Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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Herb,
You might find it interesting that the word “coffee” never even appeared in the original Starbucks business plan.
Starbucks has never been – even from the very beginning – about coffee.
IIRC the first line of the original Starbucks business plan started with something like “It will be a place that is not work, not home, but a neutral meeting place…” or something to that effect.
It was about a piece of real estate that a more mobile population could use as a meeting place to socialize with, transact business with, and generally have a place to go out of the house in an era where mobility was on the rise and “the office” was something that whole classes of business people like realtors, construction workers, and yes, creatives didn’t have access to while during the business day.
This, I think, is a precise parallel to the astonishingly persistent confusion about FCP’s business plan.
Many, many people keep trying to shoehorn it’s capabilities into what editing USED to be. Just as a coffee shop used to be about the standard food service industry model. With that, the original concept was to move dining from home to a commercial space. In a “restaurant” the kitchen was bigger, the choices more varied, and the infa-structure necessary to prepare and serve food, designed to be superior to that people could expect at home.
It wasn’t until the Starbucks people understood that the entire GAME had changed, and that what people needed wasn’t a coffee shop with a big kitchen and wait staff – but rather a neutral territory in which to temporarily sit and study/work/meet that the new business paradigm started to evolve.
If Apple is correct in the long range – what people won’t need so much in the future – is a “hardware suite” centric model of content creation – essentially the old “on-line” television station model. But rather mobile, agile tools that do a selected subset of the functions of the big suite – in a smaller, simpler, more agile form factor – precisely the relationship of a Starbucks to a old style coffee shop.
If you had tried to to argue that Starbucks was destined to fail simply because it was not Dennys – you would have totally missed the point of why it prevailed.
They succeeded (wildly I might add) precisely because they understood that the larger game (human mobility) was changing – not because they concentrated on making a “better” restaurant.
Worth thinking about anyway.
“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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David,
If you’re wedded to the idea of local storage of full-rez HD master files, I agree. But I got totally schooled last year on a series of HD uploads for network spots. Via modern H264 encoding I was able to achieve more than a 10 to 1 data reduction with no visible degradation of the signal for HD broadcast uploads.
What’s wrong with ingesting field tapes via laptop into proxy files that can be uploaded to the cloud for use by distributed teams – those should be good enough to do most of the edit process directly to and from the cloud. Then when you get back to the base with your field cards, files, HDs or whatever, you could just plug them in and the background rendering starts (just like now) automatically replacing your comp files with full rez versions.
In FCP-X, the big change is the ability to work instantly with lower rez files, even making complex layering and titling decisions and getting a very workable look at what the results look like – the files do the “catch up” processing in the background at a later time.
Why not make that the core of a new workflow?
Heavily compressed H-264 via web transfer for starting the work – then footage that catches up when the originals can be locally attached to the net file pointers sounds like something that could work to me.
We’ll see.
“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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Is this small thinking?
What if the box no longer even matters. What if everything does eventually end up stored in the cloud?
What if “editing” is something you do merely by manipulating the metadata via the cloud?
Shoot wherever. Upload everything. The “edit” is something you do on a desktop, a laptop, or yes, even a smart phone or pad. The user interface scales to whatever manipulation device you need to use at the moment. The “software” scales functions in response to required speed of access, not whatever the “moment in time” package was that you bought on the plastic disc.
What exactly are all those servers Apple installed in North Carolina capable of? We know it’s cloud sourced music and software in the initial iteration. But what will it be in the third or fourth?
In that game, it’s no longer “features” that rule the day. It’s data processing efficiency. Period. Features become purely a function of code in a mainframe somewhere.
We are told that part of the FCP-X re-structure was to clean out the code and make it more efficient.
Something that seems to have worked really well as evidenced to me by this snap from an Apple Insider post (link at: files.me.com/davisbill/ftt6c9) that shows the processor efficiency of a series of running Mac apps – indicating that Flash, just like Steve Jobs always alleged is a substantial resource hog – while FCP-X sips processing power very efficiently.
48 threads running via FCP-X using only 4% of the CPU power. Flash is running twice that many threads but requiring nearly half the machine’s CPU cycles to do so.
Others more computer savvy than I can interpret this better (I’m always leery of applying meaning to statistics I don’t fully understand) but this look pretty compelling to my semi-educated brain.
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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My assumption would have been that if you accepted money for shooting the team – you’d have general coverage of the whole team. If you accepted additional money from the parents of Kid A – then you would have focused that specific job’s coverage on Kid A. If other parents want you to cut footage of Kid B or Kid C or Kid D out of the general footage, you’d need to go back and re-cut everything with a view to isolating (as best you can) the coverage that shows THEIR kid. New edit, new money, no issue with other parents who didn’t pay in advance for additional focus on their kids.
Are you saying that you took money from Kid A’s parents then didn’t do anything extra to isolate their kids actions from the general team shots? If so, I think you did a poor job under the presumed terms of that original contract. They were paying you for the best possible coverage of THEIR kid specifically. So if Kid A has excellent skills when he’s playing off the ball – like getting open, or blocking or whatever, and you’re shooting a single camera and MISSING that stuff because you’re only following the flow of the game, you’re kinda slacking on the job they’ve paid you extra cash to do.
As to charging other parents, the concept here is that you’re charging them for the VALUE of a specific tape edited to highlight their kids actions. Nothing wrong with charging 10 sets of parents 10 fees for doing that editing – and no, the fact that Kid As parents contracted you for individual coverage has nothing to do with any editing you do for other parents.
My view anyway.
“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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Tim,
Sorry I wasn’t able to respond quicker, but I’ve had family in town.
In any case, when I got a chance to look at the Apple ad you referenced, I can tell you with some confidence that you’ve not looking at an actual camera shot in any of the frames I saw in that ad.
Those are composites. The hand model was acting in virtual space. That allowed the light hitting the fingers to come from wherever it needed to to illuminate the fingers properly. The clue is that when the solid surface of the ipad slides under the hand, there’s absolutely NO shadow cast up on the hand even tho the angle of incidence on the fingers clearly shows light hitting the underside of the same hand. That simply defies the laws of physics. The very experienced people creating thsi including the creative director, art director, cinematographer, etc all understood that “reality” wasn’t nearly as important as conveying “tactile siimpicty” in the presentation. So they eliminated everything from the frame except the experience of “the touch” – leaving that as the ONLY impression out of a negative space.
The pad surface might have been shot, or might have simply been rrendered in CG, but it’s trivial to composite the two, then to geometrically “deform” the fingertip and reflect it into the virtual pad surface to “sell” the idea of the touch.
At this level, everything is on the table as to resources, talent, and the quest for perfection in making every pixel look as near “perfect” as is humanly possible.
So it’s the key to results like this is never about the camera, the type of lights used, nor the technical stuff. At this level you use whatever you need, whoever you need, and pay whatever it takes to create the spot you need. And if anything doesn’t work exactly as you wanted it to – you toss out what didn’t work and do it differently until it DOES work.
Effective marketing to support such a product is budgeted in millions of dollars, because it supports a product generating billions of dollars. So no corner is cut, no production element is left unexamined and no “would it be better if we…” possibility is left unexplored.
It looks simple in the viewing. But it is anything but simple in the execution.
I understand it’s tempting to simply think, “If I got the same lights and a good camera, I could do that.” but that’s not how it works. That would perhaps be a little like trying to build a scene in the physical world that you see in a modern video game. It’s impossible because a world that can be designed, composited and rendered in computer space can be totally different that one that has to exist in the real world.
Such is advertising.
“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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Look, lighting a self- illuminated product with a live picture like an operating iPad is not trivial.
It’s best done in a proper studio where the ambient light is totally controlled, the space potentially reflected by the screen can be properly managed and the physical mounting oh the hero product can be adjusted.
Finally, you need to get everything set up, look at and judge the shot on a completely reliable monitor, and have the proper tools such as flags, reflectors and additional product lighting at hand in order to refine the look of the shot.
This is how it’s done for high budget productions like what you see from Apple product ads.
It it was possible to do it by simply buying a few lights and having someone with scant lighting experience set them up -every product shot on the web would look like an Apple ad – but they don’t.
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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Flip the question around.
Is there EVER a situation where having a signed release on file from a performer in any situation might be considered harmful?
Nope.
The only question that usually remains is if you might be stepping on another involved parties toes by inserting your release into their project in a “work for hire” situation. If so, ask them if they want to use yours or theirs, and leave it up to them.
Outside that, the habit of getting releases on everyone and anyone involved is a great habit to cultivate.
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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Sounds like your machine is dropping frames due to having to playback unrendered footage and effect composites.
You might mess around with the STROBE filter a bit (which essentially stores and skips frames similarly, but more regularly than actual dropped frames) and see if you can get close with that.
YMMV.
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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Find an inexpensive camera that supports the LAN-C protocol (nearly all the Sony handycams from the past 20 years will) and you can find a lot of motion detector triggers that will plug in and do what you want.
Here’s one…
https://www.trailmaster.com/tm700v.php
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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DVCAM at it’s heart is simply a more robust physical medium for capturing a standard 25Mbps DV signal to tape. Minor issues like “locked audio” aside, the picture component is EXACTLY the same stream as you’d get from any other DV signal. It’s a digital signal – all ones and zeros – so when you’re doing a file transfer, there’s simply no benefit to using anything other than simple Firewire to ingest it into an editing system.
The ONLY reason you’d ever want to transcode it to component – or composite – or anything else – would be to accommodate a downstream workflow that requires that. But even if you take the DV signal and transcode it into an uncompressed HD workflow, the original signal will always be limited to the source recording resolution and accuracy.
Just do a simple firewire transfer from one of the many decks that output DV over firewire.
Bingo. You’re done. And it’s the same quality as doing it any other way. Searching out a “component” deck in any situation where the hardware REQUIRES component in order to operate is a bit like taking a fabulous still camera with a fabulous lens to shoot a photo on the front page of a 1980s newspaper. The photo starts with poorly screened resolution, so there’s nothing you can do to make it sharper, no matter how you struggle to make the modern picture of it as lovely as possible.
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