So what are we to do? What are our clients to do? Advertising is as important as ever. Budgets are shrinking and in some cases the competition is shrinking too.

Here are some options:

• Look to what has worked in the past.
• See a commercial you like and do something similar.
• Get a message and stick to it. Then beat it into the ground.
• Get nostalgic, air commercial campaigns from long ago and freshen them up for your client with the addition of their website URL. And Voila!
• Or, my favorite: sit down with your client and ask them questions.

I like to ask a bunch of questions. I may not know a lot about what my client does and they may not know a lot about what I do, but we have that in common. Talking, asking and answering questions creates a-kind-of-magic.

I know going into a meeting with a client that they want easy to digest videos that pack a punch. So, I need to know what they want to say. I will take that info and grind it up… and the first thing I do is try as hard as I can to make fun of the product or service! Privately, I come up with a few horrible ideas (free of Charge!). I wish I could give examples… but that is a trade secret I will not divulge.

Why do this? It's fun, for one. For two, I need to take "the box" that my client created for me by answering my questions, and turn it inside out. It's the way I approach it… right, wrong or indifferent… it makes me happy and I get interesting commercials from the process. It’s a thought exercise. Does this mean I work only with the oils and brushes of comedy, satire, or self-debasing humor on behalf of my client? I wish I could do more of that, but I digress.

There really is no value to thinking out-side-the-box unless it leads your intended audience into-the-box. A creative commercial concept has to have teeth, the fang to inject the message. Wait, that is a bit negative. The needle to inject the life giving medicine of your client's life enriching message. A B12 shot for sales and happy consumers. A good commercial distracts the viewer into a state where they don’t realize that they are being sold something, or at least they don’t mind as much. The smiley face sticker we slap on the injection site… yeah that’s a good commercial.

There is no handbook on creativity and there is no rule book either. Listening to people who are self described as "not-creative" can unleash a wealth of un-tapped creativity, in them and in the mind of us "creative-types."

Just when I was starting to wonder if Final Cut Pro was beginning to catch up with Avid, I read this quote on Avid’s Facebook page:

“I don’t know anyone doing $200 million dollar movies who is not cutting on a Media Composer system. At this level, where there’s so much at stake, everyone uses it.” – Roger Barton, Editor, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

I personally don’t know anyone working on $200 million dollar movies, period; let alone ones using FCP on $200 million dollar movies. But I do know a screening room full of editors using Avid products on a daily, professional basis.

I cut on an Avid Media Composer in part because that’s what I started on back in 1997. So I may be an old-school creature of Avid habit, but I am acutely aware of many modern differences between these two battle bots that, for me and the clients I work with daily, continue to push Avid to the forefront of the editing world. Let’s briefly explore just a few…

For starters, FCP is Mac only. While that is certainly not a flaw of the editing software, it is a sizeable shortcoming nonetheless (unless you only ever intend to work on a Mac, or interface with other Mac based projects). Most clients frown on the inability to resurrect or even port projects as needed.

While we’re on the topic of projects, let’s chat a bit about media management. Any post house large enough to regularly need more than one edit system could benefit from some type of shared project/media storage device. FCP doesn’t offer a full-on solution to this need, there is an Xsan setup. While this does allow some sharing between edit systems, it requires much more organizational effort due to the fact that FCP is timeline based and not project based. This requires producers and editors to be tirelessly diligent in their organizational skills.

Guardian Studios has a 16TB Avid Unity safely holding all our projects and HD media. The beauty is this: multiple users can access the same project and the same media from different edit systems at the same time. Period. This means the client can walk in with an external HDD (or even a P2 card) and we can instantly pull the media files into the project and begin working. Or, we can resurrect an old project on one edit system while beginning a new project on another; all the while using the same media. From rough cuts in the Media Composer to Avid DS finishing, Avid’s tapeless workflow offers fast and seamless integration into any workflow.

One major time consuming task is the render. While every edit system needs to do some rendering at some point along the way, FCP needs to render when the sequence settings do not match the material. While you can mix formats on the timeline these days, it does not mean that the playback will be in real time. The only way around this is to convert all the material to a common native format. Most clients simply don’t want to sit through a long render or file conversion as they watch their budget click by 1% at a time! Of course with Avid Media Access, Avid’s new application programming interface (API), developers can now write their own codec wrappers, thus providing support for many video formats that has, in the past, been a downside to Avid.

Obviously, I am an avid Avid proponent, and not just because I cut my teeth on a first-gen Media Composer. In fact, if there was time, I could probably think of 200 million reasons why I edit on an Avid Media Composer every single day.

So let’s hear your thoughts. I gladly welcome any Final Cut Pro users to counterpoint this discussion.

National Spots move the camera, local spots point the camera. There is a difference -allow me to explain. A moving camera shot immediately says to our subconscious mind something along the lines of “Wow, that’s cool.” It’s simply that the camera is showing us something in a way that we can not experience in normal life. The camera is moving up or down, swinging over the heads of people like a bird in flight, gliding through a room smooth as silk – its movement is taking us as an audience somewhere special. As an audience we expect and demand Dynamic visualization, or at least we crave it…

Flat camera work resembles our own normal experience. A camera on a tripod is like a person sitting in a chair. Look left, look right, look up, look down… it’s flat. It is expected. The reason that I chose flat to describe this way of shooting video is this – video shot in this way creates a two dimensional image for a two dimensional media (TV) for a client/audience that is accustomed to viewing the world in three dimensional space.

Dynamic camera work gives the impression of three dimensional space in a two dimensional medium. This convincing illusion happens when the foreground and the background move in relationship to each other showing us the distance between them.

Not every shot has to be dynamic. It is also not true that every spot has to have dynamic shots.
This is part of the creative process to decide how best to utilize our tools to make your message make an impact.

Tools for Dynamic Camera work available at Guardian Studios.

• Cam Mate Jib Arm: This camera crane can be built out as short as 8′ to 30′ to give huge movement. With its robotically controlled head, the camera has complete freedom to get the shot.
• Glide Cam: This harness mounted piece of gear is worn by the Director of Photography. Walk, run, forwards, backwards, complicated choreographed moves, inside and out… all super smooth.
• Dolly: This platform is simple yet highly effective tool to move the camera across the ground in a variety of ways to “sell the shot”.