Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
-
In this particular case, it was a known and admitted bug within the Windows version of Handbrake and not Windows related. So this had nothing to do with Windows. Also..since Handbrake is open source, it took a really long time for the people that volunteer their time to address the problem and fix it.
Anyway…we’re a PC shop with 5 high-end NLE workstations and I can count on one hand the number of crashes we have per month. We leave them running 24/7 and can sometimes go weeks without rebooting while running a multitude of software and hardware based apps. So I think it really depends on how a PC shop’s computers are setup and maintained. Conversely I worked in a College a few years ago that was all Mac (with the highest-end Mac workstations at the time) and we couldn’t work for 2 hours without a crash.
Don’t get me wrong…Mac’s are great…well engineered, solid OS. But Windows PCs get a really bad rap simply because there are so many boneheads that load 500 software apps on a system that’s designed to pump out work every day. Or they build a PC as cheaply as they can and expect it to churn out workstation class performance.
Spend as much on a Windows PC as you spend on a MAC, set it up properly and it will run solidly for years.
But yes… Handbrake is a nice little program for H264 output.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’ll second Daniel’s opinion on the quality and speed of x264. I was surprised at how much faster it was to encode using it than Main Concept and Apple/Quicktime. And Handbrake is a great tool and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
The one problem we had with it on Windows was that it used to constantly crash when you’d que up a batch of videos to encode. This has supposedly been fixed with the latest release but I can’t confirm that as we stopped using it last year because of that problem.
If it’s been fixed, that’s huge because otherwise it’s a great FREE tool.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I thought I’d respond to my own post on this! You can indeed do this using javascript and the freely available swfobject.js from google.
You can find out how by going to the javascript forum at Lontailvideo.com, which is the home of the JWPlayer.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I think the good old telephone is still a fine tool to get answers and is often WAY faster and WAY more clear than exhanging emails and certainly infinitely more accurate than exchanging texts. For me, texting is just plain cumbersome.
I use email a lot, but I frankly get annoyed by people who rely on it for everything, especially “yes or no” type questions. I believe email should be for longer, more detailed issues that need to be in writing for reference and referral.
I’m probably in the minority on this issue as I don’t think most people read past the first sentence of most emails. Especially since I can ask three brief, numbered questions in an email that’s less than 50 words long, and about half the people that respond will answer 1 of the questions (if I’m lucky), 40% won’t answer any of them, and 10% answer all.
Not to mention the confusion that results from people’s varying writing and communication skills. We have one client that sends emails and the entire office has to convene to try to decipher them. It’s actually gotten to be something of a fun activity…and while we love this client, they can’t write a complete, coherent sentence much less an entire email.
We once had an employee that absolutely refused to pick up the phone to confirm things with clients. She would often say, “I emailed them this morning and haven’t heard back.” To which I would say, “WELL PICK UP THE PHONE AND CALL THEM!”
9 times out of 10 she’d call, get the client on the first try, and get an answer to the question in less than a minute. I agree with the poster that detailed the reasons for people not responding to email. It’s usually unintentional and few people consciously avoid responding or are being rude about it. They’re just overwhelmed, or unorganized or preoccupied.
Funny story, but I have a former client that once emailed me 28 times in one day about a project. That’s an email every 17 minutes during an 8 hour day!
He had other email explosions totally 26, 24 and 22, all in one day. Now THAT’S rude and unnecessary.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Todd is correct. We recently won a lawsuit against a large, well-known company that skipped out on a rather large set of invoices.
They didn’t even challenge it…didn’t dispute we did the work and didn’t dispute they owed us the money. Guess what we’ve gotten so far? A nice chunky bill from our attorney. Even after you win a lawsuit that involves a client skipping out on their bill, and even when it’s clear and provable that the client is as wealthy as Mark Cuban and Bill Gates combined, it’s YOUR responsibility to FIND the scumbucket’s money and then force them to pay.
Well…not YOUR responsibility, but your attorney’s. Who then charges you more to file motion after motion and deposition after deposition to try to prove where the scumbag’s money is and prove it’s tied to the enterprise that stiffed you.
So if somebody used Grinner’s logo in their video, he’d probably be the one writing big fat checks to his attorney trying to get the people who used his logo to write him a big fat check. Oh no..my eyes just went cross-eyed.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Digital Rapids, Matrox, Grass Valley, Bluefish and a few others make encoder acceleration cards to do specifically what you’re asking. I don’t have specifics on them but you should easily be able to find info by searching those companies specifically, and in general by googling MPG2 hardware encoding or something like that.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I believe Procoder will directly read .vob files and convert to .flv. But you can save a ton of space and retain DVD quality by using H264/mpg4.
H264 is widely recognized as being able to match mpg2 compression quality at half the file size.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I spent several years making grant supported documentary films. If you’re producing a legitimate, journalistic based film or video, and a company is involved in that story, copyright law doesn’t prohibit you from showing that company’s logo in your video or film.
Even if you go on to sell the rights to that film and make oodles of money from it (which almost NEVER happens), they have no legitimate claims against you for copyright abuse on infringement.
Now…you do open yourself up to defamation if you make claims or statements that aren’t well sourced and of course based in fact. It would be like CNN getting in trouble for showing the coca-cola logo while doing a news piece about the sugar content in soft drinks. Nobody can argue that soda has a lot of sugar. As long as what they report is accurate, not incendiary and doesn’t make claims that could damage coca-cola’s reputation, it would be difficult for coca-cola to get upset or do anything actionable because their logo was used in the piece.
Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and others (whether you like them or not) have made careers out of harpooning corporate America. The least of a company’s worry when they take aim is whether or not their logo was used in the program.
I’m certainly no attorney, but in the course of making documentaries, your freedom to use a company’s logo is really dependent on the content and veracity of your story.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I will chime in about LaCie.
I’ve had mixed results and customer service from LaCie. We’ve found that their consumer targeted drives fail at an alarming rate. But we have 2 of their rack-mount NAS appliances (they’re just striped using spanning…no RAID to improve speed and performance), and they’ve been rock solid for 18 months. When I called customer service to tweak some settings, they were very responsive (although it’s not possible to tweak much of anything in them).
On the other hand…we also HAD several of their desktop LaCie Biggest Disks and every single one of them failed within a year. Two or three of them were bought/provided by clients for big projects that required loads of external storage, so we weren’t out any money on them, but I couldn’t believe the failure rate. I literally have 3 of those big pretty silver external 1TB drives sitting on our workbench deader than a doornail. They won’t even spin up to attempt any recovery.
At the time I bought the ethernet rack-mount drives, we hadn’t had any failures with the other external units….but based on the failures I’d probably never buy LaCie products again. What’s odd is that if you look for reviews on their products online, you’ll find the same mixed bag. Some products shine, others fail miserably. Seems odd that some products are well-engineered and others are not.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
This probably doesn’t help in this thread, but it might help someone evaluating a purchase down the road. The vStor and eStor line of NAS appliances from Apace both automatically defragment the drives.
I have no clue how they do it, but their engineers explained that during periods of inactivity, there are utilities built into their implementation of the Linux OS that run defrag routines. I was concerned about defragmenting the drives when they got about 50% full so I called Tech Support and got their lead engineer (who is very sharp), and he said not to worry about it, it’s built in.
I didn’t believe him at first, so being the cynic I am, I found some utilities to actually scan the drives and show defragmentation, and darn if the things show virtually none.
Pretty sweet thing to build into a shared storage system.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com