Author: Philip

Production has always been a network-based business, except we didn’t say it like that until the new now. Back then it was “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”! Same thing: knowing a lot of people is what networking is about. In fact, one expert suggests that 70% of media positions are filled from within someone’s ‘social’ network.

There are two types of networks in the New Now: face-to-face local networks such as the MCA-I, Lions, Rotary, Kiwanis, Shriners, etc; and the online, ‘social media’ world of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.

Get involved in your industry

If there is a local chapter of the Media Communication Association – International (MCA-I), join it. You should also consider joining the Digital Video Professionals Association (DVPA) for online resources.

If you’re more focused on Event Videography, the Association of Video Professionals, or the Wedding and Event Videography Association International might be more appropriate.

Don’t just join and do nothing. The people who benefit most from any industry organization are those who contribute. Yes, it is extra work but volunteer for the committee. Help organize programs, make announcements and generally get yourself known as a helpful, knowledgeable professional.

Beyond local organizations, get involved with issues that will affect the industry. Know when there are tax changes that would adversely affect your business; when regulation is going to get in the way or other important issue. Right now, people are concerned about shifts in frequency allocation and the reduction of bands suitable for radio microphones that could lead to increased interference. If you use radio microphones, be involved.

Get involved in your local business groups.

Whatever local business groups there are in your area, you should be in at least one and be involved. You will meet other business people, be introduced to the movers and shakers in the town (a.k.a. influencers)

Social Media

Social media is the phenomena of connecting online with business people and old friends/acquaintances. It includes social networking sites like LinkedIN for business networks, or Facebook and MySpace for personal networks. While there are other social networks, like Plaxo, these three are the primary social and business networks you need to belong to.

Social media also is also used to describe any online site or tool that allows users to interact with other users and visitors. So, if you can leave a comment on a post, vote on content or rearrange the design of a site, then it is ‘social media’.

According to Business Week online, the main reason small business should be using social media is because it’s free:

“The biggest reason to use social media is that it’s free. You can be a significant player online without laying out any cash, and in this economic environment cash is king more than ever. It does take time, though, and in business time is money. But getting up to speed on social media is like learning to ride a bike; it’s difficult and intimidating at first, but once you get the hang of it you can get where you want to go quickly—and even enjoy the ride.”

Facebook

You should have a personal profile on Facebook but you should also create a fan group for your company. On Facebook, I’m in groups formed to promote the Final Cut Pro Network and Supermeets; the Boston Final Cut Pro User Group, LA Mixers (Internet Technology and Multimedia); and Goodnight Burbank.

Brett Gaylor used Facebook to promote his documentary, RiP: A Remix Manifesto. They create Facebook events you can ‘attend’ for each of the film’s screenings. They also created an RSS feed that lets you know about the film; created a Twitter channel and had the traditional “keep me posted” box for email addresses.

MySpace

While the momentum seems to be moving away from MySpace toward Facebook, if you can dedicate the time to maintaining two communities there’s no reason not to also have a production presence on MySpace.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is more a service for business connections, so you’ll want to be there and connect to anyone who could help promote your company. It is also very successful at promoting yourself. I have been approached with job offers because of my LinkedIn profile.

Here are some tips to better use LinkedIn to help grow your business:

1. You should link to your public LinkedIn profile in your email signature line.

Change the URL for your public profile at LinkedIn so that it better represents your name. The default for my profile was some combination of numbers and letters that made no sense. Log into your Profile and go to the “Edit Profile” section. At the bottom of your profile is the link to your public profile and a button to edit it. My public profile is now available at http://www.linkedin.com/in/philiphodgetts, which is much easier to remember or share. I could have used a product or company name as well. Your custom URL must contain 5 – 30 alphanumeric characters without spaces, symbols, or special characters.

2. Write reviews and recommendations for different people across different industries or cultures. Spread your name into as many places as possible.

3. Put as much detail as possible into your profile. Keep going until it’s 100% complete according to LinkedIn. Filling in the whole profile lets people know you treat it seriously and so should they.

4. Join LinkedIn groups that make sense for you and your business. I’m currently a member of the Boston Final Cut Pro User group, Digital Media LA (dmla), FCPUG Network Community and Supermeet, Inside Digital Design Radio and TV, Marketing – Video connect, Television Editors Avid and Final Cut Pro, and VOD Connect.

5. Only ask for connections from those you have some real association with. I’ll happily connect with anyone I know in person, online or have met at a conference.

6. Update your status every couple of days because it shows you’re involved and active on the site. I give this advice but do not always update that regularly!

7. Be optimistic and pleasant in anything you write. Being pleasant gets you noticed.

Many thanks to my friend Dean Forss for suggesting most of these tips on how to get more out of LinkedIn. Most would apply to other social networks as well. For more information on using LinkedIn for business can be found in the regular postings of the “I’m on Linked In, now what???” blog.

This is a small excerpt from my new book coming in April: The New Now: growing your production or post production business in a changed and changing world.

This is part of the larger writing project that (hopefully) will be finished around NAB time. This excerpt is two, of the ten sections, on how to produce more cheaply. I expect this to be a little controversial as I’m saying, essentially, “go as cheap as you can” when I know a lot of my close friends would always advocate “work at the highest quality you can afford”. They may not be different things!

All types of production are undergoing downward budgetary pressure. Some of this is simply equipment driven and of the industry’s own causing. For many years production and postproduction facilities pointed to the standard of equipment they used (or format) to indicate that they were “professional”. Then one day that equipment went up in quality and way, way down in price. Clients who understood they were paying for access to expensive equipment suddenly questioned the cost of production when the equipment went down so far in price.

Smart companies saw this coming and long ago stopped talking about the equipment and tools of production as their differentiating factor and moved to promoting their skills and talent at communication.

What the drop in production costs has created is the ability to create a program in almost every budget arena. How can we do that? We do that by adopting changes in technology and business that favor lower budget production without cheapening the look.

How much you are able to take advantage of these cost reductions depends entirely on the type of work you do and how technically pure your clients need you to be. Keep in mind that even Discovery now accepts HDV source for their “Bronze” programs (and smaller amounts in higher tiers of programming).

Here are two of my Top 10 tips for producing cheaper. Pass on the cost savings to keep clients coming back for more; or hold onto the savings and make more profit.

1) Don’t pay for quality your clients won’t see

This is the number one recommendation and one that’s sure to be controversial. A number of my friends are very quality focused: for them uncompressed 10 bit is a compromise on native film quality! (Ok, I exaggerate a little, but you know what I mean.) These people eschew “consumer” formats (like HDV and AVCHD/AVCAM) because they don’t meet their quality expectations.

Quality is fine. I’ve got no problem with shooting on Viper cameras, and doing 4:4:4 conforms at the end of the process for the Digital Intermediate, if you’re heading for major film distribution. There will always be work that requires the highest quality, but that is not the majority of independent production.

If your client won’t see the difference between something shot with 3-chip and a Thompson Viper, why spend the extra on the camera rental and the digital lab work to process to something editable? If it doesn’t add value on the screen, don’t spend it.

Over the last two years I’ve advised on a number of projects where compressed workflows were indistinguishable from uncompressed workflows. The first example was a multicam Saturday morning show being edited from the switched studio shoot, and the individual cameras. The company was “offlining” this SD project with DVCPRO 50 and then onlining to 10 bit uncompressed from Digital Betacam source. The uprez was taking them 18 hours a show and causing enormous problems for the Assistant Editors.

I suggested that they finish in DVCPRO 50 as it was a perfect match for the Digital Betacam source and challenged them to point to any visible difference between the DVCPRO 50 and uncompressed 10 bit. When nobody, from the Post Production Supervisor down to the editors and assistants, could see the difference the decision was made to use the DVCPRO 50 versions to finish.

A film project, going direct to DVD as the third in a movie franchise, was edited in ProRes 422 HQ from capture of dailies to DVD Mastering, simplifying the workflow.

Another film project, the fifth in a popular franchise, was shot with a Thompson Viper and the digital lab converted the Viper images to editable ProRes 422 HQ. The producer asked for the “highest quality” ‘offline’ in case he could convince the director to not go to a 4:4:4 conform. Given that the release was DVD only, and the market for this franchise would not perceive any quality difference, the company ultimately saved the $70,000 a conform of the Viper source would have cost, by doing color correction of the ProRes 422 (HQ) footage.

In both the last two examples, the ‘film’ was only going to be seen on DVD and the audience was the established audience for the franchise.

Once we get beyond a certain quality threshold (different for every targeted audience) there is no added value in producing in ever-higher, ever-more-expensive workflows “because we can, and we care about quality”. Clients and audiences only care about the “good enough” quality. If you doubt me, go visit 10 of your non-industry friends and see how well adjusted their home TV sets are.

You could rent a Viper or Sony F23 for a film project or buy a RED One digital cinema camera for the project, and the audience, even on a project distributed on film, won’t see the marginal quality improvement that the extra cost of the Viper/F23 provides.

Will an event client see the difference between a decent HDV camera and a $40,000 Panasonic or Sony camera? Does their home display come close to showing even that source as to maximum benefit?

Will a corporate client see, let alone worry about, so-called rolling shutter issues with an EX-1?

Don’t sweat the formats and gear. Even the cheapest modern HD camcorders aimed at the consumer market deliver “to die for” quality of just a few years back.

Compression is your friend

Compressed formats like DVCPRO 50, ProRes 422 and Avid’s DNxHD codecs are your friend. ProRes and DNxHD both do HD work, with minimal compression, at Standard Definition data rates.

This brings great benefit: lower storage costs and easy SAN (Storage Area Network) configurations. Not only is there less storage required (usually less than ¼ that of uncompressed 10 bit) but the storage does not have to be as fast, because the data rates are lower.

These high-quality, compressed formats make it possible to design a SAN based on Gigabit Ethernet , instead of requiring expensive Fiber Channel.

2) Put the money where it gives the best payback

If it’s not worth spending more than the client will perceive on the gear, it is worth spending money on decent lighting and sound. Lighting makes the pictures look great: far more so than any format change.

Research has shown that high quality audio is the cheapest way to “improve the perceived image quality”. Apparently good audio makes audiences think the pictures look better than the same pictures with poor-to-average audio.

Lighting

Gain some expertise in creative lighting then build a basic kit in whichever technology you prefer, although these days I’d be considering LED and fluorescent lighting over more traditional incandescent sources. LED and fluorescent lighting are low heat, which saves on air-conditioning needs (or prevents uncomfortably hot location shoots). LED lighting units, in particular, are smaller and lighter to transport.

Remember, with modern cameras, control of light is more important than the gross amount, once you clear the minimum exposure level that will keep the camera from deteriorating into noise.

Create some basic configurations you know well, and – along with your team – you can assemble quickly for the majority of the work you do. Creative flexibility and experimentation are for higher budget opportunities.

My ideal kit would be a LitePanel 1×1 , Two Lightpanel mini’s and Lightpanel Micro for a camera light. That kit will come to US$3880 and is highly recommended. If you look inside the back pages of the trade magazines you’ll find less expensive competitive offerings. One of the nice things about LED is that they can be dimmed without changing color temperature. If you’re still looking for alternatives check out Zylight .

Audio

Quality audio takes much more effort than using the built-in camera microphone, but that isn’t news to anyone, I’m sure. Invest in some good quality (Sennheiser or Lectrosonics) radio microphone systems and mini-shotgun system if you can, but for a budget kit here are my recommendations. (The higher price of the Sennheiser or Lectrosonics systems is offset by robustness of the gear, particularly the Lectrosonics microphones, that will mean they last many more years than cheaper gear, and offset by the reliability of “it just works”.)

Boom microphones can be expensive and, in general, you pay for what you get. The top-end Sennheiser shotgun will run you around $2500 – way over the top for a budget kit. Instead I settled on an Azden SGM-1X – Super-Cardioid Shotgun Condenser Microphone at $150. It’s a good compromise that can be used on camera for directional atmosphere or on a pole for talent audio. You’ll need a windshield and the K-ZFC Slip-On Fleecy Windscreen (Long) from K-Tek will do the job for around $80.

That boom pole you’ll be needing, along with some strong arms to hold it for any length of time, also comes from K-Tek . If there was the budget there I’d go for one of theirs.

If I had the budget I’d go for the K-Tek KA-113CCR 6-Section Articulated Boom Pole with XLR Coiled Cable (Side Exit) and 5 Locking Positions – Measuring 1.4 to 9.5′ for around $800, but instead we’ll go for the K-Tek KEG-88 Traveler Carbon Fiber Boom Pole at $370. (Yes, I know that’s more than the microphone, but the pole will continue to do duty long after you upgrade the microphone.)



Like shotguns, radio microphones come in a wide range of prices. Highly desirable is a diversity receiver . In diversity receivers there are two independent receivers, with their own aerials, and the receiver chooses whichever output has the best signal, moment by moment. I’m going for a Samson Concert 77 – Wireless Lavalier Microphone System with CR77 Receiver, CT7 Body-Pack Transmitter with Samson LM5 Lavalier Microphone at $220, which is the lowest price diversity system at B&H photo.

You’ll also need (or someone will) noise isolating headphones for location monitoring. Figure at least $50 and up. Figure $100 for cables and audio adapters for getting direct feeds from mixers and PA systems.

Another eight sections on producing more completely coming in April in my new book The New Now: growing your production or post production business in a changed and changing world.

Production and post-production are constantly evolving and developing. If you are not actively learning you are falling behind. While you have the advantage of experience, those graduating from Film Schools, Universities and even Community Colleges have experience with Final Cut Pro, Media Composer, After Effects and usually a 3D application (like Cinema 4D or Maya). Photoshop skills are simply assumed: grade schoolers are now doing visual effects and compositing.

Whatever new skills you learn, should be consistent with your brand and unique selling proposition. Most people’s immediate thought is to broaden the range of services you offer, in the expectation of being able to service more customer needs. This needs to be done carefully, whether by improving your own skills or partnering with others, to keep true to your core brand values.

One of my friends, Randy Tinfow of Image Plant and Proscenum, chose a different path. Instead of broadening their services, he chose to narrowly define their speciality. Randy says:

“I have actually gone in the other direction, narrowly defining our perceived specialty or “value add” to be in an area of great demand.  So by developing excellence in an area of need, we’ve been able to differentiate ourselves and have as much business as we can handle.  We have not sold editing, animation, compression, or production in 5 years, but 80% of our activity is doing just those tasks.  It’s the other 20% of the work that pulls clients in our direction: “providing enhanced video delivery mechanisms.
“Being great in one important area is far better than being a good generalist.  Certainly more lucrative.  It helps that we can demonstrate how our works ALWAYS saves clients money.”

By building one specific area of expertise – “enhanced video delivery mechanisms”, including the entire Proscenum delivery technology – Image Plant have grown their editing, animation, compression and production services without advertising or promoting them!

Almost everyone will have to deal with non-tape workflows. These workflow changes are upon us so. Now is the time to read and get test footage to become totally familiar with how to edit RED, XDCAM HD/EX, AVCHD/AVCCAM, etc now, ahead of client needs. Or become an expert in getting media online with expertise in encoding and hosting. Inevitably it will drive production and post production.

Resources

If you happen to be in Southern California then UCLA Extension in Hollywood offers everything from acting and animation to television writing and visual effects. Most courses at UCLA Extension and comparable schools meet for six to 12 weeks and cost a few hundred dollars. Longer, part-time certificate programs take up to two years to finish.

The various Guilds also have classes and resources for free through the Guilds’ head offices. Lori Jane Coleman, American Cinema Editors internship director, encourages fellow editors who aren’t on a show or film crew to take a Final Cut Pro class, which is offered free through the guild.

Beyond these regional activities, companies like Lynda.com, Total Training and Class on Demand have both DVD-based training and online delivery of the same training.

• Tip: You’ll get the most benefit out of any form of visual training by working along with the trainer, or immediately putting the skills into use with your own project materials. Passively watching online video or DVD rarely improves your knowledge. Actively applying what you’ve learnt within 24 hours cements it as knowledge in your brain. If you haven’t used it within 72 hours (3 days) research shows that you wasted your time watching.

Don’t forget, too that most software comes with tutorials. In the Final Cut Studio 2 package there are two DVDs of tutorial included free. You’ll be surprised how many productivity tips can be learnt.

Studio Daily and DV run periodic webinars on relevant topics you can use to improve your skill base.

BuZZdex

One resource you should be using, wherever you are, is the Digital Production BuZZ BuZZdex. The BuZZdex is an index to the best of free articles, tutorials and resources anywhere on the Internet. While we all know there are great tutorials at CreativeCow.net, throughout the Digital Media Net network and at places like LAFCPUG.org or KenStone.net, it is only through the BuZZdex that you can find articles from all these sites, and more, that are indexed by Application, Chapter and Topic.

For example, if you wanted to find an article on Chroma Keying DV in Final Cut Pro, you would go to the BuZZdex and choose “By Application”. Select Final Cut Pro then Articles and Tutorials by category. Select Keying from the category list and the topic sublist will appear . From there you can choose Keying DV and three articles will be listed ready for your learning pleasure.

Or if you wanted to know how to create a fake display on a monitor. Choose Articles then Articles and Tutorials by category and click ‘more’. Select Visual and Creative Effects as the chapter and Simulating Displays. Then simply choose the article that’s closest to the type of display you want to create.

As of today, the BuZZdex contained 7233 references to 4627 individual articles or tutorials. (Some articles have more than one reference in the index because they fit under more than one topic.) No other resource comes even close. These can be further sorted into type, so if you only want to see video tutorials, you can limit the BuZZdex to only showing you video-based tutorials.

 Optimally, regardless of workload, we all should be spending the equivalent of 20% of our workweek on improving our skills. Few, outside Google employees, can realistically find time to do that when our businesses are running hot, so we have to compensate by using any time when business is not running hot to improve our skills and improve our marketing.

When we were proposing micropayments for Open TV Network’s RSS-driven system, one reporter started her article with “Market trends be damned, the Open Television Network launches this week. ”

Such is the conventional wisdom that micropayments have been tried and don’t work. But there is a big difference in “being tried” and “being tried in a way that doesn’t get in the customer’s face all the time”. Micropayment technologies that “get in your face” and require significant data entry for every transaction, or make it really, really obvious that you’re spending money – even if it’s a penny a page.

So, I agree that micropayment models that get in your face all the time have failed. That’s no surprise at all. Although the “penny a page” model has been tried, it could work if it were designed so that there were no big warnings that you were going to spend another penny! (Heaven forbid.)

Because the Open TV Network is RSS based, we used the same “Get” button in the aggregation software (mostly Apple’s iTunes) as the “download and buy button” by pre-pending the file name with the price. We designed our system to work with payments as low as a penny a file (1c) although no-one has yet priced content that low.

Although originally considered to be as low as 1c per purchase, micropayments are now considered to be any amount that would be unprofitable to transact through the credit card system with its current charging models.  Like Apple we aggregate the charges until it is profitable to post to a credit card on file. (Apple, I believe, transacts every week.)

Others use the “buy some currency in advance”. Microsoft use this model as do iStockPhoto.com. You buy some currency and the “exchange rate” may not be one-to-one. Generally you can only spend these currencies on the one site.

Whichever model, I’d like to propose that micropayments, when done frictionlessly – without intruding into the customer’s enjoyment – are definitely successful. The examples that follow are from my own experience, but there are in-game economies in many multi-player games. For example  World of Warcraft Gold, Microsoft Points (X Box) and the Wii game store, use the advance purchase of their currency model.

The secret, I believe, is to create a disconnect between the act of buying and the act of paying.

Ringtones

The mobile industry has the most widely accepted micropayment model: you buy minutes of air time and consume them one at a time. However the bigger success model is for ringtones. $2 for a 30 second snippet of a song (they probably already own) is a multi-billion dollar industry for the Telcos. Any sort of micropayment is easy to add to a phone account. Ringtones are purchased on the phone, on the go and simply added to the phone account. A phone account is a big amount to pay every month so a few ringtones don’t appear to add significantly to the account.

iTunes Store

A 99c music purchase is most definitely a micropayment, one that has now brought-in over $6 billion worth of gross revenue to Apple and its partners. What’s more interesting here is that these micropayment purchases are of content that is mostly available free via various bittorrent sites or services. Despite being available free, people prefer to use the very simple purchase method (Amazon’s One-Click) used in the iTunes Store. Charges appear weeks later on the customer’s credit card of choice. The music purchases – in iTunes or on the iPhone/iTouch – are frictionless during the transaction and the payment essentially disappears into the aggregated credit card bill at the end of the month.

App Store

Apple’s App Store for iPhone/iTouch applications is another example where the most common price for an Application is $0.99. Frictionless. Click buy, confirm purchase and it’s done. With iPhone OS 3 Apple are offering developers the opportunity to charge similar amounts (developer chooses) and the small payments appear weeks later on the aggregated credit card bill.

Open TV Network

As I said, frictionless purchase through an RSS feed that constantly offers new audio, video or print (PDF) content of interest to the viewer, right where they’re viewing the content (in iTunes). Like Apple, this requires an account to be set up in advance, but the purchase is a frictionless as clicking a button. (The confirmation of responsibility happens when the feed is subscribed to.)

Micropayments might not save the Newspaper business (as opposed to the news business) because there are so many sources of news that it’s hard to create the artificial scarcity that would be required to make charging viable. However for tangible benefits and the simplicity of consumption of media or applications, I see a very bright future for micropayments.

Perhaps, ultimately, major established content creators will see the wisdom of offering fairly priced downloads as a way of deterring piracy. When they do, we’ll be ready with the perfect mechanism!