Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
-
Are you using a Compressor preset? There are tons of them available for any need, and serve as a good starting point.
The .mts file you are getting is, I believe, an MPEG2 type and that is NOT what you should use if you want high quality. For quality, use an h.264 preset.
-
The Adobe products do not rely on your video card enough to warrant paying a ton of cash for one. That said, you WOULD benefit from getting a Blackmagic card ($299) and a professional broadcast monitor ($400+) for viewing your work in a professional manner.
-
Step #1 – pick one of the things you listed that you enjoy most and focus on just that one thing (at least for now). I can’t speak for everyone out there, but I don’t hire anyone who is an editor/motion graphics/web designer/etc. guy. I only hire people who are focused on one discipline so that I know their skills are focused on what I need them for. Very few people need someone who can do web design AND editing, and even mentioning that you do such a wide variety of relatively unrelated things will work against you.
If you are asking how to start a business in this industry as opposed to how to get work doing it, that is a completely different story. I would dare say that is beyond the scope of any forum, because it takes years of working in the industry so that you develop a full working understanding of both the production process and business management.
-
That all depends on whether or not your setup is up to the task. If it takes you twice as long to complete in HD, clearly it may not be worth it. This doesn’t just rely on having good gear, but the work-flow and knowledge needed to work with the HD material.
Provided you have the gear and skill needed to efficiently pull off HD post, it may still not be worth the quality gains because you will almost definitely be delivering SD (and surely not in 16:9) in the end. If this is the case, it may make more sense to use Digital Beta, film or some other high-end medium that will give you 4:4:4 footage to work with, look great and fit a standard SD work-flow.
-
Generally speaking, a lot of studio managers I know figure rates using simple formulas as a starting point. This starts by figuring:
1. the gear’s useful life in hours
2. the cost of the gear
3. desired profit marginThen they do the math (numbers below are samples):
$5,000 gear price
$2,500 50% profit
——————
$7,500 total2 years useful life – I usually use 1,700 hrs/yr as a rough guide for “actual” working time (6.5 hours per day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks per year). For 2 years this equals 3,400 hours.
$7,500 divided by 3,400 = $2.20/hr. This is what you will need to charge per hour to safely recoup costs and a modest profit on this gear.
-
Regardless of your friend’s decisions, I personally think it would be unethical for you to bid on the job. If I were you, I would just confront your friend with this information directly and let him explain himself. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
As for your friend’s “ethical lapses” another reason to confront him/her directly is that you don’t know where that money is all going. He may be up to his eyeballs in related expenses that, once explained, rationalize his markup and lack of wiggle room to give you a raise.
Communication is always better than backroom dealings that burn bridges and make you look bad. All you have is your credibility.
-
This all depends on whether you are a 1099 contractor or a full time employee where the employer is withholding taxes on your behalf. If you are a 1099 contractor, you and your employer have to negotiate a working contract and that is all there is to protect you. If you agreed to work for a day rate, then you eat overtime. The contract is everything.
If, however, you are a salaried employee (they withhold taxes on your behalf), labor laws apply and overtime must be paid for anything over a 40 hour week.
As was asked upstream, you should describe your employment situation in more detail so that we can understand the nature of your situation.
-
Sorenson screw with colors pretty badly. If you can, try using a different codec such as MPEG-4.
Also, Quicktime does have known gamma issues when moving between mac and PC systems, but I haven’t heard of problems between winXP and 64 bit.
-
Being a pleaser is a dangerous trait in our industry. You are a nice guy, and there is nothing wrong with that. But mark my words – people will walk all over you if you don’t learn now how to pass on jobs. It’s tough because passing on money is never easy, but I assure you all you would be doing is establishing a horrible client relationship.
-
First off, forget about uploading 1GB files unless you are willing to wait 3-4 days for each upload. For client previews, if you know how to get the most out of video compression there isn’t any reason your files should be bigger than 200MB, and even that’s for videos in the 30 minute+ range. Using MPEG-4 compression set to 50% quality and 15-20fps, you can get files that look fine and are reasonably small.
You are right to consider moving away from Youtube as a client review method. First of all, it’s completely public and not all clients want their work publicly accessible, especially when it’s still in process and very rough. A much better, easier and more secure method is to sign up for basic web hosting for $10-20 a month, and just upload quicktime files. You don’t need “video hosting,” any standard web host will do. Using this method, you can send your clients links like http://www.videocompany.com/clientvideo.mov. MUCH better than Youtube!
There are tens of thousands of web hosts out there, some very bad and some really good. Since I can only recommend based on my own experience, I use Lunarpages hosting and feel that their customer support and pricing are pretty good. They offer a lot of packages, many of which include a free domain name, you just have to pick the name, pay by credit card and you’re good to go. Right now they have a deal up on their home page that is $6.95 a month and includes 350GB of hosting space nd a free domain name.