Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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All the TV stations, cable entities that I ever worked for or with always had yearly deals with ASCAP/BMI that allowed them to play a certain length of popular songs during news, public service and some other original programming.
As I recall, the one ABC affiliate I worked with paid something like $3000/year for those rights. If you multiply all the local affiliates, UPN, low-power, local cable outlests etc. by that number, it would add up to a pretty healthy sum of money.
So could be they’re covered under a similar deal.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’ll add to Ron’s advice that if you bank with one of the bigger banks in your city/region, seek out the smaller banks (but do your homework and make sure they’re sound financially).
Many smaller institutions are VERY willing to court new business, especially in these times. Many smaller banks avoided getting involved with the sub-prime mess and are in great posiition to loan money. NPR actually did a story on this very phenomenon a couple months back and profiled a couple of regional banks that had zero sub-prime loans and didn’t get into any of that confusing deriviatives stuff that all the big banks did.
We’ve actually been approached by a couple of small banks in our area about taking out loans (by small, I mean they have half a dozen branches in our city, with a few more in outer lying regions), and we’ve even gotten some work from one after they approached us about moving our accounts.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Bob….you crack me up. I was thinking the EXACT same thing but I’m too polite to post it! I’m lucky to get my kids to school and fed each day and then actually make it to a shoot or edit on time much less test stuff!
But kudos to you Sean for that attitude. I used to be like that until as a facility owner I realized my time was more important than being the IT department as well as the company’s creative director, technical director, client psychologist (most clients are not only insane, they’re also insecure), and janitor.
One thing I’ll point out is that we get great performance from a Gig-E network with an Apace vStor. nearly 100MB/sec read, 75-80MB/write across 4 workstations. 4 real-time uncompressed SD streams, 2 compressed DVCProHD compressed streams (720P), and nary a hiccup or pause.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
When you told the client you would train a new person, did you specify that you would train them for a fee, or for free? If you did one or the other, then you should stick to that.
If you assumed you would be paid, and assumed the client understood that, then I see no reason why you shouldn’t bill for your time.
Probably the easiest solution is to call and ask the client: “I just want to make sure you understood that I offered to train someone for a fee…right?” All they can say is: “yeah…I expected that,” or “no…I didn’t.”
You’ll have your answer there. If this client books you a lot and is a good source of income, pays on-time, and isn’t a pain in the backside, and he/she didn’t expect to get charged for the training, then I’d chalk it up as a learning experience and make sure you’re specific about stuff like this down the road.
I’ve found that people are reluctant to bring up money and contracts and fees. But I ALWAYS, ALWAYS bring it up in meetings and go through it thorougly so 2 months later clients can’t say, “we didn’t realize you were going to charge for that.”
I’ve never had a client get mad for discussing budgets, fees, payment schedules and deposits prior to doing a project. Just the opposite actually…they LIKE knowing what they’re getting into and it sets a nice precedent that everything we do has value.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
The Regional Emmy’s must’ve changed, because we have them and all we had to pay was the entry fee. We’re members of the ATAS, perhaps that exempts you from paying for the award.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Lee,
You rule! I figured it must’ve been something with the V10 install and AE integration, but it took me 2 installs to get V10 working..so I didn’t want to thru another uninstall/reinstall!
You actually don’t have to delete the files. The Velocity10 install puts the AENXFileReader.dll in the “support” folder by mistake. I moved it to the main AE7 directory and it solved the exiting problem.
Now whether it still works with V10 is another story. But we don’t plan to even test that for a while.
Thanks a ton.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I think a system for licensing music for event type video has been around a while. Back in 2002 our company looked into starting a sister company that did stuff like weddings, golf outings, sports videos, graduation videos etc. And I recall in our research that there was a way to legally use popular music for very affordable fees.
I don’t remember it being called Zoom, but I remember it was a central issue in our early discussions because the people we talked to about doing these vidoes always wanted to use popular music, and we were skeptical about getting into that.
I believe we found the info back then on the WEVA website.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I would suspect that Anne’s description of how they have it set up isn’t exactly correct. I assumed from reading her post that the host was connected to the raid via SATA…not via ethernet….I missed that little detail.
So you’re right that her description doesn’t sound correct. But her question was about how to set up projects. So I was assuming the hardware/software setup is actually working and that they have whatever SAN software they need in place to handle the file sharing issues.
Anne…care to enlighten us? Does your setup work ok in terms of being able to edit on both machines?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Whoa…she said right off she’s a newbie. Lighten up a little. I have a colleague that uses shared storage with several Final Cut workstations and when they have multiple editors working on the same project they just give each project a letter or number designation at the end of the project name to identify each segment.
So if they’re editing on a project called “Jazz Festival.” The main editor puts a _1 at the end of his project name. The graphics/compositing guy puts a _2 at the end of his file name (Jazz Festival_2) and so on.
When they want to unify everything, they just import (or whatever you do on Final Cut) all the relevant timelines. Since they use shared storage, it easy to move projects back and forth.
As for how you have your system setup….if you’re using a GigE switch, the setup as described could work, since the host machine could theoretically be looked at as the server, and the 2nd machine a client. We use an Apace vStor, and it’s basically a server (with an embedded Linux OS), with a SATA II, 8 disk raid. It’s connected to the switch, and our 4 workstations are cabled to the switch, then into the 4 GigE ports on the back of the vStor (which are teamed). We get nearly 100MB/sustained with this setup across all 4 client workstations…which is actually higher throughput than we got with direct attached, 15K four and six drive SCSI raids.
So depending on how she has everything configured, her description could actually work.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.comChris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Still no joy…tried the install shield update and the clean-up utility. Same problem. Also re-ran registry cleaners and did a repair of quicktime pro (latest version of quicktime). Still not solved.
The only other possible issue would be the recent upgrade of our editing software. Hate to uninstall that. Could create issues with our editing app, which is our bread and butter.
Scratching my head on this one.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com