Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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We’re a completely Windows based advertising, marketing and production company (we started as a production company only in 1996). So I can contribute based on extensive experience working on windows WITH and FOR corporate clients that are almost all exclusively on the windows platform.
Quicktime on windows is quirky at best, downright frustrating at its worst. As Rich points out, many IT departments WILL NOT install any software that’s not essential to their company’s operation, including media players and especially media players that install as many non-essential services as Quicktime. If you do a full Quicktime install, there are no less than 3 new services that automatically run at startup (I-Tunes helper, Quicktime taskbar launcher, Apple Mobile device driver), and sometimes there are one or two more that will get installed. They’re almost impossible to turn off unless you’re experienced working with them and understand how to disable services on Windows computers. If you’re working in a facility with 100+ computers or more, this is NOT something you want to have to spend the time to do.
Even with Quicktime installed, it’s STILL a not a very good app on the Windows platform. It’s very finicky about audio drivers and devices, audio often plays out of sync on even relatively new workstation class computers with mutlipe CPU’s and several GB of RAM. There are color shifts with several of the codecs, especially Apple’s H264, and gamma issues abound across other codecs.
So I would agree that asking your clients to install Quicktime is at best a lazy solution, and at worst, just bad customer service. As a windows based shop, we’re asked to output Quicktime files all the time…literally dozens of times each week because we also do a lot of encoding/compression work for clients. It would be like us telling these clients, “just get Flip4Mac, it would be easier on everybody!” For whatever reason, these clients want Quicktime, so that’s what we give them. We’ve spent lots of time and money on software, training and testing to figure out the best way to output Quicktimes as well. And let me tell you, it’s not any more fun on the Windows side to output high quality Quicktimes than it is to output WMV’s from the Mac. For us it’s at least a 2 step process of exporting from our NLE systems, then encoding in a dedicated compression application to Quicktime. Our NLE will output quicktime, but it doesn’t do a very good job, is slow, and is prone to crash with the newer Quicktime codecs.
You could get Pro-coder for around $500 and easily output high-quality wmv files. There are also free encoding apps out there that will likely do a decent job of it, just search google and you’ll probably find half a dozen.
The last great reason to learn to do this is purely from a business standpoint. It’s additional billing! I’d think anybody in this economy would love to add another billable service to their abilities.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
16GB for an hour HD program actually isn’t that large. That’s around 4.5 to 5MB/sec on the data rate, which for HD is pretty heavily compressed. We regularly get half-hour programs from a client’s show that airs on ESPN, compressed in preparation for our encoding, and they’re 12GB (24GB for an hour).
If my math is correct, an hour-long ProRes HD program would be more than double that size.
If web is definitely the only potential destination for these, you could scale them down to SD (720×480 widescreen) and use H264 at 2-3MB/sec data rate. That would maintain reasonable quality and cut your file sizes by maybe half. Otherwise, I’d leave them the size they are. 1TB external drives are down to around $250-$300 and you could fit 62 hours of programming on one at those rates.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Many public domain photographs are part of “special collections” housed in Universities, libraries, museums and historical societies. The collection was usually given to the institution by a photographer, collector, family member…whatever. These institutions have to house, catalog, care for, and often restore these collections. That takes money and time. Sometimes a lot of both.
So while they may not own the rights to the photographs in a legal sense, they certainly have earned the right to a little bit of payback and courtesy from those that benefit from their historical preservation.
More importantly…some of these collections were given to the institutions with strict usage guidelines that I’m not sure fall under any sort of public domain usage rights. A curator at a museum we worked with on a documentary basically said most of these collections are considered private. Meaning it would be like you taking a bunch of personal photographs from a family’s collection (regardless of the age of the photos), and using them for whatever you want and claiming they’re in the public domain. They’re not public. They’re private based on the terms of the agreement a lot of these institutions have with the familes or previous owners.
Seems weird when most of the institutions are public entities, but that’s how it was explained to me.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Me and a partner produced a documentary in 1992 (Laura Clay: Voice of Change) that aired regionally on PBS.
Even though she died in 1936 and most of the photos we used (there were hundreds) in the documentary came from historical societies, special University library collections, the Library of Congress and the National Archives, we still had to pay a usage fee for many of them (it wasn’t much, something like $35 per photo), and we had to pay for 8×10 reprints (there was no such thing as digital back then). I think we ended up paying something like $5000 for rights and reprints, and we also had to pay a couple thousand to use what was called a manipulator (this was before After Effects too) to create video moves on the images. So all in all we paid about $7000 to use a couple hundred photos.
All the archives we pulled from were very accomodating when we presented them with the idea and asked to use certain images. Nobody asked what we thought was an unreasonable amount of money for their use.
But…I don’t think ethically, legally or otherwise we then had the right to take those images and use them for anything else that we saw fit.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Eric Hansen the reaction i then get is, “why the hell didnt we do this before?”
Eric,
This is EXACTLY what me and my two partners said after we had our NAS based shared system in place for a couple of months. Like you mention, it took a big project to spur us to even look into it and then to be able to justify buying it. We lost the client to the economy (they closed 80% of their original 450 stores), but in the end, it was the smartest hardware investment we’ve ever made.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Another good practice is to follow up every meeting, phone call and even casual meetings and conversations with simple, concise emails that detail everything that was discussed, and ask the client if that covers everything. If the client responds that it does, these documents can also be invaluable should a dispute arise later.
Of course, you want to also make sure your email files get backed up in your office in case you have a drive crash or other computer issue down the road.
Simple email confirmations and correspondence have on many occasions resolved disputes over various requests and agreements with clients. I’m not sure about their place in a court of law, but you’ll rarely ever get to a court of law in most disputes, as they’re usually settled out of court. If it’s a small claims type issue, I’m sure having emails (along with contracts) would be of help.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We were recently asked to bid on a project for a company in the defense field. It was an unusual request in that they wanted us to consult with them and provide recommendations on how to brand their company and ultimately improve their marketing among agencies that bought their military type product.
We just sat down and figured out best we could how many hours we felt like it would take us to do research, meet with the client and brainstorm, and then develop a set of recommendations (based on a list of goals we had confirmed beforehand with the client).
Then we just multiplied our regular hourly rate by that number of hours. We had no idea if we were in the ballpark and we thought our estimate sounded high. But once submitted, we were the 2nd highest bidder among 4 total. The client loved our proposal but because we had no experience in the defense field and hadn’t really done consultant type work before…we didn’t get the gig. The highest bidder did! Maybe we should’ve estimated higher? Actually…all the winning company did was consult work…so that was the main reason they got the gig.
But like you…we had NO idea how to estimate or bid the job after our initial meetings with the client. But once we sat down and actually starting thinking about what it would take to give them what they were looking for, it actually became fairly easy. I will say, we put at least 20-24 hours into preparing the bid and proposal, from the time we met with the client, to internal meetings, and writing the proposal and figuring the budget.
Hope that helps.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
H264 is a much more efficient codec than MPEG2, so if you compress at the same data rates between the two, the H264 file should look better and the file size should be similar.
Keep in mind there are a bunch of different ways to encode MPEG2 files as well, from 4:2:0 files compressed below about 9MB/sec for DVD to 4:2:2 MPEG2 compressed at any data rate you want, which is often used for archiving or broadcasting MPEG2 files.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Mark Raudonis Reading the forums over the years, I have to agree with Mr. Zelin’s observation. If I was a storage manufacturer, I’d be seriously thinking about my price points and marketing efforts.
Yup…I agree with that too. I’ve posted on here a few times about how most storage manufacturers and especially resellers that package RAIDs and storage products are clueless about what business people in general and video folks in particular want and need.
Their marketing is written like an engineering manual, and if you talk to most of these companies, their sales people are trying to sell you hardware instead of solutions.
An analogy would be if the auto manufacturers promoted nothing but the technology and engineering in their cars and said nothing about style, comfort, reliability etc.
I wasn’t a bit surprised when Ciprico went belly-up. Their pricing was ridiculous and their website and marketing was a mess. Even if you’re not computer saavy, it didnt’ take a lot of smarts to do the math and see that the component costs for their $40,000 shared storage system couldn’t have been more than $5000 or $6000. That’s some kind of markup for whatever tweaks they were doing “under the hood.” I think most people saw right through the hype and just passed them by. We didn’t even give them a look because their pricing so out of whack with reality.
A lot of these manufacturers also market shared storage like it’s astrophysics. Their websites and marketing are filled with jargon that an engineer would have trouble understanding. When I was researching companies 15-16 months ago, I found that most made the subject way more complicated than it needs to be, and they do a poor job of explaining or presenting what you REALLY need to make a system work.
It got so bad that when I found the Apace website, I was skeptical for the opposite reason: because their website and marketing made it sound do darn simple. I was convinced (by all the other folks) that it COULDN’T be this simple and for that reason I initially dismissed Apace. It was only later after I became convinced the other guys were full of crap that I contacted them. Once I started talking to them via emial and by phone, it quickly became clear these guys understood why people want and need shared storage, and that they KNOW how to get these systems to work with clean, simple interfaces and straightforward cabling and configuration.
Didn’t mean to get on a soapbox, but there are companies out there that are STILL charging $50-75k just for 12-24TB of shared storage that’s coupled with video playout servers and craft editing systems for broadcast groups and TV stations. That doesn’t include the cost for the playout hardware, servers etc. Now THAT’S crazy!
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We run into this issue all the time with Web Design folks. They design their player page and video windows at all sorts of odd sizes even though we give them a list of recommended sizes.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com