Sebastian Alvarez
Forum Replies Created
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[Nathan Jang] “No, you can use Shadow Catcher, create a texture uncheck everything, then turn on alpha, then add the texture as Shadow Catcher. Now drag the Texture to the Floor”
Hi, I found this old thread because I started experimenting with Cinema 4D Lite today and I’m going crazy trying to find a way to make a layer behave like a shadow catcher. I can do that easily in Modo, Lightwave and After Effects, but all the Google results about this took me nowhere.
What you say here, can you please elaborate a little bit on that? I tried it, but you say “…then add the texture as Shadow Catcher.” I haven’t found a way to do that, and in the manual searching for shadow catcher doesn’t bring any results. Is it because I have the Lite version? It’s the one with CC 2014.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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I’m having this problem as well, and it’s very frustrating. Half the times I want to play the timeline the audio lags behind a second or so, and I have to go back and start playing again. Until now I was editing in Edius with an HD Spark card and this never happens with it.
I noticed that if you start playing from the beginning of the timeline, and you have a few seconds of black video, it will cause this lag each and every time. If you move the playhead to the beginning of the first clip, it will play in sync. But, sometimes you place the playhead anywhere in the timeline and hit the space bar, and it will play out of sync.
And, if you have automatic playback after rendering, it will start playing out of sync.
Overall, it seems to me like this card is a piece of junk. I bought it in 2010 and it used to crash Premiere every few minutes, so I returned it. Now I bought it again, hoping that it would work, and it doesn’t crash it but it has terrible performance problems. At least I can return it, and this is the last time I buy it. I guess I’ll try the Matrox MXO2.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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Thanks for your input Jonathan, but based on the multiple articles and posts I read about this, you can never pass the copyright liability to the client. The liability starts and ends with the individual or company that produces the video.
I wish I could afford a lawyer but it’s impossible right now.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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[Brent Dunn] “Any NLE will work equally. It’s all about how comfortable you are with the editing software. You can even edit with Adobe Premier Elements.”
I beg to differ. That would be true if all NLEs had the same set of features but you’d have to learn how to operate each NLE’s particular workflow. In the case of Premiere, it’s a very stripped down NLE, to the point where the Pro should read Prosumer. Sure, you can still do great things with it, even a movie if you want to. The problem with it is the time it will take you. Shortcuts that exist in Edius and make editing with the keyboard very fast don’t exist in Premiere. In Premiere you have to do almost everything with the mouse, adding unnecessary time. And multicamera in Premiere is the worst of any NLE I’ve ever used. It’s just terrible. That was the main reason why I started looking at other NLEs to stick with one that would be faster than the rest and I found Edius. I seriously recommend you download the trial and give it a try. If you don’t like it, fine, but I bet you that after working with Premiere, you’ll find Edius to be a breeze.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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Edius 6, by far. Premiere is awful for most things, it just gets good publicity because some pros started to use it, but compared to Edius and FCP is absolute crap. Vegas is very decent, but very poor realtime, especially if you work with AVCHD. I don’t know Avid, but that interface is so ugly that I never cared to use it, besides it’s the most expensive.
Once you get up and running on Edius, there’s nothing that comes even close in terms of speed. Adobe brags about Premiere’s realtime performance with some expensive Nvidia cards. Edius has far better realtime performance and you don’t need any expensive graphics card. I have an old ATI card and it flies. You can do color correction, YUV curve, and more effects all piled up and preview in full resolution, real time without having to render the clip. Unfortunately most people don’t take a little time to try what’s out there but instead go with what most pros use. In the case of the old FCP that wasn’t so bad, because it was a very good NLE, but anybody who spends one week editing with Edius and Premiere is going to end up with Edius.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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[Mark Slade] “Actually I do know. What I told you about being on a system that has previously been flagged as a source of spam and malicious activity happened to me. I didn’t bad mouth the company that hosted me, but worked with them to correct the problem. No knee jerk reaction….no ranting all over the internet about how bad they were or how much they sucked.”
You’re talking about different things there. I would have to know the specifics, but it doesn’t seem like this case, where gross negligence was involved. If I had a website that was a lot more complicated, with tons of code, and even worse, a site where people can upload stuff to, then I would be willing to think maybe there is something wrong with my website. But Trend Micro was the only antivirus showing my site as malware. I went to virustotal.com and of about ten antivirus engines, TM was the only one that showed my site as malware. And, since they changed it to clean less than a day after my complaint, it’s obvious that their algorithms are written by grossly incompetent people, because if my website would really have had any amount of malware code in it, they wouldn’t have changed it. They would have told me, your website actually has malware code in it, you need to change it before we can flag it as clean.
You have to understand one thing. This is not that people had to copy and paste my URL on their website. People that had this software installed had a big warning showing up in their browser saying that my site had been confirmed to be implicated in online scams or frauds. Now, despite the poor quality of the software itself, this company is grossly irresponsible in telling people that another company is involved in online scams or frauds without actually confirming it. It would be a bit different if their warning was not so aggressive, and maybe say “Warning, this site may contain malware”, unless they actually scan the website and determine that it actually contains malware, or receive a few dozen reports that the business has been involved in scams.
So let’s suppose that a few tens of thousands of people in my area use this antivirus. It’s not far fetched to think that maybe 50 of them are looking for a wedding or events videographer and came to my website either through Craigslist, or the other wedding vendor websites. And lets suppose 5 to 10 of those people would have seen my samples, like them and hired me. But those people had Trend Micro installed, so they never saw my samples, they never hired me, and I lost between $5000 to $10000. You see my problem? Maybe I didn’t even lose that much, but even if they made me lose one customer, that’s reason enough for me to be angry at their negligence.
Just imagine this. I go online and I start posting everywhere “Mark Slade (or your company) has been confirmed to be involved in scams and fraud”. Well, you would hate me, and you would be really really angry towards me, with very good reason.
I’ll give you one thing though, I did act impulsively, which is the opposite of what I usually do, especially in posting about this with my own name and company name, and that was stupid of me.
However, my rants about this company have no relation at all in the way I handle my customers, which like I said before, are all happy with my services and my behavior.
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[Mark Slade] “Jeez dude….you really are very emotional.”
Well, I guess you don’t know how it feels to try to start a business and finding out that thanks to a negligent and irresponsible company, several people that could have hired you, for almost three months were told that your company was involved in online scams and frauds, when you were not involved in anything like that. So you lost several customers, not only for jobs in that period, but forever, because nobody that sees that type of warning will ever come back to your website. I would like to see that happen to you and then you can tell me who’s emotional about it.
[Mark Slade] “I hope you don’t act like this towards your customers!!”
I don’t see the point of your statement. Why would I act like that towards my customers? Because I’m upset about a company that has been badmouthing my business without even being a customer, do you assume that I would treat my customers like that? My customers are perfectly happy with my service, thank you very much.
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Thanks, Mark. Actually I would like to give the design to a pro, if I had the money to do that, but I don’t. If business gets better and I do have the money for that I definitely will. For now I’m trying to do something in Photoshop that looks decent, even if not amazing, but at least the kind of design that will not make people run away from the site as soon as they land. I’ve been checking lots of videography websites for the past few days, and some and very nicely done, but some are hideous, and there’s a note at the bottom with the name of the studio that designed it.
What I’m doing now is a top horizontal menu like most websites have these days, with a link to the video gallery and the three main types of services I want to offer, weddings, corporate events and school events, as well as a “other services” link for the rest. Then obviously each will link to a page that will have something specific about that.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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Just want to say thanks everybody for your very useful advice. For now I’m redesigning my website, which is frustrating enough because website design is terribly complicated, so I design in Photoshop, export in slices and then make some changes in Dreamweaver. But besides the technical part, unless you can afford two different websites and company names, it’s really hard to design a website that will be attractive to both brides and corporations. I have looked at many videography websites and haven’t found one that is good for both types. Problem is, I don’t want to do just weddings. I’m capable of offering lots of different video services, if I cater only to brides and grooms I’d be missing on a lot of opportunities.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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Thanks for your lengthy advice, it’s really appreciated. Google Maps is not really an option because I work out of my home, so I don’t put that in listings. I don’t even plan on renting office space, it’s too expensive and pointless for what I’m trying to accomplish. However, I do need to do search engine optimization, which I have no idea how to, but I’ll try to learn.
When you say “You’ve got to sell yourself. Get out there – hit the pavement – setup sales calls. ” what do you mean exactly? What places would I go to? And by sales calls, who would I call? I mean, it’s not that I can call people randomly. Sorry if they are dumb questions, but like I said, when it comes to marketing, I’m lost.
Sebastian R. Alvarez