[Mark Suszko]

The name “creative”, especially in LA and NYC is a very common one for production or editing or effects companies to use as part of their business name, because they are in fact a creative service.

The blue cow people will argue that our beloved COW is an acronym in caps for Community Of The World and only a “cow” in abstract. It helps our case that Ron has the face of a cow in his logos, establishing prior art, but the difference is probably enough to stand up in court. A lawyer could be more accurate about it but just from my casual reading of the topic of infringement, they are different enough to skate here.

I say let ’em.

I think the better part of valor here is to politely but firmly insist on some disclaimer language discreetly placed in the web site and maybe on any brochures “Blue Cow Creative is not affiliated with CreativeCOW.net”, and leave it at that. Take the high road. They might change the name themselves if they get enough confusion from clients and have to keep explaining that no, they ain’t us.

Secondly, if this is a small company, odds are this problem will solve itself in a year or three: small companies in our biz form, grow, merge, or die off with mayfly-like life spans.
LA is a town where people steal ideas for a living. They will change just enough of your original idea so a judge will consider it unique and there is little you can do about any of it. Don;t waste lawyer fees on this past the suggested disclaimer in the interests of eliminating any confusion.

And believe it or not, great as this community is, there are plenty of people doing video who still have not heard of it. These mopes may be one of them. Best to go in with a calm face and a smile and assume ignorance first, than to go in guns blazing right off the bat anyway, since this is a legal issue.

[Mark Suszko]

Well there are a couple things going on here. I like a lot of what’s been said already, so I won’t repeat it. What I’m sensing maybe is that very normal middle-age panic that all men start to feel where the needs to make the money and the need to fulfill oneself artistically can collide. Grinner’s ongoing saga covers this well over in the Editing forum, and I wish him every success.

Maybe the problem for this guy is he’s looking at the projects he does as either-or and not of his choosing. What if he was to take a portion of his time for a personal project and sink his creativity into that to the hilt, while still paying some bills doing less creatively strenuous things for his ex-partner? He’s happiest being an editor, not a businessman or salesman. There is nothing wrong with this if he can find someone to handle those issues for him. We’re short on Medici’s now, but maybe the old partner will bankroll a special project like a theatrical film, an indie of some type, in exchange for profit sharing?

They say a change is as good as a rest: working on such a project, even if still in the same home studio, may stretch unused creative muscles in new ways.

[Mark Suszko]

Do you want only a printer, or a machine that makes the actual copies as well as then prints on them? Or a regular paper document printer that can also print on disks for occasional use?

Do you want thermal printing or inkjet?

Thermals are fast, and don’t smudge if your disc gets moist or is handled by wet fingers, but IMO inkjets have better color reproduction, particularly for photos of people and the like, and the ink is cheaper than the thermal colors. The cost per unit is always a moving target.

Think about ink: a ribbon-based machine or a single-cartridge ink tank machine means if the design for a disk is heavy in one color, that color runs out first and you throw away an ink cartridge or ribbon that may still be half full. Multi-tank inks, where you can replace just the short one of 3 or 4 colors, are a better value long term. If you stick to mostly B&W, or leave a lot of white space in the disc label design, you save even more.

Both formats require dedicated blank media: you can’t print inkjet on thermal stock at all, and thermal printing on inkjet disks doesn’t work very well. The blanks look identical except inkjets are slightly matte-finished, and thermals are more shiny.

We do both kinds at our shop, for small runs of 1-50 at a time, we really like the Bravo Primero Pro inkjet duplicator/printer: it has a small footprint, runs well with a PC or a mac, is pretty fast for a two-drive machine, good price. Rimage and Microboards are similar competitors. For runs of more than a hundred, we tend to use a dedicated self-contained Microboards tower replicator (no PC hookup required) with 10 drives and a stand-alone robotic thermal printer from Rimage with a rotating tray that can thermal print 200 at a time. The Microboards tower is blazing fast, the down side is every eight minutes or so you have to empty and re-feed it by hand. The Bravo is much slower by comparison and needs a computer hooked into it, but you can set it and forget it for as long as it takes to make 50 copies and go edit or do something else productive.

The accuracy of color between RGB video and CMYK print is always a gamble: one is additive color, the other, subtrractive and usually you’re in the ball park for color using white coated disks, but if your clients demand pantone-digit-level color accuracy, you’ll have to do some test runs and adjust color settings in the printer or in the images while in photoshop to compensate for what the printer output looks like.

Some HP and Lexmark document printers have trays that allow you to run CD’s and DVD’s thru the printer as if they were single sheets of paper. This may be okay of you only do one or two disks a week, but I would never suggest it for more than that.

I think it’s the Dymo people that make a tiny thermal printer that only makes a tiny B&W label on disks as you slide them thru like a credit card. About $50 at an office supply store. Not really for distribution use but for neatness when making in-house archives and you want something better than a sharpie pen.

Never use stick-on labels on DVD’s or CD’s, that was never a good idea.

[Mark Suszko]

Do these mics require phantom power?

Be wary when you’re going from balanced to unbalanced: if you cut one “leg”, you’re losing half the signal.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking instead of cutting up your wireless stuff, even the $20 wired lav at Radio Shack is useable for some things.

[Mark Suszko]

Pixels are not actually “fixed” with these procedures you know: the dead camera sensor pixel just has image data from an adjacent good pixel mapped over it. This takes memory and once you have too many dead pixels for the limited memory onboard the CCD to store coordinates on, the new dead pixels remain visible. On the plus side: If you edit on a mac, there is a cheap plug-in fix in post downloadable from the fine Brits at Digitalheaven.

[Mark Suszko]

There is a wonderful book you must go buy at Amazon right now, it’s out of print but still available there.

https://www.amazon.com/Scriptwriting-High-Impact-Videos-Imaginative-Information/dp/0534150667/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196654685&sr=1-1

John Morley:

“Scriptwriting for High-Impact Videos: Imaginative Approaches to Delivering Factual Information”

ISBN-10: 053415066

If you could distill an entire graduate course in how to make good corporate videos into a few pages, this would be the textbook. Morley is to Corporate scriptwriting what Syd Field is to Hollywood movie scriptwriting. But the book is more than writing the script, it covers every step before and after. Buy this and read it and follow it and you will be years and dollars ahead of the rest of us that learned these things “on the street” in the “school of hard knocks”.

[Mark Suszko]

Be sure you are really nice, reasonable and easy talking to the station guy, and think about a tactful way to suggest that they can sub out some production to you if they need to.

Station then tells car guy they can’t run your old spots. You’ll either get paid or not for them if the car guy likes them enough to get them “out of hock”. If it’s a “no” for that, then the station will offer to make him some new spots. They either then do that themselves (no big loss to you) or you volunteer to do them for the station (because you have all this raw footage ready to go) for a small markup and revenge, served cold with an invoice the STATION will now collect for you.

They and you would probably want to send a different guy to shoot new inserts and stand-ups, though, otherwise the grift is revealed:-)

(“I love it when a plan comes together… let’s drive, B.A.”)

[Mark Suszko]

And just one more point on that: what matters with my ploy is that the car dealer *thinks* he could lose access to airing the spots. Just the bluff that you could mess up his access could be enough. Like I said, it is all a game of numbers to these types, so like Keanu in “Speed“, you have to “change the equation”.

[Mark Suszko]

You yourself said it could work, Nick, nobody specified it had to avoid collateral damage….:-)

I disagree with my esteemed colleague in that the station is to be feared. Stations forgive all, as long as invoices are paid timely and complete. Stations usually have very good lawyers on call and these guys make sure the station’s contracts are solid. So you are not likely to see them have the same problems as D here.

I take the position that if the car crook is scamming the producer, he’s probably already not a favorite client of the Tv station either, because likely he’s also stringing them along as far as he can.

D making himself a “problem” for the station could be mitigated by the fact the station can use the excuse to upsell the car dealer on new spots… and there is no reaason D could not work with the station to do those spots with an apropriate markup… so the station wins either way. The station itself becomes the final bottleneck to the car dealer getting what he wants: airtime.

Finally, if we’re talking about word of mouth, you must also consider what kind of rep he’d have if the market knows he’s a pushover. Either way with the car guy, this guy’s not getting much of a referral for other business. His house could become Grinder Central, with every client thinking they can get stuff and not pay.

Yes, he can walk away from this now, and chalk it up to tuition in the school of life. Nobody would fault him for that. That’s probably the Christian thing to do.

But if you are going to fight, then I say you fight with everything you got, or don’t fight at all.

[Mark Suszko]

Bob is right on.

You said “online broadcast”. In addition to the AV company bringing in the camera gear, wiring, and etc. to shoot it, you are going to need a service to host the streaming video to a wide audience. Otherwise, only a handful will be able to see it streamed off your own comuter.

If you lack expertise in this, best to call up one of the big internet streaming hosting & provisioning outfits like Akamai or the like to arrange enough bandwidth for your audience. You may or may not have enough budget for this, depending on just how many people you expect to be able to see this on their computers. From what little I understand about such hosting, you basically “guess” at how many simultaneous viewers will watch the stream, they will quote you a rate based on that, with additional charges based on if more people than expected get on and require increased capacity thru more servers, reflector sites, etc. They will be able to show you logs to prove how many streams were served.

You are right that you don’t have alot of time to figure this all out, so hiring an events managing company or PR firm with events experience would probably be the best way to go on such short notice this time. Shadow what they do so you can do it yourself next time. They can hire the Av crews and set up the streaming services faster, and just tell you the time without you needing to first build the clock. One-stop shopping.