Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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You could convert all the NTSC movies first, or convert them on final output to MPG2. I’d limit the number of passes you make doing any sort of compression/re-sizing to the least number possible.
I’m not sure compressor is going to do the best job at resizing, but others on the list might be better able to answer that.
Also…depending on your source material, converting from NTSC to PAL could introduce some motion artifacting since you’re resizing and changing the frame-rate. If the source is really high-quality and doesn’t have a lot of camera motion, it might look very good. If it’s marginal quality and there is a lot of camera movement or even movement within the frame, it could end up looking kinda iffy.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’m not questioning these guys products since I don’t know a thing about them. But I WILL question why so many former Apple executives are founding members and are part of their executive management?
Are they affiliated with Apple? Did all these dudes get laid-off and decide to try to cash-in on their Apple affiliation? A little odd to see an “independent” company with a cool logo and so many former Apple executives running a “new” storage company.
If their products work…fabulous. But I’d certainly be suspect until I saw them in action. They’re obviously VERY new. Their support forum has a whopping 7 days worth of activity and less than 100 views.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
My question is, is this a typical situation and day rate for what I was being asked to do?
One thing I haven’t seen anybody address is Mick’s question to whether this was a typical situation. I freelanced for years in the 90’s and I can unfortunately say “yes, it is.”
I used to do a lot of freelance work for ESPN shooting sports. Mainly college basketball games. And these weren’t low-profile games, these were typically University of Kentucky, IU, Louisville and other teams in that geographic region. At the time, all of them were perennially top ten teams.
I did it because I liked it. Which was a good thing because ESPN paid $75 for a 10-hour day. Yes…you read that right….$75. And I not only shot pre-game stuff, the entire game along the sideline (usually hand-held), post-game interviews. I ALSO had to help pull-cable and setup stuff before the game, AND stay after the game to help the production truck pack up for their next gig.
It sucked, but it was great experience. At the time, on most other jobs I did, I was getting $250 to $300/day (this was 15-18 years ago).
Fast-forward to modern times. As a facility owner, we occasionally do work for ad agencies (which is odd since we also are an agency). Invariably, they schedule 12-14 hour days with way too many setups, with no breaks for crew, and they typically don’t bring anything for people to drink, snacks…nothing.
They also typically will schedule a shoot day that’s 10-12 hours long on top of a drive round-trip to the shoot of 2-3 hours. Do this 3 or 4 days in a row and you’re wiped out…and by the last day you’re at the point of not caring much about the quality of the work.
These same agencies are constantly trying to trim the budget. I’ve been asked countless times in the last 3 or 4 years by agency producers, “do you really need to light?” It’s incredible that people ask that…but they do. We’ve had agency producers plan elaborate scenes with talent, only we get to the shoot, and the talent turns out to be people they’ve recruited off the street…or from the aisle of a grocery store, or the showroom of a car dealer. Again…I’m NOT kidding.
I’ve always been a little annoyed and amazed at how badly many producers treat a production crew. When we schedule shoots ourselves, we ask people working if they have kids they have to pick up from daycare at a certain time, or if it might be a long-day, we offer them some sort of small perk to help make up for it. If it’s an employee, we give them a half-day or full-day off as compensation. If it’s a freelancer, we’ll pay them more, or get them a gift card to a nice restaurant.
Anyway….long answer to a simple question, but YES…it’s typical in this industry. I’ve never understood it…but unfortunately, it’s how most production crews work. I’ve always believed you’d get better work and footage by scheduling a crew for 3 normal days vs. scheduling them for 2 insanely long ones. And when you pay overtime, it’s probably cheaper to do the 3 day option paying normal day rates.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Been there…done that. We’ve hired freelancers several times for shoots in other cities where the client was unwilling to pay us to go there and shoot, but was willing for us to coordinate and pay a freelancer.
In each case the freelancers had impressive reels and long, network worthy credit lists. In virtually every case, we would get their footage back from the shoot and watch it dumbfounded….because 80% of the footage was unusable.
We’ve hired individuals with impressive demo reels and impressive resumes who said all the right things in multiple interviews. Then after 3 or 4 shoots realized they either didn’t know how to focus, or had no idea what proper exposure is or how to use zebra patterns, or understand color temperature or when to use nuetral desnity filters etc. I could go on and on. Ultimately, I started giving potential videographer/DP candidates our Canon XL1 for a couple days and told them to shoot 30 minutes of something and bring it back to me.
It doesn’t take long to see if somebody knows what they’re doing when you give them an assignment like this. What I’ve come to realize is that people will put ANHYTHING on a demo and call it their own. They could’ve pulled cable on a shoot and they’ll put it on their reel and pass it off as their own. We’ve experienced this exact same problem with freelance graphic artists and motion graphic designers. Their reels are incredible, but we hire them for a project and literally $2500 later, we have NOTHING usuable to show for it.
I think that many videographers, DP’s, graphic artists and others in our industry can only do good work when they’re directed…by a good video/film director or art director or producer or a combination of those. I’ve worked for years as DP and a graphic artist so I know a little about how to turn out good work on both of those fronts. And both require not only technical skill and knowledge, but also artistic skill and creativity.
Now granted, hiring a freelancer is almost always a crapshoot because it’s hard to ask them to take your camera and shoot something for you or ask them to design something for free. But we’re at the point where we won’t hire a freelancer unless we get several good referrals.
We hired a guy a couple years ago to shoot a series of studio interviews. He was in a COMPLETELY controlled environment. He has 25 years of shooting experience. He owned his own company for several years. We instructed him to setup a shotgun mic and a lavalier mic on the interviewees so we had a choice on the audio and had redundancy. He shot probably a dozen interiews over 2 days.
During setup I wanted to ask to listen to the headphones but thought, “I should trust people more, and this guy has been shooting for ages.” So I didn’t. BIG mistake.
When I went to edit the video, I was horrified. The audio was almost unusable. The shotgun was overmodulated and completely unusable. The impedance on the wireless was set incorrectly and the audio was unbelievely hissy and noisy.
We trusted the guy because he was recommended to us and was known in the area. It took me literally 2 days and numerous filter passes in Adobe Audition to fix the audio. In the end it sounded amazingly good compared to the source, but TWO DAYS to fix something anybody should’ve been able to hear. But this guy couldn’t.
When we brought this issue up with him, we got the standard freelance shooter response. “Well, I’m accustomed to working on projects where there’s a sound guy.” This is bullsh_t because we gave him the project parameters before we hired him. And it would’ve been absurd to hire an audio tech for a shoot like this where people walked in, sat down, were mic’d and we interviewed them for 30 minutes.
Anyway…I’ve had similar experiences to what the original poster describes. Luckily, I’ve either been able to save stuff or been on the shoot and caught it before it caused disaster.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
In 25 years in this business I’ve never heard of anything like this. In the early to mid 90s I worked for huge corporations as a freelancer and never encountered a single request to provide my own insurance.
I think this is a case where some department head has corporate policy mixed up and thinks these insurance requirments apply to ALL vendors. A motion graphics designer should not be subject to these.
The one about spilling coffee on the Avid is the silliest one. They’d be covered by their own insurance if that happened. It doesn’t matter if a freelancer spills it or if an employee spills it. We’ve actually had this happen…where a freelancer who is our main jib-arm operator has had accidents (not his fault) on location two different times and the jib needed repair. Our insurance company doesn’t ask “who was operating the jib.” It doesn’t matter as long as he was hired by us to do so.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
There are other media players out there that will play just about any file type. VLC (Video Lan Client) Player, KM Player and M Player all come to mind. They’re all free and all are very small, simple installs. In fact, I don’t believe any of them install additional codecs or windows system files.
Here are some links:
https://kmplayer.en.softonic.com/download
https://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Video-Players/MPlayer-for-Windows-Full-Package.shtml
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
You could likely go as high as 5MB/sec and still get consistent playback off of a newer, high-end laptop. But data rates (around 2-3MB/sec) would be more reliable. I’d suggest using 2-pass wmv encoding if you’re got that option from your transcoding application or process.
As for size, we’ve output HD files as big as 1280×720 in the wmv format and had no issues playing them back from a laptop that has a lot of horsepower and a good-quality graphics card. I’m sure you could do other sizes too.
I’m curious if there is any particular reason they want wmv? There are many other formats that would likely be as good or higher quality, be more efficient and require smaller file sizes. H264, VC1, and MPG2 would all easily playback at NTSC sizes (720×480) and look great.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
For YouTube, I think your video looks pretty good. We see the jerkiness when viewing stuff we put on YouTube all the time. I think it’s a combination of issues and we particularly see it in video that has a lot of camera movement. Videos that don’t have it usually look pretty good if your upload source is of high quality and in SD or HD sizes.
By the way, our original encodes do not stutter…they only do it after YouTube has encoded them. It almost looks like they change the framerate, but we’ve never downloaded one of their encodes to check. We tested and experimented for a month (during downtime) trying to find just the right combination of settings to prepare a file then upload it to get the best quality from YouTube.
We eventually decided there’s a point of diminishing returns on YouTube. You upload the absolute highest quality file you can (in HD if possible), then hope for the best. Our stuff looks good in HD, but in their normal modes, it looks like dog crap. But everything we give them that has fast jib moves or medium speed dolly moves always stutters slightly.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’ve never believed offering the “if you pay early or on-time, you get a discount” does anyone much good. We’ve been in business for 13 years and in our best years our bottom line net profit has been 8-10% of gross revenues, some years less, and a couple years we lost money. So if we offerred an 8% discount as incentive for people to pay on-time, and they all took advantage of it…we might get paid quicker but we wouldn’t make squat!
Our accountant has told us that as a service business we should be generating 12-15% bottom line net-profit, but it seems no matter how diligent we are about expenses or how agressive we are with marketing, we’ve never come close to that figure….and we do a decent amount of revenue and have for a decade.
A strategy we’ve used in landing some larger clients is to offer them a discount based on the amount of work they do each month. We have one large car dealer that gets a 5% discount if they spend over $10,000/month, 10% if they spend $15,000. So it actually spurs them to do more production. For instance, in a month when they’re close to the $10,000 or $15,000 figure, they’ll usually do a couple extra shoots and versions of spots to help them get to the magic discount amount. Without this discount, we would’ve never landed this client, who owns 7 car dealerships and spends well over $150,000/year on production for them. They probably get the discount about 6 months out of 12 during the year.
The upside to that arrangement is that we ALWAYS charge them full-rate for everything we do, and they get charged for every hour of work done. Whereas on a lot of longer-form and corporate work bid on a project basis, we often end up doing more work than we’ve budgeted for, so the projects are often inadvertantly underbid. Which is pretty much the same thing as giving a discount I suppose.
All I know is it’s tough to make the kind of profits that everyone says we should be making, and it’s been that way since 1996. And yes…clients are getting slower and slower to pay, with one large corporate client sending a formal letter stating their pay policy has changed from 30 days to minimum 60 and payments can’t be considered late until 90 days. Not much you can say to an $8 billion company when they send you a letter like that.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Blackmagic also has a speed test utility. Just go to their website and download the Intensity drivers (Mac or PC). You’ll get a dialogue asking you to give them your name, serial number etc. They make it look like it’s required. It’s not. Just skip it and hit “download.” Then install. It won’t install the drivers if you don’t have the hardware, but it will install the Blackmagic codecs, a nice little media player called Media Express, and the Blackmagic speed test utlity. We use it to test the speed of our Apace vStor across 4 edit systems. Works great and is very accurate.
By the way, we consistently get about 75-80MB/sec read and 85-95MB/write speeds on our systems. They have jumbo frames enabled and the MTU is set to 9100 on each system and the vSTor. Interestingly, Apace doesn’t enable this by default…yet we edited with this system without problems for several months until the drives got about half full. Then one capture station started dropping frames when trying to capture uncompressed SD. We enabled jumbo frames and were back in business.
Hope that helps
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com