Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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Daniel Low Thanks Chris, at least give me a chance to answer a question directed at me please! It’s only polite.
Was just trying to help the guy…it had been a few hours since his post saying he was confused so thought I’d try to give him some direction. I don’t consider it impolite to try to help someone on here. I’m pretty sure that’s the purpose of the entire Cow Community.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I agree with Bob.
But I can add that a little over a year ago I was one of those people who looked for and couldn’t find a $5000 solution….at least not one that I felt was robust or dependable enough over the long haul. We ended up spending about $15,000 for a NAS system (Apace vStor), backup drives, shared project storage drives, a new switch, new cabling, racks and installation…and I can honestly say it was the best investment we’ve made in the 13 year life of our company. Our first NLE system cost us almost $100,000 in 1996 and had a whopping 50GB of video storage, a 640MB system drive, and a 2GB audio/graphics drive.
So to us, getting 4TB of shared video storage that actually works 24/7, a 4TB network backup drive, a 2TB project network drive and all the other stuff listed above seemed like a bargain. The productivity gains alone are likely worth the 15k. We haven’t had a second of down-time in the 13 months we’ve had this system. The only problem I’ve had is I couldn’t find the power switch (it’s tiny) on the vStor one day after a power outage. It’s run non-stop and without issue since the day it was installed. After that first power outage, it’s now set to turn itself back on after an outage, which it does dutifully.
In the previous year, I can guarantee we had at least 5-7 full days or more of downtime due to corruption and/or hardware issues with our direct attached SCSI drives. Not to mention many harried days and nights of praying a flaky drive didn’t go bad on us during big projects, and hours and hours on the phone with tech support people that knew less than I did about drive arrays (scary since I’m no expert)…and hours and hours running their silly diagnostic steps even though I’d already stepped through them all before I ever called.
Backups all go to one big drive now and run every night. We literally spend about 30 seconds each morning just checking to see if they ran. Previously, we had external drives connected to each of 4 edit systems. We were constantly filling them up and having to offload to other drives or Dual-layer DVDs…usually several times a month and it took several hours of monitoring and babysitting. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of overlap and duplication we had of video/audio files on SCSI and backup drives.
If we moved a project from one edit suite to the other, we had to move either the drives (a pain in the butt), or actually move the footage (slow and time-consuming) across the network, which was not all GigE at the time and often had to move from USB 2 or Firewire drives across the PC’s system bus, across the ethernet…etc. While transferring, it was hard to work on either system because of the load it put moving 10, 20, sometimes 100GB of data.
Now…we just close the project in one edit suite, walk down the hall, and open it in the other, and we’re back editing in 60 seconds!
It also frees scheduling since it doesn’t matter which suite something is scheduled in or whether it’s editing, compositing, graphics, 3D work etc. It’s all accessible from any of 4 suites all the time.Another small but important benefit, is we can grant access to all these assets to our office PC’s so if we want to watch shots or listen to audio in the conference room, or at somebody’s desk, we can do it…and it plays in real-time even on 7-8 year old PC’s as long as they have the correct codecs installed and are using GigE network cards (all but a couple office PC’s are now).
I could go on, but for all those people scared by the cost, if you look at the long-term benefits to workflow, productivity, etc. It’s worth the investment.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
This issue comes up repeatedly and the same myths continue to be perpetuated.
Comments like:
“if they pay for the tape, they own what’s on it”
and
“If money is changing hands they own it”
Are just not true. You can search for and read copyright law and its interpretations all day long and not find anything to validate these two claims.
You can be paid for work by an individual, a corporation, a non-profit etc….and if:
1. You’re NOT an employee but ARE the primary creative force
2. The work isn’t specified (in writing) as “work for hire”
3. And the paying entity doesn’t ask for or demand ownership IN WRITING.Then you do indeed own the copyright to the work itself.
There are dozens of threads on this issue on the Cow, and there are several very good books available that deal specifically with copyright for audio-visual productions.
But as others have pointed out, if you’re doing it for a stipend, just ask for ownership as part of the compensation for doing the work.
Here’s a link to some wiki info that clarifies a lot of this and an actual case where an artist was granted ownership of his statue, even though it was commissioned by another non-profit agency:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
https://www.supnik.com/ (click on “copyright” then “works made for hire”)
In the case above, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, this excerpt says it all:
Thus, the lesson of the CCNV case for the entertainment industry is that one should not assume a party paying a writer or other person who imparts copyrightable authorship to a motion picture in the United States is the owner of the copyright.
As Grinner points out, if there are other copyrighted works (like paintings or photographs, or musical recordings etc) in the work you’re producing, it gets more complicated and you’d have to get permission to use those works in your own. We’ve actually done this with a non-profit, where we created a documentary of an art exhibit (with nationally known African-American artists) We got permission to use all the artists works (sculptures, paintings and poetry) and we even got permission to use Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s music in the piece for $1 a cut as long as we gave them “courtesy” credits.
We owned the video, and were even able to sell it to an educational film distributor because of it’s educational nature. Again, we had to get permission to do this from all parties, but everyone involved realized we’d have to sell a thousand copies to break even on the money we invested in the piece. They all felt the exposure and purpose of the video (exposing school kids to African American art, history and music), was worth it. Since it was produced in 1992, we’ve sold a few hundred copies so everyone benefited. We made back a little bit of the money and time we invested (it was considerable), and they got exposure of their work to school kids who likely would’ve NEVER seen or heard their work.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
scott gene When you reference H.264; where does that Quicktime codec go in the workflow? Sorry, bit confused here on that.
Not sure what you mean? If you’re coming out of Premiere, you’d export the file using the H264 codec. Flash will play just about any wrapped H264 file, so you can output it as MP4, Quicktime, F4V and others. As Daniel points out, if you keep the data rate at 4MB/sec or higher, it should look decent. The H264 codec is a pretty complex beast to decode on playback, so your playback platform needs to be pretty beefy to play it back smoothly, even at relatively low data rates (compared to other codecs). But 4MB/sec should be no problem on most modern computers.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Good points Nick and Grin. And David…we’ve got a young go-getter who was actually excited about helping to train them…so we’ll probably shoot them a price and see what they say. Better to make something from them now while we can.
As many who have worked with large corporations can attest, it’s amazing that the economic implosion didn’t happen 5 or 10 years ago. We’ve worked with a handful of large companies over the years, and the insanity that goes on inside their world is mind-blowing. Two of those large and very well-established corporations have filed bankruptcy in the last year, which came as no surprise to us. One has moved on and will likely emerge a better, stronger company, and we continue to do work for them (and get paid). The other is in tatters and we had to sue to get paid (still in litigation).
The money they waste and the poor decision-making and planning that goes on makes me wonder how any large corporation in America survives (if they’re run like these companies are).
Anyway…thanks for the input. Lots of great advice as always.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Bill Davis It should be no surprise that in this economic climate, our clients are focusing on a particular area of THEIR jobs. Cost control. It’s likely the singular IMPORTANT element of their jobs that their bosses are yapping about every meeting.
I don’t disagree with this, but if cost control is the case for huge corporations making these sorts of decisions, then the decision should be to NOT videotape the speaker at all.
We’ll likely try to accomodate them as I sort of agree with Nick Griffin’s take on the situation (especially since it was so similar).
But any reasonable “Joe Manager” that hasn’t figured out it’s a bigger waste of time, money and productivity to try to do something in-house without equipment, without proper software, and especially without people that have the know-how, should’t be managing people and departments.
I just find it bothersome that no-one on their end found their request to be just a tiny bit uncooth!
I’ve been at this for over 25 years now and the stuff that clients ask never ceases to amaze me. Reminds me of the ad agency that used to make us sign a “no-compete” with each and every one of their clients we shot video projects for…but thought nothing of agressively pursuing our direct clients whenever it suited them. Whenever we brought it up, it elicited lectures (yes lectures) from the owner of the ad agency. Needless to say, we don’t work with them any longer.
Thanks for the input everyone.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
All great advice. Interesting to see how people come at it from all directions. But my favorite advice was from John Davidson. I laughed out loud at that one:
Who is the worst editor you’ve ever seen in your life? Refer them to him.
It’s just baffling to me how people that are supposed to be executives think they’re actually helping their company by doing something like this “in-house.”
Reminds me of the extreme home improvement DIY folks that believe they can do ANYTHING the professionals can do. I’m a big do-it-yourself guy around the house, mainly because we can’t afford to pay other people to do stuff. But there are things like electrical, complicated plumbing (like installing a water heater), tearing out a load-bearing wall etc. that I realize I can’t possibly do without hiring a professional. Not to mention the cost saving in sheer time. I installed Dupont laminate plank flooring in our kitchen a couple years ago (300 square feet worth) and it literally took me 4 full weekends. This year we had the same flooring installed in our kids playroom, which is a similar size. It took the 2 person team 6 hours to completely install it including trim! It was worth every penny of the $800 installation fee to save 8 days of my life!!!
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We used to do export to DG/Fastchannel all the time and their preferred presets were indeed 720×486, MPG2 4:2:2. This is different from DVD/MPG2 specs so it’s not necessary to change the pixel size to 720×480 as you would for an MPG2 destined for DVD.
A viewer will never see that one pixel line if it’s at the bottom of the frame…so if you’re playback looks good, then I wouldn’t worry about it. DG/Fastchannel used to require a test file that they would evaluate and test before they’d clear you to provide digital files. Have you done this already or is this what you’re exporting the file for?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
There’s a well-know issue with the Apple H264 codec using Quicktime as the wrapper. Do a search in this forum and you’ll find multiple posts and solutions. The easiest one is to use a different H264 codec. I believe there’s a freely available one called x264 that solves the issue.
Another solution (I think) is to not use the quicktime wrapper. Export to H264 using MP4 or Flash (F4V) as the wrapper.
There are other solutions too…so seek and ye shall find.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Great article. I especially like the pic of the “machine” room. We still have our computers in each of our 3 edit suites, but at least we’ve gotten the drive array, switch etc. out and into it’s own room.
I love seeing case studies that prove you can do all this with existing GigE infrastructure, readily available hardware and software, and a little bit (ok, a LOT) of knowledge and ingenuity.
There’s so much misinformation out there when it comes to this stuff, especially as it pertains to video editing, it’s invaluable to read about “real-world” installations that don’t cost $100,000 that just plain WORK.
Before we invested in our setup (Apace vStor with a total cost around $15,000), we were getting quotes in the $50-100,000 range from turn-key providers like Ciprico, Harris (Nexio SAN), and a few others. You see what’s happened to Ciprico (bankruptcy), and the only people buying Harris’ solutions are big broadcasters and TV station groups.
Great article and great job on Bob and Walter’s part.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com