[Rich Rubasch]

Continuing Nick’s perspective, last NAB was my first and besides the show floor, I bought the Supersession package. Every morning I went down and got to hear some industry leaders look to the future. It was worth it and broke up the day from just trudging around the floor.

Also I was able to hear Genelec speakers firsthand. Maybe the floor is not the best acoustically, but it was a great experience and really showed me what that brand is all about.

I also got that firsthand look at some of the new flat panels, and a comparison of the various new cameras and their codecs. I live in Madison WI and there just isn’t a showroom in a 250 mile radious that I would be able to see this stuff.

I also walked around the production area (I’m more of a post shopper) and saw lots of gear that was all new to me.

I think the suggestion of Macworld as a destination might be a better fit and I love SanFran.

There is the attendees perspective and the exhibitor’s perspective. I think the exhibitor’s have a stronger argument for not going. With the major players pulling out, maybe this is a good year for the small guys to either upgrade their space for no extra cost, or get a sweet deal.

Glass still half full,

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Like in any insurance claim, the lawyers always go back to the original contract and certificate of liability insurance that was issued for the job. The contract is an important place to put any language (or if your client issues the contract to make sure the language is there) to protect you against any wrongful liability claims.

Your insurance agent should look over any contract that is written up for a big shoot to be sure it doesn’t set your company up for any big claims against you. Most of the time with big direct clients like hospitals or phone companies or the like, they provide the contract. many times it states that they will NOT be liable for any accidents to the crew etc on the set for the shoot. Just be sure you have proof of coverage for your freelancers, or make sure you add them to your policy for that shoot so you are covered. Again, this is going to raise your premiums, and you will essentially be paying liability insurance for your freelancer, but your company will be safe.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

There are three things in play for freelancers (at least here in Wisconsin where a pretty significant crackdown is underway).

The W-9 establishes that the freelancer has registered with the state as a business entity and is paying taxes on their income.

A certificate that shows a current workman’s comp policy will make certain that you aren’t going to have to pay for their workman’s comp in the case of an audit. I was audited and had to track down a lot of workman’s comp forms. If a freelancer is owner of an S-Corp and they have opted out of workman’s comp, that works too, if you/they can prove it.

Liability insurance is the real tricky one. Mostly in the case of a claim where a freelancer knocked over a lamp that caused a major fire in a hospital MRI lab and it destroyed all the equipment. (Guess you won’t be calling THAT guy back).

If you are the production company of record and that freelancer was NOT listed as an insured on your certificate of liability insurance that you provided to the client, AND the freelancer does not have his/her own liability policy, then your company will not be able to make a claim for the insurance. Could be lights out.

This is different than workman’s comp, which the state requires that every employee has.

You can roll into your liability policy any freelancers you use, but they must be listed on the certificate of insurance for that particular job, and your premiums will be higher.

A better option is to have your freelancer talk to your liability insurance agent and get a $1,000,000 policy for themselves for about $500 a year. This is a VERY GOOD idea and will be good advice.

One company here in Wisconsin provides a list of things the freelancer (or even a staff member of another production company) must provide in order to work with them. One of the keys to get cooperation is to play nice, explain why the state requires these things, and why in this business it is a good idea to have insurance. Especially when equipment is so expensive and many things can go wrong when a crew is on the set with wires running all over the place. Especially small accidents that will become workman’s comp claims.

One thing we do with workman’s comp is this…workman’s comp is based on the annual salary of the employees. I estimate high….maybe $10,000 over a best guess. This way, even if we are audited, (we were) they will look at the premium we were paying and discover that it covered the salaries of even the non insured freelancers (or those who we could not get a form from). In my audit we were high enough over that I got a $9 refund check after the audit because I paid in too much….apparently $9 too much.

Get a good agent who can roll together your office/equipment insurance, workman’s comp, liability, and vehicle policies. If they can do all that, they will be an excellent resource when the auditor comes around, or when a claim is being filed against your company. I only found one company in our little town who could handle all this, but they do it well and I have peace of mind that I am insured.

For about $4000 a year!

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

I have two Bravo SE on a Mac and they are great. I have been running them for about 8 months and when they doubled the capacity of the ink cartridge that solved a lot of the problems.

The only issue i have is the printer driver. No way to kick up saturation or color correct before printing, other than a quick trip to Photoshop and back.

The Bravo SE was sold as a bundle with the Primera DUP7 duplicator tower. Everything has been chugging along just fine.

For the record all our suites have the Epson R800 printers and I haven’t used mine for printing to disc since we got the Bravo’s. They are available on the network so we can print from any edit bay.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Doesn’t sound like this will be the best NAB yet, but I’ll take on of them Bob Zelin tee shirts.

I have only been to one NAB but it seems to me that there are many ways to enter the show floor so no single venue has the best seat.

Also, I just saw on an NAB ad in DV magazine that AVID is still listed as a vendor.

Also, this could be telling that Apple is not making major strides in the “Pro” apps, but more toward the consumer who walks into their stores. The Apple Store is no place for pros. It is certainly a consumer driven company.

I might attend NAB from my laptop here at home.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Are you judging the quality on your MacBook monitor or on a regular TV monitor after encoding to a DVD disc?

Deinterlacing in Final Cut or Compressor might help some aliasing when viewed on an LCD panel or computer playback.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

You simply cannot say “it needs to be MPEG” and “it needs to be uncompressed AVI” in the same sentence. Those are two very different things.

Also any form of MPEG is not the best codec for web streaming. At least not today. However, it your client only wants a QT movie that they can recompress to the codec of their choice you might have done the right thing. However, I still think you need more clarification from your client what formats they can take to recompress the file for web. Or what codec they want you to compress for the web.

More questions about what they want.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

With the exact same settings? Doesn’t sound like it. How about frame rate? bit rate? Constant or variable?

Not sure what’s going on there.

Oh, what is the content. If one is waving trees and the other is lots of whitespace that could make up the difference.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

I might be living dangerously and most will tell you to install on a separate boot drive, but I have FCP 4.5, 5.1.4 and 6.0 all on the same computer….and have done this for every major upgrade since 3.0 . I also have DVDSP 4.0 and 3.0 on the same system. with DVDSP 3.0 installed I get the old MPEG-2 export out of Quicktime.

Again, most will advise against it, but I have done it for more than three years and never had any issues related to that.

We work with many clients who don’t always have the latest version, or sometimes I want to load an older version without updating it. This has worked perfectly. The files FCP uses in the System Library are different for each version. The only issue you might run into on an older version is with a Quicktime version that it doesn’t like….or a capture card driver that is not compatible.

Again, never ran into those issues.

But I always used to run my Avids with internet, email and AfterEffects rendering in the background, all against the advice of Avid. But I always got my work done, and never had an issue.

Other than operator error.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

This might sound crazy but we do this all the time….except we build all our moves with the high rez images in AfterEffects. If we need a SD output we let AE do the scaling and render out SD versions. But we always have the HD comp. Actually with the mix of HD and SD we almost always start with a 1920 x 1080 comp in AE or in Photoshop. From there we can make it any format, including anamorphic etc.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media