Mike Cohen
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Milton,
I checked out your website and see you have over 400 posts on the COW. Based upon what I have seen, you should know better.But you’re human, so this is your one allowed moment of weakness for the year.
How do you charge a client for an iTunes download? You “just say no.”
If the client insists and say “oh, this is just for our sales meeting” then say no again. In-house projects for private viewing will wind up on YouTube within a day. Then you have XYZ company name and WXY song synced up for eternity. Then if the company gets sued or a cease and desist, they will blame you. It is, after all, your job as a vendor to tell the client what they need, and to dissuade them from doing anything you wouldn’t.
As Peggy Olsen likes to say “the client doesn’t always know what’s best.”
But you as a vendor do.
If you are as up the river and paddle-free as you appear to be, then you have to talk to the guy who sold you the raft or abandon ship and start dogpaddling.
Good luck.
Mike Cohen
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The fact that you have come to the COW seeking advice for your future career shows that you have a good brain inside your head already!
Excel in your course work. And I mean be the best. Sometimes (always) college video assignments can be hokey and seemingly not useful, but if you have chosen the college route, then do your absolute best work.
Get access to the gear. I was the guy who knew the ins and outs of our studio and I had a part time job as a teaching assistant and studio assistant. The best part about this aside from the $5.50/hour was the magnetic key card that got me into the equipment room 24/7. Not only could I grab a camcorder at 3AM, but I was also the gatekeeper for 50 other students. That meant a lot of free meals at the dining hall.
If your instructors or the career office don’t have a line on local internships, get on the phone. And learn how to network. My sophomore year I took a no-credit adult ed course in the evenings put on by the advertising club of Hartford. One of the guest speakers was a big whig at the local CBS station. A few months later she got me an interview for an internship and that was my first one. 3 months at the news assignment desk was fun and I learned a lot, and learned that news was not necessarily for me. But that didn’t stop me from getting another internship at the much larger ABC station in Boston. There I had a lot more responsibility and actually got some videos I edited on the air. Simultaneous to this I was involved in starting a campus tv newscast.
The next summer I interned with a local cable advertising group, learning all about making 30 second local spots (the $250 or free spots that are discussed often in this forum). The final internship was with a high end corporate video company. We did work for some big Fortune 50 type companies and they had one of the first AVID systems in the region at the time.
In summary, find opportunities to learn everything, on your own time. As Mark said, don’t wait for a professor to pick you out of the crowd. There is a ton of useful material on the internet, but when you are first starting out, the best way to learn is by doing, and from spending time with people with more experience.
Good luck.
Mike Cohen
PS – When I was your age, we didn’t have the COW. We didn’t even have the Web. We had to find people and talk to them in person.
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[Jason Jenkins] “Sweet, another Speed Razor user! I thought it was some great software. I still miss some of its features. Running it on Windows NT… that’s a whole different story.
Jason Jenkins”
Yep, we evaluated the Radius Telecaster and the SpeedRazor system. While the Telecaster was hardware supported Premiere v. 2.0 perhaps, the SpeedRazor used a Targa 2000. Built-in Dolby surround encoding and a pretty robust feature set for 1996 made this too good to be true. Alas, even with RAID storage the data rates were still too high for 1996 Windows technology. But it was great for CD-ROM level video export (Cinepak or Indeo). And it doubled as a still store for the online bay until we got a proper Media 100 a few years later.
Ok kids, that’s your ancient technology discussion for today. Please join us next week as we describe D2 pre-read technology and we see live video of the self-threading 1″ machine!
Oh the good old days.
Mike Cohen
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I’m late to this party, but here is my answer:
Pay yourself first. Don’t make your hourly rate the hourly rate you pay yourself. You have to figure your prices based upon your business staying profitable, not just you paying the rent. In other words, if you take home $50/hour as a paycheck, add to that your overhead and profit. That is your actual hourly rate – multiply by the estimated hours, plus a shoot charge and now you’re talking.
You want your client to walk away happy, as opposed to just walking away. But make sure you are charging enough so YOU walk away happy too. If you bid low and wind up working 40 hours, making your hourly rate $10, then you lose.
A good rule of thumb in business, don’t lose!
Mike Cohen
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Tim, we have been a Firstcom customer for 20 years. Every 3 years I re-evaluate the alternatives and come up with the same conclusion – you get what you pay for.
Smartsound and Digital juice are always in the running, but a large selection of the exact type of music we need seals the deal. Buy-out libraries offer many genres and seem like a good deal, but most of the genres are inappropriate for the work we do.
If you take the political, movie-type themes, sports themes, heavy metal, guitar riffs, hip hop, calypso, world beat, olympic fanfares, classical, polka and other non-corporate type music out of the mix, we are left with several dozen discs of acoustic underscores and tracks that have a contemporary sound. None of the other libraries have come close to this variety.
It seems like a lot to pay, but variety when you need it and consistency of particular types of music is worth it.
The Firstcom website has a pretty powerful engine for selecting instruments or moods and it finds sample tracks. The new contract will have web-only downloads, no more discs. I too think browsing a disc is more efficient than the web, but this internet thing seems to be here to stay.
Mike Cohen
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Nice.
I remember using Crystal 3D fonts on our Quadra 650 or some such ting. Also had something like that on the in:Sync Speed Razor system. That Pentium1 133mhz machine could do a lot if you were real nice to it and bought it flowers.
On occasion I use a freeware called Anim8or – you can import 3Ds models or create your own. Simple to use especially for 3D extruded text. Will render an alpha channel. I mostly use this for animating free Star Wars models, but have used it in a few projects. Sometimes simple is just what you need.
Blender takes a bit more time to learn, but we have used that for 3D text also.
Mike
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The reason for my inquiry is to see if there is a cost to benefit ratio of upgrading to a RAID. The question is not “can you afford it” rather “can you afford not to.”
Thanks
Mike
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Late to the party here…but this is a good thread.
Will a RAID 5 help with HDV playback. I know the processor has to work extra hard with HDV, but will faster data throughput help or hinder?
A RAID would allow me to use the Intensity card that i bought but which has proven useless without a RAID.
Thanks
Mike Cohen
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I hope you are not using the switcher as a prop in a Star Wars fan film. That Death Star gun fader bar is a cliche. That being said, I must have made the death star gun sound 1000 times when I was TD of a newscast.
Mike Cohen
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If using an upscaling DVD player – most non-blu-ray players these days are upscaling, you need to set the output to match your tv. But then you also need to set the tv to the correct aspect ratio.
This illustrates how the consumer is using technology without knowing anything about how to use it. Everyone buys the HD tv, because they are affordable and football games look awesome, but it seems many people are still watching SD programming and DVD’s, myself included.
I would say 9 out of 10 people have no idea how to setup their DVD players for tv aspect ratio. While the DVR did away with programming a VCR, the DVD player aspect ratio problem has taken its place as something most consumers don’t understand.
Since brides usually complain that they look fat on tv, viewing a 4:3 wedding stretched on a 16:9 screen will bring out the bridezilla in anyone.
To the original post – if you are selling DVD’s to people, you need to be aware of how the end user is using the disc. Buy yourself a 16:9 set, even a $199 one from Costco, just to see what happens to your material on a 16:9 screen.
Mike Cohen