Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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Seth,
It’s good to hear you’ve got stuff working in a way that helps you be more productive. Keep posting and asking questions because people on here really do want to help. If they didn’t they wouldn’t spend the time posting and writing articles.
I think the frustration that Bob talks about isn’t just felt on this forum, but all across Creative Cow’s forums. Me and my partners are in our 13th year of doing business, and I was always looking for the “cheap” way to do things…so much so that I sometimes tried to “roll my own” so to speak.
What I slowly figured out was that most of the time, once I’d spent the time and gone through the trial and error, if I added up the money I spent on failures, re-do’s, and my own time…I usually spent as much as I would’ve spent had I just bought the professional solution in the first place and paid someone to install it! Rarely did I ever actually save more than a few hundred dollars.
Now granted, I learned A LOT going through all the trial and error and it made me more technologically saavy, but it did not usually save my company money, and it almost never made us more money. So while Bob did write that original article, if you read it closely, I believe you’d end up spending at least several thousand dollars, and that’s if you already have some decent Mac computers lying around.
What we repeatedly see on this forum (and I’ve only been contributing for about 15 months) is people who ask for advice and get really specific answers about hardware, software, configurations etc. Then they answer that they’re going to try it there way anyway…often when other forum members have already failed trying these methods.
So yes, you CAN build your own SAN or NAS appliances for video editing. But it still requires some expense. It’s nearly impossible to take parts that you have laying around (drives, switches, ethernet or fibre channel cards, old computers etc.), hook them up and expect them to work reliably.
So I don’t think the response was directed at you specifically…but more in a general sense that people don’t listen to the advice they get about how to do this stuff.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Forgot to add that we occasionally use one on Windows called Flash Video Studio by a company called increditools (I think). It’s a nice little app as it adds the player skins, creates the .flv and .swf files as well as an .html file that you can just copy and paste to embed the flash video into another web page.
If you’re on a MAC….others would have to chime in with suggestions.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
It loaded right up when I went to the page. Pretty much immediately in fact. AE isn’t a great tool to export to flash. I’ve only used it once and could never get the file to look right.
There are a ton of modest priced apps that will convert from quicktime to .flv and .swf files. Just do a search on google. You can probably find one for $50.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Most of the large projects we’ve won over the years have come about through persistent “selling” of our services to those particular companies. What usually happens is after a period of trying to get them to try us (with one company we stayed after them for 5 years), they’ll throw us a small nugget of a project.
These projects were usually small, with limited budgets and of little significance. What we usually did was try to “hit a homerun” so to speak with this small project. Which means we worked our butts off to make it as impressive as possible. That usually meant putting in twice as many hours as we were getting paid.
If you’re lucky, the client is impressed, and they give you a slightly larger, more important, larger budget project. We try to do the same on that one. Once they become confident that we’re:
1. Good at what we do.
2. Can deliver on-time and on-budget.
3. Are enjoyable to work with.More work usually follows. I’m not sure there’s any big secret to winning large accounts, unless you’re incredibly gifted and already in demand, have some special technique or process that people are enamored with, or you’re already a large company with an impressive client roster.
Another method we’ve used that’s worked a couple of times is to find a service or project a large client is using or having done. Study it and find out what the client likes or dislikes about it. Is it too expensive, is the vendor responsive (or not), do they get the work on-time etc. Then offer them the same service or work at better quality and a better price.
As an example, we have a client that has 16 web sites and they use video on all of them. They use a large Content Delivery Network (CDN) to store, manage and deliver them. The client continually complained to us about how they disliked working with the company. They noted problems ranging from poor customer service to incompetent technical support. We even tried to help them by acting as an intermediary and trying to solve their problems with the CDN company, and we saw first hand how bad the service and support was.
So we put together a pitch to encode, prepare, upload, manage and deliver their videos on our own video hosting service, and do it at half the price of what the current company is charging them. We’d still make a significant profit and their web video headaches would go away. They love the offer, but are tied up in contracts with the CDN until the end of the year. But it looks like it will pay off in the client moving their video hosting to us.
As an aside, we’ve never done this before. So we’re learning all we can now to prepare. We’re pretty knowledgeable about most of it, having done a ton of compression and web video, but we’ve never actually set anything like it up. But for a big account, we’ll learn.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
walter biscardi If they are paying for your time to shoot and they are paying for the raw tape stock, it’s theirs.
I agree with Walter 95% of the time, but this is his policy, not the generally accepted industry standard. It’s also a policy that a lot of production companies adhere to and there’s not a thing wrong with it. But there’s also nothing wrong with claiming ownership when clients don’t specify otherwise.
So you were also right in your previous travel and tourism jobs to retain ownership since those clients obviously didn’t ask for it. In this new case however, the client is also well-within their rights to ask for ownership. Once they do that, from a legal point of view, you don’t have a lot of options. They’re basically asking you to do the job under a “work-for-hire” agreement. Copyright law is pretty clear on this, and under these circumstances, they retain ownership.
Naturally, I’m not an attorney, but we’ve had two instances of clients claiming they own the footage and have had intellectual property attorneys explain it the exact same way each time. On both of those the client didn’t ask for ownwership up front, so we retained it…and needed it as leverage to collect money we were owed.
This issue has also been dissected and discussed often on here and there are a ton of myths and misconceptions about it. Not to mention that it can get complex depending on a number of factors, like the amount of creative input a client has. Do a search for “copyright” or “ownership rights” on the forum and you’ll probably find a lot of threads that can help.
As another person pointed out, you could ask for joint ownership, that way they get the footage and you still get to sell it.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
david Eadenhall What is the difference between progressive download and streaming. When i am compressing my video, how do I know what type of download I am compressing for (progressive or streaming)? I have a streaming server set up so that my users can use the ‘seek’ function, will both these types of download be compatible with this, or is there one in particular that i should go for?
Some of this may not be technically perfect, but it’s a general explanation of the difference.
Progressive download sends the file (usually to a temporary location on your computer) to each end user, while true streaming feeds the video in real-time to end users (often called Video on Demand or VOD) or multicasts it to many users without having to actually cache or download it to your computer.
When they’re both done correctly, end users usually don’t see a difference between the two, as they both play the video as if it’s in real-time.
Streaming is usually used for live webcasting, like what CBS did with the NCAA basketball tournament and NBC the Olympics, while progressive download is typically used for produced content.
There are exceptions of course, like when a corporation conducts traning via the internet and hundreds or even thousands of employees watch a pre-produced video. Of if your videos are so popular that hundreds of people may be watching your videos simultaneously. Or when a company does an online web event or promotion.
Streaming is usually more expensive because to do it reliably requires server side software and programming, and sometimes even special server hardware. It also uses a special transport protocol. Progressive download is less complicated and uses regular HTTP for sending files, and videos can often be stored right on your web server. Again…there are exceptions, as freely available software has streaming server capabilities built in, like VLC and others, but it’s not for the faint of heart to set up.
Progressive download will start playing after only a few seconds of video has downloaded and continues to play as long as the download stays ahead of playback. You can also program in buffer or load times into flash metadata (the instructions that are typically part of a player skin that wraps the flash video) to ensure that a certain amount of the file downloads before playback begins, which helps keep the download ahead of playback. Some of the Flash encoding apps even offer simple options that allow you to specify the buffer time when encoding the video.
There are probably some technical things I haven’t got quite correct, but that’s the basic difference.
Here’s some quick, concise articles that are helpful in explaining things further.
https://www.mediacollege.com/video/streaming/server.html
https://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=10952&page=1
As for encoding your video, virtually all the encoding we do is for progessive download, so I’m no help when it comes to preparing media for true streaming. But I don’t think there’s a whole lot of difference other than making sure it’s coded to stream, and it’s data rate is constant (CBR) as opposed to variable (VBR).
Others can probably explain the requirements better. But more than likely, progressive download will work for the majority of web video.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Walter Biscardi, Jr. Or a terrible contractor for your house. Winning judgements doesn’t do a whole lot unless there is pressure in some way for them to pay.
Yep…and putting that pressure on people who can afford to pay attorneys to act as a buffer is expensive and from what we’ve read and been told, rarely results in settlements.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Wait until you deal with a really large company with a really wealthy and well-heeled owner. You can win judgement after judgement in court but finding their assets to actually collect is near impossible.
But I will say that since the original poster was paid once right after the shoot…I would think that just keeping after the issue would get it resolved.
In our case, the company we’re dealing with actually changed their name and the state where they’re registered to do business since stiffing half-a-dozen vendors for at least $750,000 and likely much more. The original corporate entity (very well-known by the way), which is a franchise corporation, still exists but they have no assets. Why? Because they moved them all to the new corporate entity.
Our attorneys couldn’t find this new company when doing their discovery. We found them through one of their former employees who feels badly about how we were treated. He only knows because he was formerly an executive of the company.
We also had zero bad debt for the first 12 years we were in business, including dealing with a couple of large corporations for a number of years.
But if a large company really doesn’t want to pay you, for whatever reason, believe me…if you’re a small company, there’s little chance you’ll see it no matter what happens in court here in the U.S.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Daniel Low Sorry if might come across as arrogant, rest assured I speak to everybody with this tone. Chris, thanks for following me around, picking up the pieces and feeding off my scraps. 😉
I have no idea what that means. Just because you speak with that tone with everyone doesn’t magically make it ok.
The intent of these forums is to help people solve problems. Not become a contest for “who’s knows more than who.” I joined the Cow about 4 years ago, posted a handful of times on various forums…and was greeted with responses like yours to Mike. I didn’t contribute again for two years after that.
I found it incredibly unprofessional to join what’s billed as “creative COMMUNITIES of the world” and immediately be lectured about how to ask questions, and be admonished because I didn’t know what I was talking about. That’s not what a “community” is supposed to be. When I joined, I was 9 years into owning my own company, with 22 years of experience, including an Emmy award for a documentary on PBS.
The majority of people that come to the compression forums are people that are NOT doing compression on a daily basis. In fact, in the world of video production, there are relatively few people who can say they do it full-time. So while I respect your knowledge, I, and obviously others who visit this forum, find the tone unprofessional and unncessary.
Thankfully the tone on the majority of forums has improved tremendously since I first joined. Most people that come to this forum typically do so because they do compression occasionally and are rightfully stumped by its complexity. The last thing they need is a kick in the face when they’re just looking for guidance.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Mike,
I think the answer is that MP4 will likely work…and figuring out how to set encoding parameters related to identifying specific frames or timecode is the solution.
Unfortunately I don’t know the answer to setting those to improve the software engine’s ability to hit those specific points. But I imagine if you do a few google searches about I frames and GOPs related to MP4, you’ll get a better idea and some information that could help you narrow it down.
And one thing I’ll add…the arrogant tone that permeates a lot of these forums has always irritated me (as it obviously did you).
It’s as if everyone is trying to show how much more they know than the poor guy or girl that posts just trying to solve a problem…or that they’re deconstructing the depth of information someone provided in their question.
Frankly, it embarrasses me. No-one would talk that way to someone in person and I don’t know why it’s acceptable or why it’s allowed on these forums. Sure people are giving of their time, experience and knowledge to help others. But the last thing most of the people seeking answers need is more attitude. They probably have already gotten enough of that at work already….and that’s why they’ve turned to the people on the Creative Cow.
Ok…I feel better.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com