[Mike Smith]

Hi Dave

Nice reels. Could perhaps do with more diversity, specially of sound, though, to my taste anyway!

The corporate video production space is changing real fast just now – maybe even faster than the broadcast end.

Most producers active in this area will put together whole spots, and have invested heavily in kit, skills and sometimes people to research, generate ideas, script, shoot, edit, composite, create effects. 3D is an area where the learning curve has a number of people wanting to deliver more than they create in house.

In those producers’ shoes, would you see you as a resource, or as a potential competitor? If the latter, would you hire you ..?

If your taste and skills lead you towards taking on whole productions, then why not go for that? You will need a marketing and sales effort – few corporate customers commissioning outside work offer any kind of regular flow – but you will get to control things how you like, or at least how your customers like.

But if you really fancy a little light corporate dressing on the side while between broadcast / music projects, then maybe finding a few producers with big-budget clients, and without the in-house kit / skills to do all their own effects sequences, might suit. You just need a compelling offering to make them want to choose you over other potential suppliers.

But back to the beginning: this space is changing. AE, FCP, PPro, Vegas, Velocity, Avid Xpress – businesses and agencies can kit up with this stuff for not much, and find enthusiasts fresh from college with some talent, to provide technical back-up to their own ideas people – so the old-style producer may have to be working harder, selling harder and keeping budgets tighter than back in the day when video was new and shiny.

So there’s an issue – how to make enough of a buzz in the marketplace for people to want to come to you (with their budgets, for your skills) – and how to keep ahead of the curve with what you deliver them, so they keep coming back!

Have fun.

[Mike Smith]

Gear Video will allow for DVD authoring, Mpeg 2 encoding – what’s needed to make a DVD

Stuttering playback on a DVD player suggests maybe the data rate of your mpeg2 video is too high – did you keep it down below 8Mb/sec? If you left the sound in PCM format, that can eat data rate …

https://www.gearsoftware.com/support/documentation/encode-video-dvd.cfm might help.

[Mike Smith]

Yup. And everyone should be above average, too!

[Mike Smith]

Procoder from Canopus will do a decent job of the conversion. I’m not aware of any way to do it in Adobe software without expensive plugins.

You’ve probably seen this thread on the AE forum.

[Mike Smith]

Why not scale to whatever your output format is going to be?

Shame it was letterbox and not squeeze … a lot of the resolution is already thrown away in letterboxing. And how does a letterboxed vid look on a widescreen?

The Beeb likes material recorded and edited in 16:9, and then put through an aspect ratio converter to generate a 14:9 master for broadcast.

On a standard 4:3 screen, the viewer then sees a thin black bar top and bottom, and on a widescreen a thin black bar left and right – unless the screen’s auto adjusatment kicks in …

So a compromise for you might be to “blow up” your letterboxed footage to 14:9, and similarly shrink your 4:3 footage to 14:9.

Of course if you want the band to look skinny, you might prefer to stay with the letterbox format, mask on black bars to match top and bottom on the 4:3 footage and reposition it “pan and scan” style.

Yours is going to be a bit of a makeshift repair job whatever, so it might be as well to make a feature of it, stretch the pix to make them look how you like, and do enough picture processing to make sure the low-res look seems like an intended feature and not a shortcoming!

[Mike Smith]

Strange. AE does this fine: so either the camera setup is off – which it sounds like we know is not the case – or the IEEE 1394 port is not functioning – lets check that – or there’s some problem with the AE install – which seems unlikely.

I’d be thinking about troubleshooting the port next.

The system is evidently “seeing” the firewire port, or AE would not offer you the option – but it sounds like the port isn’t working for you.

Is there another firewire socket on your computer you can try?

Do you have other firewire devices running?

It would be good to know that the port is functioning correctly, so if you’ve used anything else with it successfully that would be a plus.

Otherwise, you might try looking in control panel / system / device manager for the appropriate 1394 bus controlller, and check in its properties panel that it reports functioning normally …

[Mike Smith]

Criminal violation and civil right to privacy are not at all the same thing: maybe you need to take legal advice from a qualified California attorney on possible civil remedy for invasion of privacy.

Thess links may be relevant point ..
https://www.photosecrets.com/p14.html

https://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use

[Mike Smith]

That Adobe post you refer to is about AE 5.5 and 6.0, not 6.5 and 7.0.

If you select IEEE 1394 out from your preview options, AE will allow you to mirrow your comp window to firewire. Then if you have firewire in to your camera, and have selected any menu options you need to enable firewire in on the camera, you should be able to plug in a video monitor to camera video out and see your AE output.

It does work, and doesn’t need additional hardware or drivers.

[Mike Smith]

It’s very hard to get current, accurate data on what browsers have what plug-ins / ActiveX controls installed. You could look at this https://www.prestospace.org/project/deliverables/D12-6.pdf for more if you wanted to.

The “usual suspects” here are the Macromedia stats (hardly unbiased, suggesting 68% for QT) and the Frost & Sullivan report from 2004 – which also has to struggle through the same fog of data (suggesting around 37%).
Sfaik Apple does not publish an estimate for % of systems with QT player installed.

Detailed web metrics from a sample of high-traffic sites would be most welcome, if anyone can point to them?

[Mike Smith]

Except, of course, that many (maybe half) browsers do not have Quicktime plug-in support, and H.264 requires QT 7, further reducing the % of people you will reach.

You might want to look again at Flash video …