Categories
Item of Interest

“You’re Too Into Real Business to understand Advertising and Social Media”

http://bit.ly/9siPSX I thought we’d got over this stupidity with the crash of 2001, when all those Internet “businesses” that didn’t have any real business plan but spent a fortune on “eyeballs” because “this time it’s different”.

Business is never “different”. You need customers, revenue and a problem that they want to pay you to pay you to solve.

All kidding aside, no matter how much new communication technology evolves, some businesses will be quick to evolve and others won’t. Manufacturing, distribution, marketing, advertising and financing all respond to market pressures the best way they can. It’s the nature of business.

I think it is a huge mistake to focus or fixate on what the universe will “eventually” look like. It’s not a good strategic exercise and it’s not a good practical or tactical exercise. Most astrophysicists agree that at some point the sun will expand and consume the earth. Is it really helpful to put that in your long-range plan? So why try to guess when technological efficiency will usurp incumbent, massive, inertial systems? Why not simply profit from the delta between the two and be best practices at both?

 

Categories
Item of Interest

We use it every day. “The internet: everything you need to know”

A great, insightful article by John Naughton. http://bit.ly/bAuoOY

A funny thing happened to us on the way to the future. The internet went from being something exotic to being boring utility, like mains electricity or running water – and we never really noticed. So we wound up being totally dependent on a system about which we are terminally incurious.

He compares the introduction of the printing press with the Internet (an analogy I totally agree with) and wonders just what the ultimate result will be; after all, 17 years after the introduction of the printing press it would have been totally impossible to predict the overall effect.

It’s a long article, but definitely worth a read:

  1. Take the Long View
  2. The web isn’t the Net
  3. Disruption is a feature not a bug (read only this if you must skip the rest)
  4. Think Ecology not Economics
  5. Complexity is the new reality (Sharkey says complex systems can’t survive)
  6. The network is now the computer (but I still save things locally because connection is NOT ubiquitous and NOT 10%% reliable)
  7. The Web is changing
  8. Huxley and Orwell are the bookends of our future.
  9. Our Intellectual property regime is no longer fit for the purpose. (Amen)

Categories
Item of Interest

Things You Can or Can’t Fix in Post: Video Acquisition.

Things You Can or Can’t Fix in Post: Video Acquisition http://bit.ly/bB4bqK

Mark Schubin’s presentation from the San Francisco Public Television Quality Workshop, June 8, 2010.

This presentation consists of one PowerPoint and four MOV video clips (download each file):
Schubin-SFPTVQW-Acquisition (PPT, 22 MB)
Mounts-the_Problem_(slide10) (MOV, 8 MB)
Mounts-Fixed_in_Post_(slide11) (MOV, 8 MB)
Mounts-Not_Exactly_Fixed_(slide12) (MOV, 6 MB)
Rolling_Shutter_(slide61) (MOV, 11 MB)

You will have to play the video clips manually based on the on-screen prompts in the PowerPoint.

I had the pleasure of producing Mark Schubin’s The Schubin Report for NewBay Media for nearly 18 months – two episodes a month. It was great work because, not only was I reasonably well paid, the whole time I listened to Mark, I was learning!

Categories
Item of Interest The Business of Production

Pre-buy a frame of a movie to fund it?

Pre-buy a frame of a movie to fund it? http://bit.ly/dhtAK6

The makers of The Tunnel, a horror movie set in the tunnels bored beneath Sydney (Australia) are looking at a rather unique way to fund the movie:

The funding for the film is being handled by the ‘135K project’ – a reference to the 135,000 frames that will be present in the finished 90 minute movie. A freshly launched website invites people to invest directly by buying a single frame of the movie for $1, 25 frames (1 second) for $25 or a minute for $1,500.

Now that’s not a huge budget – around $168,000 – but for an independent feature it can be enough.

This approach was decided on with the (accurate) realization that there’s no way of fighting unauthorized distribution so you might as well move forward understanding that.

No media these days is excluded from becoming available on the Internet, and Enzo’s previous production was no different.

“It just takes a quick Google search to see the endless torrents for that [Food Matters], too. The production company was nowhere near big enough to even try and fight it, so it was accepted that it would happen. So this time around I figured we should try and embrace that huge potential audience and make it a part of our strategy,” he told us.

Categories
Apple Business & Marketing Distribution New Media Studio 2.0

How do you get Disney to fund your next production?

It seems like an odd idea at first: could you fund a production – film or ongoing series – using iAds? After all, Apple have lined up $60 million in ad spend for the second half of 2010 and that would fund a lot of independent production! But how would it work?

First off iAds go in Apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad – or they will from early next month – and are an integral part of iOS 4. Any developer can add ads to their App simply and 60% of the revenue from ads goes to the App developer (or owner). That’s $36 million that’s going to be paid out to someone, why not your independent project?

I’ve long thought that the future of programming was Apps. An App, like a website, gives a single place for everything about your project: blog, previews, special content, upcoming events, merchandising etc. The advantage of not only having a website, but wrapping it an App is that the App will be a better fan experience, and it’s easy to add in-App purchasing of digital goods.

So, create an App for your project. This App will have:

  • An area where you can read the production blog;
  • Forums and chat around your project;
  • The Twitter feed from your project;
  • Connection into your Facebook presence;
  • Previews of scenes or trailers of movies;
  • The full project, with a little in-App purchasing (or not).
  • Calendar for screenings, parties and other events around your project, including signup (filtered for just the geography of the fan if they want, thanks to GPS on most of the devices)

Having everything to do with your project in a mobile app on iPhone or iPad makes it much easier for your fans, friends and followers to stay involved and participate. Involvement will improve. (Connecting with Fans and giving them a reason to buy is a basic tenet of independent production in the digital era.) Plus fans will likely be clicking on some of those ads if they’re well targeted, bringing revenue to the project.

Plus, there a minor security advantage. There’s no download function in Mobile Safari and Apps can’t download very much. Plus there’s no way to actually get anything downloaded within an App out of the App to a computer. That means your finished, high quality version could be viewed in the iDevices without much risk of it being distributed without authorization. (Recognizing though, that it will get distributed unless you project just plain sucks!)

Who’s going to be the first to give it a try?

Categories
Assisted Editing Item of Interest Metadata The Technology of Production

I’ve just uploaded some computer edited videos to YouTube

As well as showing the software in action, this series of videos show the results from the software. Each “edit” is based on a set of story keywords (logged with the clips) and a duration. Lower Thirds are automatic; story arc is automatic; b-roll is automatic; audio from b-roll is faded in and out and dropped in volume. All automatically and in seconds.

The project is about a young triple threat – singer, dancer, actor – Tim Draxl, discovered in Sydney when he was just short of his 18th birthday.

He played Rolf in a professional touring production in Australia in 2000 and his career has blossomed from there, and the three CD deal he has with Sony Universal: the first when he was 18!

Remember, these edits were done in seconds, from selects using Assisted Editing’s First Cuts software. And yes, this is my baby (along with Dr Greg Clarke).

The Sound of Music Edit

Without limits – about 13 minutes of material.

Four minute limit set. Edit is tighter and only the best material makes it to the edit.

 

Growing Up

Tim grew up partly in Australia and partly in Austria as his father worked as a ski instructor. This is the unlimited version of the “Growing Up” edit.

[Update: I forgot the 10 minute limit so one of the movies was too long and YouTube can’t distinguish between a 6 minute cut and a 4 minute cut, thinking they’re the same. Fortunately the videos are also available on our site. The Growing up unlimited  and six minute versions are available at http://assistedediting.com/FirstCuts/results.html]

And finally with a 4 minute limit.

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest The Business of Production

Bittorrent only full of leechers?

Bittorrent only full of leeches? http://bit.ly/amlT3X Peer-to-Peer (P2P) users of bittorrent are often thought of as only leeching on honest content creators but this group have organized funding for a seven episode series. Or at least the first episode.

Interesting turn: financed, released and distributed via P2P networks.

VODO’s newest release is titled Pioneer One, a brand new 7-part TV-series that raised enough funds to film the first episode through donations from TorrentFreak readersand other supporters. Unlike traditional television, the sci-fi-ish series will debut on the Internet, on BitTorrent.

Pioneer One is an ambitious project from Josh Bernhard and Bracey Smith who have collaborated before on ‘The Lionshare’, a BitTorrent-exclusive film which was released on VODO earlier this year. With support from even more big names than before, Bernhard, who wrote the script for the TV-series, hopes that today’s release will set a new record.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

Some cool tools for Final Cut Pro from Edit Mule

Auto-Collapse for FCP http://bit.ly/dtJQ1h Tidy up those timelines by collapsing redundant layers, removing unused parts of clips, etc. Looks powerful and useful.

We often create or are presented with messy, confusing timelines… This is the perfect way to simplify unwieldy timelines… It’s ideal for efficient use of drive space before media managing and re-conforming; and also for consolidating sequences to one track for exporting old style CMX EDL’s.

Filter Removal for FCP. Unlike Final Cut Pro’s Filter Removal tool, this one allows selective removal.

So often we find ourselves with sequences with tons of filters of all varieties. For example, say you have a whole sequence that’s been de-interlaced, colour corrected, with some maybe blur and film effect filters peppered around too, and you want to remove just the interlace filter… its impossible without deleting all the others. The workaround for this little problem is as tedious as it gets, you’ve got to pick through each and every clip and manually delete each of those pesky de-interlace filters… Now with EM Filter Remover you simply select the sequence whose filters you want to edit, and it does it all for you!

And one more that I didn’t tweet about is Auto Scratch. Automatically set the Scratch Disk to follow the project. Yah!

Particularly useful for machines and facilities with many operators and projects… EM Auto Scratch remembers where each projects render files and media destinations are meant to be, even when you hop between projects. No more excuses for colleagues who’ve accidentally deleted all the media for the project you’ve been working on for months!

Until today I wasn’t even aware of Edit Mule – out of the UK and creating some nice tools.

Categories
Item of Interest

Google’s Cloud Editing for YouTube

Editing “in the cloud” (i.e. with media and power remotely on the Internet) is hotting up. Google has just released a new tool for YouTube http://bit.ly/cahd27 while Avid have been previewing their cloud-based editing application. http://bit.ly/bnNPUQ

Still, uploading media seems to be the sticking point for any serious amount of editing.

Categories
Item of Interest

Journalism monopoly was also a market failure.

Journalism monopoly was also a market failure http://bit.ly/cAaY3t

From the article, which says it all:

For everyone but the monopolists and oligopolists, the market was grossly inefficient and nearly impossible to change.

Impossible, that is, until the barriers to entry dropped. In print, desktop publishing was the first crack in the dam, but it didn’t fully open the market. That only happened when the Internet came along — when eBay and Craigslist and Monster and Google and a host of other nimble companies created Internet advertising alternatives that monopolists couldn’t begin to match; and when a zillion content-based start-ups started finding better ways to tell people the things they needed or wanted to know.

The FTC is the principal federal government agency charged with promoting competition in American commerce. I don’t recall that it paid much attention to the inefficient, uncompetitive markets we had during the dominant days of newspaper monopolies and cozy, government-protected broadcasting.

So why, when the market finally opens up to competition at a variety of levels, is it suddenly time to fret so urgently about a market failure in journalism?