[Ron Gerber]

I hope you got the bid. Personally, I go with tape and bring a consumer DVD burner and run a line out of the PD170 to make a “real time” DVD. That will save you a lot of time in the end. Also, it will inevitably occur, 4 weeks into the season, they (a player, a coach, a college looking at a player) will need an additional dub of the game or just select series from the game. And please make sure you get a shot of the scoreboard between every play. The coaches are looking for down and distance info. I’ve heard horror stories of film sessions that were useless because the coaches had no idea what the game situations were they were watching.

[Ron Gerber]

I heard a great analogy today when a similar situation came up:
“It’s a lot like taking your car to a mechanic and after he’s done fixing it telling him you also want his tools.”

[Ron Gerber]

If it helps, I believe this commercial was shot around 1,000 frames per second using the PhantonHD.

If you want to see how fast Ernie’s swing is in real time, here’s the behind the scenes of that commercial.

[Ron Gerber]

When I meet with clients and they want to target everyone, I try to find out who are the customers that would make the biggest difference to their business and focus the message to them. To the point where your message is almost a one on one conversation with that potential client.

I usually bring up a story from years ago to help me explain to them about reaching the right people: we were doing a commercial for a restaurant. The owner had these special black angus cheeseburgers that were great, everyone loved them. So of course in the commercial we branded him the home of great cheeseburgers, you could only get them there, they were so unbelievably good, etc. His business takes off and he’s selling more cheeseburgers than you can imagine.

It should be a great success story but, we never asked him if the cheeseburger crowd was going to make a difference in his business and as it turns out, his margin on cheeseburgers was very small. So small that he had to change from the black angus burgers to a different type of burger (which really wasn’t very good). His business fell apart. His best margin was on seafood and all these cheeseburger folks were clogging up his restaurant and he wasn’t making any money and now the cheesburgers weren’t as good and the cheesburger folks found other places to go.

So, I learned from that experience that you have to find out who will make the difference and target them. If 80% of your profits come from 10% of your customers – target the type of people that make up that 10%.

Sorry for the long post but it’s Friday and lunch time and I’m hungry.

[Ron Gerber]

Woodstock will blow your mind, especailly Sha Na Na. Here’s a split screen music video for Semisonic. I can’t even imagine how complex this was to shoot.

[Ron Gerber]

Check with the local station or cable company. They should have a spec sheet that will give you more info. Send them a file to test everything out. Most likely they are not inserting your commercial in HD so they will probably want it to be 720 x 480. Using the h.264 codec would be a good place to start. A :30 spot should be about 43mb.

[Ron Gerber]

Here are the steps my company has been telling everyone to use for MPEG2 Delivery using Sorenson. Most likely they will be similar to what your station wants – It would probably be best to send them a test file well in advance to trouble shoot the problems – usually the problems will be audio related.

1. Drag QuickTime reference movie (or a Regular QT movie) into Sorenson.
2. Select MPEG-1/2 drop down, Select “DVD_NTSC_LG” by dragging that to the QT reference movie
3. Double click on the DVD_NTSC_LG to open up it preferences.
Video:
Set as follows: format constraints: DVD (MPEG2); stream type: Program; Codec: MPEG-2 Video; Method: 1-pass CBR; data rate: 9570 (or you might have to do 2 pass VBR and set all avg, max * Min to 9570); format: NTSC; frame size: 720 x 480; frame rate: 29.97; aspect ratio: 4:3; field encoding: bottom field first; I frame rate: 15

Audio:
Set Audio to MPEG PCM Audio (or you might have to try the Layer 2 setting if the station tells you there’s no audio)
Sample 16
Sample Rate 48000
Channel Stereo

5. press ok & then squeeze it

Good Luck and if you have stock in FedEx, it might be a good time to sell.

[Ron Gerber]

I’d try to follow your tape procedure as closely as possible. If you have a server everyone can access (traffic, production, & master control) create a couple of folders – one for traffic, one for spots to be encoded, and one for spots that have been encoded. Once you finish the spot on FCP – drop it into the traffic folder, send them an e-mail (along with the AE) to let them know it’s there or how ever you would normally let everyone know a tape is ready.

Let the traffic people do their thing – and then they move it over to the “to be encoded” folder. Master control does their thing then moves it over to the “have been encoded” folder.

Depending on how many spots you are doing, back up the “have been encoded” folder up at the end of the week or as needed.

Also, have production keep a backup of the spot (before it goes to traffic) just in case Master Control has a problem or somewhere in the process the file gets misnamed or lost.

I hope all that makes sense.
Good Luck.

[Ron Gerber]

The answer is yes they can not sell you the air time if they want to. I’d suggest talking to the sales manager of your local cable system, tell him what you want to do and see if you can work something out to pick up overflow work or commercials that they don’t want to tie up their department doing. In most cases, the cable company production departments are not profit centers, just a vehicle to help get advertising clients on the air. If they won’t work with you, take the money you would spend on the airtime, pick out a few select clients that you feel like you can do a great job for and take them out to dinner and sell yourself to them one on one.

[Ron Gerber]

Having done a lot of the really bad local car commercials, generally our point of view is that Ford sells the car; we sell the dealership that sells the car. In most cases, the running footage is more a convenience to use. Generally the dealerships don’t know what the manufacturers are going to feature until the last minute (like financing offers or rebates) and they want to beat their competitors to the punch and get on air first. In most markets, the local dealers also have an advertising group that they all chip in to for air time of their product commercials produced by the manufacturer (like an F-150 commercial telling you to go to you the Ford Dealership near you)

There are a few dealerships that we have shot “local” running footage for but for the most part they don’t want to do it because of the cost (and at times the look/quality). They do get co-op from the manufacturers on the air time but generally the production comes out of their own pockets.

I hope that makes sense and I didn’t add to the confusion.