[Alan Smith]

My experience has been that Lacie is tempermental and not reliable for important work/projects. Of the 5 that I have had, two of them crashed and I lost every thing on them. One of the remaining is rattling so I don’t use it. I have several g-tech drives and they have never failed.

[Alan Smith]

As one who owns a video production business whose target audience is non-profit organizations, I find this thread interesting and valuable. I started Media317 a few years ago to provide churches, schools, and non-profit organizations video production services. The reality is that ministries NEED production services to effectively communicate their message to their audience. Call it Marketing or some other word, the reality is they have a message that needs to be communicated and video is the most effective tool.

The problem is that typical productions cost more than the average ministy or church can afford to pay. When over 80% of churches have active memberships of about 100, production service cost are way over their available budget. The approach that I have taken is to provide these services to these organizations at a rate they can afford. I have purposed to make video production available to any church or ministry. We achieve this by having the ministy do various aspects of the production, such as VO, drafting the scripts, talent from their ministry, etc. There are ways to make if affordable and viable.

We have had alot of success over the past few years operating with this philosophy. I do not define success as many would. We are not “rolling in the dough,” but we have enabled small organizations and large organiztions to effectively communicate their message. I think we need more production houses reaching this market and recognizing the long term value it offers.

Alan Smith
Media317.com

[Alan Smith]

The problem is that they are not on the original tape. We have gone back and looked at the original footage and there are not hits. These “tape hits” do not exist on the original footage, they only appeared today. This event has occured on footage from multiple different cameras digitized from multiple different decks. There does not seem to be any pattern to the cause. All footage was shot using new, purchases in February 2008, Sony XD HDCam and digitized with the new PDW-70 decks. All footage was shot 1080i60 and digitized using ProRes 422(HQ). We are perplexed.

[Alan Smith]

We use the XDCam and connect to the PDW-F70 deck via firewire. We researched the cost for importing and using firewire and found that with an FTP application, like Cyberduck (which is a free app) and the Sony XDCAM transfer application we could import footage from the disc without having to purchase the Flip4Mac software (about $500 a seat and we have 10 seats).

The deck has a series of settings to set up your network. You should set the ip for the deck, the subnet mask for the deck, and determine whether the deck is going to be managed via DHCP. We have ours setup with DHCP turned off and manually configured our ip and subnet mask. Once the deck is properly configured, set the deck to network using the switch on the front of the deck.

From the computer you want to access the deck, open your FTP application and connect to the deck using the ip address. Ours is set to 192.168.3.107. The username and password are deck specific. The username is usually admin and the password is usually the deck model number. We have the PDW-F70 decks, so our login is username: admin and password: pdw-f70.

Once connected to the deck, copy all the information from the disk to a folder on your computer, SAN, or other storage location. You then import footage into FCP using the XDCam transfer software provided by Sony. From FCP, you choose file>import>XDCAM and the transfer program launches. You add the folder you copied the data and files to and log and import footage as normal.

We have found that this workflow allows us to import footage from XDCam much faster than real time and it saved our company about $5,000.00.

[Alan Smith]

Thanks for your input thus far. I agree that the intangibles of resume development and long term benefits are extremely valuable. My issue lies with leaving money on the table. If this is there initial offer, I’m assuming that there is more money available to negotiate. I know that two of the editors doing the same work that I will be doing are making $65+ plus a benefits package. They have about 6 years with the company, which is significant, I know.