[Al Bergstein]

Funny Jason, I met a guy when I first moved to Seattle, in the 70s, that had been raised in Bremerton and never gone up onto Rainier. Seemed bizarre, but there you have it.

Amazing that you are having buffer problems on 10Mb FIOS, but I guess we could draw the conclusion that Vimeo is not as robust a back end infrastructure as Youtube, which would be a logical thing to assume. Google does have the cash to throw hardware and fibre at bandwidth problems, and Youtube could easily be leveraging all those datacenters.

Lastly, I find that Vimeo works much better when I tell my clients to turn off HD if they aren’t really needing it.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Perhaps you should talk to your banker. See if you can get AR financing for Client A’s projects, go to Client A and explain that you have to do that because of their payment slowness, and that you need to get POs from them for your banker, and will need to charge them the interest on the money you are borrowing based on their tardy pay schedule. You can’t be expected to float their business payment schedule, because you have payroll to pay too, supplies to buy.

This problem is endemic in the world of advertising agencies, and by working with a business banker, you will gain valuable cred, especially to help you grow your business. However, in this economy, it may be hard to find a business banker to help you, though it seems to me, given my experience that US Bank and Bank of America (a bank I would not personally use) are two that specialize in business banking, which often includes AR financing. How tight the market for this kind of thing is, is anyone’s guess.

I personally ask for money up front (1/3rd in front and more depending on the trust of the client). Also, you might talk to your client about a retainer. If they are a monthly regular, tell them you need $x on a regular basis, you will credit them with so many hours, and account for the hours used every month. One of my clients is done that way, and they don’t even ask for an accounting anymore for hours used. I track them anyway. Maybe explore an escrow account, where they would deposit a large chunk of the costs in advance, they would control it, and you draw down what you need, when you need it. If the job is ongoing for $10k a month, for example, they deposit the whole amount in the escrow account and draw as needed. On delivery, use get the final, remaining amount. Talk to their bookkeeper about methods that person would be willing to back with management, then talk to management about it.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Sharepoint is good possibility, with a lot of flexibility. I’ve managed a Sharepoint site, and some of the issues if you are using Active Directory for internal users and non active directory login for outside consultants make setup a bit more problematic, but it still is a great tool. It seems to be a bit less elegant for Mac users, since it takes advantage of Windows integration. But I have used it with a Mac, and it does work. The person managing Sharepoint should be on Windows (and preferably on Windows 7). I recommend Sharepoint to most people, when I do IT consulting, which is a sideline business I do, given my background.

Basecamp is an ‘cloud’ based solution you might look at.

A sophisticated Excel spreadsheet or Access database might also do the job just fine, if you lock input to various cells. Or you could create a ‘rollup’ spreadsheet to track just what users need to see, and hide the underlying data from prying eyes. Also, Microsoft Project or other project management tool can create Timeline and Gannt charts that people like to see, as can Powerpoint, albeit it in a less sophisticated way. I’ve worked in large corporations doing project tracking, and often they use very simple methods. Trying to create something too complex, can lead to frustration. Look at MS Project’s web site to see the various ways to track projects, and it does connect to Sharepoint, but the higher end version does require a great deal of focus on someone’s part. It is likely to be overkill, and I have encountered companies that have abandoned server based Project attempts because of the complexity of the application.

You didn’t mention how many users the solution needs to support, how many tasks, the kind of security you need for the various phases ( a management call) and the kind of security for the various users, the kind of tasks you are tracking (timeline vs. budget vs. phase) That could seriously guide your choice, but given that you are only using a whiteboard now, it seems like the assumption is you are a small team! What are the specific goals you are needing to track? i.e. Are we ontime? Are we on budget? What % of completion are we at? What are the next tasks we need to address? etc. You also didn’t mention whether your teams are using Mac, Windows, a mix, or simply all online (cloud) based.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Jeff, I think this is great news. I have preferred Vimeo for some time now, mainly for non profit work. The ability to specify a JPG for the thumbnail is a great advantage over Youtube’s braindead thumbnails. I will certainly expand my use of Vimeo because of this. Vimeo’s channels are much more flexible than Youtube, and their groups are more interesting. I rate them 5 stars. Youtube still has the larger user base, so I often post to both.

Jason, I don’t seem to get any worse downloads with vimeo than Youtube. I add instructions to my clients to simply start the video, pause it without closing the browser and wait for the download. I’ve not seen any independent tests that show that Vimeo is any worse or better than YT. Have you?

From what I know, the herky jerky nature of the videos happen even when I was using Cablemodem speeds. Recently, I trialed cablemodem at 5Mbs and found that switching over to 5MB DSL got better performance on downloads during peak hours, especially with Netflix. But the problems can be found out on the internet, in the structure of the net. I live a long way from the nearest city, and our peninsula has a limited amount of fibre optic bandwidth to it, so I guess the bottlenecks come when too many people are trying to get out of the peninsula. And while I have 5 Mb DSL the actual throughput making it to the test stations (using Speedtest.net) shows results to Lynnwood WA from the Olympic Peninsula to be between 2.5 Mbs and 4.5 Mbs, the latter at low useage times (early AM). Perhaps, if you are working in Silicon Valley, where the bandwidth is huge, and YouTube servers close by, you might see greatly improved throughput and less herky jerky. I don’t know where Vimeo servers are located, or whether they are optimized for global caching, like I assume YouTube servers are.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Sorry, been away from the forum for a few days.
Yes, after cutting using mc mode, expand the tracks back out. Then you can do xfades, etc.
Once you expand out, you can resize the takes, and do new fades, etc.
Seems to work for me. But save frequently, you never know when something will screw up Vegas and it crashes. My setup has been very stable lately, knock on wood. I have not yet moved to 10.e because of the stability.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Did you expand the tracks back out afterwards?

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

I’ve never figured it out, but i have seen fx templates that are preconfigured to do multiple windows, beyond two.haven’t needed them yet, but it might be worth the investment, or create your own, to simulate it? Think split screen.but i agree it would be cool to go from single take in multiview to seeing four screens simultaneously in the video easily.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

I agree with all the posts recommending to let it go.if i were in your shoes, i wuold call him back, or write him, let him know you understand the situation, and wanted to let him have the option, if his friend’s son didn’t do the quality job he expected, to come back to you some day. He might not, but remember, people tell 10 people, when things go wrong, so they say. Your reputation is worth more than the job. And get a down payment next time, 1/3rd up front 2/3rds payable on delivery.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

I’m going to update this in case someone finds this in the future.

Also, make SURE you have your audio tracks in sync before entering MCM because it appears that you cannot resync them after you start editing. I tried it today, and no matter what I did, even after expanding tracks and undoing multicamera editing, that I could not slip tracks to sync.

Was I missing something?

If not, be forewarned. I needed to revert to last save.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

I believe the answer to what you are asking is that if you get out of Multicamera editing and uncollapse the timeline, can you recollapse it and go back into MC editing and edit it again to make changes to the takes? Yes. Highlight the tracks you want to go back into (assumption here is the same ones you were editing before), turn on MCE and create a MC track. as you move through the timeline, wherever you are rightclick on that position, and go up to TAKE on the menu items, then you will see a list of all the takes,with the active one marked, and just choose a different one. Or go back to your preveiw and choose it there.

Alf