Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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Nick, I preach this to our employees but too often it goes on deaf ears. There are people in this world who view every obstacle as “a problem” and I’m not sure it’s possible to change them.
I tell our employees, “how do you like it when you go to a contractor or salesman or vendor and they start their answer to your questions with, ‘the problem is…'”
I hate it…especially if that’s their stock answer to every question. So your story is a great reminder that our job is solve customers’ problems and do it without stressing them out or aggravating them in the process.
I love it when people are asked to do a job and they just go do it. Especially if they have to go figure something out and they just take the initiative and do that too.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
We’ve seen this on a lot of Windows computers with Quicktime (both free vesion and Pro). Best we’ve been able to find in doing searches is that Quicktime for Windows doesn’t like a lot of Windows sound drivers and/or sound chips and cards. One fix we’ve seen is to go into the Quicktime settings from Control Panel and change the audio playback sample rate to 32khz instead of 44 or 48khz. This has synced audio back up on a number of systems. It has no effect on quality or anything other than changing how Quicktime is outputting the audio to your sound card and drivers.
Quicktime for Windows is very quirky, especially in how it handles audio.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Short answer, if you agreed to do the job at that rate…then you should do it and learn from it.
Nex time estimate the job based on past hours and raise your flat rate. We do this all the time. A client comes in with a project. It has very loose and fluid specs that make it difficult to estimate. We estimate it best we can but the job takes 6-8 hours longer than estimated. We stick to the estimate but the minute we go over our budgeted hours we tell the client…saying, “hey…this is taking longer than estimated. We’ll do it for what we quoted, but on the next one, we’ll need to adjust the estimate to compensate.”
Now if a project goes WAAAY over…we sit down and discuss it and tell the client that we’ll have to adjust the budget. but if it’s a reasonable amount, we stick to what we told them.
Most clients like this. They don’t have to go back to their boss or their client and tell them they’re going over budget. They don’t have to have new P.O.s issued. Some clients even say, no problem, we’ll generate a new P.O. and pay for what it costs. Virtually all of them are fine with upping the rate for the next similar job. They appreciate that we don’t try to stick them for extra costs when both parties negoiated in good faith. They also appreciate knowing in advance that the project takes more time so they can let their boss or client know.
We also build in contingencies of anywhere from 3% to 5% on most flat rate projects. So if we bid $25,000 to do a corporate video, we’ll add a 3% contingency which adds $750 to the estimate. That’s a half day of shooting or editing, which can come in handy. We also always add in a full day for revisions on larger projects.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
The end user with the Windows machine would likely need FFMPEG and FFDSHOW installed in order to play the resulting file. They’re both free, open-source utilties that add all kinds of codecs and direct show filters so that Windows systems can playback just about any codec out there. But…they can be very confusing to setup and can mess up or change how various media players function.
There’s also a direct show plugin that would allow a Windows system to play any Quicktime or H.264/mp4 file directly in Windows Media Player, KMPlayer, BSPlayer and a few other Windows based media players. It’s also free and can be found here:
https://www.medialooks.com/products/plugins/quicktime_plugin.html
So if the Windows machine has this plugin, it can play just about anything that a Quicktime based application can output.
One question, can Quicktime play the resulting AVI file you’re creating? If it can’t, it might not be a codec or direct show filter problem but something messed up in the encode.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
We went through a similar problem a couple months ago. We ended up having to take the file into After Effects, then export it to an uncompressed AVI file with alpha. Nothing else would work. All other encoding and NLE software would act like it was outputting alpha and the file would read as a 32 bit file, but the alpha channel in the AVI would be all white. After Effects worked ok, but the black portion of the alpha channel was too bright. It read at 15%IRE on a waveform, so we had to mess around with that too.
I’m not sure what the incompatibility is but it was a pain for us and what should’ve been a simple 15 minute conversion took hours.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I don’t think they would natively be available in the apps you mention, but they could be. If not…the manufacturer (AJA) has them available for download as software codecs for both Mac and Windows here:
https://www.aja.com/support/kona/kona-2.php
Scroll to the bottom of the page for both versions. We’re on Windows and we have them installed on a couple of systems and they show up in all of our NLE systems and encoding applications when going to Quicktime.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Daniel Low: In the end, I’m not sure what your point is Chris, I can’t tell whether you are behind the new format or not.
I don’t really have an opinion and don’t feel a need to be “behind” any particular format.
Daniel Low: Ultimately people want high quality products that work with the minimum of fuss without chewing up batteries or bandwidth.
The vast majority of people want products that work at affordable prices. Most people would love to buy a BMW, but most cannot. Many people would love to buy a Mac or an iPad or even an iPhone, but they can only afford less expensive alternatives.
Daniel Low: Your old friend is a total loser (and so are you) if he thinks that ‘Good enough’ wins over ‘great’. All that said, I don’t see what your point is apart from trolling.
Market share in virtually every industry says otherwise, especially as the price of the item goes up. The best selling cars are most often the ones offering the best value.
Also, you don’t know my friend (he’s a multi-millionaire with a legion of successful companies he’s built, bought and revived, and bought and sold) so I don’t think you’re in a position to judge him. Second, I’ve won Emmy awards, have owned and operated my own company for 14 years and have scores of loyal clients…so you have no business judging me.
Daniel Low: The real point here is about HTML5 vs Flash and which can offer a better experience on a broader range of devices.
WebM supports HTML5.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I hate to be the dissenter in the group, but in the business world, just because something is technically better, it doesn’t always become the market winner.
Considering they have Chrome, Firefox, and Opera browsers plus Google & YouTube all behind them, along with launch partners like Skype, Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD, ARM, Brightcove, Encoding.com, Kaltura, and HD Cloud, I’d have to say they have some considerable clout in their camp.
Another dubious point the original article makes is that “H.264 is a modern codec, fast and light…” There are a lot of tests out there that show the “fast and light” claim depends very much on the computer hardware and the OS. Jan Ozer has done at least two pretty extension tests on this claim over the years.
For me, the whole issue isn’t much different than 3 or 4 years ago when H264 first started gaining traction, or 4 or 5 years ago when Flash video first started being used for video delivery. Nobody knew much about them and in the case of flash codecs, they were initially terrible. They’ve improved tremendously since then.
In the end, consumers don’t really care that much about the quality difference between H264 and On2VP6. They didn’t care 2 years ago when YouTube video quality was jaw droppingly awful. They also don’t care about which standard is adopted, they just want their videos to play in their browsers and on their mobile devices and on their pad based computers.
As a wise old business friend of mine has told me over the years, the vast majority of consumers want “good enough.” And while that’s certainly not a particularly inspiring lesson to preach to a business owner or innovator, more often than not, “good enough” wins out over “great” when it comes to market share.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Todd’s experience mirrors ours EXACTLY. And I’m not sure about Rich’s online/offline explanation. When we were using DG and sending spots to over 100 markets at a time, with each spot having it’s own end tag address and phone number (yes…we uploaded up to 100 spots, which took hours across multiple upload servers at different locations), they never provided us with any information about which station got a digital delivery or which station got a tape dub.
All we were ever told was that they’d deliver the spot by a certain time of day, always the next day after our uploads. We knew that some stations didn’t have the digital equipment necessary and that they’d get a tape dub, but we weren’t provided information about which ones. Maybe that’s changed.
And almost every single station, once they received the spot (digitally or on tape), would either take the file and output it to tape, or re-encode it to a digital format for their servers. DG also would re-encode our high bitrate MPEG2 files to their own flavor of compression to make them smaller to speed deliver to their station roster. I actually saw some our DG delivered spots run in other markets like Louisville, Cincinnati, Nashville, Birmingham, New Orleans and Orlando at various times, and in most cases they looked jaw droppingly bad. They usually looked like they’d been dubbed to VHS without anybody checking the setup on bars & tone…(anybody remember VHS…for that matter do any of these places actually check bars & tone?).
Our experience with their techical and customer support people is also exactly the same. With all of them being extremely nice and very responsive, but with all of them contradicting each other about technical specs (even though they had a one-sheet they sent with specs on it).
We’d have techs tell us to ignore the technical specs, that they were “just a guide,” and they’d tell us to do this or that. One big issue we constantly had was with audio level. One tech told us to use -20dB as the digital standard, another said no, use -12dB, yet another told us no…use -6dB. Well that’s BIG difference in audio levels. Ended up we settled internally on boosting our audio 4db from it’s digital standard of -20db. We figured it would be kind of in the middle of the two international digital standards and that seemed to work.
Lastly, their billing department was woeful. One of the reasons we stopped using them was CONSTANT billing problems…mainly gross overbilling on their part, and in some cases being billed for OTHER clients traffic! Our business manager and production coordinator would pull their hair out every month having to pour over their bills to check them for accuracy against what we sent, and every single month they’d overbill us by hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. They’d also send us bills for invoices we’d paid months prior. This is the part that was truly a joke. I hate to be so critical of a company, but in our experience they were a complete nightmare to deal with when you’re doing a high number of sends. We’d often send spots to 100 markets four times a month…sometimes each market would get 2 or 3 versions of a spot in one week, so we wer dealing with 300+ sends each month. There was one month where we had over 700 digital sends to stations. Now maybe they’re better with smaller loads, but they just simply seemed incapable of handling that capacity on the billing side. On the delivery side they were fine, they’d usually get the stations their spots. But the other issues were just unacceptable in my opinion.
We also used Vyvx for another client, and the experiences there were very similar, with similar technical confusion and amazingly similar billing issues. This client was smaller so it wasn’t as big of a headache, but it was still NOT a seamless process. It involved a lot of work on our end to manage and track.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
If the final use is for the web, I’d export using something that’s faster to render out to… that’s still reasonably good quality…like say DV. I would think it would be faster than an uncompressed file using the animation codec and it will still give you good enough quality to make good looking FLV files from.
Other options could be JPEG 2000, Apple Component or the H264 you mentioned, all of which are better quality than DV and might be faster than doing what you’re doing now. I’d do a quick test of a 1 minute segment and see. You already know the animation codec is taking 4x the length of the program…so 1 minute would render in roughly 4 minutes. So if one of those codecs above renders twice as fast, then you can assume you’ll save twice as much time.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog