Mike Cohen
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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The White House has actually done a good job using video to propagate their, er, propaganda. They also have a nice visual style, uniform fonts etc. I noticed that during the health care summit a few weeks ago the name cards on the tables even followed the same design guidelines as the website.
Mike Cohen
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Just know what you are getting into. Ask a lot of questions. If you are only being asked to bid on the videos, not the programming, there should be a producer or project manager giving you directions.
And there is usually a committee involved at an advisory or approval level, so be prepared for lots of cooks standing around the chowder pot.
Mmm, chowder. With potatoes, fresh clams and cream. Is it Summer yet? Meet me in Niantic.
Oh, sorry, were we talking about business?
Having done a few public safety projects, the moral of the story is, know what you are getting into before you are into it.
For all you know they use some proprietary thing they bought decades ago. Also look up SCORM compliance – most government work needs to be SCORM compliant.
Mike Cohen
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I don’t use the Premiere multi-cam editing feature because it does weird things with the audio.
I just add a motion effect to all sources so they appear in a grid. Then whenever I want to make a cut, I just razor all tracks with a keyboard shortcut.
Make sure you name your tracks based upon the camera angle (Tom, Bob, Sue vs Cam 1,2,3) for ease in editing later.
Then after you play through the program, making your cuts, you go back and manually trim each edit, and either delete the clips you don’t need, or make those tracks invisible. I move the selected shot to the uppermost track, and make all lower tracks invisible, thus retaining all unused shots, at least for the first edit. If there are shots of no value whatsoever these can be deleted.
The sequence is a mess at this point, but it is your first cut.
Make sure to save an unaltered sequence before starting your edit.
Playing 7 streams in real time will be next to impossible unless you are using the WOPR, so you will be in draft playback and still struggling most likely.
Hope this helps.
Mike Cohen
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The problem is that it is FLV. Try f4V – still a compressed format but the h.264 may yeild better results than the FLV encoding which is kind of old at this point.
If you export an AVI, DV or animation codec, do the images hold up?
Also, export at native size, so when you make the video full screen, as flash video is generally displayed, you are starting with the best image resolution possible.
Depending upon your application, you can vary the bit rate.
Mike Cohen
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download the free utility “bulk rename utility” – just google it – saves me countless hours.
You can not only add or change extensions, but change the names, replace characters etc. I use it a lot when working with powerpoint slides. They all come out as Slide1.BMP, Slide2.BMP etc – I add a prefix, such as Jones_ to the lot of files in a lot less time.Mike Cohen
PS – This is a PC utility.
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[Aaron Cadieux] “The spot is actually for Tape/film to DVD transfer services”
Unfortunately Walmart, Costco and Target have killed this once lucrative small business service. $1000 seems like a lot to pay per month for a service that might fetch you $50 per job.
Mike
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Sounds like a question for the US Dept of Commerce. They track imports exports of most items of value, such as steel, beef, lumber, dead horses (I am not making this up).
https://www.stat-usa.gov/tradtest.nsf
Mike Cohen
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I agree with Mark here. If you are advertising your production business on local cable – how many viewers of tv in general are potential customers for video services? I would say one out of 1000 at best. If you do weddings or bar mitzvah’s, maybe 1 of out 328 or so. But I guess it is worth a try if you have the money to burn.
As for the quoted price, you basically say “I want to buy 1 month, not 6 months” and leave it at that. No one likes an over aggressive sales person, but there are a lot of them out there.
Mike Cohen
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I am envisioning Herve Villechaize on a motorcycle, but that reference may be lost on younger viewers.
Mike Cohen
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I too have never heard of Tyler Perry – sounds like the love child of two members of Aerosmith.
Was the quote mentioned something said as Academy Awards patter? The presenters just read what they are given on the prompter. We should be blaming the writers of the show. Personally I did not watch the Oscars – much easier to check the web in the morning and get all the info in like 30 seconds.
Editing is storytelling. Whether you are editing picture, sounds, effects, copy, motion graphics or sound design – you are helping to tell the story. Show me a best picture nominee without fantastic editors in all of these departments.
Software is guaranteed to change every decade – the craft of editing remains. Perhaps new tools can make editing tasks better/different/more variable/faster/slower/whatever but if you can’t tell a story then all the buttons in the world are not going to help you or your project.
I have edited on 7 different systems over the years (13 if you count software versions of Premiere) but the end goal remains the same – making the final product.
That’s my contribution to this editors’ manifesto.
Mike Cohen
PS – I googled Tyler Perry and I still can’t figure out what’s so special about him.