Mike Cohen
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Set your monitor window to 100%, remove the safe area overlay, hit Print Screen and paste into Photoshop. Much faster workaround for me.
Mike Cohen
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We lease servers from Aplus.net and have had pretty good luck. Our HTML served Flash videos work pretty well. We host dozens of client review websites without incident.
Mike Cohen
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Great responses, especially that good clients can turn sour – hypothetically speaking of course.
As far as people asking for a refund or change to the invoice – this is especially difficult if the 1/2 down happened 6 months ago – that money, while funding the project, is long gone. Client money does not go into an escrow account waiting to be spent. It’s like the scene from It’s a Wonderful Life where George Bailey says, “Your money’s not in the bank. Why, Tom’s money is in Bill’s house. And Bill’s money is in Steve’s house.” I paraphrase.
There have been lots and lots of threads about grinders. I was not looking for more of that. I am interested in hearing opinions on what the right amount of client involvement is. At what point do you feel like you have a baby sitter?
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Holy Cow!
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Are you saying you charge by the hour for on-location production? This is wrong and diminishes the value of your services. It is traditional to charge a half or full day rate for a shoot, even if the shoot is an hour. It in fact diminishes the value of the whole industry.
Having read the other posts and your follow-up John, I see you are dealing with the cable market, which is generally cheap or free. The cable advertising place where I interned gave a free commercial to new customers who bought time. This is why many local ads are horrible, because the time is the commodity, the ad is salad dressing.
Mike
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When I graduated college, this was before the internet, there were a few ads in the Boston Globe, looking for people to do deferred payment work on films. Deferred payment means never getting paid.
The best advice for young people starting out is, “if it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. Also, there is no free lunch. Also, watch your back because nobody is watching it for you.”
Internships are free work which can help you get a paying job. But unless you have income, or the free work is a labor of love, just say no.
Mike Cohen
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Fantastic. Nice to see people really thinking outside the box. The “box” of music videos includes such things as “band performing on a windy rooftop/mountain/in the rain/in an apartment”, “band appearing while singing in some sad love story,” and “band not appearing in video, but other characters in a story mouthing the words.” Those things have been done so many times they are not interesting.
This. This is interesting. I like interesting. More please!
Mike Cohen
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Donald Rumsfeld famously used a standing desk in his office at the Pentagon. Clearly this helped him make wise decisions during his career!
Seriously, I am a big proponent of good ergonomics, regardless of your favorite position for working.
Here is what the government has to say
https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/computerworkstations/components_monitors.htmlGet a chair that lets you adjust the height of not only the seat but the arms as well. Your arms on the arm rests should be somewhat parallel to the floor. Of course if you work for the Penguin and your floor is seriously tilted, then you’re on your own.
The angle of your back should be straight. A chair with adjustable back angle is best, or one that is fixed in the vertical position.
I like the center(left-right, top-bottom) of my monitor roughly lined up with my nose, roughly arm’s length from my person.
As for the keyboard, the J key should be lined up with the sternum or solar plexus. I prefer to have the mouse at the same vertical level as the keyboard, that is on the table, level with my belly button. If you do not have a belly button, then your navel! This is based upon a standard 30″ desk height.
Speaking of your navel, just down the road is your posterior. Those of us who sit a lot need whatever extra padding we can get. I use a small cushion on top of my chair’s built-in cushion. There are other drawbacks to prolonged sitting which I shall not get into (eat bran).
Depending upon your leg length, your feet should be flat on the floor. If you have long legs, you may need to extend your legs at an angle in order for the other positions to hit their marks, or get a higher desk.
The positions of other frequently used objects is just as important. If your telephone is behind you or on a short wire, this can impact your neck and other appendages.
Most important of all is your snack drawer. You should be able to reach a Snickers bar or can of Jolt without even looking or moving your chair!
Hmm, now where did I put that heavy instruction manual..ah, here it is, let me just reach at an odd angle for that…ooh, got it.
Mike Cohen
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We had some CS4 Media Encoder growing pains, but things run pretty smoothly now. Definitely check your startup items in MSCONFIG and turn off anything you don’t need like itunes helper, anything associated with Real player and the elusive Java update.
As Tim and the others have mentioned, a Premiere sequence with embedded AE is going to be slower. You should keep track of how long certain variables take to render, so in the future you will know that, for example, a 10 minute sequence with XYZ filer should take about 6 hours, or whatever.
It’s not magic, it’s a computer!
Mike Cohen
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While not a music video, check out Timecode from director Mike Figgis. He shot the 90 minute movie using 4 synced digibeta camcorders. It’s all one take and the 4 cameras follow different action that eventually converges. They had to do several takes, since one screw-up and all is lost.
A better use of split screen, especially if you are doing this with one actor, is to do the poor man’s version of Kylie’s video. One locked down shot per scene, and have the actor do his thing in different vertical slices of the scene, then crop each take on a separate layer to make it look like all one scene. Sync is the challenge – you will have to record and play back a lot on set, and do not touch the camera.
Good luck.
Mike Cohen