[Chris Blair]

You can keep doing what you’re doing primarily…or:

1. Get a collection agency involved. Though most of them aren’t all that good from what we’ve heard and read, and they’ll take a healthy percentage of what’s collected. Many of these companies’ track records for actually collecting anything is pretty dismal.

2. Get your lawyer involved. If they’re like ours, their tab adds up pretty quick and they rarely have much more success than collection agencies.

We’ve been trying to collect a six-figure debt from a company owned by a multi-millionaire (he owned an NBA team for 15 years if that give you an indication of his wealth…think Mark Cuban rich). We’ve sued in federal court, won default judgements and still…there’s little hope of getting adime. Why? Because these folks hire people to “take care of their money.” Meaning they find every loophole available in setting up their corporations and hide as much of their assets as is possible. This company and owner have multiple six-figure breach of contract lawsuits pending in federal court amounting to $750,000. They have a California state judgement against them for $150,000, and there are likely a half-dozen other companies owned similar amounts that haven’t bothered to pursue it in court.

None of us will probably ever see any of the money regardless of how many judgements are handed down. The law just isn’t set up to actually force people with means to pay what they owe. They can afford to work the system and delay having to actually pay anything until most small to medium size companies give up because it’s not worth the money they’ve invested in attorney fees.

The only punitive recourse is to sue for fraud and that too gets expensive and is also unlikely to result in any significant reprimand (fines or jail-time), and even if it does, they can afford the attorneys who know how to appeal and motion and delay these rulings until the plaintiffs again give up.

It’s really a sad state of affairs when it comes to collecting from large companies. Sorry for the long post, but seemed like a nice opportunity to vent and pass on the

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

Thanks Daniel…that helps explain why we see inconsistent results depending on what and how we’re compressing.

I didn’t realize the host app was the one that always handled the resizing. That explains a lot.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

I’ve never heard of that brand of switch. Stick with well-known brands and follow Sean’s advice. I doubt you’re going to find a really good Gig-E switch with all the features you need for less than $500.

And to expand on what Sean says…link aggregation basically links multiple ethernet cards in software and makes them work as if they’re one device. So if you take two 1GB ethernet cards and aggregate them, they operate as if they’re one 2GB card. Link 4 cards and you effectively double the bandwidth capability to 4GB. Now keep in mind this is theory and you don’t REALLY get 4GB line speeds, but you will see a big increase in performance.

So in most NAS based shared video editing setups, the server that houses the drive array would have multiple ethernet cards that are linked to increase the link speed beyond the limits of a single port.
It is also used to increase reliability in case one card fails.

You can even go so far as to place two or even three ethernet cards in your workstations and link aggregate them to increase their speed, but it’s usually not necessary with standard definition video.

Jumbo frames is another setting in software that allows an ethernet card and a server/raid to move data in larger chunks. Smaller frames typically use more CPU interrupts and more processing overhead for a given data transfer size. So if you use larger ones, there’s less CPU ussage and less processing, hence, faster data transfer. You have to set it up on both the server and the workstations.

So the theory is if you aggregate cards and increase the size of the chunks of data they’re moving, you can significantly increase throughput and reliability.

This is a very simplistic, non-technical explanation, but that’s the basis using these techniques.

But I’ll point out that with our system, the Apace vStor, the default configuration for it was that jumbo frames was NOT used. It worked that way, but we had capture issues when trying to capture uncompressed clips or long compressed clips. When we called their tech support and asked about it, they walked us through setting it up and it provided an immediate 20-25% increase in measurable performance across all 4 edit systems. So you definitely want to make sure your switch uses it.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

I think what everyone is trying to say is that hundreds if not thousands of people have tried to take various hardware, from fast SATA drives, switches and ethernet or fibre channel cards, and configure them in a way that allows them to share files for video editing.

A lot of them probably succeeded in getting them hooked up properly and even getting blazing fast test results from data throughput testing software. But then….they tried to actually open NLE projects on different workstations and share footage and read and write simultaneously. It didn’t work. It almost never works. I’m no engineer, but I read many horror stories while researching this. So many that we spent our money ($15,000) on a turnkey solution that was proven in the field by demanding broadcast pros. (Apace vStor)

There are even stories of people buying allegedly turnkey systems from fringe companies (which I won’t name but have been called out in this forum a few times) that simply don’t work. One of those companies somehow convinced PC Mall and Mac Mall to sell their supposedly turnkey shared video editing products. How…I don’t know. Likely no one actually tested it to see if it worked. Because the one or two people that did try it (and posted on here) confirmed it did not.

So what everybody is saying is, “if you try to build it yourself, follow…TO THE LETTER…other people’s instructions.” They’ve done the trial and error for you. Don’t make the mistakes that they’ve already made figuring this stuff out.

That way…you’ve got a good chance of making a DIY system work. If you don’t follow somebody else’s cue, you have almost no chance of it working correctly. The other option is to buy a turnkey system that’s made specifically for video editing and is proven. If your school has $4000 to spend as you indicated, it’s probably not enough to do this correctly. A good quality gigabit switch is going to cost you $600-800 alone. We spent almost $750 on ethernet cabling because we had to upgrade a lot of existing cabling from old category 5, and we only configured 4 edit workstations. We spent about $350 on racks because we had nothing to hold the drive arrays (they’re big and heavy) or the rack mounted backup drives we bought. We spent about $1500 paying an IT company to come in and install, do basic configuration and setup all the workstations with the correct static IPs, replace the old, outdated cabling and such. We could’ve done all that, but it would’ve taken me 3 or 4 days wheras it took them a day and a half.

Anyway…everybody on the group is trying to help you…not admonish you or make you feel dumb. As I said a few days ago..you’re VERY forward thinking…especially for being in high school. You’ll appreciate everybody’s admonitions if you follow the advice and end up with a working system. Then…you WILL be a hero!

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

From what I read about it on Nexsan’s website, you’d still need file-sharing software if you want to share files between and among the Final Cut workstations.

Are you sure you understand the differences in how SAN, ISCSI, AoE (Sata over ethernet) work compared to NAS (Network area storage) works? The first three use what’s called block level access, which doesn’t incorporate a file system. That’s part of the reason it’s so fast. The drawback is you need 3rd party software to manage the files for you and it’s usually fairly expensive.

With NAS based solutions, you just use the native file-sharing of whatever OS you’re workstations are using, so while you sacrifice some speed and overhead (due to using ethernet and the OS’s file sharing architecture), you don’t need third party software. But a NAS should be plenty fast enough for editing DV footage when configured properly.

I had problems understanding the differences when we were researching all this 18 months ago, but slowly it sunk in, and we opted for a NAS based system and we’re editing DVCPro50 quality stuff across 4 workstations.

Hope that helps.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

No offense…and I hope you were kidding…but I don’t think Craisglist is where professionals turn when they need a good freelance editor.

I have no idea what NYC editors get, but in the midwest, anywhere from $350-$500/day is standard, depending on the project budget and how complex the project is.

When we’ve used freelancers, they have to be more than just technicians…they have to understand how to tell stories and understand how to structure a piece. A lot of editors out there are technically amazing, but have no clue how to edit for the story.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

Ok…I’m gonna buck some of the responses so far. You can throw out terms like ROI all you want, but in 13 years of running our business, and another 12 working for TV stations, production companies and as a freelancer, I’ve never seen a single one of them actually run any numbers to determine ROI. Nor have I seen accounting firms handling these companies’ finances run one (we have one of the best in our region doing ours).

Why? Because if you have an accounting firm do it, it’s expensive. Not to mention that if you don’t keep meticulous records of expenses and track time relentlessly, the data you end up with will almost certainly be incorrect. And if your internal administrative people do this (probably one of the owners in a small company) they simply don’t know how to accurately determine this.

Now on the subject of defining customers. This is probably one of the single most difficult things to do in our business….or any business for that matter. I’ll give you an example. A woman calls us one day with 100 photographs and wants to put together a video/slide show for her daughter’s wedding. We don’t normally do that sort of thing, but we weren’t busy at the time…so we did it. We made virtually no money on it, but she loved it. She told her husband. He’s a CEO at a large regional company. He tells his marketing director who watches the video, expecting to see some hack piece, but is duly impressed with it. He goes to our website, is further impressed and calls us to discuss some projects.

Examples like this have happened to us at least half dozen times in the last decade. We do a small project for an individual, a non-profit or an institution. Someone in the family or organization sees it, is impressed, and things roll downhill from there.

So while you probably don’t want to spend marketing dollars targeting these types of clients, neither should you automatically turn them away just because it’s “not what we do.”

If you’re not booked, then why the heck NOT do it. At the very least it will generate goodwill and possibly some good word of mouth. And quite possibly it could plant the seed for bringing a large client into the fold.

From my perspective and experience, your target market consists of people and companies that need the solutions you can provide, even if you’re not currently providing those solutions. And those solutions are almost always evolving. 5 years ago we did very little compression. But we’ve gotten really good at it and it’s becoming a bigger and bigger part of our business, so much so that we’re actively marketing a web encoding and video hosting service to several of our large clients. One is already on-board, another is coming on-board after their current contract with their video hosting provider expires. It will likely add anywhere from $25-$75,000 worth of revenue to our business, with almost zero additional costs, since much of the encoding work happens overnight, rendering on our computers while we’re not there.

So for us, defining customers comes down to:

1. What media related problems do corporate and retail customers need solved…and which of those companies are large enough to be pay for services such as ours?
1. Who’s used us in the past.
2. Who’s using us now.
3. What media based services do current clients need that we’re not providing…and can we do it cheaper and better than the people they’re currently getting it from?

Lastly and perhaps more importantly. Landing new clients can be a very long process. We courted a car group dealership for no less than 7 years before getting a small nugget of a project. They loved what we did on that…and a little more work came our way. They loved that and our level of service and they eventually moved all 7 dealerships to us. They’re our largest client now.

So persistence….keeping your name, work and possibly your face in front of those people who need your services (and who may have turned you down repeatedly over the years) is just as critical to the marketing puzzle as any fancy brochures or slogans.

Sorry for the long post, but marketing yourself means getting out there and making contacts, knowing what problems your potential clients face, then providing information about potential solutions their problems.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

Sorry…you were right. It’s free…the support is what costs money.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

I could be wrong but I didn’t think OpenFiler was free. Might want to make sure before moving ahead with it. I’ve just never heard of anyone using it for video editing before. Most of the SAN/NAS management software for video editing is pretty specialized. But I also beleive Bob and others have put together some systems just using Mac’s native file sharing. Again…I’m not a Mac guy, but that’s what I recall from reading some posts in the last couple months.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

Chris,

Nobody is trying to insult you. As one of my first posts said, you’re to be commended for being forward thinking enough to implement this at your school. And Bob talks that way to everybody! We’re just use to it! 🙂

Actually…Bob just doesn’t beat around the bush or sugarcoat his answers. You’re on the right track…just ask your network people the questions Bob posed and see what they say. If they understand that stuff, then there’s a much better chance this will all work. If they don’t, then you’ll need to check out Bob’s “hot to” that you said you found, and ask more questions on here.

What you’re trying to do CAN work, but only if it’s setup properly with the right hardware and configuration. Also..be patient. We all work demanding jobs and post on here when we get a free moment during the day..or more likely in the evening.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com