[Mike Cohen]

Set your motion keyframes on one clip on one track (making sure you don’t zoom past whatever % at which you lose sharpness), and assuming all tracks are registered to one another, copy and paste the motion settings to all other clips.
I do this all the time when animating multi-layer illustrations but with different filters or effects on some but not all layers.
Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

you used to need video of some kind to go with the audio, however I would suspect that absent video you would just get a blue screen. On the PIX240, which is similar to the KiPro, if you remove a video signal while recording, you get a blue screen on playback but the recording continues without incident. Worth a try PRIOR to your shoot of course.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

and a related article about production specifically

https://www.cnn.com/2014/06/04/tech/innovation/movies-drones-faa/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

[Mike Cohen]

searching youtube and vimeo you can find both pro and hobbyist “drone” or “quadcopter/octocopter” videos. On the pro side you see some beautiful results, though possibly not fully in line with FAA rules (ie, flying over populated areas).

On the hobbyist side you see every manner of things. There is a video of someone flying a camera from the lawn next to the Eiffel Tower. Cool but potentially dangerous.

There are all sorts of malicious uses of a drone with or without a camera – the FAA and local police are well aware of the privacy and public safety concerns.

I too would be worried about a drone with an amateur operator hovering over a highway or flying near electrical wires. While you can control the drone via a remote video monitor, you don’t exactly have air to air radar or communication with local ATC to know who else might be in your airspace.

I read over the weekend about a scheme in NY whereby drones carrying wireless transmitters can insert software into over the air broadcast signals into smart TVs and subsequently get onto unprotected wifi networks and steal data or plant spyware. One so equipped drone could access one square kilometer which in NYC could be 100,000 people.

Caution, I believe, is entirely prudent here.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

Seeing as we are partly a direct to customer outfit we have a merchant account with a traditional CC machine. Website transactions go through electronically. We also use a machine for transactions at trade shows, or a website backend control panel.
Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

I use LinkedIn for the following purposes:

Participate in some forums. However most forums are for people in the same industry. Kind of like I don’t expect Mark or Todd or Nick to hire me for production work just because they interact on this forum. But it’s kinda fun. Sure I’ve hired some fellow Cows as sub contractors but that is again not what the original post is about.

I accept most but not all link requests. Excluding people I already do business with, family and college friends, that leaves about 60% people I have no direct connection with.

I reach out occasionally to say hello and reintroduce myself. I get the impression a lot of people really don’t use the service since manu of my messages are unreturned or are replied to weeks later or longer.

Then I get the random contacts from people in unrelated fields (ie, not production and not medical related) and often from the ends of the Earth. Not sure how this happens.

I see why one might pay for the pro service. You can use Linkedin to identity prospects (ie, show me VP of sales at widget companies) because they usually are a 2nd or 3rd connection and you cannot direct message with the free account. So you take your chances of annoying a stranger with a spammy linkedin message on the 5% chance they reply.

I might have to experiment with this myself.

It is obviously working for some people.

Another interesting feature is the “who viewed your profile in last 30 days”. I clicked today and with the free account I got:

HR director at XYZ firm
A former co-worker whom I have no contact with ever
A video editor at a tv station in Oklahoma
An unnamed executive at an unnamed company.
Next is the pitch to pay money to see these people and more. Reminds me of Classmates.com.

There is also a news feed, which seems to contain the same viral links that also populate my FB feed, Twitter feed, Reddit and Digg. I suppose the point here is to engage in conversations with tge OPs but most are bland links (that is the OP does not add their own insight).

Back to the forums. I participate in the video editors forum. Fun but not for prospecting as far as I can tell.
Other forums seem to be a combination of:

Introduce yourself – problem here is in a marketing forum you have 50 people who all do essentially the same job pitching their services to one another.

Links to viral articles or blog posts

Work from home spam

Other job postings or recruiting firms

Occasionally an actual thread but there is a lot of pollution in the forums.

Then there is the Profile Building activities. You log in and are asked to update your profile. I do it and have a pretty good rating. Then it asks you to endorse others for skills.
I get endorsed for video related skills by people I have never worked with. Very nice gesture but kind of meaningless. But this is what Linkedin does, creates busywork masked as productivity.

Now if you are looking for a job Linkedin seems like a good place to look. I get numerous suggestions for jobs which I am not remotely qualified for. I wonder how that function works.

Anyway, Linkedin serves some purposes. I call it Facebook for grownups. Although since the exodus of kids, Facebook is now Facebook for grownups and Linked in is in most peoples’ opinion kind of useless. But lots of people have an account.

As an experiment I tries to connect with people sharing my name. I have two other Mike Cohens as connections, but I don’t think they got the joke!

Can you get business from LinkedIn? For many of us it remains to be seen.
I hope so.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

While plenty of people have had no issues, most video work is too important to risk having a problem. Using SD cards with a camera which has a native SD slot is one thing, but using an adapter is basically putting a square block into a round hole.

I read an article about Anthony Bourdain’s travel the world shows. The crew uses Sony F3 or F5 cameras, and some smaller Sonys as needed, and treat their SxS cards like tapes. Shoot, fill a card, and pack it away until they get back to New York. Granted we don’t all have the budget to buy 50 SxS cards!

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

Are you all saying that when the CC server went down you could not use your local software? I thought CC only had to re-authorize once every 30 days.

[Mike Cohen]

There is certainly a lot of industry hype about 4K, but you need to do what makes sense for your business. We are in a similar boat – we produce everything in 1080, but 90% of customers view on a DVD on a computer, on an iPad, or via web streaming at SD resolution because in the corporate world, high bandwidth for viewing videos is not the norm.

If you are making films or documentaries or anything for broadcast, maybe 4K is the right move. But for corporate, local cable and a lot of work for hire, 1080 HD is plenty of resolution. I’d suggest evaluating cameras based upon the type of shooting you do – action, low light, interviews, etc.

A camera with built-in audio and a good lens with easy to find controls is key. Chip size always used to be a budget decision – you can get plenty of single CMOS cameras for under $2000 which might be good in some situations, but not others.

I have wondered about the merits of the various 2013-4 Sony models which all seem similar in many ways. I think you would need to try these cameras out before buying.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

Thanks for the feedback Denis. Yes we learned that the switcher adds about 1 frame of delay and there is another frame or two somewhere in the system, so when we play back recorded files, the lip synch is off – easy enough to fix in post.
However the delay is sometimes noticeable on the projectors during the event – can’t fix a live event in post!
We’ll try the sync generator on the next event and report back.
Mike