Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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Sounds more like a video card issue than anything. Make sure you are using the latest/proper drivers for your card.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I tend to agree with David, FCP is the way to go. Avid systems are very expensive and many studios are getting rid of them in favor of FCP’s lower cost of entry AND operating/upgrade cost.
The only problem is, good luck renting an FCP facility, especially to any production with a budget even close to those mentioned being in your target range.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
There’s a substantial amount of feedback here on the content, pretty much all of which I agree with. It really is a great design and feel. On the technical side, I have no clue what your experience level is with web design, if you created the site yourself or hired someone etc. but I have a few thoughts.
1. Having an all-Flash site is cool, but not ideal for getting new business. Your web site can be a powerful lead generation tool but only if those leads can actually find your site. Search engines won’t index your site properly when it’s purely Flash, and has no actual text rich with keywords like “video production” etc. I know the big studios and agencies have all-Flash sites, but that’s because they are known brands, so they have little need to show up in search results. Which they don’t – do some test Google searches and see who comes up on top. YOUR competitors.
2. While most of the free world has Flash installed, there is one crucial group that often doesn’t – Corporate users. Many IT depts. strictly lock off their employee’s ability to install programs, especially things like Flash that are arguably only useful for entertainment AKA wasting the company’s money. IN ADDITION, since you are using the Javascript method of calling your Flash document (which is definitely the correct way) you are also losing everyone who has javascript disabled. Again, IT depts can be heavy handed in this regard, because it limits the number of viruses and other nasty crashes etc. they have to clean up. So while this group may be a small percentage of web users overall, in this B2B industry they make up a potentially huge portion of your target market.
3. Your site has no META tags aside from the Title tag. Even worse, since the site is all Flash it is basically just one single HTML page and that’s it. This means that, to the search engines, the only text available from your entire site is the single line of text in your title – “Flowmotion Media | Seattle WA | Video Production.” This is so little information that you won’t ever show up for searches outside of the words “flowmotion media” and even then only because that’s the URL of the site (www.flowmotionmedia.com) so you get a little boost there.
4. Since you have no “Description” META tag, a Google search for Flowmotion Media returned your site, but the description just says “setstats.” That’s a little odd to say the least, and may turn off potential visitors especially when all the other listings next to yours have full, clear descriptions.
So what the hell am I driving at here? While you can’t be expected to abandon that beautiful Flash site to solve these issues, there are some things you could do. This should include putting in good Title and Description META tags no matter what. Going a step further, you would benefit greatly from creating a second version of the site that is purely HTML and uses individual pages for each section with real text. By simply adding an html link to this second version at the bottom of your current home page, people without Flash have somewhere to go and Search Engines have information to crawl through.
Just my 2cents.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Bridge can catalog volumes that are later taken offline, but I’m not sure how it handles browsing of the cached offline files.
From the sound of things, Final Cut Server will also do what you’re looking for.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
The “value” should be the negotiated hourly rate X the number of hours you put in so far. But, that depends entirely on whether your contract with the client states that you get paid even if the work isn’t completed.
If there is no contract, a judge may very well side with the client that abandoned work is not what they agreed to pay for, and therefore owe you nothing (while getting nothing in return, of course). I’m no legal expert…
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
You didn’t say which version of After Effects you have, and that really is the last piece of info needed to really answer your question. I’ll assume you’re using CS3 for now.
AE CS3 utilizes multicore processors by silently launching multiple instances of After Effects in the background, one for each core. Each of these processes will then render frames, working as a team. Each process needs as much RAM as you would normally throw at AE for rendering – a minimum of 1GB, ideally 2GB RAM. This means you should really have around 4-8GB RAM to really bring out the speed of your multiple cores. I highly recommend 8GB, especially with the cost of RAM being at historic lows.
Also, make sure multiprocessing is turned on. When you go into After Effects preferences>Multiprocessing there is a check box that must be on for multicore processing to work. In this same tab, it will tell you how many cores it will use based on the amount of RAM available (per my above comments).
One “trick” people often suggest for forcing AE to use more cores without adding RAM is to tweak the preferences>memory settings, lowering the “% used” values while checking the multiprocessing tab – when % used is set low enough, AE will use more cores. The simple truth is that this won’t get you anywhere, since each rendering process will be totally RAM starved. Sure AE will be rendering with more cores, but each will be going so slow that it’s a wash in terms of performance. I would avoid this tactic, and just buy some shiny new RAM.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Large files are a fact of life when doing video work. Archiving your projects or animations in a lossy codec is incredibly penny-wise, pound-foolish and you will eventually regret it.
If you insist on doing so, maybe try using the motion-jpeg Quicktime codec. It’s crap for archiving, but any lossy codec is.
As for the hard drive, a basic Google search will turn up many options in the $80-$100 range.
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Wow, excellent reply – I appreciate it VERY much! This is a better description of the options than I found even on Nolo’s site.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Todd,
This is actually one of the primary reasons we are feeling the need to switch structures – those end of year spending sprees, because you either do that or send the money to Uncle Sam.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Camtasia Studio works great, that’s not your problem. The file format you chose for it to output to is more likely the culprit here.
Do a quick test – In Camtasia, set it to output a Quicktime Animation Codec movie and do a brief capture. The file size per second of footage will probably be very close to that of your AVI, but the file will be much more compatible with AE and other applications. Once you have this “test” Animation codec file, treat it exactly as you did before in AE – import it, drag to make new comp icon, then render it out and see if the quality takes a dive. Just make sure you are using the “Add to Render Queue” method of rendering, not the File>Export. If you’re unsure about this, post back and I’ll give you the info needed. Here again, the format After Effects outputs the movie to will greatly affect quality. Since you plan to put it on your web site, your options get a little limited. FLV or h.264 might be good options here, with a bitrate around 1600kbps and a frame rate of 15fps.
There is another problem here, however, that is much greater than anything mentioned so far. Since you are capturing at 1680×1050, you are probably going to need to scale the video down for viewing unless your visitors will be downloading the video to their local computer. Even then, 1680×1050 is huge. You will probably want to halve that. if you simply scale it down in After Effects, it will turn to mush for reasons beyond the scope here.
The preferred approach is to lower your screen resolution while capturing, ideally to 800×600. You could post a video this size online and it would fit okay in most people’s browser windows, but you may want to crop it down even smaller. To do this, you would set up a composition that is maybe 600×400 or however large you think your final video should be. Use After Effects to crop and “Pan and scan” on your capture so that you never have to scale it up or down, you are simply moving it around to focus on what is being shown. This will give you a web video that fits in a browser window as people will expect, retains its quality very well and is a much smaller file size. The main point here is that you do NOT want to scale the video at any point, including your final output, if at all possible. Doing so will destroy quality.
Once it’s compressed for the web using FLV or h.264, it will lose some quality, that’s just unavoidable. But using the technique above, you should be able to retain as much quality as possible.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com