Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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That’s all good to hear. As an aside, we opted for an Apace vStor when we moved to shared storage in Feb. 2008, and the only downtime we’ve had was ALSO because after a power outage, we couldn’t find the power switch! We called, got a support person immediately (after hours no less), and he pointed it out to us. It’s an absolutely tiny button with an even smaller label. I assume the Active units are similar and they’re designed that way to eliminate the possibility of accidentally turning the unit off.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Aaron…I’m on your side on this one. And yes…I was referring to past posts…not this one. I think what people are trying to say is that you have to pick your spots on a lot of these issues…and you have to be aware that there could be a whole host of reasons why it’s taking so long to get paid.
We typically pay vendors BEFORE we get paid on most projects. But when projects get into the $20,000 and up range and we have a lot of vendors involved, we sometimes are at the mercy of the main client. We always get deposits, typically either 33% or 50%, but we typically don’t use that for paying vendors. In this economy, it’s not unusual for it to take 120 days to get paid. Does it suck? Yes. Does it do any good to bypass your client (in this case your employer) and go directly to paying source? Nope. It’ll just piss people off and you might not ever get paid.
We used to do work for a national company…VERY well known in it’s industry. We annuaully did over half a million dollars in revenue with this one client. They were woefully slow-pay, but always did eventually pay. Once, when we told them we were going to stop production and not release any more work until they paid us, their VP of Marketing told us, and I quote; “I wouldn’t recommend that. It’ll just piss off the owner and then he’ll never pay you.”
Knowing our past dealings with the CEO/Owner, we pretty much believed them. We stuck it out and eventually got paid, albeit months later.
So while it’s tempting to try to expose people that take advantage of others when it comes to financial dealings, it can also be professional suicide. And yes…I remember when $650 was an important chunk of change to me when I was freelancing…but in the large scheme of things, it’s really not enough to stir up the waters so to speak.
With our current issue with the non-paying client, I’ve posted on blogs and forums about the issue and have been sure to name this company and their owners, and I’ve also submitted them as story ideas to news magazine shows and large newspapers, since there are at least 4 other companies they’ve stiffed for similar amounts (we found this info while searching for other lawsuits filed against the non-paying client), and they’ve also taken tens of thousands of clients money and not delivered promised products and services, which amounts to fraud. This has been going on since last summer…a full year…yet not one news organization has picked up on the story…not even in the city where this company does business and it’s owners are prominent citizens.
So I guess the point is that the when you see the court system and news organizations not caring about a company that’s bilking it’s vendors and customers out of millions, surely nobody is going to take notice when a small company runs roughshod over a few employees.
I’ve always believed that EVERY job is a valuable learning experience…ESPECIALLY the crappy ones. So take what you’re learning from this and don’t EVER do it to anyone else. That’s probably the best that will ever come from it.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Yes I tire of the whiny posts from Aaron, and I agree it would be unethical for him to go to client B for his money.
But I have to say that if what he routinely reports about his employers is actually true, they don’t sound like particularly likable folks, or particular scrupulous business people.
So, I also see where he’s coming from in believing when people don’t speak up about others that run businesses like that, bad things inevitably happen. Naturally, a $650 bill isn’t much to get upset over, but if a company treats a small bill like that, it’s likely they’re no better with larger ones.
I’ve learned there are basically two types of business owners. Those that have a passion for their craft or service or art; and those that have a passion for money.
The ones that love what they do are dedicated to producing the best work they can and treating their clients, employees and vendors with respect and integrity. The ones that love money usually look for and start businesses they believe can make them the maximum profit while exposing them to the least amount of risk. They rarely put clients or vendors or employees before money. They’ll pay themselves before paying anyone anything they’re owed. The person that loves their craft will pay everyone else before even thinking of paying themself.
Just so Aaron doesn’t feel bad. We had a client (we’ll call them Client A), who contracted with us to do work (we’ll call us Vendor B). We demanded a subsantial deposit for the work, got it, then got stiffed for the remaining portion of the bill, which is over 6 figures. You read that right…6 figures.
We waited roughly 150 days before suing, won a default judgement when the company didn’t even send an attorney to the hearing or respond to any of our attorney’s inquests…yet we still have to go “find” their money without the aid of the court. This after we have documented proof that after the owner of the company (the guy we’re suing) sold it in January of this year, he proceeded to pay himself $700,000 in salary from January to March (1st quarter) because his company was still winding down it’s operations. This after his attorney claimed the company was “insolvent.” They even reported a profit for the first quarter of this year on their quaterly statement! And…he owns an acquisition/venture capital firm that’s headquartered in the same building as the previous company, and on their website it declares it’s a $100 million firm!
So maybe that will make Aaron fell a little better about his situation, but it likely won’t make him feel any better about Corporate America. When it comes to money, it compels a lot of people to do things they wouldn’t think of doing when money’s NOT involved.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Thank you Bob! You always say what I’m thinking better than I can type it up!
Again…I am NOT knocking anyone’s products, especially if they work. But the “plug” for Active Storage products just seened so out of place in relation to the original post and that’s what prompted my response to it being a little odd…and prompted me to check out their site and background.
Almost everyone that comes to this forum is looking for an economical way to implement shared storage. I can only remember a handful of posts in 2009 from people that had decent sized budgets to purchase high-end fibre channel SAN solutions. The cheapest Active SAN array is a 4TB model at $7,000. The original poster’s Proavio model on B&H Photo is priced at $6800 for a 12TB array. I’d say that’s a lot more bang for your buck. A Proavio 24TB fibre channel array is $9500, versus $10,000 for Active’s 16TB model. Again, a lot more bang for your buck (if the Proavio’s work of course).
It’s important to note you still have to buy fibre channel HBA,s, switches, cabling and SAN management software, THEN have someone install and configure it. You’d almost certainly spend $20-$25,000 total (or more) by the time you could actually use that $6,800-$10,000 disk array.
I think the point is that while Active might indeed have fabulous products and first-rate customer service and wonderful forums, in relation to the product he was asking about in his original post, he likely couldn’t afford them. The Proavio solutions are roughly 30% -40% less expensive.
We implemented Gig-E shared storage in Feb/March 2008, installing a 4TB array and we STILL spent $15,000 by the time we bought all the additional ethernet cards, switches, cabling, racks etc….and had it professionally installed and configured. Had we chosen a fibre channel SAN, it would have been at least double that, and would’ve been technically more challenging to setup and administer.
It’s obvious from most of the posts on this list and from my discussions with colleagues that the whole shared video storage industry is confusing, especially the differences among how SAN, LAN, I-SCSI, and AoE systems work. And from my experience researching companies and systems and talking with many different vendors, a lot of companies prey on people’s lack of knowledge and feed them full of misinformation when it comes to explaining what’s needed to make a system actually work.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
During our first 8 or 9 years in business, we only raised our rates once or twice. Obviously…not a good way to do business. Our current accounting rep advised us years ago that to remain viable as a business, we’d have to raise our rates every year just to keep up with the cost of living. 4-5% each year is considered pretty standard, and there have been some years where we’ve raised it as much as 10%. That said, going all those years in the first decade and NOT raising rates has made our current average net profit margins very thin, typically 5-8% in most years.
So if you’re not raising your rates at least a little every year, at some point it’s going to catch up with you. We also have a couple of clients where we’ve negotiated per project fees. On those, we go back to them every 2 or 3 years, take them to lunch and tell them we’re going to have to raise rates, typically just to cover cost of living increases. They’ve never objected and in fact aren’t even surprised by it…even when the increases have been as much as 20% over previous deals.
I think a big reason most of these clients aren’t surprised or don’t object is because most acknowledge that we provide a level of service that they’ve never gotten before from other marketing companies, ad agencies or production companies.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Brian…you left out a key phrase from my original post:
but from all that I’ve read on the forum, Compressor is sort of a swiss army knife of compression…doing a lot of things moderately well, but none really well
You can find post after post across Creative Cow where other people have noted that Compressor can’t be considered a high-end encoding and transcoding app. So there are a legion of people that pretty agree with that assessment. The point to the post was:
1. We need more info.
and
2. Compressor is likely going to require a specific workflow to create a clean, high-quality encode.
I also pointed out his quality issues were likely from resizing the file upon export to MPG2, which you acknowledge in your post as well.
For the life of me I don’t understand the antagonistic attitude that resides on these forums, nor the allegiance to particular platforms and applications. There are a half-a-dozen things that could be causing his quality issues and without additional information, it’s nearly impossible to determine what exactly is going on.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
You really can’t trust RAM preview to give you a true indication of what a rendered file will look like…and I doubt it’s the compression causing this. It’s likely a field/frame issue.
Are you rendering directly from AE to H264? We need more info to help. Like frame size (HD, SD etc.), your compression settings (be detailed, read the post at the top of this forum on what to include).
If you could give us more info…lots of people could give you some tips.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Why yes…I AM skeptical. Like I said at the top of the first post. I wasn’t questioning their products since I don’t know much about them. But the guy who plugged them lists in his profile that he’s a support person for their products. Whether he works for them or does it as part of a forum…I’m not sure…I just know that a lot of people try to use these forums as thinly veiled marketing pitches for products, which has always irked me.
More power to them if they’re putting out a quality product that makes using shared storage easier for folks. I just prefer to read unaffiliated, unbiased opinions about products from end-users (like yourself).
I spent months researching the solutions we chose, and the vast majority of people out there selling shared video editing solutions are selling snake oil. Most don’t understand what video professionals want or need, and they also sell products that don’t do what they say they’ll do once they get into the demanding environments of broadcast production.
Heck, some of them don’t work out of the box moving a couple of streams of SD video! Anyway…it just seemed like an odd post when the original question was looking for opinions about the Proavio line of products.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
What are the quality problems you’re seeing? I don’t use compressor so others could better answer compressor specific issues, but from all that I’ve read on the forum, Compressor is sort of a swiss army knife of compression…doing a lot of things moderately well, but none really well.
The first thing I’d suspect is you’re seeing artifacting from resizing from HD to SD…or perhaps there are field issues since you state you shot 1080 60i.
Give us some additional information about the compression settings and what specific quality issues you’re seeing.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Uncompressed 8-bit would be ok, but 10 bit has a greater color depth I believe. If you edited it at 8 bits though, I don’t think archiving it at 10 bit magically adds those extra 2 bits of color data, since it’s not there in the original. I could be wrong on that though as it’s a very confusing subject.
So if you captured and edited at 10 bit, then archive at 10. If you captured and edited at 8, archive at 8.
I’ve had arguments with people about this subject. We shoot mostly SD using DVCPro50 (which is an 8-bit format) and have had engineers tell me that capturing and editing at 10-bit is pointless (since the source is 8). But others claim that capture hardware converts the image from 8-bit to 10-bit upon capture. I’ve never gotten a straight answer from the hardware people when I’ve asked them directly. It seems a little suspect to me that additional color information could be added to my original source digital file upon capture thru SDI.
Also..I found this on an Apple Final Cut Forum post:
10-bit codecs use an extra 2 bits of data per channel. If you’re working uncompressed, then it’s roughly a 20% increase in filesize. But you get 4 times as many levels of color for each color channel –and this is a huge benefit while you’re editing and mastering. But trancoding an 8-bit project to 10-bit file doesn’t result in any quality gain, just a larger file-size.Again..that poster could’ve been wrong on that forum too.
Another analogy is if you record original audio at 16 bit 48khz. Then take that file into an audio editing program and resample it to 24bit 96khz….the audio program is digitally upsampling your original data. I’ve had people argue that the file is now higher quality. Most engineers I know say the original file is the highest quality file you can have, and that any processed copy, even if it’s upsampled, will be slightly inferior to the original. The best analogy for me is saying if you take an uncompressed SD file and uprez it to uncompressed HD, it increases quality. Well we all know that is NOT true, and it’s basically the same thing as all of the above.
On no…I’ve probably started a big argument with all this!
And I agree with the other poster, 30GB is nothing these days. I think you can get thumb drives and flash drives that will hold that much.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com