Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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No offense…but from a post-production business point of view…that app doesn’t look like a very good deal unless your business if driven by credit card sales.
It’s Mac only…so if you’re a PC shop, you’d have to buy a MAC.
To take credit cards you have to buy their Credit Card Service Plan on top of the cost of the software. That plan’s fees are WAY higher than what your local bank will charge. In fact, they’re almost as much for Visa/MC as AMEX charges, which is why so many small businesses don’t take AMEX.
They also charge more if you key in the credit card number rather than swipe it. That’s really ridiculous.
Who believes it costs more for them to process keyed in information versus information read from a magnetic stripe?
So unless you’re running a video or maketing business totally geared toward credit card based transactions, I can’t see how it would be better than just setting up the ability to take credit through your bank.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Then I sort of agree with you!
And yes…people dislike anything that upsets their normal routine. I used to be a big reader of business books, and while most are bull, there were a few that preached innovation is the secret to longevity in business.
The basic theory is you can be successful by doing something well and by giving great customer service in the short-term (say 10-15 years), but at some point, an innovative competitor is going to offer your customers a “better way,” or…what is perceived to be a better way. Your customers will flock to the new way if you don’t keep pace.
Anybody remember Service Merchandise? A friend of mine was a manager there for years in 1980s to late 1990s. He continually tried to get their upper management to realize their business model, which pre-dated the internet and a lot of the Big Box stores, was outdated. In fact, they were considered one of the “big-box” stores of their day, usually anchoring high-end strip malls.
Their showroom had one display item of each product on the floor. If you wanted to buy it, you filled out a ticket and your product was retrieved from the warehouse. If it wasn’t in-stock at the warehouse, their computer system found the closest store and automatically scheduled a shipment to the local store for pick-up at a certain date. It was very innovative and advanced in it’s day.
It saved people money because they strictly controlled inventory and had virtually no “loss” in terms of theft or damage. Customers liked it because they could receive merchandise quickly even if it wasn’t in-stock by way of this innovative computer inventory system.
Well…in the 90s, that innovative computer system hadn’t been updated in over a decade, it constantly broke down, and Wal-Mart and Best-Buy and jewelry chains sold the same merchandise at lower prices, stocked and ready for immediate purchase right on the showroom floor. Not to mention the rise of internet superstores that undercut prices and could drop-ship merchandise from the manufacturer to your home. Service Merchandise even initially resisted selling online because it didn’t fit their “business model.”
My friend preached and preached they had to change, but their upper management would not listen…even when he showed them elaborate pricing comparisons from Wal-mart, Best-Buy, jewelry outlets, Office Depot etc. that showed their prices were actually higher, not lower than their competitors. Well…you know what happened to Service Merchandise. They went belly-up.
Circuit City had a similar business model (with the whole take a ticket to the counter and the warehouse will retrieve your merchandise idea). They were equally slow to change and by the time they did, it was too late and they never caught back up to Best-Buy.
Changing how you do something is hard, and most people don’t like to complicate their lives. People like the comfort of knowing what to expect and being confident in the outcome.
So convincing that low-wattage “bulb” to brighten into a shining star is not an easy thing to do…especially if they’re older than say 30 and are comfortable with their situation in life.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Ok…I’ll bite. What is a “point of sale” package?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I don’t believe that’s true of all credit cards at all banks. We work for a large plastics manufacturer in our area and they pay with Visa through a local bank and the only cost to us is an annual bank charge for the charge account and a fee for the equipment to administer the transaction. The total isn’t that steep. It’s certainly worth it in this case because as soon a project is approved, we run their card and are paid immediately.
AMEX certainly does charge fees and and it sucks. We handle a large auto dealer group and last year the owner required that we take AMEX for payment of his production and media placement because he loves the points he gets. He spends over $125,000 on production and $1 million on media. Amex charges something like 3% on all that, so we lose a LOT of money with this setup. something like $33,000 over previous years when he paid by check.
Luckily, we were able to offset that some because our previous contract called for a 13.5% media placement commission. In the new one, we raised it to 15% to offset this new “expense,” all the while thinking they were going to see it and nix it. They did not and a year later, it hasn’t been a problem. So we got some of that back. But in the end, it still severely affected our margin on this account. All in all, we see little benefit to offering credit card options unless you do a lot of consumer based work.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.comChris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
John DavidsoneSo perhaps the better question is, how do you identify the rock stars you already have, and how do you manage them in ways that keep the sheep from burying them in bureaucracy (which is the ultimate weapon of sheep).
You must be herding with a different staff than me because I’ve never seen the so-called “sheep” become any kind of “star,” much less a rock star!
Unless of course you’re talking about Moses! He’s the last one I saw make the transition.
Virtually all business owners and high achievers I know were always top performers in almost every endeavor they undertook, from work to hobbies to social groups to church committees to sports. These people include friends from high school and college, former colleagues, and even some relatives. I cannot think of a single person I’ve ever known that achieved any level “success” (in all it’s many definitions) who fit the work ethic that most people have described as a “sheep” in this thread.
From the very first job I had, to the last job I held before starting my own company, co-workers used to call me the “hardest working man in the company.” I never intiated this title, but it follwed me literally to every job I ever worked, which includes 8 different companies between the ages of 16 and 35.
The business owners and top performers that I know all share common traits that the people we’ve described as sheep do not. They include a willingness to take chances, or maybe better described as a willingness to fail; they’re unbelievably positive, yet almost always pragmatic; they’re incredible problem solvers, refusing to quit until an issue is resolved; they’re self-motivated to the point of not needing to be given quotas or lists or goals; they’re innovators, almost always asking “why do we do it this way?”…and “is there a better way?”
I could go on and on. But these traits DO NOT describe the folks we’re talking about in this thread. These are NOT traits that people typically learn. Can they? Sure…but in my experience, people that lack these traits rarely do.
The person who’s pissed off complaining about the boss is usually….well…just that…a pissed off person complaining about the boss. If he or she was motivated, they’d be complaining but backing up those complaints with better solutions. And not only offering those solutions, but coming in on nights and weekends implementing them without prodding, without fanfare.
So John, while I still hold out faint hope that you might be right. 25 years of experience in this business, and 13 as a facility owner tell me otherwise.
I’ve even seen people that have loads of potential and talent that simply don’t have the commitment and desire needed to rise above the mediocre. They just don’t want to work that hard and don’t enjoy the difficult process that accompanies learning new skills. Like Ron said in an earlier post, you can send them to seminars, give them encouragement, challenge them etc. And none of it works. Maybe in larger orgainizations there are those few gems in the sand, but in smaller companies like most of ours, the consensus is: it rarely happens.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I believe you need to inject the .flv metadata into the file so the flash player recognizes the length of the file, frames per second etc. Adobe Flash can do it I believe, and there are some shareware programs that can do it if you don’t have that and don’t know how.
Here’s one we’ve demo’d and it works…but I only tried one file and didn’t extensively test the results. It will put a watermark and an ad link on your file until you buy the software, but you can see if it solves your problem. It’s Windows only I think:
https://www.any-flv-layer.com/flv_player/flv_player_converter_mp4.html
We recently had the same problem with a quicktime/H264 file. It just wouldn’t play correctly without injecting the FLV tags in the file.
Here’s a link that explains in simple terms what metadata is and why it’s important for flash video.
https://www.easyflv.com/kb/flv-metadata.php
Recent versions of Flash say they support Quicktime/H264 natively, but we haven’t been able to get any of them work without going through the above step. I’ve read you can change the extension from .mov to .mp4 and it’ll work, but thta didn’t work for us in the case above. The movie kept stopping about 10 seconds in and wouldn’t start back up.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I could be wrong but I don’t think Premiere can read or import .vob files, which is what DVD files end up being.
Do you have Compressor 3? It’s suppose to have batch conversion capabilities. If not…you’d have to get a transcoding application like Procoder.
Otherwise…yes you’d have to convert file by file, which would indeed suck.
Other Final Cut users might chime in here with suggestions.
Procoder could be an option (Windows only). I believe it’s in the $5-$600 range, but it’s a great application that you will get tons of use from down the road….and it has the color conversion filter you’ll need. But…I don’t know if it imports XDCAM files…although it should.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Great explanation Todd! I will add that many camera manufacturers have gone to great pains to create scene files that configure camera settings to greatly minimize the stutter you might be seeing.
Panasonic’s presets are great examples. Set the camera to the 60i defaults, then JUST turn on the 24P mode, and the footage is barely watchable. Load one of Panasonics presets designed for 24P shooting, and voila, almost all stutter is eliminated, except of course if you violate the rules Todd just detailed.
But as the first reply noted, shooting 30p is a nice compromise, and some cinematographers will shoot film content that is only intended for video (like TV commercials) at 30fps to avoid having to add pulldown in telecine. Of course, that can add significant cost to film stock, processing and transfer if you’re shooting an hour-long drama, so that’s why it’s not often done on those.
But these days, film is used less and less for even dramtic television programs.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Yes…all the SAN software like Fibrejet, MetaSAN, XSAN enable some form of file-level sharing, but they work differently than NAS based shared storage in terms of how you manage/assign volumes, grant read/write priveleges etc.
We considered the way SAN systems work a stumbling block primarily because the way the systems move data from the workstations to the raid requires the added layer of software (like XSAN) to manage everything. So that adds cost to each editing seat, which can run into the thousands per license depending on what you use. And..from lots of people we talked to, setting up, configuring and managing a SAN based network is just more difficult from an administrative standpoint than a NAS. We literally NEVER have to go into the GUI and make changes to permissions or grant access to volumes, or change read/write privileges. Our NAS based system follows standard Windows conventions.
NAS based solutions allow you to use what you already know for sharing data, whether it’s Windows, Mac or Linux, and they don’t add a dime to the cost per seat. As an example…just the cost of Fibrejet licenses alone was almost as much as the entry level vStor system we ended up buying!
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Holy Cow. 1700 hours! Are they related to Andy Warhol? You could buy a nice set of hardware and software based encoding tools and still make a good chunk of change on this!
One benefit to the Digital Rapids line is you can control your decks via RS422 (with the StreamPro software), where you set in/out points and create capture lists like you do with editing apps, then it captures and transcodes to your format of choice in real time. Plus you get the nice de-interlacing that Daniel mentioned.
We don’t have one but I have a colleague that uses one of the PCI card based solutions with the StreamPro software and he raves about it, especially for big jobs like (of course he’s never mentioned a job THIS big). And they’re not all that expensive. I think he paid $4000 for his card and software…or something like that, and put it in an $800 HP xw series PC he bought off lease from ebay.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com