Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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Total Training has some very excellent After Effects materials, better than any class I’ve ever taken. May not fulfill your need since it’s not total immersion (unless you lock him in a room with the discs), but it’s probably far cheaper and can be used to train all of your employees current and future.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Hmmm, I guess I’m stuck being the lone contrarian here.
I agree in theory that a freelancer should stick to their rate for pride and reputation purposes. But 5 years from now when you’re working at Walmart because you couldn’t stick out this recession, how useful is that artistic pride and “reputation?” It is a tightrope walk, and if you simply cannot land paying work at your normal rate, you have three choices:
– commit to being a broke artist type
– go work for Walmart
– lower your ratesIt sucks short term to lower prices, but virtually every business in the world feels the need to at some point or another just to keep their doors open. This is even more true if you’re a freelancing videographer – I get 5-10 emails a week from freelance videographers looking for work, because it’s such a competitive and crowded field.
Besides, I sincerely doubt anyone is going to be passing around the word that said artist is a lowballer because she agreed to lower prices during the worst recession in modern times. Context is everything here.
I could be wrong, there are some good points raised in this thread. Just my 2 cents.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Do you have your gain and/or f-stop cranked full blast to compensate for low lighting levels? The fact that the floor looks washed out to almost white is a clue that something is fishy. With proper lighting and camera settings, I can’t imagine footage coming off of a cell phone camera looking this torn up, much less from an XL2.
Either way, you’re just not going to get a good key from this footage, a reshoot is pretty much mandatory if you need reasonably professional looking results. You will need to evaluate where all that grain and quality loss is coming from. There’s almost no doubt in my mind that it’s shoot-related, not something happening in post. Even heavy compression wouldn’t result in footage with these particular problems.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
A very nice, cost effective option is the Blackmagic Intensity Pro card. Some modern video cards have an HDMI out and there are HDMI adapters that fit onto a standard DVI out, but both options just pipe your entire desktop to the external monitor so it isn’t true monitoring of the source. The Intensity, on the other hand, feeds your After Effects preview window (or the preview from any editing app) directly to the monitor so it only shows the final product, not your entire interface.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
It’s my opinion that door-to-door is probably a quick way to irritate people and lose out on otherwise decent prospects. I don’t know of anyone just sitting around waiting for a salesman to show up and demo something they are selling. It could be seen as imposing and presumptuous. Unsolicited sales calls are bad enough…
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Yes, the description given by Alan is for “point of purchase” displays, not point-of-sale or POS systems.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I’m sorry I think the fees I mentioned are primarily Visa and Mastercard. Should have been more specific.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Credit card processors charge you a percentage of sale, often 2-5%, so accepting credit cards could bite into your profit quite a bit. It may not sound like much, but on $500k in business you’d be paying $25,000 in fees.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I would definitely use Toast and make sure it is creating a mac AND pc compatible disc.
Either way, you’re going to need access to a PC to test it properly.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Did you say they output the files from Flex? That is a web development app, not a keying application so I am confused by that…
If they encode the files to the Animation Codec, the files will actually be pretty manageable in size. Animation Codec is very efficient and all of the keyed areas won’t contribute to file size much at all. As such, even HD-sized files can be reasonably small. Just make sure they use the Millions+ setting or the alpha channel will be thrown away and you will be stuck with useless files. And make sure they don’t just convert the FLVs to Animation codec files – you need them re-output from the original key in After Effects.
No matter what you do, avoid the FLV option like the plague because it is going to give you nothing but headaches and drastically lower quality on final output.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com