Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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We do work for a monastery near us. The monks there have a saying:
“We seek the extraordinary through the ordinary work of our everyday lives.”
What they’re saying is that the guy assigned to scrub the toilets takes as much pride and care in doing his job as the guy who’s running the entire show. It’s a “team” approach taken to it’s extreme.
It must work. Monasteries have been around since the Crusades and this particular monastery has been there for 150 years and is more vibrant and financially sound than it’s ever been. This…despite all the bad PR and troubles of the Catholic church over the last decade.
What I’m saying is, pay shouldn’t matter when it comes to the quality and speed of the work you do for your employer or your clients. I’ve had employees like you in the past. I hate them. Yes…strong words…but a fact. If you have that attitude about your current job, you’re going to find reasons to not do your best at any job you work. I’ve been in this business 25 years and a facility owner for 13 and I’ve seen it over and over.
Jobs are NOT designed to bring you fulfillment and self-worth. They’re designed to pay your bills. Should you find one that brings you the other two, you’re damn lucky. I own the company and I’m not particularly fond of 50% of the stuff I do. It doesn’t make me do it slower, or at any lower quality. My reputation is attached to EVERY single thing I do. It’s attached to every single thing my employees do. They screw up. I look bad…not them. MY money is tied up in this business. If it fails, I lose my job, probably my house, my credit and years of hard fought goodwill.
Your employer may very well be a crappy, uncaring boss, but he’s taking risks you’re not. You can leave without repurcussions at any time. He or she cannot.
I don’t mean to sound harsh. But the best employees we have are those that are positive, upbeat, have a good sense of humor and don’t constantly question every motive and course of direction they’re given. Very few owners and bosses assign work to people with any ill intention, and most I know understand that they have to pay good employees well to retain them. Maybe your boss doesn’t want to retain you?
Again…I don’t know you so I hope I don’t sound too harsh. But a business owner has enough to worry about, especially in these times, without having to worry over the grumblings of someone who thinks they’re being taken advantage of. Heck…maybe you are being taken advantage of, but learn from it. Don’t do it to other people when you get in a better situation. Learn to NOT manage the way this person manages.
In the meantime, look for a new job.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I have to agree with Grin and Roy. Ain’t nobody gonna buy your ideas unless they’re packaged with script treatments, show formats, budgets, experienced crew attached to the project, and quite possibly even a pilot episode(s).
We’ve pitched some ideas to cable networks and gotten as far as having executive producers assigned from TLC, but that project took us a year to develop and we had a 16 minute pilot that was basically a complete show missing one segment from our show format. Ended up we couldn’t agree on what it would take budget wise to produce the shows and TLC was unwilling to partner in the production, only buy a complete season of episodes.
I know Grinner just recently sold an idea he wasn’t even pitching! But only after years of pitching other ideas and making many contacts along the way. Not to mention accumulating years worth of samples to show he can actually get the work done.
Nobody here wants to dash your dreams. But you’ll have a lot better chance of success if you know the obstacles up front, and go into pitches prepared. If you pitch ideas to networks or other producers and you don’t have all the details thought out, they’re not going to have much confidence the idea can get out of your head and onto a TV screen or website.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’ll throw in my $.02. You can get both the search engine traffic and the referred traffic by simply editing keywords into the HTML. Search google for how to insert metatags into the code for your web authoring program. It’s very easy to do and you don’t need any text on your site to get really high rankings very quickly.
On the site itself. In my humble opinion, busy business people aren’t going to take the time to watch all those videos just to learn about what you offer. Even though the videos are all on point, there’s an awful lot of stock footage and animated stills in them. They’re not bad, but they’re certainly not top-of-the-line when it comes to corporate video. Ditto on the voice. Clients will assume that’s the quality of VO they can expect.
My guess is you’d attract clients that have small to modest budgets who are looking to “throw something together.” If that’s your target, great. But if you’re going for high-end corporate clients too, I think they’d pass your site by very quickly even after a referral.
There’s not a thing wrong with the design and layout of the site. It’s quite quirky and fun. But I know very few corporate folks who are in the mood for either. The corporate people we work with are overworked, stressed, harried, and being pulled in 6 different directions on 12 different projects. They want someone to take projects off their hands to where they can watch it and say…”change this, change that, replace this…etc.” They want stuff taken off their plates. So spending 20 minutes watching video on a website won’t be high on their list of “things to do.”
One other minor thing for me was there were a lot of images and icons I wanted to click on, but when I moused over them, nothing was there to click. Things like road signs, little guys with circular crossouts, etc. The main page also has music that plays that I couldn’t find how to turn off. That’s really annoying. There were 3 little TV’s with spinning logos in them. Neat, but again I wanted to click them for more stuff. But no dice.
I’m certainly not trying to tear you ideas or your site down, but from our experience with the corporate world, you’re going to eliminate a lot of people right off the bat by making them work for the info they want “right now.”
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
If editing is what you want to do, you cannot let a mere 7 months defeat you. When I was in my late 20’s, I had worked for a couple of companies and had about 5 years experience. My dad passed away and left the kids a little money. It wasn’t a huge sum, but I was young and wanted to travel and do a few things before I wasn’t free enough or able enough.
I left my job and took 6 months off and had fun…thinking naively that I would easily be able to get a job when I was ready. Well…think again. I had a decent reel, was well-thought of in the town I lived, and more times than not, if I could get an interview for a job I was qualified for, I would get offers.
Not this time. I went over a year with almost NO interviews. Twice companies called me to set-up interviews, then called a few days later to cancel saying they had filled the position from within. Talk about being demoralized and angry. Being a stupid 27 year old I wrote them both letters telling them how unprofessional it was to schedule an interview with a prospective employee then cancel it. Of course, they probably just chuckled at those.
During that time I had to go back to waiting tables to make ends meet. That really hurt, especially when friends and colleagues would come in and end up in my section…always asking me, “what are you doing waiting tables?”
At one point, an old college friend called me with an offer to interview as the director of a small town’s Economic Development Office. It was a town of about 25,000 but had a lot of industry and manufacturing because of it’s location in the state. I interviewed and they offered me the job at a very nice salary. I was tempted but turned them down because I wanted to work in video production. My college friend thought I was nuts. The job had nice perks like a company car, travel expenses, entertainment expenses, lots of fun things like golf outings to woo prospective companies etc.
Eventually about 4 months later I took a job with a new Independent TV station as a promotions producer making $6/hour. You read that right. I had to continue waiting tables at night and weekends to pay bills.
The job sucked, but it got me back into the industry. About a year later I got a job at a production company in Louisville and nearly tripled my salary. After that, it got much easier…although I experienced another bump like that later when I spent 3 years making grant-supported independent films. After getting the two films finished (one of them won an emmy), it took me about 6 months to find a full-time job…again with a TV station. While I was looking that time I thought, “I have an Emmy…” people will be calling me to come work for them. Again…very stupid.
But after working at the TV station for four yearsI was able to move on to an advertising agency and eventually start my own business. That was 13 1/2 years ago and I haven’t looked back.
But I certainly remember wondering both times I was out of work if I just didn’t have the skills to succeed in this industry. My only advice is to do what you have to do to survive financially, even if it means taking a job outside your field working nights or weekends. But do not give up the job search if you enjoy this work and aspire to do it as your career.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
John,
Another DP friend of mine had suggested this on another project a while back. Does it give you greater control of DoF as well??
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I would’ve bet money you’d tried that trick too. The Magic Bullet app sounds interesting…although I’ve never been a fan of the original Magic Bullet stuff…or Cinelook or Film Fx for that matter.
Back in 2000 we created out own preset flow in Digital Fusion that de-interlaced (if footage was interlaced), added the appearance of 3:2 pulldown, and tweaked all the gamma and color settings. It looked better (in my opinion) than any of the commercial software plug-ins, and it rendered about 5 times faster.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
When I was referring to the media players as being “cross-platform,” I probably used the wrong terminology. I wasn’t referring to them working on both a MAC and a PC, I was talking about their ability to playback virtually any format and codec.
We constantly have clients (ad agencies, marketing deptartments at corporations, non-profits etc.) who receive a video file (from us or someone else), and they can’t play it. So we always recommend players other than their OS default, typically KMPlayer first (for Windows) because it’s free, doesn’t require an installation, and will play almost anything. Then BSPlayer, because it also has a free version, then VLC.
For clients using MACs we work with them to setup Flip4Mac with Quicktime, VLC or Mplayer (one I didn’t mention originally that’ll work on just about any OS).
Anyway…for those out there that are just trying to get their files to play and look correct, or for people that only occasionally do compression, it can get incredibly confusing, frustrating and time-consuming when dealing with all the variants.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Thanks Todd,
Appreciate all the info and tips…and after re-reading the emails from the folks with the Letus rentals, the 2/3″ B4 relays may not be available yet. They both said “will have…” in their emails.
Zacuto makes the relay and I went to their site and it appears to be a brand-new product released for purchase just 3 weeks ago, with an 8-10 week special order delivery time. So…the P+S Technik is probably our only option.
And yes…the $600 package was by far the best available. The next best was $750, and then $900/day. It’s a shame all this stuff is so darn expensive. It would seem like after technology has been around a while they’d be able to figure out ways to reduce production and manufacturing costs to bring the cost down some. I’d love to buy one but it’s just not viable right now.
I get so frustrated using video lenses on shoots. In post I end up building mattes around subjects and defocusing background elements in an effort to control where the viewers eyes are drawn.
The client was very open to spending more money to do this, but I’m just not sure they were prepared to pay another $3000… so I’ll float the cost of the P+S rental by them and see what they say.
Again…thanks for all the thorough information. And as I said, it’s obvious to me just by looking at photos that the P+S Technik adaptors are smarter products than their competitors.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Thanks David…I had actually read it earlier but appreciate the info.
Todd…I should’ve pointed out that the Letus Ultimate doesn’t by itself work with 2/3″ cameras, you need their 2/3″ B4 relay lens as part of the package. The rental places I talked with both had the relay and have rented it to several people using 2/3″ cameras.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’m not trying to get into a peeing contest here..just trying to help the original poster. The gamma issue could’ve have contributed to what he was seeing in the difference in quality in playing his video on a PC, then a MAC.
And I pointed out that we output virtually everything “in the middle” of the 1.8 and 2.5 extremes, (at 2.1), so not sure how I am missing the point.
4 of the players I listed are cross-platform, not 3.
What I meant about Carbon Coder was that it has options listed on all those presets for gamma correction, with drop-downs for various settings. I was just pointing out that one of the leading encoding programs out there recognizes that adjusting the gamma of files is something that might need to be done.
The .flv videos on our site are 320×240. There’s an error in the way the .swf player skin instructions interacts with the video. We noticed it when we first put the videos up over a year and a half ago, but like a lot of people, have just never gotten around to fixing it. It doesn’t significantly affect how they look. YouTube does the same thing…it’s player window almost always incorrectly sizes your video no matter how much you jack around with trying to get it to display exactly the right size. As soon as you figure out what they’re doing, they change their settings.
Our newer videos size correctly in the player skin they’re in. And thanks but I know the various recognized sizes for outputting videos for the web.
I don’t post suggestions or answers without first making sure they’re valid. And what I posted was a valid possibility concerning the thread. And the information about all the other available players is also valid considering how each processes a digital file differently and each affects the perceived quality and color values of the exact same video. I’ve seen videos that are beautifully encoded look like dog crap when played on certain PC systems using various players.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com