Just thought I’d pass this on in case anyone can use it.
There’s plenty of free vector art out there, but most of it shouldn’t be seen in public, let alone on your latest digital art masterpiece. Here are 60 completely free vector graphics that even the professionals use. They really should cost money, but we’re not complaining!
Check them out here.
A lot of my friends and associates are getting their passports ready for IBC this year. Every year I think “maybe this year” but there’s always one thing or the other. One thing has been Visa renewals which have happened in August the last three times. Leaving the US without a valid visa would make the European trip a much longer one than the five days or so of IBC – Sep 12 to 16.
So, once again I’m not going, and this year it’s bad. This is the first IBC FCP Supermeet organized in part by my good friend Mike Horton. Imagine putting together a major even a couple of thousand miles from your home base, in a city with a foreign language, expensive currency and way cool coffee shops. (They probably wouldn’t help Mike keep organized though!). The agenda has been set for the September 14 meeting at the Culture Park Westergasfabriek, Gashouder. (I hope that’s an address – for all I know I could be insulting someone’s mother!)
And there’s a good lineup for the meeting – ok, obviously *I* won’t be there to wow the crowd with a demo of Assisted Editing, but we will be giving away a copy of First Cuts as a raffle prize.
Those that make it will get Paul Saccone, Director of Technical Marketing in Apple’s Applications Marketing group, will provide the latest news on Final Cut Studio. If you’re into Digital Cinema Technology QuVIS will debut their offering there. Adobe’s Simon Hayhurst and Jason Levine will show how Adobe Production Premium’s suite of applications can compliment the Final Cut Pro workflow. (BTW, smart marketing by Adobe – people will have the CS3, and before the end of the month it appears CS4, and be tempted by what Adobe adds to the Final Cut Studio) without taking it on directly.) There will also be opportunity to see how the Infinity camera integrates with Final Cut Studio.
If you want to see the work of your peers, Darius Fisher will show clips from “Fields of Fuel” – the documentary that won the Audience award at Sundance 2008. Darius will also show how Final Cut Studio was used to make this complex and important documentary work. “Traitor” has only just been released Aug 27th (same as First Cuts/Finisher) and has an incredible pedigree behind it: written and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, edited by award winning film editor, Billy Fox and it stars Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce. Once again, the role of Final Cut Studio will be discussed by Billy Fox and (if available) Jeffrey Nacmanoff.
The final show and tell will be Miguel de Olaso – a Director of Photography from Spain – about using the Red camera with Final Cut Pro. Not to forget that the ever-smart Rich Young – editor of Macvideo.tv and founder of the UK FCP User Group – will share his “Top Ten FCP Tips and
Tricks”, which would make the trip worthwhile.
In addition to the above agenda there will be twenty vendors from all around Europe showing off their wares. Many of these companies will not be on the show floor at IBC. The SuperMeet will be the only place you will see them. There will be food and cash bars and rounding out the evening will be a
raffle with prizes totaling into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Doors will open at 5PM (17:00) and the show will begin at 7PM. (19:00) Tickets are on sale online only for Euro 10.00 each and this event is expected to sell out. Historically every SuperMeet for the past seven years has sold out.
Complete details, including daily updates on the agenda as well as a link to where to buy tickets can be found on the lafcpug web site.
Maybe I’ll make IBC 2009
AT the Boston Final Cut Pro User Group on Thursday February 21
Details at the Boston FCP User Group website.
Saturday February 23rd in New York. Distribution Workshop.
Hope to see you there
A story that came through my newsreader last week You Don’t Understand our Audience and summarized by Ars Technica resonated with some of my thinking around a book I’m working on.
The way the United States system was set up was an attempt by the Founding Fathers to avoid the perceived problems of the English and French political systems of the day. Congress balances the Executive Branch while the Executive Branch balances Congress. The Judiciary is there to ensure that Laws are Constitutional and that the actions of the President are Constitutional. The press – the so-called “Fourth Estate” – reports on, exposes flaws and generally keeps the rest honest.
At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Avoiding the political commentary on the first three “Estates” (Executive, Congress and Judiciary) it’s clear that the press and media have failed us completely. The linked article begins to explain why but one thing that’s not noted there is that “the press” has changed significantly since the days of the Founding Fathers. Then, there were hundreds of small, independent (and local) newspapers – not a very limited number of very powerful “media corporations”. The White House Press Corps are intimidated and will never call out the press secretary when they are clearly, obviously and provably lying; or where other lies can be easily proven by playing back a tape. But they don’t and they let the people down when they don’t. They know their job requires access to the press room and they too scared to do their job.
But they fail America because of their timidity. With so few media outlets obvious lies do not get exposed by timid “journalists”. We need a return to hundreds of independent voices uncovering lies and doing real journalism.
I hate to say it but it seems the blog-o-sphere is our last chance to save democracy and “keep the bastards honest” to quote Don Chip – a now-dead politician in Australia who led the third party trying to break the duopoly of political power that exists there (and in the US).
Notorious publicity hound, author and possible Nazi, Andrew Keen, claims that “amateur” reporting, aka blogging, is ruining news and that only professional journalists (producers, writers, editors, et al.) can be trusted to produce content. I refuse to actually link to Andrew but you can find his book, his blog and the explanation for the “Nazi” reference with a quick google search if you must.
It’s so easy to blow up the whole idea that only professional journalists can be trusted because the slightest analysis shows that the people who can be least trusted to report news accurately and without bias, are in fact journalists. Let me ask you this:
I thought not. I’ve been part of a number of newspaper stories, and been present at tapings of TV news stories about my mother’s business, and every single instance has had factual errors in the resulting story. Every single story. Since I’m not megalomaniacal enough to think that the media has in some way singled me out, I can only assume that the same level of (in)accuracy is part of every story in the professional media.
Not convinced yet? Fair enough. How about the White House Press Corps? We know, because we have videotaped evidence, that President George Bush has repeated lied to the Press Corp, contradicting himself and refusing to acknowledge that what he previously said was something he did say, despite abundant copies of the video being available to all press (and shown on “fake news” The Daily Show). Has the Press Corp ever taken him to task and asked, “with respect sir, you are lying and here’s the visual and audio evidence?” Perhaps they are awed by the Office of the President.
However there is no such excuse for continuing to give Press Secretary Tony Snow any credibility as he also can be demonstrated to have patently lied to the Press Corp repeatedly. In fact the only credible response to anything Mr Snow says at a Press Conference is “Sir, you’ve lied repeatedly to us in the past, we must assume you are lying to us now.”
Why does this happen? Because it’s more important to those so-called professional journalists that they have access to the White House, than doing the job they’re paid to do: report accurately what transpires, including calling lies, lies.
What about the countless times the professional media reports press releases from interested parties without, for one moment, applying any critical thinking to what might be being presented. An example from this week: according to a story by David Pendered – presumably a “professional journalist” at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reported the story Mayor rips craigslist over child prostitution, without for a moment applying any critical thinking. Absolutely zero evidence was presented (i.e. there is no factual basis for this report other than the Mayor said something); the only example given was a women who states that she is 21 on the site (but the “Mayor thinks she might not be” based on no evidence at all); and even if the ad were not true, Craigslist is a service provider and the fault is with the person placing the ad. The Mayor’s office, and the allegedly professional reporter (who clearly did no research) don’t realize that every Craigslist ad has a built-in reporting mechanism if the post is problematic.
So, instead of the Mayor reporting their concerns to the site, where something could be done, they picked a tame reporter who uncritically gave the Mayor the publicity they wanted, but failed the public and contributed to the recognition that the “professional media” is nothing but, once again, the lackey of the interested party.
This is not an isolated incident – in any given week you could find hundreds of such cases of media reporting that uncritically publishes whatever’s put in front of them. Take reports of “rampant piracy costing the US $12 billion a year” from the “think tank”, the Institute for Policy Innovation. Has any professional journalist examined the underlying assumptions of such a paper? No. Did any of those allegedly professional journalists check the background of the organization and find that it’s funded, mostly, by the RIAA and MPAA or even notice that much help was provided by organizations closely associated with the two-bit cartels? Of course they didn’t! That would require thinking and actually doing their job. Instead, it’s much easier to take the inflammatory headline bait and run with it uncritically.
Want more evidence? Back on August 22nd, ABC News polls asked who won the Democratic debate of the evening before. When Dennis Kucinich came out the winner, they simply changed the poll to give the results they preferred. That’s the “professional media” Andrew Keen thinks we’re supposed to trust because (and for no other reason) than they’re trained professionals.
Give me a break.
Of course, the professional media’s failings aren’t limited to egregious errors and lies, there’s the matter of accuracy of reporting on any technical subject. This week Adobe announced that the next generation of the Flash Player would support Industry Standard MPEG-4 H.264 video, but Associated Press, who apparently have no-one vaguely competent to report on the subject, made the discussion about High Definition video. That’s a small, tiny part of the story (a subject I do know a little about) but basically misses the real story – web video just became a whole lot better quality for small videos as well; we have one industry standard for multiple purposes and Adobe abandoned their proprietary video formats in order to embrace a ISO industry standard.
It’s not just “professional” journalists. Today Morgan Stanley’s Internet analyst Mary Meeker – a person investors are supposed to be able to rely on for accurate information – reported that YouTube’s new overlay advertising would bring in $4.8 Billion in the next year. Only problem was, she totally misunderstood that CMP is “Impressions per thousand” not impressions. She was out by only a factor of 1000! No wonder I haven’t believed an analysts prediction in more than five years. Guess compounded by bad math!
My final example is the way those “professional journalists” fell all over themselves to report Paris Hilton’s into-jail-out-of-jail-back-to-jail story. At best it was a footnote on life at that time, when there were thousands of more important stories, and yet news hour after news hour after roll of newsprint later all we got was wall-to-wall Hilton. So much so that one MSNBC on-air presenter had enough and refused to read the story placed in front of her.
Mr Keen (who will probably see this because for sure he has vanity searches at Technorati and Google Blog Search) couldn’t have chosen a worse example than attempting to defend “professional journalists”. To my mind, I’ve never actually run into one in the mainstream media.
What we need is a Fifth Estate, because the Fourth Estate has failed us. The Founding Fathers of this country had an experience of the press that was comprised of hundreds of independent voices, with a diversity of opinion. They did not expect it to degrade to just a few voices amplified in the echo chamber of incompetence, irrelevance and inaccuracy that is the mainstream media.
The Fifth Estate must rise up, it’s the only realistic way to keep Democracy alive in this great country.
So, I’m reading Time Magazine this week and stumble upon Joel Stein’s Totally Uncorked article.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s daily 15-min. video blog has 25,000 viewers who click onto his site each day to hear him describe–as he did a few weeks ago–a New World–style Spanish wine as “not obnoxiously over the top and fake as many of these types of wines are. Instead of a full face-lift and boob job and suction and all of that, maybe this just got a nose job.”
It’s clear that he’s doing the blog as promotion for his wine store business, which is at the same site as the video blog, so he doesn’t needcompensation for the blog. It’s also clear that Gary Vaynerchuck is that rare combination of expert (self taught so he retains the common touch) and a great on-air personality. Maybe a little over-the-top for some but very hard to look away from (perhaps for the same reason it’s hard not to stare at a train wreck).
But let’s say this guy just did the video blog and wanted to make a buck. The TV Wine Library vlog is daily and, according to Time Magazine, has 25,000 viewers per day (site visitors). Grant me the one indulgence: the technology to charge for individual items in a feed, as is suggested in this model, hasn’t been released yet, but it is coming.
Let’s say he could get some proportion, 20% maybe, of that audience to sign up for the feed even with a small charge associated with viewing the episodes. With incentives you might get a more than 20% to subscribe. Make the charge per episode low: a no-brainer decision level. For argument and easy math let’s say 10c per show, charged when it’s downloaded.
I think it’s reasonable to argue that if 15 minutes of programming isn’t worth a nickel then why are you wasting your time watching it? Your time to watch it is worth way more than that. (If you earn $10 an hour, that 15 minutes is equivalent to $2.50 of your time; scale your time’s value up to know how much it would cost you to watch 15 minutes of programming!)
Once the subscriber is on board, then the default in software like iTunes, is to download every show. (I prefer people to set it to manual download.) If you’re interested in wine then you’re probably not going to quibble over a dime a day. Make all the inevitable comparisons: “about the cost of one cup of coffee for a month’s wine entertainment and knowledge building.” (BTW, that’s the type of programming that has the most potential growth over all.)
Whichever way you put it, it is not a lot of money for a viewer. In an RSS feed it’s not a lot of effort, either: at most it requires a single click on the download button, if the aggregator is set to manual. All libraried in the same software (if using Apple’s iTunes). The show could then be sent to the Television via an Apple TV.
Ok, given that this is currently not possible, but will be in the near future, then our wine guy, with his smaller “for pay” audience over his the larger audience who watches for free, could pull in $1000 a day. That’s $5,000 a week, $20,000 a month, $240,000 a year. That’s a decent, middle class income.
His $5 million-a-year wine business is probably more worthwhile for him, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a hundred (or more) niche knowledge areas that would attract 5,000 or 10,000 people for a daily does of entertaining enlightenment. But I’ll bet that there are more than a few people for whom $150,000 plus a year would be a decent income.
1. There is an open, unmediated marketplace between producers and viewers where viewers compensate producers directly.
2. Production values do count: at a minimum they make the communication visible, audible and so the editing won’t make the target audience nauseas.
3. High production values are not the be all and end all, there will be outstanding product that breaks all the rules and makes a fortune because it’s popular.
4. Prices paid for content will trend down.
5. More people will earn a living from this new model of Television, overall more money than is earned now by the existing ‘Television Producers’. This likely means that fewer people will get mega rich but more people into a “middle class” of producers, making a good income meeting their market.
6. It can be profitable to meet the entertainment, education (or a mixture) needs of audiences from 250,000 to 1 million, which is the new mass market. Smaller audiences can be profitable if they serve a niche well.
7. Simplicity and convenience can compete with free. It can compete particularly well in open marketplaces where otherwise trends downward in revenues would unfortunate.
8. There is a role for non-television, done-for-the-fun-of-it with no expectation of profit, but for the fame of it. Production values will count less, and poor production values would never stop a video going viral.
9. The rise of the citizen journalist with easy visual verification tools – still and video cameras everywhere – makes for more openness and honesty in the political and social realms. Citizen Journalists form a new line in the defense of Democracy and the US way of life from those who would subvert. They form a Fifth Estate, behind Executive, Legislative, Judiciary and Press.
10. Programming styles will evolve outside the constrains of parallel programming and “half hour” or “hour” programming blocks. If programming is viewed on viewers’ schedules it can be whatever duration serves the story of that episode.
In an article at Ars Technica today , Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment, told the New York Times
“…that if fans want the show to live, they need to watch the broadcast because that’s how the money gets made. Stressing that live viewing is “of primary importance,” Tassler said that “We want them to watch on Wednesday at 8 o’clock… and we need them to recruit new viewers who are going to watch the broadcast.”
If CBS believes that only “appointment television” matters my best advice is to short sell Viacom. Appointment Television is dying. Every single trend points to the move away from Television of the 50’s and 60’s with limited channels where the family sat down together to watch.
But since then, Television has moved on to place more and more choice and control in the hands of the viewers. If CBS and it’s cousins at the other networks don’t see that as their future, they are dead. Short them!
Adobe have opened AIR to public beta. Formerly known as Apollo, AIR basically takes those Rich Internet Applications (RIA) from the browser and runs them in a cross-platform desktop environment. The biggest advantage of Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), over a browser, is that it allows developers to do things in their application that are “forbidden” (for security reasons) for a browser to do, like have local data storage. (AIR includes a SQLite-like database for this purpose.)
Development is basically the same as for RIA as browser deployment. AIR is the basis for Adobe’s upcoming Adobe Media Player. At least Adobe are “eating their own dog food” or more politely, proving their own technology is at least good enough for themselves!
AIR, like Microsoft’s Silverlight, is unlikely to directly affect many video professionals except that it will probably spawn a dozen players.
The news feeds I create are hosted hosted by the Digital Production BuZZ. This website is hosted on Media Temple’s Gridserver, which we chose because it allows us to absorb large amounts of traffic by simply using more resources on the Gridserver (for which we pay of course).
Unfortunately, Media Temple had a major problem with the Gridserver this morning and despite multiple phone calls to tech support and their media relations people did not get returned. Finally just now, I reached Marketing Director Alex Copehart, who could comment on the record. He had a team of people with him for the call (I suspect they were already together working on understanding this morning’s problems) and I was able to ask why there wasn’t more information on the website and why I hadn’t had my calls returned.
Here’s a tip, if you get to an outside call center for an organization like this, try hitting the directory number for sales! Most companies are more responsive in sales than anywhere else. It was via sales that I was able to get a useful comment.
The problem with the lack of detailed and timely information, Alex explained, was because t they were still attempting to understand fully what went wrong and they did not want to post misleading information.
David also offered, unprompted, to find us a different solution that would be more robust as a discounted price and we’ll explore that further with him over the next few days.
In any technology “stuff happens”. The Grid Server is a new concept and one that has potential, and we’re treating this as a one-off glitch. We may get hooked up with a different solution with them or
we’ll find a more reliable hosting service. We hope that today’s problems are transient. We’ll see.
My take-away, is for businesses that are having a problem, is to be as open and honest as you can be as quickly as you can be. My biggest frustration today is that I had no idea whether this was a problem that would be fixed in an hour, in which case we’d just wait it out, or whether it was a really big problem and I’d better make other arrangements to keep our site and feed alive. We’ll certainly be exploring failover provisions for the future.