Mike Cohen
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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What Mark said!
Here’s the cake we made today – I’ll send you all a slice. I wonder if a tv show about cake decorating would be popular.
Thanks for a great year.
Mike Cohen
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That’s what I would say. Shooting progressive and then exporting to interlaced could cause problems. Stick with progressive. Let the DVD player deal with interlacing should the end user have an analog tv.
Mike Cohen
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My new Win 7 workstation is on its way to Launch Complex 39A. Just filling the liquid oxygen external fuel tank and topping off the solid rocket boosters. Auxiliary power units on standby. Discovery is ready for takeoff.
Will report back once we get into orbit.Mike Cohen
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Since you have some planning time, you might think about doing a dry run, say 10 minutes of some event – even your friends running around on the field – then take the footage into post and figure out how you would want an actual game to look, and figure out what works and what doesn’t. You might even post the practice run into final form and present that to your professor as a proof of concept. That would show you take a logical approach rather than jumping into the deep end head first. Once you have your prototype, you will have a better idea of how to plan for the main event.
Check out some of these search results:
Mike Cohen
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This has been addressed before but I’d be interested in opinions. Assuming you videotape the wedding as it happens, and you on-cam mic picks up the music during the various dances, and you don’t replace that with the actual track from the CD. Is that still considered illegal by the music industry? I would say yes, but as soon as a wedding videographer is sued the whole industry will be threatened. What bride wants to view her wedding dance with her husband without the actual song she danced to?
Mike Cohen
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Years ago the local equivalent of Barney Fife came into the office with a VHS tape from the local fillin’ station. A local yout had pumped gas and dashed off without paying. The car was caught on grainy black and white video, but from the roof. I was asked if I could enhance the image. At the time we were using Sorenson Squeeze on the Mac, which had a function whereby it could take the average of several frames of video and build a better new image, taking the best parts from each frame. Amazingly we were able to see absolutely nothing useful in the resulting image.
I was able to sharpen and lighten the image so we could make out the approximate make and model of the car. The resulting APB read:“Attention all units in the vicinity of Shell on Main St. Be on the lookout for a late model blue, red, silver or beige 2-door or 4-door Chevy, Ford or Pontiac car. License plate contains letters or numbers. Suspect is a male or female and is to be considered armed (or not) and dangerous (probably not).”
Mike Cohen
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just shot a few min of video today for the first time – I see why people buy the Zacuto or other shoulder mounts with the follow focus wheel – it is near impossible to hand hold and manual focus without a lot of shake. Most likely a tripod camera for me. Results are pretty sharp image otherwise. We got a Zoom recorder too.
Mike Cohen
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We got our Samsungs in the office today. Thanks Chad.
I have to laugh when to this day I see the magic version of photoshop still being used on tv cop shows. Lie to Me, a decent show, does this all the time. On a recent episode they zoomed in on a glass window and saw the exact facial expression reflected from someone nearby. Amazing. And of course such zooming can only be activated by lots of furious typing, with each keystroke accompanied by a beep.
Mike Cohen
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Here are some things we have learned with a nod to your site:
Don’t use images for navigation. Your main navigation is images, and your contact info is an image. So when you google “Huntsville video production”, there is no text on your site that says Huntsville, so your likelihood of a high result is lower. You should never have to click more than once to find the address and phone number of a business. (our site requires one click – we are working on a major redesign as we speak).
If I then click Maps, you are the 5th listing on there, so that’s good.
As someone else pointed out, have page titles. All of your page titles are:
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
Better would be:
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc. – Portfolio
or lose the company name after the home page and go with:
Portfolio – View TV Commercials
Look at Creative COW’s home page. The title is not simply Creative COW. Rather it is Creative COW: Creative Communities of the World.
Be descriptive – Google likes descriptive.
As for posting to YouTube and elsewhere, it doesn’t hurt. Here are my 2009 link referrals in site visits:
YouTube: 280
Creative COW Magazine Article on Surgical Video Production: 150
Facebook: 112
Creative COW forums/blog: 150
Creative COW Services: 15It should be no surprise now that I spend a lot of time on this website – it is good for business.
Finally, have compelling content – be it a blog about what you do – or descriptive text about your services – the more relevant text the better for you because the more likely Google is to spend time indexing your site and the more likely you are to have content that people are looking for.
Granted our site is also a catalog of products, but there have been over 20,000 different keyword searches this year taking people to our site. Why? We have a lot of words. But we have words that people are looking for.
And we are adding new words all the time. Know of another site that is adding lots of words to its content all the time? Creative COW, that’s who!
If you do AdWords, as Ron cautioned, choose your words carefully. See which words result in a hit via organic Googling. No need to pay for what you can get for free. But if there is a word that has a lot of competition, you may consider paying for it. And then of course you need to see if you are getting a return on your investment – but AdWords is a marketing expense for most people.
We also do e-marketing using Constant Contact. We send our past customers timely email updates for our latest relevant products and services. And we do so in a polite way – no more than one message per time period to any mailing list. We get few opt-outs, because these are current customers, and we actually get some business.
Of course if you don’t have such a list of leads, then you need to get people to sign up for your mailings, and seek out people in the community to sign up for your list. That can be part of your selling process.
If you place videos on your website, use a video site map – this associates key words with your videos so they show up in searches. i think. We are investigating how this works.
Mike Cohen
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to answer your question, if you have 16:9 DV, edit as a 16:9 DV sequence. If you bring 16:9 DV into an HD sequence and scale to frame size it is going to look like rubbish. If you have the specs for the broadcaster that will tell you what you need to do. However if the local station requires HD spots, you may be SOL. However most local stations in my area flip flop from HD to SD spots, and just play the SD spot out the HD feed.
Report back with specs and we can help.
Mike Cohen