Mike Cohen
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Questions to ask yourself:
Will I be better off than working freelance?
If there are benefits, such as health care, dental etc – figure that into the equation.
Are there a lot of available jobs at the moment in your area?
I have heard that people starting out in life these days will hold something like 10 jobs in their lives, so assume that if this doesn’t work out off you will go to the wild blue yonder. But for the present, is it a decent job to start your career?
Depending upon how far down they want to talk you, negotiation is generally part of a job offer – however if you are just starting out, you don’t have much leverage. If they are offering say 30K, see if you can get 32.5.
As has been discussed countless times on this forum, $30K in Dallas vs $30K in LA vs $30K in Urbandale, Iowa are very different things.
What are you worth? Probably a lot more than that, but it will take time to get there.
Mike Cohen
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Hey Brendan – I checked out your site – nice work.
Mike Cohen
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If you are a dedicated project manager, then you have lots of time for managing the managing of the projects, such as with Basecamp, MS Project or Dot Project.
However most project managers in media production are not only doing PM duties, but also a variety of production duties.We have, over the years, tried a number of offline and online solutions. Nothing has worked perfectly, but you need to be careful that you do not create more work for all involved.
In order to update the status on something or track hours it should be as easy as visiting a web page. You also have to make sure you are not generating too much paper, excessive update emails or need for meetings.
Our group is all in one office, so I use a large markerboard that lists all projects, and then an excel file if we need to break things down further.
However if you have a lot of people involved, that is a lot of emails and potentially different versions of an Excel or Word doc. Not good.
I have evaluated several of the web-based, paid and open source PM suites. They all use a dashboard of some kind, but they all have a limitation or they violate one of the rules stated above.
Usually, simpler is better. Since we have an in-house web developer, we have come up with some easy to manage web-based tools for tracking and updating tasks, reviewing media and letting multiple parties share the same information with a minimum of emailing and phone calls. Since most project tracking activities can be accomplished with a database, when we think of a new requirement, a wave of his php magic wand usually yields good results.
In other words, a custom solution has been just what we needed. There is either the cost of a paid web-based service, the cost of implementing an open-source package or the cost of programming something simple from scratch.
A markerboard and some licorice scented markers is the lowest cost of all and did I mention the scented flavored markers?
Check out my Creative COW blog – i talk a lot about project management.
Mike Cohen
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In Encore, right click the m2v file and select “interpret footage” – this may be greyed out unless you have interpretable video. Normally NTSC widescreen mpeg2 exports from Premiere work fine.
I see you are making your MPEG-2 files Progressive – are you starting with Progressive source such as 720p? I had always heard that you should not convert interlaced video to progressive when going to DVD as it could affect playback. Not sure this is still (or was ever) true.
Mike Cohen
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Mark,
As a CT resident, I was especially interested in your post, and agree CS4, unless in a rock solid system, is not for the deadline conscious. Although the upgrade to the Media Encoder improves things a lot.
We used to capture DVCPRO into our Media 100 and occasionally had errors. Granted this was via RS-422, not firewire.Mike Cohen
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well, if you do find yourself doing a wedding, as I did for the niece of my uncle, there are plenty of good examples on the web for inspiration. That video posted by Richard Cooper is really nice, and seems to be worth the money it must have cost.
Makes me want to get married again to get such a video. Let me rephrase that, since I am still married. Makes me want to…oh never mind.
The same uncle videotaped my wedding, which I then edited together with 2 other videos and a bunch of stills. Now if I only had a functioning 1″ machine, I could transfer that to DVD. Who knew 1″ wasn’t going to be around forever?!
Mike Cohen
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Good post. Your thanks as a vendor is your payment. If a client does say thanks, thank them right back, or say “thanks for the business.”
As a vendor, you should be saying thanks all the time. Be grateful for the work, but don’t over do it.
If I have a really appreciative client, I may say “my pleasure” or “thanks for the compliment” or “nice feedback” because usually it is not a “thank you” but rather “the video was a big hit, thanks” or “I got the DVD and the CEO loves it, good job.”
As for my vendors (narrators, designers, etc) they say thanks all the time, to which I reply, “thanks for your good work.” And I will thank them when they send me Harry and David fruit baskets, but that doesn’t happen much these days. I did get some nice swag from our freelance book designer however.
It all comes down to knowing your client or vendor. Know their culture, know their nuances of behavior.
Mike Cohen
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As a manager, who used to be a shooter and editor, and who still does some of that, I will admit that the biggest challenge has been finding that balance.
As a project manager, I need to get the work to my client. However, knowing how we creative types work, i know that interruptions will impact my timeline.
We used to have bi-weekly meetings, or monthly meetings, to go over all active projects. However this was a bad use of time, and honestly, an editor or programmer really only needs to know about the current projects, not something coming up 3 months from now.
So now we just share information informally, office to office, and that is much more efficient for everyone.
But there is always room for improvement in any organization.
Good find.
Mike Cohen
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I was at the grocery store yesterday, and they had a compilation CD of Michael Jackson songs for sale at the checkout. According to the cashier, he died a few weeks ago. First I’ve heard of it too.
Too bad the news media missed this opportunity to report on such a historic person’s demise. I thought they usually went for things like this.
Now, as far as a business and marketing angle on this thread…I don’t think so.
Mike
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can you be more specific? What is a job log?
Are you looking for something network based for tracking work or a web based thing for job tickets, like in the IT world?