Joseph W. bourke
Forum Replies Created
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Part of it depends on what you quoted on the project. That frustration may come in part from realizing you quoted too low a price for what you’re giving the client.
The other part of it may be that since you’re new to the process, you’re not maximizing your time, and you may not know a lot of the tricks and shortcuts which come with experience.
As an Art Director of fourteen years at a broadcast station, I often spent weeks creating a new open for a special which might run for a week. I remember many times calling my wife in to see it air, only to have her miss it, since it was only ten seconds long. You just have to remember that all television is disposable – and keep getting part of your reward from the challenge of being in over your head. Of course, the money doesn’t hurt, either.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Angelo –
I don’t know about Audition, but After Effects has had this feature for years, called “Collect Files”. I don’t know whether you get the Creative Cow Magazine, but in the July/August 2011 issue I wrote an article titled Managing Broadcast Assets with Adobe Bridge, which talks not only about Bridge, but also about setting up a naming system so that multiple users can access it, and find files quickly, as well as using the Project Manager and the Collect Files features.
I used the Collect Files feature in AE on every project, and it enabled our graphics department to quickly move projects around to work on in different shifts. While there aren’t quite as many options to Collect Files as there are in PPro’s Project Manager, it does the job quite well.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
You’re right, Walter. And there’s a big difference in how Apple and Adobe work with their users. Apple keeps all their cards close to their vest, and apparently doesn’t listen much to their user base.
Adobe puts it all out there for people to see (check out Labs.Adobe.com and you’ll see what I’m talking about) with their Labs website. If you’re looking for the roadmap, Adobe lets you look over their shoulder. If you want an Apple roadmap, you have to have the keys to the corner office.
I’d much rather have a good idea of where the technology behind my livelihood is, than to have to play twenty questions, and never get an answer.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
The first thought which comes to mind is making a montage out of a single still, but with multiples of that still colorized in different tones. Layouts can vary, and by animating them in After Effects, you can have one still as a “train” of pictures, drifting montages in 3D space, or whatever you can imagine.
The second is making a “3D” version of the still in Photoshop, by cutting various elements (the shot would need elements within it which would lend themselves to being cut out – person, car, grouping of things, etc.), then retouching the background to fill in the cutout, and bringing it in to After Effects. Then move the elements on the z-space, and you’ve got “3D”.
Here are a couple of other ideas which could be tried:
https://www.adobe.com/designcenter/photoshop/articles/lrvid4006_ps.htmlThe third is using displacement maps drawn in Photoshop to make a 2D image “3D”. Here’s a tutorial on this amazing effect:
https://lesterbanks.com/2010/09/3d-from-2d-images-using-displacement-maps-in-after-effects/
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
I hope you’re posting this to the Adobe features request page:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform
They do listen…
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Shawn –
Maybe re-thinking your workflow a bit might help things along. For fourteen years (up until 2009) I was Art Director at a broadcast facility which put out five daily newscasts, a daily half-hour magazine format show, and daily promotions. I was responible for producing eighty to ninety percent of the graphics packages for these. On any given day, they might have included animated lower thirds, over the shoulder graphics, chips and snipes (animated), full opens, bumps, rejoins, and other keyable animations.
I created all of these with a combination of After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and 3DS Max, and delivered anything keyable as Quicktime, Animation, highest quality with alpha. I just dropped the elements in a carefully titled folder, and everything worked like a charm. I know that it’s nice to have revisable projects nested within the editing timeline, but this could work as well.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Here’s the method – it works equally well in Premiere and After Effects. In Premiere, it’s called Project Manager, in AE, Collect Files.
It allows you to trim down your project, and put only what you’ve used (even trimmed, if you want – it will tell you the project trimmed size, as well). Lots of useful options:
https://layersmagazine.com/using-the-project-manager-in-premiere-pro.html
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Victor –
What Walter says is right on the money. Start thinking about your video projects the way you might think about a printing project, for example. You have your plate (many of which are digital or paper these days), which is used as the master copy. You would never send it out, or have someone try to read it. It is merely the master, from which distribution copies are made.
Along the same lines, you want your master copy of the video purely to be used as the source from which your distribution copies are made. When I’m doing a project, I create my master at 1920 x 1080, Quicktime Animation, Uncompressed, then I create the approval and distribution copies, usually at 640 x 360 and 320 x 180, if the client is putting them on a website. On my i7, with 16GB of RAM, the master stutters and locks up so that I can’t even watch it. Even at 640 x 360, with the wrong encoding, you can end up with a file which will stutter on most computers. It’s a tradeoff between file size and quality; you want the best looking video at the smallest file size.
Here’s a link which will give you way more information than you probably want, but it’s an education on a single page:
https://www.adobe.com/devnet/video/encoding.html
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
It all depends on the market where you live, because you will be competing with those in your market for local work, and the market worldwide, given that you can put up a website.
I would suggest that you come up with an hourly rate, based on the cost of your equipment and software, your overhead (office rental, electricity, and other fixed expenses), and what you think you’re worth. Then when someone calls you for a quote, you can figure out what you are going to charge for the project. Just telling someone what you charge an hour can sometimes scare them away. If they know what you charge an hour, plus how many hours it will take you (roughly, at least), then they can plan on what the cost will be.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Can you imagine what that would do to the price of the videographer/stringer, who shoots for a living? Suddenly anyone who has a phone is a stringer (which is actually the case for local news in any market – if you’ve got video, the station wants it!), and the value of having the news footage shot in a quality manner is trumped by the fact that there are thousands of stringers, virtually everywhere, who are willing to give away the footage, just for that 10 seconds of fame (if that). And given the disposability of the news product, that’s just where it’s going…
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com