Dan Barter
Forum Replies Created
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Josh,
Thanks, that’s some great feedback. We are actually taking short stories from new authors, not specific authors. So I guess that would be considered unsolicited in this scenario.
We’ve got a fairly clear submissions page, but it mostly covers the “what” rather than the “how” requirements. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to include something on formatting as well.
Thanks again. Good stuff.
Dan…
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Tim, thanks for the feedback. It is good to know that I’m not alone with my formatting issues. I’m certain this will get worked out in the long run, particularly since he won’t get his magazine delivered to the printer on time. If I have to do design, layout, cover and most of the story art, plus the formatting, it’ll be tough to meet a three 30 day deadline.
By all means, please talk it over. I think there may be more of us out there. I’m not dialed very far into the horror genre myself, but my friend/publisher is. He talks often about amateur start up ezines or magazines that don’t get very far because they don’t know the next step.
With regards to your “host” pitch… nice curveball. Though, I’m the guy asking questions. Wouldn’t you want someone who answers them? We are making a change from ezine (PDF) to actual print this April, so I’ve got some stuff figured out, but am by no means an expert.
Dan…
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It’s odd, actually. I find I run into problems in layout, but that are related to publishing. Stuff that doesn’t exactly fit in the InDesign forum. For instance, is there a good on demand printer out there that folks use? How do I calculate leading, which seems, based on what I’ve read, almost a VooDoo type of process depending on the type of layout you are doing. These don’t all seem to fit naturally into the mechanics of InDesign. Maybe someone who has actually published a magazine could steer me right.
Here’s a good recent example. We are a magazine geared toward new, unpublished horror short story writers. I have a GREAT team of folks, but we’re all basically new at the process. Since I’m doing the magazine layout and design, I get the stories fresh from my editors, but occasionally find the formatting has gone weird or there’s 5 spaces instead of a tab for every paragraph.
As willing as I am to do all this work for my friend for free, I’m not necessarily sure that fixing the stories, formatically. (like that word?) should be my job. Is there some line somewhere that a designer should draw, regarding these sorts of issues?
As I said, this is basically done for free and for a friend, but I might run into this on some other job.
Dan…
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Ok now, Brian, THAT’S a cool site. Thanks to both you guys for your help. I’m on the right track now.
Dan…
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Ok, I see this now. Seems to be working for me. I’m going to try to add a few more gears now, so hopefully this won’t explode on me. Man, someone needs to write a really good book on XPresso. They’d make a fortune. 🙂
Thanks Randy
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Randy,
The range mapper bumps my gears out of alignment when I set it up. Not sure why that’s happening. I tried the Math.add and changed the node to multiply -1, but it didn’t work. Can you give me a few more details about this, please? I’m a little new with XPresso.
Dan…
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Adam,
Presuming they’d tell me how they build the DVD, is a 2 pass encode something that I can do on my desktop in order to produce an acceptable output? I’ve read that there are a lot of folks bringing this stuff in-house now and producing some very fine product. Obviously, I’ve got a lot to learn here, but can a simple in-house set up produce the professional quality of an out-sourced video house.
I expect, by your job title, you’re going to tell me “not a chance!” 🙂
Dan…
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Ultimately, I expect that’s what I’ll end up having to do. I was more or less trying to convince them that with the masters, they can do it in-house without a whole lot of expensive equipment.
Thanks,
Dan…
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I’ll give Streamclip a try, thanks. I’m sure I’ve got the mpeg-2 quicktime extension already. I think that came with FCP, but I’m make sure.
The quality was terrible with DVDxDV. Any thoughts on compressor? Will that also convert VOB files to something editable with FCP?
Dan…
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Sitruc,
Clearly this is beyond my skills. I just haven’t done much in the way of Java. PHP and ASP are WAY out of my grasp. This is not an overly complicated site, and at this stage, my plans are very fluid, but I’m sure you’ve determined, my skills are very limited here. I’d welcome your help, but don’t want to put you through the trials of teaching a beginner the ropes. I’m sure you’ve got more important things to do.
Let me ask you this, though. If I would like to become more knowledgeable in this regard, what training and or books would you recommend? Would you say PHP and SQL is the direction to take? I”ve heard Cold Fusion is very popular as well. I’d like to become more skilled for this website, as well as offer my company my skills in other areas as well. What would you recommend?
With regards to the site… Do you think there might be an easier way of doing what I’m suggesting? I’m sure php could handle it readily, but as I said, not my skillset. I can animate text and build 3D, but this isn’t something I’ve ever been into.
Thanks
Remo…
[Curtis Thompson] “in that case, you need to pass a get parameter to the 2nd page that tells it what page to load, and then parse parameter either with javascript (less reliable) or make all your pages a server side script page like php or jsp or asp or the likes…
the first page link would be something like:
[a href=”page2.html?isrc=software.html”]page 2[/a]
and then page 2 would parse that passed parameter and show the proper iframe source using the above code, or even simpler would just be to make the iframe source the isrc param directly…
i don’t know if such a change is feasible on your site – again, you can parse the parameter and extract it using javascript on page 2, but if the user has javascript disabled (and some do for paranoia reasons), then your system won’t work…but php or a server-side language can easily read parameters:
$_GET[“isrc”]
so it’d be much easer to grab that parameter. but if you are not comfortable with converting your site to use a scripting language, then i could make a mockup of the javascript concept for you…
sitruc”