Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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Diana DiGiano: That’s a charity. Not all not-for-profits are charities. For goodness sakes, think about it – most theater companies are not-for-profit. They’re arts organizations
This is straight from the IRS website about obtaining non-profit status:
The Internal Revenue Service allows organizations to file for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) if they fit within one of five identified categories. The organization must:
have a “Charitable Purpose”; or
qualify as a “Religious Group”; or
be considered a “Scientific Organization”; or
Serve a “Literary Purpose”; or
Qualify as an “Educational Organization”.You can incorporate in your state as a non-profit without meeting some (or in a few states) any of those criteria, but without the blessing of the IRS, you won’t receive any of the economic benefits of being one.
I also specifically mentioned “arts organizations” in my reply. I worked for an arts center in Lexington, Ky for two years teaching filmmaking and animation. I also made independent films with the arts center donating space and occasionally providing the non-profit sponsorship David mentioned. I certainly understand a non-profit has to genereate revenue to survive. The arts center I worked at had an entire curriculum of after school, weekend and adult arts classes that they charged a premium for. They also charged for attendance at swanky art shows and the like. But their sole goal was to promote the arts and every penny that came in beyond covering operational costs went to that. Unfortunately, there was rarely any pennies left over for that purpose, even with outside grants from individuals, corporations and state and national funding organizations.
I also made several independent films using the sponsorship method, partnering with existing non-profit organizations, and funding was channeled through them.
We chose non-profit status (or using partnerships) for all of the independent projects we made because primarily because:
1. We wanted complete control over content and ownership.
2. We wanted to be eligible for grants from organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, their state counterparts, and the many other funding agencies that support independent filmmaking.But when I decided to open a production company, we never even considered the non-profit route, mainly because I wanted to make money.
I spent almost 5 years involved in the non-profit filmmaking world. I got some films made, with one airing on PBS. But at the end of the day, what I spent 75% of my time doing during that 5 years was raising money and NOT filmmaking. I wanted to be a filmmaker, not a development director. So that’s why I gave it up and went the other route. Raising money for our projects was very difficult and very time-consuming. We paid ourselves salaries, but the FIRST place funding organizations balked when we sent in proposals was the salaries we listed to pay ourselves. They always thought they were too high. In reality, they were ridiculously low compared to what people make in the real world. National funding organizations were less likely to object, but educational foundations, and state level arts and humanity organizations typically thought our salaries were too high a percentage of the overall budget.
It was the classic catch-22 and both me and my partner ended up having to work freelance gigs in addition to working full-time trying to raise money and get some projects made. Then…after they were made, we had to raise yet more money (or budget it into the original funding) to promote it and get it seen, which was another time-consuming fight.
I’m not trying to discourage you, because people told me the same things when I did this 18 years ago. Did I enjoy it? Heck yes! It was great to make films I thought were worthwhile and I’m still proud of them. Two are still in educational distribution and we get royalty checks for them (the last one I got this summer was for $7.40) Were the people who advised me about the pitfalls correct? Yup…they were.
Going the non-profit route and staying true to the spirit of being a non-profit is a tough way to make a living, and the notion of starting “for-profit” arms of the company to me is a little unseemly. It’s like a museum starting a business that’s for-profit on the side that benefits the museum director and his staff. In my opinion it’s inappropriate and it’s skirting the spirit of being a non-profit. Now if they start that for-profit company and it’s sole beneficiary is the museum or arts ogranization itself, with no individual profiting, then fine. But I question how an organization can, on the one hand, devote their full attention to running their non-profit endeavor, when the other hand is running a for-profit corporation with all it’s demands and administrative needs.
Do many people and organizations do it? Yes, thousands. Food banks, churches, and yes probably filmmakers. They do it because it’s legal. Is it ethical and in the long run good for the organization? In my opinion, no.
You asked for opinions of the folks here on the Cow about the pros/cons of for profit and non-profit. As someone who made non-profit independent films for a number of years, and started my own for-profit company (14 years now), I think I know a thing or two about both.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Something has changed since that article because we’re finding the reverse is true. Since the iPhone OS update to version 3.x, files encoded with the mp4 extension are the least likely to play now.
We’ve spent hours testing, and we’ve gotten mov files to play consistently coming out of the encoders. But with the exact same settings, the mp4 files won’t play, and most of the m4v’s won’t either. In fact, the mp4 files show up as unrecognized files to the iPhone safari browswer.
I’ve found a few other forum posts from web folks who’ve experienced the same issue, and found a post on Apple’s iPhone discussion group that indicated it’s a bug in the new iPhone OS update. According to that post, the problem has brought a few iPhone video sharing sites to their knees.
Very odd since all of those file would play fine before.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Diana DiGiano: Since my intention is to create educational/historical media, this structure could be right for me.
Operating as a non-profit corporation is a slippery slope in my opinion. Most people perceive a non-profit or not-for-profit corporation as one whose aim is to provide altruistic work to aid others.
Places like hospitals, schools, arts organizations, zoos, and the like are all designed to provide enrichment to the people that use their services.
I suppose you could argue that if you’re making strictly educational or historical videos, your business is the same. But as soon as you start competing with “for profit” production companies and agencies for corporate or commercial work, you pretty much break the spirit of being a non or not-for-profit company.
Like Grinner, there was a company in the town I used to live that operated like that. They’d compete with and underbid other companies for corporate work, then cozy up to the large PBS affiliate in town to receive grant supported work. They’d compete with indepedendent filmmakers for grant money to make documentaries, while at the same time producing the latest music video for mid-level country music artists. The owner drove expensive, fancy cars (yes plural), and somehow ended up on the society pages of the newspaper time and again. Then, he somehow ended up being named Production Director at the PBS affiliate, and he CONTINUED to run his business. As production director of the local PBS station, he would award local PBS work to his own company!
It was an ugly situation and let’s just say he was viewed with much disfavor in the production community.
So I think the key is that if you incorporate as non-profit, you need to run your business in the spirit it’s intended and not compete for obviously profit oriented projects with local and regional production companies. In my opinion, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim to be a non-profit to qualify for grant supported work (I know, I spent 3 years making independent films and have an Emmy to show for it), then turn around when it suits you and compete for that big commercial job with the large regional hospital (just because they’re non-profit).
I have no idea what your plans are, but from an ethical point of view, you should take one route or the other and be true to the spirit of what being a non-profit is about.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
That sounds cool. Does it emulate a web server? We build websites and do a lot of testing of pages and sites across browsers from local computers but we always have to test any Flash or javascript stuff from an actual web server to get it to work.
From our use of JW Player, it will load the player from a local computer, but won’t won’t play the video unless it’s calling the video from an actual web server link.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’m certainly no expert, but if the data is still on the discs, as the recovery company said, then there should be a way of recovering it. But depending on what’s causing the failure, it could cost a few hundred or several thousand to retrieve it.
Can you do it yourself? Mabye. The first question is does the computer bios see the drive? If it does, there is a piece of software we’ve used to successfully recover a failing drive. It’s called SpinRite (it’s only $89) and you can google it to find it. If the drive doesn’t show up, then that indicates something mechanical or electrical has failed in the drive and data recovery companies are the only ones who could recover data from that.
From what I’ve read about data recovery techniques, there are basically two types of drive failures. One is corruption of the data itself or corruption in the formatting that allows a OS to read the data. The other is a mechanical or electronic failure of drive components like motors, circuitry etc.
So these recovery companies either fix the corruption problems (similar to what SpinRite does), or they take the physical platters the data is stored on, and move them to a functioning drive assembly so they can read the data.
So I’m not sure why a firmware issue on the failing drive assembly would prevent an accomplished data recovery service from doing one of these things. My guess is they don’t do that type of data recovery.
I’d try another company. But the companies that move the platters to functioning assemblies are VERY expensive…in the thousands of dollars per drive I believe. Spinrite is worth the money if you can actually see the drive in the system bios. If you can’t see them, then Spinrite can’t work on them.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I was primarily referring to people that don’t have a track record. We were consistently told by networks that since we hadn’t produced an entire season of shows before, they wouldn’t commit any funding during the production phase, but would commit people in the form of executive producers who would advise us during production.
The Learning Channel and one of the Discovery Networks both expressed interest in that regard, and The Learning Channel even assigned producers who we had discussions with. I don’t blame a network for operating that way. Until you prove you can deliver, it doesn’t make sense to commit much more than that.
But both networks told us our per-show budgets ($50,000 per show) were too high, and that they were producing shows with similar production requirements for $30-$35,000 per show.
That’s what we found mind-boggling. Again, this was about 7 or 8 years ago, but even then, $35,000 for a 22 minute network-quality show seemed ridiculously low. Production values have increased immeasurably on many of these networks since then, but the whole experience dampened our enthusiasm for pitching programming ideas, since it seemed pretty difficult to make much money doing it at those dollar amounts. Hopefully it’s changed since then.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I use JW Player quite a bit too. You need a specific version of the swfobject.js with the latest version of the JW Player. If you have the wrong version of swfobject.js, it won’t work. I think it’s version 2.1 but not sure. I initially put the wrong version on our web server and it took me half a day to figure out my mistake.
Using JW Player also only works from a web server. So you can’t load it on your office PC, code the links to your hard drive and have it play (unless your office PC is setup with web serving software of course, which it likely isn’t).
If you use the wizard on the JW Player site, it actually references swfobject.js from Longtail’s site, so as long as you have the correct reference link to your video file, (residing on a web server …very important), it should play right there on the JW Player wizard page. If it doesn’t, you did something wrong. It took me half a dozen tries to get it all right the first time I tried.
However, if all you want to do is play the mp4/flv files, download VLC media player for free. It will play just about anything. You can also download a free plugin for Windows Media Player that will play H264/mp4 files and any quicktime based codec (as long as Quicktime is installed on the computer). Get it here:
https://www.medialooks.com/products/plugins/quicktime_plugin.html
They also have a Flash plug-in for Windows Media player I believe.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We run Gig-E shared storage and all of ours are CAT 5e as well. No problems whatsoever and we even bought a couple CAT6 to see if there was any performance improvement and it tests exactly the same as
CAT 5e.Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Yes…that helped. I was just curious why a basic Gig-E setup like ours doesn’t seem to take any sort of performance hit from rendering from AE and Digital Fusion while also editing from one or two NLE workstations. And both the compositing apps are pulling source footage from the shared storage as well. I just did a project that had over 100 layers and used multiple video source clips per frame and it didn’t seem to tax the system at all.
It wouldn’t seem like a compositing app would use more resources than a NLE system does, unless we’re talking about projects that are simultaneously loading dozens of source files for each frame being rendered, which I guess is possible.
I was just curious about it.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Once you do your budget based on all your research and info, immediately add about 25-40% to it if you hope to come up with a realistic figure that you’ll be able to actually stay within.
We’ve pitched a few program ideas to networks, with one being accepted by The Learning Channel but eventually falling through, and we were surprised (actually shocked) by how low the proposed budgets were for entertainment type programming. Most of our show pitches were in the vein of HGTV style shows, where you have a host, do a handful of segments and basically stick with one theme.
The show they accepted was about beer and we pitched a budget of $1.3 million for 26 episodes (22 minutes each). That’s roughly $50,000 per show and they told us that was too high. We’d done a lot of research and we just couldn’t make money doing the show for less than that. They also required delivery of ALL the episodes before they’d contract to buy them. That meant we had to come up with over $1 million to produce the programs. It just wasn’t feasible.
We produced a pilot to sell the thing and a guy that does a beer blog put it up on his blog and YouTube if you’re interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gXSUrKRzPY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz98FHmAnfY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99W-gCTAhC0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVoVxF6PiaU
That was a few years ago, but I’ve heard from others that the second tier networks still aren’t willing to pay much for unproven ideas, and still want you to deliver an entire season of shows before they’ll commit to buying them.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
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