Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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According to their website and a review in DV Magazine, Letus released a new version called the Letus Ultimate that will work on 2/3″ cameras, including the SDX-900.
The review of it was very favorable, although I’ve found some forums that were spotty in reviewing the first 50 or so units that were sold in the fall. Apparently, they’ve fixed those issues because since about December, the forums have very little negative to say and quite a lot of positive things. Our upcoming shoot just doesn’t have the budget for the P+S Technik. The best package prices I’ve found for it along with a set of Leitz lens is $600/day.
We need the DoF converter for a week to give us 2 days of prep and practice time and 3 days of shooting…and $3000 just eats up too much of our budget. I can get the Letus with the same set of primes for $250-$275 day, which is doable.
I can tell by looking at the websites that there’s a huge difference in the ergonomics of the two units, but if the Letus will work, I’m willing to risk $1000 to get great images. One nice thing about it is that it has a flip feature that automatically flips the image for you.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I don’t think anyone, including Walter, is acting as if nothing is going on out there. But there are many companies that are not feeling the effects of the economic downturn, especially companies that provide services that people need whether the economy is good or bad…like Health Care. Insurance is another area that isn’t significantly feeling the effect (yet).
You’ve got to figure there are many companies cutting wages, freezing spending, and laying off workers because they CAN. I have a friend that works for a property management company that owns scores of big apartment complexes. Their occupancy is at record levels.
Yet just this week a memo was sent stating that all executives and management will get a 10% pay reduction and that layoffs are coming. Obviously, it’s management folks are baffled and angry. Their costs have not changed significantly, yet their CEO is acting as if business is bad. It doesn’t take a lot of smarts to see this is a company whose board of directors is saying, “hey…everybody else is doing it, we can do it too (and get away with it) and make even MORE money for us and our shareholders!”
Then there companies like Toyota doing everything possilbe to avoid significantly cutting wages or laying off workers. Like reducing work-weeks from 5 days to 4 for salaried employees, re-tooling assembly lines to be more efficient, moving products to assembly plants that can build faster or leaner, etc.
So I think finding innovative ways to cut costs, and getting better at estimating and pitching your services to clients is a HUGE key to survival. Advertising, marketing and video work isn’t going to cease. There will be plenty of it, but getting better at finding the available work and getting better at winning I believe will be a big key to surviving.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
TMPGEnc will also do this and it’s cheap. In fact, I believe the original software guy gives away an older versions of it hoping people will pay for the upgrades. It’s called TMPGEnc Free. There’s a paid version that has additional features for only $37.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Several of those I listed are cross-platform and will also play Flash. KM_Player and Zoom will play just about anything and both have some incredibly deep and useful feature sets. I actually prefer both of those to VLC. BSPlayer is similar and will play just about anything as well. We’ve found it to be buggy compared to Zoom and KM player so we don’t use it on a daily basis, but there are millions of end-users that prefer BSPlayer.
On the gamma thing. Carbon Coder has options for selecting gamma correction on probably half it’s HUGE list of export options. It literally has hundreds of presets for various format, codec, wrapper combinations.
And not that many end-users are going to have Cinema displays, or even know anything about setting up their consumer level display or their software playback device. So we’ve found it’s better to output stuff right in the middle of the two values (1.8 and 2.5). It will sometimes look a little washed out on certain PC setups, but it’s better than it being muddy and dark on the systems expecting 2.5 and getting a video with 1.8.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Another thing that contributes to a perceived difference in quality is that Windows and Macs treat gamma differently.
The difference between the default gamma on a Mac (1.8 I think) and PC (2.5) is huge. Some compression software has options to adjust the gamma or set in the middle of the two defaults for the platforms (2.1 typically) so you get decent looking output on both platforms.
In fact, different media players will display the exact same video much differently. We usually play file in a bunch of players (if it’s a really important client) to just check the quality. Some players include VLC, KMPlayer (Free and a GREAT player), BSPlayer (sucks), Zoom Player, Wimpy for FLV’s (also free), as well as Quicktime and Windows Media Player. Most all of those listed are free or only cost $29…so if you do a lot of encoding, it’s worth it to test playback.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Daniel,
It IS our favorite…and Procoder, essentially made by the same software engineers, is a close second if you’re on a budget.
We figured the issue out. We’re using the H264 export preset, which offers you three containers or wrappers (is that the right term?), F4V, MP4, MP2 and Raw.
We selected MP4 because that’s what the ad agency uses on it’s website. The settings are pretty complex and use some really unfamiliar (to me at least) terminology…but there’s one check box that sounds vaguely like keyframing (it was called something like “frame seeking”), so I checked it…and voila, ZERO banding and absolutely beautiful output.
We had done all our H264 up to this point in a great little program called Flash Video Studio ($59 with great codec and skin support), which has fewer tweaks available and was having the same banding issue (although not as severe) in the blue sky with clouds.
The H264 quality (using any of the file extensions listed above) looks stunning, and a :30 spot came in at 3MB.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
While I would’ve written a little more softly…I’ll second Bob’s post. We’re also busier than we’ve ever been…and that’s after losing a half a million dollar account last fall. We had a record January, and February looks to be nearly as good, with lots of work also already booked for March and April.
Our clients are varied, from car dealer groups to kitchen cabinet manufacturers to health care companies, with some religious and educational institutions thrown in for good measure. None (even the car dealers) seem to be greatly reducing their advertising or production.
But we pride ourselves on giving great service, solving clients problems (i.e. doing the things they don’t know how and usually don’t have time to do on their own) and on knowing more than our competitors. So much like Bob, I just turned 48 and I spend hours each week researching and learning new techniques, new technology and evaluating new processes. I think all those things pay off in times like this.
And while our work isn’t wildly creative or groundbreaking, it’s consistently well-done and most of all it communicates and gets done on-time and on-budget every time.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Haven’t used them but their website, sample and business model sure make a lot more sense than the people we’ve been researching, like Limelight, Brightcove, EdgeCast and a few others. Limelight’s cheapest monthly package is something like $1200. Brightcove’s is $500 (50GB of bandwidth). Bits on the Run’s 100GB/month plan is listed at $128 US monthly, which includes unlimited storage.
Not to mention they take the task of encoding and compression off your hands. You upload a high-quality video file, they compress it for you to what appears to be outstanding quality. Pretty cool.
Frankly I didn’t see many negatives from their sales pitch. The only thing that might keep me from using it would be if they require you to embed in the website without being able to play the video in a pop-up. Many of our clients want to have videos on their pages but don’t want them embedded. They want users to click a link and have them open up in an HTML window. So might ask about that.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’m not sure I’d use a line of credit for marketing and advertising. We have a fairly large line of credit and we typically use it for operating expenses, especially with large client projects. Meaning, we have a shoot where we bring in 5 clients, they bring in 20 of their customers to be on camera. We put them all up in nice hotels and feed them for several days. Bam…we’ve spent $13,000 in less than a week. That’s what we use a line of credit for. Stuff we know we’re going to get back fairly quickly.
But…others might have another opinion. We do a little bit of marketing and advertising, but I bet 75% of our business comes from word of mouth, referrals and good old fashioned guerilla marketing, where you get out and talk to people at community events. We’ve gotten an incredible amount of business by doing free stuff for non-profits, who then either talk about us glowingly to their boards (made up of big corporate executives), or end up using you for paying gigs when they do finally get some marketing dollars.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We don’t have any issues whatsoever with aspect ratio mismatches, and we typically render out to our native .dps file format out of trueSpace. I’ve rendered a few times to Quicktime when someone else needed the animation, and they never had a problem with pixel aspect.
Same with the animation guy we use up near Chicago. He does big-time stuff, animation for music videos for David Byrne and other big-name musical acts, and all I know is his Quicktimes using the animation codec look correct and are clean as a whistle.
Our Velocity system also has a feature called a virtual file system that allows you to take the captured video file, and access it instantly as an image sequence in any one of about 10 still formats, including jpg, bmp, tga, tif, sgi, raw, pic and several others. The BMP sequences look perfect if you import them into AE, Digital Fusion, animation programs, Premiere CS3, Vegas etc., and require nothing different in terms of settings or processing than the other image sequence formats. It’s really a cool feature and that’s why so many animators have used DPS (now Harris) stuff over the years.
So while you’re exactly right about bmp and DV PAR, Velocity and trueSpace are are doing something to correct for this and doing a transparent job of it.
BUT…I’m curious to know if the original poster has figured out HIS issue though!
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com