Mike Cohen
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Take the full time job. It’s 2011 in case you forgot – you take the job if it is offered and there is nothing else on offer. It’s not for the rest of your life if you don’t want it to be.
You have freelance clients? Great. Is the freelance work enough to keep you in milk, bread, netflix and baby formula on a consistent basis? If not, take the full time job.
You’re a video guy? Great, then you must be a whiz at Photoshop which you can use to create print ads and website content. Go for it.
If you hate it, so be it. Do you like having a roof over your head and heat in the winter?
Sorry to sound like your father, but I do tend to talk like my father.
Good luck.
Mike Cohen
PS – Now your current and future employers know your story.
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I love reading or listening to the less well known moments of well known missions. Everyone knows “Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed”, but not many people are familiar with “Buzz, this is Neal. The space toilet is full, think we’d better open the window.”
Seriously, there was a lot of minutiae that the public was not aware of. This is a fantastic resource.
Thanks for letting us know.
Mike Cohen
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This thread is why the COW rocks!
Mike Cohen
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Not sure your shoot has happened yet but here is my input. All of my shoots are a plane ride away.
Rent lights if you are by yourself. Airline baggage handlers and light kits don’t mix. You can get a set of kinos or an Arri softvank kit for under $200/day in most big cities.
Plan for the unexpected.
Don’t go to Home Depot for anything involving lights. You’re not shooting an indie zombie movie in your mom’s backyard.
Have a plan and share with your client.
Assume nothing.
Shooting during business hours can be problematic. We once shot 11pm to 3am in a hospital as that was the only quiet time.
I hope your 2 grand is your shoot and travel budget not the whole thing. Ir is this a “free” local cable ad?
Safety first. If running lights and audio in an active business don’t forget sandbags and gaffer tape.
Don’t cross the streams.
Goid luck.
Mike Cohen
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[Mark Suszko] “The information I found most interesting though, was when he told me the shooters at his station don’t actually shoot HD with the P2, they only shoot SD in 16:9. When I asked why, he said that in HD mode the P2 only gave him about 15 minutes of running time, whereas in SD, he could run all day on one pair.”
We run into this issue in hospitals (not with P2 but with limited record times). Many operating rooms have $50K+ recording devices attached to their HD medical scopes. However the included tiny hard drives only hold 30 minutes of HD video, so they use high def cameras and then record SD 4:3 MPG2 and burn to a DVD or copy to memory stick. Some newer models let you plug in a USB hard drive but it is the same concept – sort of.
Mike Cohen
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When you are slow you double your efforts to not be slow. Sounds like you are making the most of your time,
Mike Cohen
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While we are currently shooting HDV (I could not imagine doing a typical two-day 3-camera run and gun shoot where we come home with upwards of 20 hours of tape) using P2 or SxS. We’d need an extra person just to wrangle the data not to mention the media costs. Yeah, I know you pay for the time to capture the tape, but that goes on mostly in the background on a dedicated capture station.
Our next camera will likely be P2 or XDCAM EX.
Mike Cohen
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We use Firstcom. They are expensive but every time I evaluate other options I always come back to them for the selection and the type of music we like. They have discontinued CDs and now have a web based search engine which is quite clunky to use.
Mike Cohen
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Every internet forum site has a culture
The culture at the COW, in my opinion is:
1. Old timers are happy to help anyone who asks a logical question, and who accepts the answer or provides more details if requested. I will happily choose to view newbie questions, because I have been a newbie with about 12 different editing systems in my career and I know how these folks are feeling. Though I won’t necessarily answer questions for which a simple search of the site would reveal the answers. In fact very often when you google a problem your top results take you to the COW anyway.
2. The nature of some questions from newbies and sometimes from middle-timers who have perhaps just been burned or who have had too many 5 hour energy servings or who have just broken been kicked off their friend’s sofa can be frustrating to deal with. For example:
Original post:
Hi. I’m trying to convince a client that I should charge him $1 million for the raw footage. I’m within my rights because the client is XYZ Corp and they are loaded.
Thanks
Joe BaloneyResponse 1:
Joe. Are you kidding? What’s your contract say?Joe:
What’s a contract?Response 2:
OMG.Joe:
Dude, like just answer my question already. Why won’t you help me out here, I’ve been nothing but nice.Response 3:
Joe. I very nicely told you that you should have a contract if you are going to dispute something with a client. How was that offensive?Joe:
I hate this site.3. Newbies who break the norms of forum etiquette. For example:
Original post:
Hi. Can someone take a look at my reel?time passes
Email in my in-box:
Hi. I enjoy your blogs. Can you look at my real?
Thanks
Ernie BertramMy reply:
Ernie
Thanks for the compliment. Please post this on the COW.
MikeSee what I mean? We like newbies and I think the word newbie is a bit derogatory. (911 what’s your emergency? Your mum’s not breathing? Hmm, this is pretty easy to solve, just google it newbie. Please call back if you have something more advanced like a black widow bite or a lacerated spleen…ok not really the same thing (I’m in the 5-hour energy category at the moment)
But some newbie questions are either too easy to merit their own thread because they have been asked before, or the OP questions the responses or is looking for some kind of confirmation that they are a good person. I would suggest a psychologist.
Should we triage users automatically? Not sure. I’m sure that will get some criticism when it drops but we’ll see. It will tidy up the popular forums (keeping the “what cheap camera should I buy for my brother’s bar-mitzvah” questions out of the Premiere Pro forum for example).
I too wish there was a forum like these when I was a lad. I luckily had a tv studio engineer to hang out with and learn technical jargon, but it would have been helpful to have a message board for the Chyron VP1, Microtime DVE and that newfangled format known as S-VHS!
Long live the COW.
Mike Cohen
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cool – I never noticed that