[John Davidson]

People will know you by your work. I checked out your videography demo reel and I would suggest if you want to be a shooter that you take whatever camera you can get and shoot something that looks good (in HD). Use a tripod (I used a $15 one from Rite aid last week!) – shoot some time lapses (you can do this on an iphone), try to borrow a camera with a good lens and get some nice depth of field shots, pull a nice focus, shoot some music videos for friends, make some free commercials for family friends with small businesses, get good audio on these, and most importantly demonstrate that you are good at shooting video. A lot of your footage in the demo is low res and handheld (shaky), which is not something that people want to pay for.

Once you’ve made about a half-dozen commercials, even with an iPhone, you will start to learn things that people will want to pay for. You may even notice that people will come to you and ask you to make commercials for them. Perhaps you’ll make $200. Make a nice, respectable resume website with iWeb or wordpress. Look respectable, be well mannered, don’t talk too much, and while I agree with Mark that ego is important, understand that most people would prefer you keep your ego to yourself.

Be humble. Try hard. Don’t give up.

And use a tripod :).

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

You don’t need my inspiration Chris. The magic was inside you all along!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Welcome to the club. 7 months in and very happy with the results thus far.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

That’s kinda hot. I’m still not 100% happy with layback and ingest options from BMG or AJA. Layback is especially annoying, we still go to FCP7 for that. The again though, we only have one tape client left, so maybe it ain’t that big a deal.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

So funny you posted this. We did our first HDcam layback in 4 months yesterday and had almost completely forgotten how to do it. I would love to offload this HDCam deck, but I know as soon as I do we’ll get a huge request for it.

I think in another 2 years nobody will be using tape. And that will be glorious. Hopefully UVerse will increase speeds by then though, the 3MB upload speed is getting a little bottlenecky.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I watched tutorial after tutorial from all the sources listed below. I refused to let myself touch the program for a set period of time while I kept watching these tutorials. By the time I saw a few ‘build your own transitions and generators’ tutorials, I was chomping at the bit.

In other words, observe the workflow until you get the passion to use it that you got as a kid to learning new software. Getting the car keys isn’t enough. You have to watch Dad drive it for a few years to really want to drive yourself. Then it won’t be a chore, it’ll be a joy.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

[Steve Modica] “Anyhow, I’m really sorry I didn’t see this sooner.”

No worries Steve, I usually start doing research on things like this weeks or months out form actual implementation (like with the Peg6 Mac Mini awesomeness you helped me with), so I wasn’t sitting here twittling my thumbs :). Seems like what you are talking about is exactly something I was concerned about. We don’t do huge 2Tb dmg’s for our FCPX workflow, we use smaller project specific dmg’s with media referenced to a central location on the NAS. It’s rocking along pretty well three months in.

Anyways, once the new imacs FINALLY get here in December we’ll probably try a single machine with multi-users and see how that fares. The NAS is great and makes potential workflows like this possible on multiple client machines, assuming people don’t do stupid things like save important project files to their desktop.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Awesome! I kicked a Cow legend! Great talking to you too Bob. Thanks for the help!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Thanks Bob, I think what I’m trying to ask is, if I want multiple users on the same machine as different login accounts but all being able to access the Mac Mini Server (using the Sonnet Tb Expansion Chassis), they can all use the same server information per client system (edit1, using your example, which is actually what we use as well). I wasn’t sure if there would be a problem with multiple users using the same server credentials.

Thanks!

[John Davidson]

All on one iMac
-Promise Pegasus, never been unplugged or anything in a year. Electricity might have gone out once or twice, but it’s always on and always ‘there’.
-BMG Ultra Studio Express – No problems. It’s always just on.
-Ethernet adapter goes into the Promise connected to a NAS. No problems with that either.

Tb is awesome. I can’t wait till everything is set up for it.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.