[Mike Cohen]

Let us hope that the aforementioned young people who visit the COW for career advice read some of these great pieces of advice.

While watching The Cleaner, my wife asked me “Why are they doing this picture in picture thing – it looks stupid…?”

I told her “To me it seems like a lazy way of editing dialogue. Also, editing systems make this very easy to do.”

Let us not forget Jeff Goldblum’s famous line from Jurassic Park “Instead of asking if we could[clone dinosaurs], did anyone ask if we should[no, we shouldn’t]?

Interesting responses.

Mike

PS – I too have non-fond memories of doing multiple picture in picture effects using just a 1 channel ADO and multiple passes of tape!

[Mike Cohen]

Ron
So sorry for your loss.
Loss is the part of life we wish we could avoid, but it is felt because of the strong love we have for those we miss. To have loved or nurtured is a blessing.

These very old lyrics give me comfort in such times as these:

Though the days are long,
Twilight sings a song,
Of the happiness that used to be;
Soon my eyes will close,
Soon I’ll find repose,
And in dreams you’re always near to me.

I’ll see you in my dreams,
Hold you in my dreams;,
Someone took you out of my arms,
Still I feel the thrill of your charms!,

Lips that once were mine,
Tender eyes that shine,
They will light my way tonight,
I’ll see you in my dreams!

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

Funny, I was just loggin in to post a similar question.
I have made hundreds of successful DVD menus in Encore.
Using CS3, with no motion menus, I get all the button navigation to work in Encore Preview.

But on the burned disc only the navigation on the first play menu works, on all other menus there is no functionality with either the mouse or a regular DVD player/remote.

This is after rebuilding the DVD due to an error which would not allow a disc image to be built.

Try making your menu static, just to see what happens.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

I would ask you to answer the following questions:

1. How are you marketing your videos? Your own website?

2. About how many of each product do you sell in an average month and how many products total. Or just answer, how many discs total do you expect to sell in a month?

3. How often are titles updated?

4. How much stock do you keep on your shelves to keep up with demand?

5. Given the costs of a self-duplicated DVD including label and packaging, and your own time spent building your inventory (this is a cost also) at what point are you losing money by doing this all yourself?

In other words, how does your time and materials spent relate to your profit/earnings?

Outside services have their drawbacks if low quantity and high profits are limiting factors.

We sell books that we publish ourselves. Some we sell through our own website and mail order catalogs.

Others we sell through book distributors, who have inroads with a specific audience (medical bookstores) and through Amazon and other generic book selling websites that have access to any book with an ISBN. Those methods buy the book from us at a discounted rate and mark it up to their customers, which is how nearly all retail works. Sure we make less per unit sold, but our discounted price still gives us some profit over our cost of goods.

Look at the big picture. I’m a fan of Excel – make a spreadsheet of your inputs and outputs and see how much you can stand to give up for the benefit of offloading some of your work and fulfillment. It may even out for you if you look at the overall net numbers.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

So I suppose that company in greater central CT that charges money to have the Little Mermaid wooden cutout on the front lawn wishing Uncle Bob a Happy 79th Birthday is a violation. It more than likely is.

I don’t know about you, but in the more rural parts of CT, I still see a lot of trucks with the peeing Calvin decal.

Then there is the urban legend of the dad who sent a videotape of his little girl doing her ballet recital to the music from Beauty and the Beast, and getting sued by Disney.

Your average non-media worker does not even think about copyright or intellectual property.

[Mike Cohen]

I thought that the author was confusing computerized motion control or multiplane cameras with computer animation, or as someone else said, the targeting computer and stolen plans animation.

It is actually pretty amazing how low tech the original Star Wars was, versus how incredible it looked on film. To think that movie was made for like 11 million dollars!

Anyway, the point of mentioning this was that inaccurate information, as wikipedia has been accused of, is a problem for young people who, from what I hear, are becoming lazy in terms of research.

[Mike Cohen]

try rendering a portion of the sequence
try exporting the whole sequence or a portion.
You may need to use trial and error to find the clip that is causing a problem.

Alternatively, make a new project and import the problem project into the new project.

Premiere’s vague error messages can be frustrating – i have posted my fair share of questions about these over the years.

[Mike Cohen]

Premiere 6.5’s best feature was the batch rendering. You could import files such as AVIs or you could import projects. Thus you could render your web or dvd files from your projects, without having to first export to AVI or some uncompressed format.

Granted, with CS3 and a fast processor, rendering with Media Encoder is much faster, but it would be good to render one sequence and work on another.

[Mike Cohen]

somewhat related – I was at my local library, flipping through a young adult book called “Computer Animation” which was on the new non-fiction shelf.

When discussing Star Wars (the 1977 version) I found these shocking quotes:

“It also set a very high benchmark for CGI, featuring sophisticated scenes of animation that were produced by the computer.”

and

“Lucas did merge several computer-animated scenes into the final print of the film. For example, in the closing minutes of the film the hero, Luke Skywalker, must navigate a jet fighter over the mechanical terrain of the Death Star on his way to dropping a torpedo into an exhaust port of the ship. The surface of the Death Star was generated by a computer; in the film, the terrain speeds by under Skywalker’s jet fighter as the hero evades enemy fighters. It took the computer animators a month to produce two minutes of footage; just forty seconds were used in the final cut of the film.”

later when discussing Empire Strikes Back:

“In the film, audiences were dazzled by the backgrounds surrounding the Cloud City, which were created through computer animation.”

and the final nail in the coffin:

“And then, in 1983, the third film in the series, Return of the Jedi, included even more CGI effects – some seven hundred images that made it into the final film were produced on the computer. ”

If this example, from a book written for young people, can have such inaccuracies, I can only imagine the drivel young people are getting fed in film school, or worse, from their local libraries!

Sure this is an extreme example. Perhaps the author, Hal Markovitz, is confusing the DVD special editions with the originals.

Ok, now I return the book to the library. Should I write the correct information in the margins..?

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

That’s pretty funny.