[Walter Soyka]

[Adam Berland] “I am having 3 camera w. iso shoot w/ live switching having program deck and engineer. Plus I am having another camera guy running around with sound guy and host. I am renting the all this gear that is hdx. How much you think that would cost for rents? Also I am how much you should I charge the client for labor? This going be like around 10 hr day.”

Why not contact some rental shops near you to get real quotes on the gear? I’d rather have a quote in my budget than an off-the-cuff estimate any day.

As for how much to charge, I’d refer you to another thread here with a similar question. Here was my answer:

I think that’s a risky way to set your pricing, because without understanding your costs, you could easily undercharge and hurt your business. Better questions to ask might be how much it will cost you to produce, how much overhead cost do you need to offset, and how much profit would you like to make.

Threads like this one pop up pretty frequently on the Business & Marketing forum; here’s a good thread that goes into this in detail on setting prices.

There are also many excellent articles on business here on the COW.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Adam Stephens] “Hello all, I just started a video company and there is an artist that would like me to video their live concert. I’ve been doing weddings and some commercials, but I never done a live band before. My question is: How much does the average videographer charge to shoot a live concert?”

I think that’s a risky way to set your pricing, because without understanding your costs, you could easily undercharge and hurt your business. Better questions to ask might be how much it will cost you to produce, how much overhead cost do you need to offset, and how much profit would you like to make.

Threads like this one pop up pretty frequently on the Business & Marketing forum; here’s a good thread that goes into this in detail on setting prices.

There are also many excellent articles on business here on the COW.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Great suggestion, Thomas — Animoto might be worth a look, too.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Kate Koyama] “I’m looking at creating a video to be displayed on a 4 feet by 18 feet (3456 px by 15552 px) banner. I was going to use After Effects for the video and compose it in a pixel dimension that is proportional to the banner size. So I was thinking: 720 px by 3240 px. However if we’re playing the video from a projector that is hooked up to a computer , is that possible? Or do I have to make the video fit within a regular screen size, say 720 by 480”

My general rule of thumb is that the display system determines the playback system requirements, and the playback system determines the content requirements.

How will the projection system work? Is it going to be a single projector, or is it going to be a blended projection system? What is the native resolution of the projector or projection system?

Once you know that resolution, you can determine the playback system. Then you can design your video to those specs.

For example, you might use a single projector at 1920×1080 and mask off the top and bottom portions of projection. You could choose to feed it with Blu-ray. You could design in a 1920×426 comp, and nest that in a 1920×1080 comp for output.

[Kate Koyama] “Also we want to make sure the video is not pixelated. Since it’ll be displayed in such a large dimension. “

How far away from the screen do you expect your audience to be?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

From AE CS5 livedocs, it seems that multiprocessing works the same on CS5 as it did on CS4 — it launches a separate process for each core (though CS5 supports hyperthreading and can take advantage of virtual cores).

That means that if you want to use multiprocessing in order to render multiple frames simultaneously, you’ll still need a healthy amount of RAM for each process.

However, if you turn multiprocessing off, your renders will be slower, but even a single process should be able to access all the available RAM in your system, which means larger comps, bigger image buffers, deeper color, and longer RAM previews.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Are you running CS4? If so, have you upgraded to 9.0.2?

Do you have OpenGL enabled for renders? If so, turn it off.

What format is your footage? If it uses temporal compression (H264, MPEG2, etc.), transcode to an intraframe codec and replace the footage.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

AE doesn’t do interactive. You might try Flash or Director.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Shaho Teyib] “CS5 work on windows 7 64 bit? “

Yes; in fact, AE CS5 requires either 64-bit Windows Vista or 64-bit Windows 7 on the PC platform.

https://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/systemreqs/

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Dan Jacobsen] “Win XP Prof
X5450 @ 3.00Ghz 8 CPUs
3GB Memory
Nvidia Quadro FX 3700 “

AE CS5 will not install on this machine. It requires a 64-bit OS: on Windows, it needs to be 64-bit Vista or Win7.

That’s a cripplingly small amount of RAM — I’d ask for at least 16GB.

I also haven’t seen anything that indicates AE CS5 will use the graphics card for acceleration; if it’s like CS4, the Quadro will be overkill, unless other apps you will run on that machine benefit from it.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Zeno Pierre] “btw, Grossmann’s “tail end” effect with the rolling stones was awesome.”

Agreed — it’s “little” touches like that really sell the shot. The technique used there is probably a rigid body dynamics simulation; the artist builds the boulders, defines the rules for the physics, and builds the geometry the boulders will interact with. Then the software simulates the physical interactions — collisions, bounces, etc. That movement data is fed back to the 3D renderer for final output.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events