[Mike Cohen]

we have a person who is in charge of managing the project schedules, and is updated regarding milestones met or missed, and she tracks this in Excel (when we remember to tell her!)

If you do not have a full time person at your disposal, I like the wiki idea and we are waiting for some downtime expected in 2011 to try this out 🙂 Or try using a free online forum service. We tried that years ago and it would have been effective if not for the pushback from the IT department…so we fired the IT department!

Seriously, my dream is to have a customized web-based tracking system with simple drop down menus, for a one-page global view of projects, and each person logs in when they complete a task.

If our current web guy gets some free time maybe he will build this. Shouldn’t be too hard for someone with good php skills.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

FYI – They are not allowed to ask your age, sex, marital status, religion, health status or favorite color in an interview.

As far as being overqualified, I would follow the advice of others and send a nice thank you note, reiterating your experience and willingness to work freelance. If they fail to hire someone with your chops for edgy editing, they may find themselves in a pinch and need your talents.

You need to learn, over time, to ignore personal jabs from other people. Even something seemingly positive like “you’re overqualified” can hurt.

Good Luck.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

let me add that it depends what full screen is. Full screen at 800×600 will look better than full screen at 1024×768 and on up. My display is 1600×1200, anything short of Quicktime HD does not look great full screen.
I have seen some good full screen video using DIVX, however most people do not have DIVX player.
Quicktime MP4 or H.264 can give very good results, but fewer people have Quicktime than you might think.
The new Flash Player 9+ supposedly plays MP4, so we are eagerly waiting for that to equalize the playing field for online video, and allow us to use MP4.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

I came to this forum today to post a similar issue. I use Compression Suite 4.5 on a PC – Core 2 Duo, 2 gig ram.
Rendering of most formats out of Premiere 2.0 is appropriately fast or slow depending upon the codec.

in Squeeze, I have the following issues:

1. When using a watch folder, the first file compresses, but gets stuck at 99% and does not continue.

2. Individual files, regardless of the codec, take a lifetime. Even going from a WAV to an MP3 takes a half hour – saving out of sound forge takes like a minute.

3. RealVideo, Windows Media and MP4 all have the slow/freeze issue.

I have not yet tried reinstalling, wanted to see if others have similar problems.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

As I think the now second newest person here, welcome Todd. May you impart wisdom to us all in a way which exemplifies the wisdom imparting goodness of all things wise and impartingable.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

I am in a unique position in that I work for a production company (we bill net 30 – 50% up front or after the shoot – 50% upon completion of project. If shooting only, we bill 100% after shoot, but send the tapes asap whenever possible. We trust our clients to pay.)

However we also use crews around the country, for either last minute jobs or overflow, or situations where it does not make sense to fly my whole staff somewhere. In these cases, we either pay with a credit card up front in full, or get billed 100% net 30 after shoot. In all cases, tapes are shipped overnight after shoot, or handed over if I am present.

If you will sleep better having 60% deposit before a shoot, that’s fine. But when you get a call at 7am for a shoot later that day, don’t count on any money changing hands in that short timeframe.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

I have to agree with this post from beenyweenies. I encounter clients even here in 2007 who have any of the following issues:

1. Windows Media Player 7
2. Flash player version 6
3. No media player
4. A DVD-ROM drive but no DVD player software.
“can you make a DVD that plays in a CD-ROM drive?” actual question.
5. Firewall preventing any media and/or downloads.
6. Inability to understand “right click to download file”

We too created a flash and php based client review system. Most clients love it, a few don’t “get” it and a few have one of the above issues.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

I have done one project in multicam mode and had a horrible experience. Granted this was on my older computer, but the audio is the worst part, as you only get the mixed audio from the original sequence, or audio follows video, which is usually no good if you shot something like a live event.
I had to export a mixed-down WAV and use that for my multicam audio.

If you are pressed for time, try this:

I prefer to do a multicam edit by lining up my video on multiple tracks, then shrink each video so you see them all at once, such as in a quad view.

Then watch your program and add a user mark wherever you want an edit.
Then go to each user mark and razor all tracks.
Then select which shot you want and make that clip full screen and either delete the others or make them opacity 0%.

It seems like more work than the multicam, but if you are in a pinch it may be a better way to go.

Good luck.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

A few times a year a client requests on-site editing. Normally this is tweaking only, so I can use my HP laptop and it is enough to get some final edits and maybe record a narration.

If a client really wants to do major editing, they should be encouraged to visit your studio.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

We started posting videos and other media files to our client website in 2002, but really ramped up this process in the last 18 months.

Our latesxt incarnation has been a game-changer of our own. The changed game is more than just saved shipping costs, but includes satisfied clients who can see revisions within 24 hours or less, and slightly easier for project management as some of the manual labor of tracking comments is automated.

Whether one uses Media Batch, another application or proprietary software as we do, changing work processes to save time and increase client satisfaction is money well spent.

While it is true that some corporate clients do not grasp the “right-click to download” concept, just as some people are not familiar with alt-tab or other “basic” computer functions, most of our clients find it very easy to click on a e-mailed url, login with the supplied password and download files from a basic index.php page.

Lately we have been using e-mail addresses for logins, so people do not need to remember a password, and the database records logins.

Last year we created a content review website of our own, because we needed a way for people to review documents images and flv videos all in one session. Comments on all pieces of media are saved to a database and immediately displayed for others to see.

We simply put a time-code burn on the FLV video and people can easily type the timecode numbers into their comments.

The document review feature was especially important. If you have a half dozen people reviewing a document, options are either send everyone a Word doc, then you need to compare all of the revised documents manually. Another option is to use a separate service such as Writely or Writeboard, but it is a separate application and not as easy to manage. With our system, we simply open the original word doc, then display the comments from the database which are sorted by user and date. It is always being improved.

Mike Cohen