Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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Philli Imbrenda: Even in this recession, small-business owners cannot be afraid to shed their problem customers.
I see this sentiment expressed a lot on this forum. I see all the posts about “grinders” and I’ve read the Cow article about it. I don’t disagree that some clients are exactly that…grinders. But I disagree that it’s always best to cut these clients loose.
If they’re a small client and they don’t spend a lot of money with your company, then hire a freelancer to do the work and mark it up. And when they’re a large client, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars with you a year…I simply disagree with this philosophy.
Virtually every large client we’ve ever had or have is very demanding. From wanting things done on short deadline to demanding multiple revisions and changes, often after a project has been approved, to yes…sometimes even treating us not so fairly.
Despite this, I’ve never looked at these clients as liabilities. I look at them as billing machines. When they ask for things, we charge them…full rate and overtime rates…with rush charges if they apply. Two of our company’s biggest growth spurts came while we were servicing clients like this. It allowed us to buy a building, add new and improved equipment, learn new skills, and generally raise our profile in our region and industry.
Were they fun clients? Nope. Were they well run companies? Nope. Were they a pain in the ass? Yep. Was it worth it to tackle these challenges despite the aggravations? Yes…very much so.
I’ve always been a big believer that you learn more from bad or difficult experiences than you do from good ones or easy ones. Growing your skills isn’t easy and to do it you have to do things you’re uncomfortable with. Just like Bob said earlier in this thread, we’ve often taken on challenges we had no real experience doing or any real reason for the client to choose us.
Burnout for me doesn’t happen with these clients. Stress? Yes…but I’m too busy learning new skills (proving I’m up to the challenge) to get burned out.
I get burned out with when I work with people who are content to do the same thing over and over and over. I get burned out when I work with people who are still producing work while clinging to advertising and marketing principles that were taught 40 years ago. I get burned out when I work with people who perpetuate advertising and marketing myths like, “you have to use the client’s name 3 times in a TV ad and you have to mention it somewhere in the first 5-10 seconds of that ad.” I get burned out from working with complacent people who have no desire to grow and improve.
But I just don’t think that cutting all your difficult clients loose is part of a good business model. Raise your rates to the point where they go elsewhere. Give them undesirable booking times. Assign your B team to do their projects, or as noted above, find freelancers to do their projects while you mark it up and make money for managing the project. Difficult people and companies are everywhere. Learning how to deal with them in my opinion is key to growth and success.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been warned about a potential client or producer, only to meet them and work with them and have a great experience.
Anyway…burnout is just not an easy thing to avoid or predict. It can happen to anyone who works hard and comes across a rough stretch of productivity. But I agree with everyone that the only way out is to keep working hard. Sooner or later a spark from a project will bring you out of it.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
You’re welcome. There’s no good reason that I’m aware of for what you’re seeing happen.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
What version of WMV are you compressing to? Versions 7 and 8 aren’t very good. Version 9 (which uses a version of the VC-1 codec) is quite good and is comparable to H264 in terms of quality to file size ratios.
The non-square pixel to square pixel theory doesn’t seem to fly if adding the extra DVCProHD to ProRes step clears up the issue. From my understanding of ProRes422 (from Apple’s white paper on it), it can handle full-raster or partial width sources (non-square by my understanding). So going from DVCProHD to ProRes shouldn’t change the pixel aspect. Hence, then going to WMV from ProRes would mean there’s still a pixel aspect change from non-square to square.
I don’t have an answer for you as to why adding that extra step results in a better WMV encode, unless the complexity of decoding from DVCProHD to WMV throws a wrench into the transcode.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
You might also google “helmet cam.” There are specialized rigs you can rent for taping stuff like this from a specialized helmet cam…some of which can shoot hi-def to a dedicated hard drive that hooks to your belt and is tethered to the camera. Some even include small battery powered LCD monitors so you can view what you’re shooting.
Of course, you don’t have much (if any) lens control, but seeing as how I’d be holding onto my balls if I was up that high in the air, I probably wouldn’t need to make any lens adjustments anyway.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
While I generally agree with everyone (especially Bob!)…I think burnout is a little more complicated than everyone is making it out to be. You can absolutely love what you do, be very good at it, be a good businessman (or woman), and still experience burnout.
You see it all the time in sports (think John McEnroe taking a 6 month hiatus at the height of his career, Bjorn Borg retiring at 28), the music industry (artists like Shania Twain and Garth Brooks disappearing after 5 or 10 years), and in countless other industries.
If any of you are golf fans, maybe you’ve read Bob Rotella’s books on sports & business psychology. He’s big on goal-setting and positive reinforement but he points out that everyone reacts differently when they reach various goals. For some, it spurs them to greater heights. For others, it signals the end of their journey and we don’t hear from them again. Nick Price, Curtis Strange and David Duval are examples of guys who worked relentlessly to get to the top and win majors, and soon after they won one or two or three….they virtually disappeared from not only contention in majors, but also the leaderboard at virtually any events. The same thing can happen in business.
There are also people who are extremely good at something, but they don’t particularly like that activity. Again…if you’ve read Andre Agassi’s recent book (which is actually very well written and interesting), from the time he was a teen he hated tennis…but he was smart enough to realize he was incredibly gifted and it could open a window to fame, wealth and other opportunities.
Plus…many people also have partners in business (as I do), who don’t always think the same way you do when it comes to running and growing your company.
Lastly, as hard as it might be to believe, not everyone aspires to be wildly rich, or incredibly famous, or even the very best at what they do. Many people just want to be good at something and make a living. Can they succeed in business?
Maybe….probably….especially if they’re reliable, persistent, and at least capable at their skill or craft.
I agree with Ron in that talent alone is no guarantee of success.I think you must have some talent…and at the very least you need a solid skill set, but often people with lesser talent and better work ethics and marketing skills become bigger winners in the end.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Matt Geier: I say don’t spend $20,000 when you can spend half of that and get into an Ethernet based solution for Mac that was designed for Real Time Video Editing in a Shared Storage environment – shoot on over to Small Tree’s forum and read about GraniteSTOR!
I don’t know if you’re associated with Small Tree or not, but that’s my point. Apace has 4-6TB solutions that run under $10,000. Add a $800-$1000 switch and a few network cards and you can have an entry level system that works right out of the box along with great customer service for between $10-12,000.
Apace tech people spent literally 2-3 hours using Go To Meeting to set up the vStor and our 4 edit systems, assigning IP addresses, configuring the drives etc. Then a few days later spent another hour tweaking some settings and diagnosing come cabling issues we had in one suite.
I am NOT associated with Apace. I’m just a customer with 25 years in this business who’s seen countless computer, non-linear editing and storage companies tout products that don’t work the way they’re supposed to, or fail repeatedly. Apace’s products do exactly what they claim, they’re rock solid, and their customer service is excellent.
When you consider the complexity of shared video editing, along with the demands placed on the hardware, and the need for 24/7 reliable performance, solutions like their’s just seem to be a no-brainer to me…especially considering their systems work with Avid, Final Cut and a whole host of other NLE systems, including Harris VelocityQ, Canopus Edius, Sony Vegas, and Adobe Premiere.
When we were researching systems, they were the ONLY company that provided me with a list of past clients to contact to get feedback. All of those companies (four of them) were using Final Cut. All had similar experiences to mine in terms of service as well.
Apace was the only company that gave me a money back guarantee…in writing!
I also have to compliment the reseller we dealt with…IEEI out of California…who got me estimates within hours, provided answers to all my questions, setup phone conferences with Apace engineers and our IT company to help with deciding what periperhals to buy (switch, network cards etc.)
https://www.ieei.com/ieeibroadcast/vstor.shtml
I rarely…and I mean rarely tout a product, company or service…but after the frustration I experienced trying to get answers about shared storage, these guys are a breath of fresh air..and their stuff just plain works.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Bob Zelin: you CANNOT share the office IT network along with the shared storage (which needs to be a dedicated network), using Ethernet port 2 on your MAC Pro’s, with static IP addresses.
Perhaps this is a Mac thing…but in our Windows based facility using the Apace vStor, we can share our office IT network right along with the vStor’s shared video storage using just one 48-port switch. I don’t recall the brand or anything, but it was an $800 switch recommended by Apace. We can also set-up one of the 4 edit systems to act as a gateway of sorts for our office PCs (11 of them) to have access to the audio and video on the vStor with no noticeable impact to editing performance. The vStor also works happily with Final Cut and the majority of systems they sell are to Final Cut facilities.
Bob Zelin: ethernet with an MTU of 1500 will max out at about 50Mb/sec
The Apace vStor can use jumbo frames, but it’s default from the factory uses an MTU of 1500 and we consistently got read speeds above 75MB/sec and write speeds above 60MB/sec. We eventually enabled jumbo frames on the vStor (and the $25 intel GB ethernet cards from TigerDirect in each workstation) and saw about a 20% increase in read/write speeds. Each workstation has 2 ethernet cards, one that uses a static IP address to link to the vStor, with the other using static IP addresses to connect to the office network.
Now I don’t know if this is all the exact same thing as what’s being discussed here…but we were told repeatedly by other companies (EditShare, Studio Network Solutions, Tiger Technology and others) that what we’re doing could NOT be done using one switch. I’m here to tell you it CAN be done and is being done everyday in facilities using Apace products. We get 3-4 real-time streams of DVCPro50 video across 3 edit systems, with the fourth getting at least 1 or 2 real-time streams while being used for compositing. We see virtually NO hiccups, no pauses, no issues whatsoever. I can count on one hand the number of times playback has paused or stopped during editing in 18 months of use. I can count on one hand the number of times a render stopped or had corrupt frames. I can count on no hands the amount of down-time or file corruption we’ve had (since it’s zero).
I have no idea how the engineers at Apace achieve this kind of performance when everyone, and I mean EVERYONE else says you cannot do it. But I’m here to say they do it.
I realize the thread is talking about a DIY sort of scenario with Macs, and perhaps using one switch isn’t possible with them. But it IS possible with affordable, turn-key products that just plain work. No fuss, no headaches, no figuring anything out.
So my advice is STOP trying save $5000 or $10,000 and build a system from existing components. Just bite the bullet and pay for a system that’s gonna work and has a 5 year warranty and FREE technical support. You’ll be glad you did.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
David Bark: I’m doing 520/370 or 420/315…using On2 VP6, 800kbps bitrate, mono and 64? audio bitrate…I’ve got a 6 minute video that’s coming out as a 39mb Flash file. Is that way too much? What happens if I lower the audio bitrate?
Nothing much wrong with your sizes. 800kbps isn’t a huge problem but people with slower connections will likely have problems playing back the files without some pausing and buffering. The solution there would be to program in a buffer time within the flash player. What this does is requires X number of seconds of CONTENT to download before playback starts. It doesn’t mean the user will have to wait for that amount of time because theoretically the video loads in less time. A good place to start would be to set the buffer at 5 seconds. You can do this within the Flash Player coding or using javascript along with your player. Some people refer to this as AJAX (asynchronous javascript & XML), which in simple terms, just means writing very simple text based code within the HTML page to control your Flash Player.
On the compression…you could probably go down to around 512kb/sec on the video without seeing a huge hit in quality, and lowering the audio bitrate to say 48kb/sec would help a little.
The best way to get the file size down would be to use an H264 codec instead of On2 VP6. You could probably cut the size by 40% without changing any of the pixel sizes or bit rates.
The downside to using H264 is it requires the end-user to have more computer horsepower. As an example, I keep a 12 year old Windows 98 computer as a test computer for websites and video. It will play a video encoded with On2 VP6 without problems. It cannot play an H264 video from the web…it just stutters and freezes. In fact, it can’t play an H264 video from the hard drive smoothly and cleanly!
That’s how much more complex the H264 codec is than the On2 codec. That said, we use H264 for almost all of the stuff we encode for ourselves and clients because just about any computer made in the last 6-8 years CAN play H264 files without issue.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
It loaded fine on a windows system in IE, Chrome, Firefox and Windows Safari. The page itself takes a while to load (about 10-15 seconds), but I didn’t see anything with the loading of the video that was unusual.
The page itself is also a little sluggish if you click around, so it could be the page coding and not the embedded video that’s causing the issue?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Fernando Mol: All the magic behind SEO is that you get free traffic to your site via organic search results…In my opinion, SEO should be part of a full service in every web design company
Yes this was exactly the reason for my post. The sad truth is that it’s not part of most web design companies services here in the midwestern U.S. There’s also a misunderstanding about what SEO is. It doesn’t have to be a specialized service you pay for, but should be an integral part of how a website is designed and written. Again…the sad truth is that most web design companies don’t even think about it while building, writing or designing a site.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com