Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “That is quite beside the issue of what tools broadcast outfits will use.”
But Franz, that IS my point. You are thinking at the “what tools will broadcast outlets use” point in time. Lots and lots and LOTS of people are looking beyond, or maybe next door to, or even totally aside from “what tools broadcast outfits will use.
In fact that’s the primary argument I keep making here. Broadcast is one, singular important but not critical outlet for a person with media skills.
I’ll also freely acknowledge that in the old model, if you achieved the skills to output “broadcast quality” you could also do ANY other type of video work, since there was a single, reasonably monolithic target as to what “pro” video consisted of, that required significant mastery of a very specialized skill set that was both rare and demanding.
In the world of NOW, this is less and less the case. Great work is still great work, but increasingly, diversity of viewpoint, visuals that are as much computer generated as “camera generated” and access to skills (maybe mountain climbing, eco tourism, or hell, mathematics for all I know!) are going to be as much drivers of content as was being a part of an old style “media production company” in the past.
It’s not the only change, it might not be the most important change, but it is a change worthy of consideration.
Simple as that.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Never a quarrel with people who try things and find them not to their taste.
I’ll even acknowledge that part of the excitement I had was that my kid came to me, excited by the video and wanted to share it with me. We may all forget about it and dismiss it 10 minutes after seeing it – which is fine. But I’ll remember how I found it, that it showed me something unfamiliar and cool, linked my son’s generation and mine, and even tossed in a bit of Genius (Mr. Geissel) in the mix.
So for a Tuesday morning, not a bad way to start a day!
Peace.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Bill,
See magisto post, below.
Franz.”
Okay, I’m catching up. (Just coming out of a couple weeks of heavy shooting/editing/motiongraphics/and on-site event support in SoCal.)
But I’m not seeing your point. Is this a comment on the copyright thing? If so, that’s going to be a persistent problem for the next decade. (And why we all probably need continuing SOPA education and to pick a side and take a stand) – but to see the OTPYG-Burning Man video through a lens of copyright issues is like looking at a Henry Moore sculpture and obsessing about a small bird dropping on the foot.
The over-arching change here is that excellence is now possible via different workflows and business arrangements than were possible before. That does NOT diminishes the importance of craft. It actually elevates it. (Somebody had to know enough to practice obsessive lens care during that shoot – cuz I didn’t see much evidence of dust -and that alone tells me that craft was being honored stringently even in the face of difficult shooting conditions.)
The point is that at the bottom line – as it’s has ever been in our industry – the work itself speaks the loudest.
If you can produce the work. You’ll be fine.
And even if you prefer to focus exclusively on traditional tools and workflows you’ll STILL be fine – provided you do the kind of work that those tools were developed and refined to do well.
But don’t mistake that for the fact that there won’t be NEW work processes that engage audiences and provide more competition for audience attention.
I suspect that those who keep an open mind about the NEW on TOP of the old may be in a stronger position that those who simply decide that it’s too painful to change what they’re used to and stretch.
Or maybe not. Who knows.
I just know that I really liked that piece of work – and am delighted that my son was compelled to run in and show it to me – because unlike some stuff that’s captured his attention – I think the quality of the effort is well worth the viewing.
And that SHOULD attract eyeballs. Period.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Maybe.
And if so, yawn.
This is no longer the era where the big action is in top down production. Thats a robust, important industry with many people working in it. But it’s not the future. The future is what’s happening globally with the use of the new tools.
Want an example? Search the string “OH THE PLACES YOU’LL GO BURNING MAN” (a few days old but if someone hasn’t linked you to it, they soon will.)
It’s the best example I’ve seen in a long time of modern, agile, outstanding video craftwork. It owes little to the “big production” mentality and everything to the aesthetic that skills and the access to great equipment is really what matters in putting together content people want to search out and watch.
Just try not to finish watching it.
Have NO CLUE what tools were used. But I can tell you that it wasn’t Six production trucks and a five person craft services team.
And whether it was cut on Avid, PPro, Legacy, or X is absolutely irrelevant. What is relevant is that it’s precisely what the revolution is all about. More chances to work in more ways to tell more stories and engage more viewers than ever before.
This whole think looks to me that it happened in a “shop” of talented people – not in a “station” or in a MGM or Turner style “Studio”
So sorry, but maybe once the test was “broadcast quality” but the new test is “show me something that lights up my brain.”
Simple as that.
(Hope they got permission from the Suess estate, but that’s another topic for another day.)
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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I have a totally unsupported suspicion here about why it works this way.
I think the Project library will eventually morph into a “video publishing” system. As you edit and revise, you publish to the PL. It represents the “distribution state” of your project. You want to work on an alternate version, you make a clone so that you don’t disturb your publishable master.
This approach is also why what we could do in Legacy, which was “select any range” and trivially output just that directly from the timeline is no longer as easy.
I may be totally wrong and Apple may never link the PL to some distribution system like I envision, but if they ever do, it will make X an amazingly powerful content creation/distribution system in and of itself I think.
And that’s also why I think the key wording is so focused on the Event library rather than exclusively in the clips themselves. Assets that reside in the Event Library can be used by multiple projects simultaneously – and only when they are “baked” into Projects do they become ready for distribution in a fixed form.
It’s a totally different approach from Legacy where the “publishing” of an isolated “cut” as a totally separate entity cut off from the program was the standard procedure. Now, in the Project Library, cuts are linked to the timeline and can be altered at will.
Totally different approach and one I think will turn out to be a HUGE capability in the long run.
(my fingers are crossed about this!)
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Kevin Patrick] “Now that he is gone, I won’t be surprised if Apple becomes more like IBM and less like Apple.
“I don’t know about that.
I just had an experience a couple of weeks ago in an Apple store that was totally contrary to any retail experience I’ve ever had.
I had a 1st gen MacBook Air that I wanted to pass along to my son. I thought it’s only problem was a broken hinge, and I saw that there was a hinge problem with them, so warrantee care was not an issue.
I take it into the Apple store and the “Genius” looks it over and agrees that yes, the “mfg defect” is covered even tho the unit is long out of warrantee. So they pack it up and send it into repair.
Here’s where things get interesting.
I get a call from the repair facility telling me that along with the hinge issue, the case has two damaged corners AND the logic board is bad. (probably from a drop.) He quotes me the cost of a new logic board at $600+. I mention that it’s not worth that level of repair.
What does he do? The tech calls the Genius at the retail store for a consultation. They huddle via phone, and he comes back with a discounted price that knocks TWO THIRDS off the cost of the repair. My son gets a nice computer for $200 bucks. And when they returned it, it was obvious that not only did they repair the logic board and the hinges, but they completely replaced the entire case. It literally looked like the day it left the store.
The odd thing was that the 20-something year old Genius at the store level had the ultimate authority not only to solve my problem, but that the “chain of customer satisfaction” stopped at HIS level. Not at his managers, or at some supervisory level, but at the customer-facing employee. He controlled even the REPAIR centers behavior. It all went through him.
Considering parts and labor there’s no way they didn’t take at least a small loss on the transaction. But they certainly achieved an extremely happy customer.
That’s what impressed me.
Apple gets this right, even at the “street level.”
And at least in the retail sense, this is the total antithesis of a company that wants to “exert control” at every stage.
FWIW.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “One of the things that I like about this is that it is clear about how to judge innovation. Something is not innovative simply because it is new or different. To call something “innovative” is to judge – to assess how it addresses problems and needs.
“Still kinda roped schedule-wise, so I’m skipping the above threads (as much as I yearn to weigh in!) and just taking a second to recount an experience from earlier today.
I’m showing a client a piece of simple animation I created in Motion in order to explain a company process for them. It has a logo buried in the animations. The client immediately says “how many days will it take and how much will it cost us to revise the animation with different company logos each time, because we have probably 50 clients I like to pitch this to and I’d love to brand it for each one.”
The point is that without my having forced myself to spend my own uncompensated time understanding the nature of the tool, I wouldn’t have a way to even judge the question properly. In the old “agency” model, I would have called the sales manager or the creative director to quote it out.
Now those people aren’t involved. On the plus side, they’re not sucking up my dollars when times are slow, but it also means I have to be conversant with rigging motion graphics in order to satisfy my client’s desire for a realistic number.
I’m reminded of that because In the posted article, as interesting as I found it – I kept seeing it as the writer having a single construct of what “the customer” is.
It’s a cohesive entity that will have a consensus answer to those kinds of questions.
That works great in a shop where you clients are, in fact, cohesive.
What I’m finding on the ground, however, is that today’s customers are ANYTHING but cohesive. The modern customer is frighteningly diverse as to their wants, needs, and expectations.
At least yesterday’s customer was somewhat “trained” on their place in the creating order. When they came into the TV studio, they knew they were reliant on the pros. Today, not so much. (IN their own minds at least.) They’ve likely edited stuff at home themselves, so they know the buzzwords and since they WATCH so much cpmtemt, they believe that they understand how i works!
Today’s customer sees something cool on TV, or in the Movies, or on the Web, or on a friends Facebook Page, or at the mall kiosk, or in an email attachment, and they have NO problem saying “I want something ilke that for my project.”
That could mean video, or stills, or sounds, or kinetic text, or amorphous clouds of particle bees that swarm/morph into ice cream cones.
They don’t know or care how simple, or complicated, or even possible it is. They saw it, so they think they want it. And don’t understand why it might be difficult or expensive to provide it.
Period.
That’s the world we’re in right now.
I’m pleased to see that IBM is in the ascendence again. I hope they do really well.
But when I hit the chart, the only thing I could think of was reading Tufte. (Huh, why did they start it in 2009. What would it have looked like if they published one that started the Axis in 2000? Or 1970?)
In other words, the article was written to persuade. Not illuminate.
And that means it’s opinion (like all of what I write here) – and can therefore be totally wrong.
(back to the salt mine, grateful to be in an “up” salt market for a while at least)
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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*** Cue rant from Bill Davis about the use of the term “professionals” ***
Deeply sorry to disappoint, but I’m totally roped with projects for the next 3 weeks. Barely have time to breathe.(yes they will all be produced in in X/Motion5!)
Work appears to have broken loose among the local and so/cal clients – so irons must be struck whilst cherry red.
No time for rants. But will keep reading and keep the Rant-o-lator 5000 polished up for when the work is finished!
Till then the rule is as passed down from a relative who used to work at Chiat/DayLA in their salad days…
“If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in Sunday…”
Happy New Year one and all!
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Hi Linda and welcome to the Creative Cow Audio Forum.
As to your question, there are some basic ideas that can help you decide how best to accomplish your tasks and give you a path to the answers you need.
The first concept is to understand the difference between how your old tapes worked verses the way new digital recordings work. With tape, sound quality and time capacity was largely a function of the SPEED the tape moved through the machines. The faster the tape, the better the audio quality but the less time you had to make your recording.
Computer storage doesn’t work like that. instead, you’re given a fixed “bucket” to hold data (the CD or DVD) and you have to decide what to fill it with.
The way to store “longer” content on the fixed sized disk, is generally to “compress” the data mathematically in order to make it fit into the bucket. Some compression is “lossy” other schemes are less so. But the challenge is to pick the “right”l level of compression for what you want to do.
Now this can be a big issue for complicated digital streams like high resolution video or even really complex audio signals where complexity and nuance must be maintained – but for your purpose, the good news is that spoken word recordings aren’t very complex – so the difference in the amount of compression needed to fit a 90 minute recording instead of a 60 minute one into the bucket is probably not enough to make a noticeable different for the average listener.
So just try it on a sample. If you like what you hear on playback – you’re fine.
Also, since “cloning” of digital data is so easy, it’s always smart to keep do your original recording with as little compression as possible – – and then making a somewhat lower resolution “copy” of that to give to the customer.
Hope that helps.
Good luck.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[stephen sarsfield] “i wish apple would give those of us who have invested in their edit product over the years a token discount on X!”
After you convince them to do that, could I hire you to convince all the book publishers that I’ve given $16-25 bucks a copy for the 400-500 hardback books in my library to let me trade them in on a nice discount on downloading the iBooks versions of what I already own??? Now THAT would be truly sweet gift!
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor