[Jeff Bach]

I’m using an HVX200, so after reading your post I got out Barry Green’s book and sure enough, there on page 121 is a description of Synchro Scan which reads just like Sony’s Clear Scan. Hopefuly my bacon isn’t cooked after all.

thanks for your response!

[Jeff Bach]

OK I tried the search one more time and found the Disney channel bit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD0xTp59y_k

The photo effect on top of the map starting at about 26 seconds is what I am after…..

Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI.

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[Jeff Bach]

I just read about using Final Cut’s composite mode, screen option and gave that a go. I was shocked at how much improvement I saw in my low light wedding footage. Composite mode is my new best friend in FCP…..

Just copy and paste clip onto v2 track above the original clip. Right click on the v2 copy, find composite mode and select “screen”. Pretty much like blend modes in PSD.

Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI.

[Jeff Bach]

Readers take heed – I think Ron has hit the nail on the head as far as articulating the dangers of complacency and failing to keep your nose in the wind as far as discovering new things that lead to new sources of work and revenue.

Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI.

[Jeff Bach]

Almost everything is on a “lifecycle” for lack of a better word. I would argue that the services described above have all reached a point in their lifecycle where everything of value has been wrung out of it. The lifecycle is not over though, it is simply at its most commoditized point. The fact that a robot has replaced the prior product/service/person simply means that the function had reached a point where it had been so described, processed, regimented, and systematized that a robot could be built to follow all of the rules that describe what needs to be done.

Robots are not bad. They are what happens at the ultimate low value end of a lifecycle. This is happening all over, with everything that can be described by rules and processes. Basically anything that is repetitive can be automated, which is all that robots are. Further examples include: taxes being done by Indians in Mumbai, x-rays being done by those same Indians, cheap nasty manufacturing in China (duh), but also crops being planted by machine with the help of GPS guidance systems, paper being made on presses 125 feet wide going 35 miles an hour. on and on.

The value is gone when a process can be sued to describe something. Value remains where things are one-off, custom, and otherwise cannot be described for purposes of automating a process.

The above are all examples of formerly high value service that reached the low value commodity end of their lifecycle. Prior to being automated, EACH example had a long and high value life.

To me the point that gets missed in this line of thought is that by the time in the lifecycle that automation shows up, the high value has been reassigned to something that is new. The clock is reset and starts over in effect back at the valuable specialty point of the lifecycle. A good example of this is the craze around 3D movies. They cost a premium right? They are new right? I think they are positioned back at the beginning of the lifecycle for movies. The trad 2D movies as we all know are now DVD’ed, streamed, pirated and otherwise treated like commodities.

Innovation is important. Thinkers, creators and those looking to solve problems are no longer involved or needed in the commodity part of the cycle. Instead, they are off solving problems and coming up with the new things and services that live at the specialty front end of yet one more new cycle. And if they are not they should be.

To me, this is the problem with unions and other complacent sectors of our culture. They stay in place, while everything else changes around them, leapfrogs them and soon replaces them.
my .02
Jeff

Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI.

[Jeff Bach]

Hi Matt and Bruce

All good words from Matt. I agree 100%. The recent price drop is a step in the right direction, but still keeps Blu-ray out of the hands of 96% of the authoring world. At least that is less than the 98% that it was before 🙂

I’ve passed from the frustrated phase into the apathetic and “resigned to wait” phase. The BDA seems to not want the business that comes from the 96% of the people that they do not yet have. The SD DVD world still owns the giant bulk of that crowd. My authoring is still at DVDSP 4, just like it was four + years ago.

I have to throw in a tip of my hat to John Harrington at Netblender. I love their product. From day one, they have had the authoring solution for HD DVD and then Blu-ray, that I have been anxiously waiting to use. But, I have yet to get the client or the budget that allows for the hit that the BDA/AACS requires 🙁

Hopefully, someday soon that will change.
Jeff

Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI.

[Jeff Bach]

Hi Mark

There is certainly the risk of freely pitched creative being usurped by the client and used in the wrong way. No denying that. However, I think that to ignore evolution is every bit as dangerous.

To me, in the beginning of a business/service/product lifecycle, value is high, demand is greater than supply, and several other parameters are all inline, making it favorable for the creative to work in the way that you and the articles describe. The problem is that this market condition does not last. Our society/culture/economy are very fluid. The articles seem to want a market condition that is static. Things just don’t work that way. Amongst other things, other creatives see the opportunity and enter the market. This changes the supply/demand balance and creates more competition. Tools, services, and other costs of business drop. New markets open up offering additional means of marketing and/or advertising.

In general, every market matures. Within that market there is a steady movement more towards “commodity” rather than the “specialty” that existed at the beginning. The articles you cite have their valid point of view, BUT….to ignore changing conditions also ignores your new set of competitors, most of whom are going to be lower cost and more flexible, who have figured out how to deal with a new marketplace, leaving you in the dust of bankruptcy and no customers.

Like it or not, creative is increasingly a commodity. The software world has succeeded in getting Photoshop, Flash, etc. into the hands of just about everyone that wants to make pretty pictures. Creative is in very plentiful supply wherever you look across the planet. Cost of entry is incredibly low, distribution options abound, etc. The advantage has swung from the creative to the client. To me, the articles imply a client with limited choices, which is not really the case any more.

Happily, creatives with strong client relationships are mostly immune. In the client world, I think referrals and word of mouth still are very effective and are two ways for an old school, high cost creative agency to start a relationship with a new client. If your agency is big enough to pay for the overhead of an experienced bus dev, you are cooking, especially if the bd guy has a big network of client contacts that can be mined for new work.

There are some high dollar clients who recognize the value of old school creative and its costs AND are willing to pay the specialty costs that come with an old school creative agency. Increasingly though, there are even MORE clients that use crowdSpring and other new media type tools to lessen costs and force creative further into the low cost commodity slot that most budgeters want creative to fit.

Right or wrong, my overall point is that evolution in the marketplace is happening. I think this evolution is going to drive rates down, force less overhead, force costs down and force creative to change their ways. There are too many people now, who simply don’t care about the way “it used to be”, and are instead focused on finding that next client and making the next deal, much like the rest of the business world.

Jeff

Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI.

[Jeff Bach]

Hi Bruce

I’ll bet if anyone had the stones to offer a service like you are looking for, the BDA/AACS would have them hauled to court and promptly shut down.

I would HUGELY love to be wrong, but I’m almost positive that a service like Createspace that does Blu-ray on demand will never happen. Due almost entirely to the slew of licensing, patents, royalties, DRM, etal., that is along for the ride on the cluster~!@# that is Blu-ray for anyone besides Hollywood-scale authoring houses.

To me, this is a huge MISSED opportunity. Over the last ten or so years, the SD DVD world has created this whole ecosystem of people that understand the authoring workflow and would still be quite amenable to upgrading to Blu-ray. Instead, Blu-ray BDA/AACS has shut this entire ecosystem down and left most of us on the sidelines waiting.

my .02
Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI.

[Jeff Bach]

Hi Max

re: #1 Yes it is paid by content owner, overall though my intent is that this is a multiple thousand dollar line item in a budget, whether it is mine or someone else’s. This line item was absent in an SDDVD project and to me is a showstopper for most projects.

re: #2 I associate compression with preparing the video stream. I think of MPEG2 as compression. I am hazy on the techie stuff in multiplexing but I see it as the last step in the process. I think that compression is above muxing in the stack of things that occur in a project. I think of muxing as some sort of “machine-like” language that combines the audio and video streams together into something that is readable by a DVD player.

My point here is that this is an extra step that now needs to be dealt with. Before, muxing was wrapped up and “magically” done inside of DVDSP. We never had to deal with it.

I just want it to work at a price point that can make projects go 🙂
Jeff

P.S. I looked through wikipedia for a definition of muxing and found this bit – “Multiplexing is the process of building a project in your authoring program so that it can be burned to DVD and read by a standard DVD player.”
– from the COW’s very own Noah Kadner circa 2003
https://www.aidinc.com/features/dvdfaq.asp

Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI.

[Jeff Bach]

I was in early to the Netblender camp and very much liked their HDDVD authoring solution. I think their Blu-ray authoring package looks as good as what they had for HDDVD. I like their pricing structure and I like the company. Looking at the prices, as Eric points out, also makes it easy to like Netblender.

But the authoring package is only one of the three MAJOR issues in the Blu-ray authoring workflow.

Unless I am mistaken, and I would love to be wrong in this case (so someone please correct me!!), you also have a significant financial hurdle to overcome courtesy of the required $US4,500.00 AACS licensing fee if you use a 3rd party replicator. In addition your Blu-ray content has to be mux’ed. Muxing is part of DVDSP but it is not part of the Blu-ray authoring tools, it is an extra step, to the tune of ~10k for purchasing the needed hard/soft ware or finding someone that can do it for you, likely for a premium, which is OK since even finding someone is hard to do at this point.
It’s still early and still exciting in a nervous anxious kind of way 🙂
Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films