Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
-
If you’re using those settings you really shouldn’t be seeing artifacts. It would also help to know more specifically what you’re seeing when you say artifacts. Is it blockiness, pixelation, stair-stepping?
The only thing I can think of that could cause issues when compressing using modern MPG2 codecs is incorrect field order, or resizing from 720×486 to 720×480 instead of just cropping off 3 pixels top and bottom to go from 486 to 480.
Keyframing can cause issues in compression sometimes but many MPG2 codecs don’t even concern themselves with keyframing, especially if you use a preset, which is often optimized for DVD use.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I agree with Bob. I’m not one who subscribes to the whole “grinder” theory. There are difficult clients everywhere. There are a few great clients here and there. There are a few clients that are a nightmare. If you’re business is so well thought of and you’re so busy that you can turn away the nightmare clients….(especially the ones who pay you and most especially those who pay on-time), just because they’re difficult and demanding of your time, then you’re indeed a rare company.
There are precious few companies or individuals whose work is in such demand, whose skills are so well thought of, that they can call the shots on who they work for and when. And even the folks who ARE in that position, usually don’t stay in that position for their entire careers. Most will have small windows of time where the work they produce and the influence they wield is so high, that they can turn away what they deem undesirable clients.
Like Bob, we’ve had clients we’ve worked for who we say…”never again.” But when they call with another project, just like Bob, we take them on because we cannot logically see turning down work that we’re pretty darn sure we’re going to get paid for, even though working with them is unpleasant.
And on the subject of contracts…we use them, but if you have a client who truly doesn’t want to pay you, believe me, they can get away with NOT paying you even if you sue in Civil Court and they lose in an uncontested judgement! How can this be so? Because in our country, civil courts only hand down judgements. They DO NOT enforce that judgement. It’s up to you and your attorney to collect on the judgement. How do I know this? Because we experienced it with a large, well-known company that went from “well-known” to bankrupt in a matter of months….despite the fact that their owner is well-known and still extremely wealthy. He’s Mark Cuban rich…having owned an NBA franchise for 15 years (can you say Philadephia 76’s from 1981 to 1996!)
They didn’t even challenge the lawsuit, but once the decision was hnded down in our favor, their attorneys filed motion after motion after motion after motion, until our attorney bill exceeded $10,000 and we gave up on collection (at the recommendation of our attorney I might add, who admitted we’d NEVER collect from someone with this individual’s means). This man had at least 6 other lawsuits from other former vendors…. each well over 6 figures…. that he was doing the same thing with in terms avoiding payment. This guy was sued by the state of Oregon and the state of New York for advertising fraud….lost…and NEVER paid the fine…and NOTHING was ever done to him.
Anyway…you work for the people that will pay you…unless you’re so good and in such high demand that you have the luxury of turning away the clients you dislike or who make your worklife difficult. I simply believe that in these economic times…few of the people on these forums are in a position to do that.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
“Michael Mahoney Jr wrote: Chris and John: I will not sign this legal document knowing full well that I intend to break it. Or just go blindly along thinking “they won’t touch my stuff. They don’t care.”
How can you guys think like this? Don’t you understand what is going on here?”
I think we do. What is going on is a company trying to protect it’s proprietary products and/or brand. Companies do it every day. Non-compete contracts are required by many companies as a condition of employment.
I can’t speak for John, but what I’m saying is if your videos and creative work truly don’t compete with their products nor do they do them any harm, there is virtually no chance they will percieve that you’ve violated that contract. Further…they likely don’t have the time or inclination to police such activities. It’s just a way for a company to protect it’s interests and insure that employees don’t take the company’s products, techniques and technology and use them for their own gain.
So what I’m saying is if what you do on your own time truly doesn’t harm or compete with your employer, then sign the agreement and do your other projects under the understanding that you’re NOT competing with or harming your employer in any way. That’s not deceptive, that’s not morally wrong. Since their contract language is incredibly vague, you can in good conscience move forward under the understanding that what you’re doing doesn’t violate that contract. End of story.
Bottom line…nothing will ever come of this agreement if you sign it and in my experience, you’re making a much bigger deal about it than it deserves. This isn’t a record company taking your music and compositions and selling them as their own, it’s a company looking out for the products, reputation and good will it’s built for itself over time. You’d do the same to protect yourself if the shoe was on the other foot.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I have to agree with John Davidson on this. What chance do you think there is of a company monitoring your outside work and activities? Unless you produce something that becomes wildly successful and well-known, there is little chance that:
1. They’d ever even know what you’re doing on your own time.
2. They’d feel threatened enough to do anything about it.
My advice? Sign it and keep doing what you’re doing. If your videos truly don’t conflict with your employer’s products, then the chance of anyone getting upset or taking any legal action is incredibly small.
This isn’t a matter of a company trying to take away your artistic freedom, it’s a matter of a company trying to protect what they perceive as proprietary technology or products. Stay away from doing outside work that touches those things and everybody will be happy.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Jason,
Yes it is. We had an intern who worked with us that’s now at WFIE. I can’t remember his last name. First name was A.J…A great kid. He one you know?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
SD 4:3 material already compressed to MPEG2 isn’t going to ever look very good in a 1080i project. Short of using a hardware based up-scaler than has line doubling or quadrupling ability, there isn’t that much you can do.
One thing we’ve done when we’ve had to use SD material in an HD project is to NOT up-rez it…but instead combine the SD shots on-screen either split-screen or in 3 stylistic boxed areas etc.
We used to do this with VHS stuff people wanted to put into their SD projects with excellent results.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
There’s a difference between them but it’s not huge. Microsoft’s DV codec is generally considered pretty poor. But there are many others, from Panasonic’s to Canopus that are all considered good codecs.
Keep in mind DV is a pretty ancient codec that’s relatively low quality. It’s similar to MPEG2 in that it uses 4:1:1 color space (meaning half the color is thrown out), 5:1 video compression, which in practice seems much higher since the video portion of a DV video file is 2.5MB. They get to that number by taking a 20MB/sec uncompressed starting point, throwing out half the color (theoretically the file becomes 10MB), then compressing that 5:1 to get to 2.5MB.
If you have the Panasonic codec, when you install it other applications should see it.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Mads Nybo Jørgensen: Once something is on the net, it normally stays on the net. So even if the publisher was to remove the story, it will still be stored on Google servers and elsewhere.
I don’t believe this is true. If something is taken off a website or a page is taken down or the links to the page are removed, as the search engines crawl the site, it will re-index the content. If you have a website you can actually test this by putting up a page with some specific content. Wait a few days until Google lists it…then take that page down or remove the link on your site to the page. Within a few weeks, it will be gone or will move way down the rankings. To stay highly ranked the algorithms have to see the content often and there has to be valid links to it…the more links the better. So if you remove the content and the links, it will die a slow death.
Even if Google still shows the content, if you can get the newspaper to take down the story, the link won’t work, so people won’t be able to link to the story that shows. If all content stayed on search engines forever, you’d constantly end up with search results filled with dead links.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
This issue has been covered over and over in these forums and the same misinformation continues to be given in the answers. If you’re hired to shoot a video for a client, in the absense of something in writing specifying ownership of the raw footage, the shooter or production company owns the footage rights…NOT the client.
In the case of broadcast producers, they will almost always have something written in their contracts specifying they own the footage, but corporate clients rarely if ever will address the issue…in fact….corporate clients usually sign OUR contract, not the other way around. So if you specify that you own the raw footage, then….it makes it even clearer. They’re paying you to produce a finished video for them, not shoot raw footage that they can take for their own use in other videos with other companies. If you’re like our company, a lot of pre-production work and creative planning can go into a shoot and that work is worth something in the form of the raw footage. If the client wants to use it for another project with us…GREAT…there’s certainly no charge for that. But if they want to take that footage to another procution entity and cut something different with it, there’s certainly some sort of charge for providing that footage.
Now with that said, we typically just charge dub or duplication fees (tape or digital…doesn’t matter which), but we get something for our time to provide this to them.
Also…from a legal standpoint, owning the raw footage doesn’t really give you much in the way of financial gain, it just gives you a little leverage down the line when it comes to having an advantage over a competitor. If you have hours and hours of beautifully shot raw footage of a client’s facility, that gives you a bit of an advantage over a competitor when it comes time to bidding a new corporate video since you won’t have to shoot as much new stuff.
If you’ve given that footage away to every faciility in town….your advantage is zero.
Anyway…the idea that if they hire you they own the footage is just incorrect and is constantly put forth as truth on this and other forums. It just ain’t so. It’s no different than ownership of still photographs. The photography studio owns the copyright to those photos and EVERY time a client wants to use it for a new project, the photography studio can (and many do) charge a new fee for it’s licensing and use. Video is absolutely no different.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I used to do documentary work and we used Library of Congress photos in many of them. The research and duplication costs can surprise you. 17-18 years ago it used to average costing about $50-$75 per photo. Not bad but if you need a lot of photos it can add up in a hurry. Video was similar in regard to the duplication costs.
And their “research” isn’t much to write home about. Once while researching a film about the 19th Amendment, we spent 2 days there looking for images. There were two of us and we had one person assigned to help us who we saw about once every 2 or 3 hours and who provided little if any help. Had similar experiences at National Archives and Smithsonian in terms of getting any assistance for “public” images and films. It’s a lot less hassle to buy them.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog