default settings, you should have something that looks like this -

Not bad, but it looks more like you've been drinking too much Fizzy Lifting Drink, instead of being ready to zoom through space. No worries. Let's make some adjustments to the effects settings. Make these adjustments -

Scatter - leave at 100
Speed - change this to .10
Phase - Leave at 0
Grid spacing - make this 8
Size - make this 20
Blend w. Original - Leave at zero

Okay, so now you should have something that looks more like this -


Much better. But it's still got that too-perfect, computer generated look. One way to improve this situation is to use the Effect:stylize:glow effect, which will give the stars a nice subtle halo. The default glow settings actually look pretty nice, but go ahead and fine tune them to your taste.

My favorite way to make stars really shine, however, is to use the Trapcode Starglow effect. Yes, it's a third-party plugin, but trust me, the Trapcode plugins are well worth the money. They are reasonably priced, and you'll find yourself using them all the time. Download the free demo and give them a whirl.

The default setting for Starglow is a bit strong, looking like something out of Superman The Movie, so let's dial them down a bit. Use the Warm Star preset, and set your streak length to 2.

Now you should have something that looks like this -


Fine tune this to your taste, but you can see what a huge improvement this is over the original, and how well it matches the traditional cinematic star field look.

Got your own tasty AE star field effect? Let us know in the comments.

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Can you hear me now?

It's often lamented that audio is the bastard child of video. People notice good video and bad audio. Audio has a huge impact on the quality of your work, yet many simply don't put a whole lot of time or energy into quality sound. That, in my opinion, is a mistake.

In field production, the easiest way to ensure good audio is to, well, hire an audio guy! Yes, I know you spent a whole lot of money of that lav or shotgun mic, and darn it, audio guys are expensive, and the client's budget is tight as it is...

First of all, I agree that there are times when you can get away with not hiring a sound guy. If I'm shooting a single camera, talking head interview, I generally don't hire someone to do audio. I can handle clipping a lav on the talent, (Sanken lavs are my faves, by the way.) and monitoring sound while shooting what's basically a lock-down shot isn't too taxing.

But for anything more complicated, anything dramatic or in any way acoustically challenging (a noisy environment, for example) I pick up the phone and call my favorite audio guy. Why? Because then I don't have to worry about the sound. Sounds simple, right? But think about it. I'm busy shooting, which is a full-time job, requiring my full attention. I can't also be effectively monitoring audio. With a dedicated sound guy, I know the audio is being taken care of , and if theres a problem the sound guy will let me know, we'll listen together and decide what to do about it.

Good sound guys (and so far in career they've all been guys, at least for field production. I'm sure there are some highly talented sound gals out there, and I salute you...) usually bring a kit of tools and gadgets that would make McGyver jealous, and know the techniques for solving just about any audio problem. ("Hmmm...so the talent is wearing chain-mail...we might pick up some jangling...").

Budget wise, a sound guy is a pretty easy sell to your client. It's not a hard thing for them to understand, that if they want good sound ("Good sound is important to you, yes?") they need to budget for it. And it will save everyone time, too, having someone dedicated to getting the audio, freeing you up to just worry about images.

That said, it's worth having a small, basic collection of audio gear. A couple of good lavs, a nice wireless, a decent shotgun and a boom pole. You never know when you're going to have to deal with something last-minute, so it's best to be prepared, right?

Speaking of shotguns, here's a really nice shotgun mic shootout. Lots of good information and sample clips.

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Mac (Pro) Daddy

Alrighty, dear readers. Today we're going to be quick, because I seem to have picked up a bit of a stomach bug that's making its way through the Bittner family. It's either that or the raw oysters I was eating at the Baltimore Rotary Club's annual Bull and Oyster Roast fundraiser. Consuming uncooked, filter-feeding, bottom dwelling shellfish may not be on the list of recommended practices from the fine folks at the FDA, but they sure are yummy. Once you get past the snot-like consistancy, of course. But that goes without saying.



At any rate, Apple caused a bit of a stir today by releasing a new batch of Mac Pros. As is their custom, the announcement comes a week before Macworld expo, which creates the sub-stir that Apple must have a fine selection of other announcements for the expo if these systems are being given a quiet launch. Let's not forget that the Macworld is considered a consumer show, and the Mac Pros are considered, er, pro machines, so they're not typically updated at Macworld.

Improvements in this latest round of heavy-computing-iron from Apple include 8-cores across the line, and the option for much improved graphics capabilities via the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5 gigabytes of onboard RAM. It will be interesting to see what's to come at NAB this year, and what Apple will bring to the Final Cut Studio suite to make use of so much graphics horsepower. Motion should see a nice speed boost, methinks. Of course, the top-of-the-line card costs as much as the base CPU, and is probably overkill for most users. Still, nice to see a truly high-end graphics option from Apple, and area where they've lagged behind.

With eight cores I have to wonder how much performace inprovement you'll see with the faster speed versions. All of these machines are blazingly fast, and After Effects CS3 tears through renders on these Intel machines like my son ripping the wrapping paper off his Nintendo DS on Christmas morn. Extemely fast, with singular determination.

Now pardon me while I help those oysters complete their circle of life...

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"Travel expenses payed for by the state of Montana"

Back when we were making our travel plans for TripFlix, a friend of mine who works in tourism explained to me that state tourism commisions have money set aside for media that are traveling to promote tourism in their state. TripFlix is a coast-to-coast interactive travel DVD for kids, so our mission fit their criteria perfectly. Not every state was able to help us, but many of them were able to provide free or discounted hotel rooms, as well as assistance in securing locations for shooting. Some even had beauty-shot reels of their state, which saved us a ton of money on aerial footage. They are more than happy to provide this for you. It's what they're there for! (Artbeats was also a valuable source for quality stock footage. Their Road Rush collection is heavily used in TripFlix.)

Actually, there seemed to be an inversely proportional relationship between the popularity of the state and their willingness to throw money at us to visit. The more off the beaten path, the more excited they were to have us come to town.


Having the local and state tourism board help with your travel and planning is one of those things that seems obvious when you think about it, but it was news to us. Good news. It saved us thousands of dollars in hotel fees and countless hours, not having to track down locations and permits for our show. TripFlix is a very ambitious project, budget-wise, and every dollar saved on travel expenses meant we had a little more to spend on production, marketing and distribution.

Have any travel tips? Share 'em in the comments.

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When Betacam Ruled the World

I've been shopping around for a new smallish-HD camera (the Sony EX-1 is the current top contender) and it got me thinking about how we're in an era now where there really isn't a dominant HD tape format, the way Betacam SP used to be in the analog days, and it's quite likely there never will be one again. Of course, I'm dating myself merely by using the term, "tape format," since there probably will never be any new professional video tape formats. Data formats, yes, codecs, yes, but the days of running strips of rust-coated plastic by spinning tape heads are coming to and end, slowly but surely.

Back in the late 80s and through the 90s Betacam SP was the dominant, universal tape format. Everybody had it, and the quality was high enough that most felt is was acceptable for mastering. Digital Betacam, or "digibeta," as we used to call it, was a (surprise!) digital version of Betacam SP, with measurably higher quality. Problem was, digibeta decks were around forty grand each, making them a tough sell for many smaller shops like ours. And Sony, in a classic "let's protect our high end products and in the process keep ourselves from owning the larger market" move, never introduced a more affordable digibeta deck. Shops like mine were begging for a simple digibeta player/recorder, something that could be controlled by a nonlinear system (remember, this is the mid-90s, so non-linear systems were still in their adolescence...), but all Sony offered was a full-featured deck with all kinds of cool stuff broadcasters needed, but that was overkill for hosing up to a nonlinear editing system.

In the mean time, Sony released the UVW series Betacam SP decks, which were affordable (under ten grand, as I recall) and perfect for nonlinear systems. They sold like crazy, and further cemented Beta SP as the universal format for analog video. They're video wasn't as clean as the broadcast-level BVW-series decks, but for many users that didn't matter. As long as you could hand over a Beta SP tape, you were good to go. (Actually, with some of the early nonlinear systems the noisier UVW decks yielded better final video quality, because the noise in the signal helped prevent banding.)

But time marches on, and soon digital formats started to gain popularity. miniDV was huge hit with pros and consumers alike, Panasonic made major inroads in TV news and the general production world with DVCPro, followed by DV50, which delivered digibeta quality at a fraction of the price (and was our in-house mastering format for many years). Sony released DVCAM, a DV variant, but claimed it was an "industrial only" format at first - true pros would never lower themselves to use anything other than digibeta for broadcast work, according to the Sony literature of the day. The tragically named Digital-S, later rebadged D9, was a great format (technically comparable to DV50) but large physical tape sizes and being JVC-only really kept it from catching on.

Still trying to protect Digital Betacam at the high end, Sony released Betacam SX, a lower bitrate digital format. It suffered from image quality problems and never caught on, although a number of news stations used it for a few years. In the mean time, Panasonic's DVCPro/DV50 cameras continued to win market share from folks who years earlier would have laughed at the idea of using anything but a Sony camera. (One of my college professors had a funny, fake ad on his bulletin board. It said: Sony - Because everything else is crap. And at the time it was true.)

I'm willing to bet that Sony could have owned the high-end digital tape formats had they introduced a simple, nonlinear-friendly player/recorder Digital Betacam deck. But, like Walter Donovan, they chose...poorly. And Digital Betacam never achieved the wide acceptance it could have.

Enter HD, memory cards, disk recording...and here we are, with tape formats becoming less important, and your shop's internal IT infrastructure and digital archiving strategies becoming vital. (We'll address those issues in more detail in future posts.) Heck, one of the things I like about buying a Sony EX-1 is that I won't have a buy a deck to go with it!

Still, through it all, it's fun to look back and reflect on how easy it was, back when having a Betacam SP deck meant you never had to worry about compatibility when exchanging tapes.

What do you think? Have any fond memories of tape formats from long ago? Still pine away over the sound of a 1" machine coming up to speed? Share your thoughts in our comments section!

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Can We Meet?

Years ago we were working on a medium-sized project for a government client, a video production with a good mix of motion graphics, 3D animation and live video. Interesting project, fun subject matter. We were all pretty excited about the job. Not a huge budget, but certainly worth our time. Or so we thought...

A couple of weeks in and we realized that the project coordinator on the government side was a "meeting guy." I'm fairly sure he came to work on Monday mornings, looked at his empty calendar and said to himself, "Hmmm...how can I fill my schedule, so I'll appear to be busy? I know, I'll call Pixel Workshop and set up a meeting!"

The problem was, he would call a meeting, come to our shop, and proceed to spend a couple of hours reviewing things that had long-ago been settled. He was killing time. And costing us money. Even worse was when he would ask us to come to his office, which, after fighting traffic and finding parking, could easily chew up half a day.

Obviously, some meetings are important, and need to happen as a regular part of doing business. But how do you protect yourself from the time-suckers? It's an important part of client management.

Your first line of defense is, of course, to bill for meeting time. When we prepare budgets this goes under "Producer Fees," which is a nice generic container for all of the things that take up time on a project that aren't directly line-item billable. Almost every project gets at least a couple of days of Producer Fees budgeted, and trust me, once you start tracking them (and you do want to track them!) you'll be amazed how quickly they get used. For our meeting-addicted client, simply remind them that they are working against a budget with every meeting. Be polite, but firm.

"Sure, I'd be glad to meet with you, but keep in mind that our budget is limited and we don't want to burn through our time together too quickly. How about we spend a few minutes together, now, on the phone, and that way we'll be sure to have time left toward the end of the project?"

If they insist on meeting, be sure to let them know that budget adjustments will need to be made later on if they run out of hours. This isn't always going to work, of course, and there are times when you just have to bite the bullet and hang in there, knowing that next time you will either budget way more time for meetings, or simply not bid on their next project.

The important thing is for you to set the tone with your clients that your time is valuable, and they are paying for it. You will give them tremendous value for their money, you will go to the ends of the earth to give them what they want, but you simply will not do it for free. Even if you're a one-person shot (especially!) you need to set the ground rules from the get-go. If you don't, you're setting yourself up to get taken advantage of.

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Say Your Name and Spell It

Here's a simple, yet often overlooked technique that will make your editors love you, save you and your clients time and energy, and will make you irresistable to members of the opposite sex. Okay, that last one's an exageration (and by exageration I mean "lie").

When doing on-camera interviews, roll tape (or start capturing to your memory card, as the case may be) and ask the talent, "Could you please say your name and spell it for me?"



This does several things for you. First of all, it gives you a record of the correct pronunciation and spelling of the person's name, specifically, the way they prefer to be identified. Your editors and graphics people will thank you for this, since they won't have to chase down this info for lower thirds, and they won't end up making last minute changes because no one knew that Sir Richard Dovington the Third preferred to be called "Skippy."

Perhaps more importantly, though, making this "no brainer" your first question sets the tone for the interview, and puts the subject at ease. They're thinking, "Hey, this is easy! I can answer that! Maybe this won't be so bad!"

In fact, when interviewing someone who's visibly skittish about being on camera, it's often best to have a few soft-ball questions lined up to use first, to help establish repore and give them time to get comfortable.

Interviewing is a skill, and the more you do it, the better you'll be. You'll develop a sense for what you need, what you don't and how to guide your subject toward the content you're looking for through the clever formulation of your questions.

Oh, one more thing - We've found it much more effective when dealing with non-professional talent to use an interview technique, rather than having them read from a prepared script. They tend to come across much more naturally when having a "conversation" with the interviewer (even though the interviewer is never seen) than if they are reading prepared copy, usually written by the folks in marketing and gutted by the folks in legal.

What do you think? Got any lower-third nightmares to share?

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My Favorite Light Kit

Lighting is probably the most important element for creating quality video. As a friend of mine likes to say, "Videos without lighting are just home movies." Yes, there are certainly plenty of moments when you need to run-and-gun, and have no choice but to use available light, but most of the time (and with good planning!) you should be able to have control of your lighting.

One of the most common set-ups we find ourselves shooting is the single camera talking-head interview. No, I don't mean a sit-down with David Byrne, (My high school english teacher taught David Byrne. He used to do her bulletin boards. How cool is that?) I'm talking about a simple, straight-forward single person interview, the kind where you don't see or hear the person asking the questions. Think more Ken Burns and less 60 Minutes.

My favorite light kit for this situation is the ARRI Softbank IV. Two 150 watt Fresnel's, a 300 watt Fresnel, a 600 watt Fresnel and 1K open face with a Chimera, providing a nice, soft source. This kit is almost perfect, but you'll want to add an additional light stand (which will fit in the wheeled case), some colored gels, diffusion, wood clothes pins (when you're on-set you'll want to call them C47s), and a few other odds and ends we'll cover in upcoming posts.

I know, I know...if you're just starting out, you're probably saying, "Holy crap, Dave! This light kit is almost three grand! That'll buy a lot of burgers, pay a lot of rent!"  Yes, indeed, it will, but investing in a lighting kit like this one is one of the best things you can do for yourself when starting out. Why? Several good reasons.

First, because lights don't become obsolete. I've had by Softbank IV kit for over ten years, and I'm still using it all the time. My kit has travelled all over the world (it was a lot easier pre-9/11), collected its share of battle scars, but other than a few minor repairs and regular lamp replacement it's been a workhorse. And in that time we've been through several tape formats and camera packages, from Betacam to DV50 and now HD. Good, quality lights can last for decades when properly cared for, and ARRI lights are top-notch.

Second, because fresnel lights provide a lot of control and are much safer than open-faced lights. The more control you have, the more creative options you'll be able to explore. Remember, good lighting is as much about where light isn't as it is where light is. 

When I first started out I had a Lowell Omni kit that I purchased used from a friend for a few hundred dollars. (I still have it, and it does occasionally see use. Lights last forever...) Lowell makes quality lights, for sure, and there are circumstances where they are the perfect tool for the job, but I found myself frustrated with the lack of control I had over the lights, especially in the small spaces we often find ourselves in when doing corporate talking-head interviews. Investing in the ARRI kit gave me so much more control, and my work got better because of it. There were so many new, interesting creative possibilities to explore. It was thrilling!

To be fair, Lowell has come out with some really nice kits in the nearly twenty years since I bought that kit. Still, the ARRI Softbank IV remains my favorite, all-around go-to kit for quality and versatility. The wheeled case makes it relatively easy to tote around, and my crews never tire of hearing me joke about how heavy a light kit is. (Right guys? Anyone?)

In a future post we'll go into detail on how I like to light a single-camera talking head interview. In the mean time, what's your favorite light kit?

About PixelCadabra

PixelCadabra reflects my desire to share the things I've learned after nearly twenty years in the motion media production world. I've seen a lot, starting out with tape-to-tape linear editing, early Avids, Video Machine, Media 100 systems, and now Final Cut Pro on the editing side, 3/4" tape, 1" tape, Hi8, Betacam SP, miniDV, DVCPro50, and now HD on the shooting side. I've been a successful steadicam operator, After Effects animator and Photoshop artist. And I've seen the ups and downs of running a small business, dealing with clients of all sizes from all over the world as a co-owner at Pixel Workshop.

The point is, I've lived through many of the most important revolutions in this industry, riding the waves of boom and bust, making a lot of mistakes along the way and, hopefully, picking up some wisdom and good old fashioned common sense. 

My goal is to share the things I wish I had known when I was starting out. I certainly had my share of mentors over the years, and hopefully there are things here that will help you puzzle through some of the challenges you will surely face in this biz. I don't claim to have all the answers, not by a long shot, and there will certainly be times when you may not agree with the things I have to say. And that's fine. Everyone needs to find their own way, create their own business style and figure out what works best for them. Heck, some of you may come here time and time again for good examples of what not to do! 

This is a fun, rewarding, potentially lucrative business if you're willing to hang in there, hone your craft and operate in a professional, ethical manner. 

And that's what PixelCadabra is all about.

Finally, a special shout out to David Hobby from Strobist, who provided the inspiration to make me think long and hard about tackling this endeavor, and continues to offer incredibly valuable advice. He's a class act, and his site is worth your time.