Jeff Carpenter
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Good advice, Mark. Your post reminds me again why I have a regular, full time job and only do this event-shooting stuff on the side. It’s tough enough to deal with the small amount of business I do every year and I certainly don’t envy anyone who has to do it all the time. I find that I can manage the number of schools I have to deal with, but you’re right…once you add it up to a lot of work it might be more trouble than it’s worth!
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The first thing to try is to go to APPLICANTIONS/UTILITIES and open up ‘Disc Utility.’
Use it to repair permissions on your main drive. I don’t know if that will help, but it sometimes fixes little problems like this. Let us know if it doesn’t work.
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When you say “from CD it has been imported” do you mean that the MP3 file was on a data CD or do you actually have an audio CD of the music?
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The Fall and the Spring are both good times for school plays/performances and ballet studio performances.
Find the big events and ask them how happy they are with their past videos. I’ve gotten a lot of work simply because people were only “sort of happy” with their event-videos of the past. Get one nice demo done and people will really pay attention. There’s one ballet studio I shoot now where the 2nd time I shot it, I had several mothers come up to me and tell me how much better my last video was than the last people they used. If you can find those “sort of happy” places, and you can do a good job, then they’ll stick with you for sure.
The great thing is, if you’re somewhat sure that they’ll sell about 100 copies you can offer to do the job for free and just sell them DVDs for $20 apiece. Tell the school to sell them for $25 each at the event and that you’ll deliver the entire batch to the school. Look what you’ve done…you’ve just offered the school a way to pay NO money up front and end up making $500 off of the videos.
Yes, that’s a risk…they might only sell 50…but if you only offer that to the large public schools with a history of selling a lot of tapes every year then you shoud be fine. The smaller events will need a different payment plan, of course, but you can make yourself very attractive to large schools with this plan.
Here’s another tip…shooting with 3 cameras makes YOUR job easier for these kind of events. You only need 2 shooters…leave the 3rd one wide on the entire stage. It REALLY makes editing go faster. And the best part is…you can make it sound like it’s a benefit for the client instead of yourself!
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Well, I can at least help with Final Cut prefrences.
Do you have FCP 5 yet?
If so, download this program:
https://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/fcprescue.html
It’s a simple script program that takes your prefrences and backs them up. If they ever get corupted you can use this to restore the old ones. It’s pretty handy for everyday use but it sounds like it can help you here too. Download that and open it. Back up your prefrences, then, after you re-load Final Cut, go into it and restore them.
(If you’re using FCP 4.5 you’ll need the last version of their program. I can’t find it right now but search in the Final Cut room or ask them there.)
As for un-installing, just erase the program out of the Application folder. Then search the hard drive for “Final Cut” (or whatever program it is) and erase any other folders you find with that name. Then re-install everything and do the updates again.
Run Disc Utility and repair permissions after you’ve re-installed but BEFORE you do the downloads. Then run it again after everything’s done.
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Yup, everything you said is correct!
Once you’re done running permissions repair off the CD you can just quit the installation and it will re-start the computer. Doing it that way allows the repair to check EVERY part of the hard drive. If you’re running it while OSX is running there might be some parts it can’t see. You don’t have to run it that way every single time, but I think it’s a good idea to end with it after making so many changes to a system.
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When you restart the computer holding the “C” key with the OSX CD in the drive you’ll get the OSX installation screen. Before you actually run it, you can find the “Disc Utility” in the pull-down menus.
If you run it from the CD (instead of finding it in the “Applications” folder) and erase the drive entirely from there, I can promise you that NO data will survive. That shold take care of any problems you’re having!
Once you get it up and running, I’d use the System Update to load any software it can find, then install all your programs and then run the update AGAIN. Each time you run it, check it again. Do it until you see nothing left in there.
Remember as you re-install everything (and run the updates) to stop every now and then and ‘repair permissons’ using the Disc Utility. You can run it from the ‘Applications/Utilities’ folder between updates, but once you’ve finished everything, I’d run it off the CD one last time to finish things up.
Good luck!
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There’s no rule, really. You’ll atract different kinds of people with different kinds of products. I don’t do much of that stuff and the people who hire me tell me that they came to me because they DIDN’T like those things and everyone else they saw was doing them. I find enough of those people to hire me that I’m sticking with my style, but since there seem to be so many other people doing those things I have to assume there’s a large demand for it as well.
So it’s up to you to decide what you LIKE doing. Do what you think looks good and you should attract the people who like that style. You could decide to offer many different styles and let the customer choose, but I’ve always thought that was a bad idea. You should devote yourself to becoming the best you can at one particular style. Once you get really good at it you’ll attract the attention of all the customers who really like that kind of work. If you have all sorts of things on your demo reel or web page then people won’t know what to think. But if they see a standard style everywhere and it’s what they want, they’re far more likely to call you up.
I’ve let customer comments guide me over the years…my style has altered slightly since I started…but the point is that I try to have a style that’s unique to me. Watch as many other people’s videos as you can, they’ll help you learn, but don’t try to copy any one of them exactly. Take hints on certain things, but that’s it. Being unique is a great way to get attention in this business.
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I just use the motion tab in Final Cut. There are probably better plug-ins, yes, but I don’t think I do anything complicated enough to worry about that. I also have After Effects which is really the best program for this kind of project but I never even use it because Final Cut does exactly what I need.
The key is to really watch your finished product on a good, external monitor. You may sometimes make an effect that doesn’t look as good as the others. In that case, just change a few settings slightly and render again. For example, sometimes you might have something in the photo (like horizontal lines) that create odd effects when moving. Try rotating 2 degrees for something like that.
That’s just an example, there could by many different problems, but I haven’t found one yet that I couldn’t fix by just altering the settings slightly.
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If it makes you feel better, you can open up the Quicktime player to do it from there, too.
It’s the exact same stuff that’s running iTunes, but if you like the way it looks better you can certainly do it that way.