You gotta check out this video I found this morning. It’s 2-minutes long and is about the woes we’ve been discussing here in this blog regarding people who hire us and then don’t want to pay for an honest day’s work and can’t understand why we charge for our work. It was posted on the ProVideo Coalition site. Mike Curtis, at ProVideo Coalition tags this at the end of his post:
“PS – and thanks to my friend from a post facility who sent me this link – to protect the innocent from the guilty, we’ll just call him a John for now….”
So to all the Johns, Jills and everyone else working in the trenches and not being appreciated for their work: this one’s for you.
I know this video has been making the rounds on the video-blogs lately, originally at the Art+Copy Club, this presentation by Joy Moeller explains the pet peeves of the editor / producer relationship, from an editor’s perspective. I’m a pretty mellow editor, but a lot of her complaints really resonated with me, especially the ones about not touching my computer screen, and sitting so close that we’re sharing the edit desk. I had a good laugh and thought I’d share it with you.
We just now received word from Canon that manual exposure firmware updates for the 5D Mark II DSLR camera will be coming soon. Canon says the new firmware update is to accommodate the many user requests they’ve received for manual exposure control while using the 5D it in video mode.
A true video or photographic artist must have complete control over focus, exposure, and shutter, and although the manual exposure control was there when shooting stills, the 5D reverted to auto control when set for video recording. To video producers, “auto” is a 4-letter word!
While being announced today, this firmware will not be available for download until early June. When we know more about it, we’ll let you know.
Meanwhile, watch this beautiful video,Reverie , that we discovered recently on filmmaker Stu Maschwitz’s site, ProLost. The video, by photographer Vincent LaForet, is 3 minutes long, was shot in 72 hours on a borrowed 5D, and demonstrates the capabilities of video production using this camera… and a lot of photographic skill, tools, and support staff.
So, with the upcoming retirement of Supreme Court Justice David Souter, President Obama must nominate a new justice to be confirmed by the Senate. The cat’s now out of the bag: it’s Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. She has been a target of criticism for a long time, and this is another time where the Internet’s deep memory has remembered something quite interesting: a 10+ year old clip of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) taking the opposition to task for their position.
The Internet now gives everyone the power to say “We won’t forget” and really mean it, and video on the Internet adds mightily to that power. It’s truly an exciting time to be on the Internet, and an even more exciting time to put video onto the Internet.
Manufacturer of unauthorized Mac clones Psystar has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. We have some mixed feelings about this news. A little healthy competition would be good for Apple, as obviously unexcited they are about that prospect (hence, their deauthorizing PowerComputing, Motorola and Umax from building authorized PowerPC-based Mac OS computers a little more than a decade ago)–being able to get a different selection of hardware at a more attractive price point could bring more people into the Mac-using fold. By extension, this might mean fewer viruses in the wild, it might have made Apple consider different hardware configurations (*cough* headless iMac *cough*), it could’ve meant a bigger dent in sales of Windows machines (and Microsoft is using this in their advertising now–PCs with similar specs selling for less are looking pretty attractive to a lot of buyers in this economy.)
The availability of a Mac clone could help video editors–there are a lot of editors who feel more at home on the Mac but can’t afford it, particularly when it comes to being able to add storage, exercising video options, etc. We wish Apple would allow clones again, but it seems unwise to try holding our breaths. Of course, with their reliance on TPM as a mechanism to make sure the “Mac tax” has been paid (and we know this is all about profits on hardware), Apple could simply sell a kit containing a copy of OS X and a PCI Express x1 card (or, for the laptop version, an ExpressCard/34) with a TPM module in place to any PC owner willing to shell out for it. This kit could be $300-350. Apple pockets a few hundred bucks and counts another user of Mac OS X, and everyone’s happy. I’d certainly consider doing this on a couple of my personal machines, if the option was available to me.
A British taxi dispatcher is getting a lot of attention at the international Cannes Festival in France this week with his amazingly low-budget movie about zombies, of all subjects. How low budget? Try $70. Director Marc Price begged and borrowed most of the gear to make his movie, “Colin”. He pleaded with friends to appear for free, and taught himself special effect editing in his spare time while working nights at the taxi company. So don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t make it with low-budget equipment… if a story engages an audience, it doesn’t matter how it was made or how much it cost. Take THAT over-paid Hollywood moguls! The people have spoken.
As for the rest of you, maybe this story will inspire you to use this three-day Memorial Weekend for something creative… who knows, maybe next year we’ll see YOU at Cannes.
ZDNet has posted a story on Four great camcorders for summer. The top two listings are simple cams, but they still shoot 720p HD video.
There are some “real” camcorders here too, that record AVCHD to SDHC cards (the Panasonic HDC-HS300) and hard drives (Sony HDR-XR520V). But everything listed is HD. This is a major turning point in the consumer electronics industry, in that high-definition has now reached the level of mainstream. So as far as we can tell, there’s really no reason to consider SD anymore. That, and you can still find some great deals on HD LCDs.
Ok. Gear up… it’s time for readers to confess their errors in a public arena – the annals of Videomaker magazine and website for possible entry in our annual “Video Horror Stories”. The rules are simple: tell us in 500 words or less about that time when, as a video producer, things that could go wrong, did go wrong… and how you remedied it, (if the footage was salvageable that is!) Did you show up to the chapel without fresh videotape? How ’bout that time you dropped the camera and broke the viewfinder, but still had to shoot the interview with the CEO of the company that hired you? Don’t forget that time you were stuck in the rain at a high school football game, how did you protect the camera? Read the rest of this entry »
The good folks over at isara.org, an organization dedicated to helping kids in Thailand, is holding something I hope to see more of: a video-equipment raffle fundraiser. The organizers of the raffle certainly know our demographic, there’s not much we wouldn’t do for a chance at a cool new piece of kit, and being able to help others in need at the same time is a fantastic bonus.
I’ve given to raffles for charity before of course, but most of the time the prizes are shall we say, a little lackluster. But in this case it’s a win-win. I want to help these kids, AND I want to win this gear!
Anyone who knows me knows that I constantly rant about the blatherings on social networking sites. People who so mistrust the whole Big Brother concept and identity theft woes seem to think nothing of posting everything from extremely personal data to photos of their kids on a social site that is completely run on automation. And they connect with unknown strangers who connect with unknown strangers who connect… etc, until they have a huge pile of virtual friends who in the real world they might not have given out their name to, much less their home phone number.
A while back, I pulled down my Facebook account because a very strange person from my past contacted me and insisted on “reconnecting” as friends.
This person who is NOT a friend, but is one of those former coworker-from-hell personalities, contacted me via FB requesting a friend invite. We were never friends before but she continued to send me badgering email requests so badly that I had to remove my account. I had a public profile, and was unable to change it to a private one, despite going through all the steps to make it so.
Recently, technology and media journalist Shelly Palmer wrote in his blog about a scary moment when his wife’s Facebook account was actually hijacked by a hacker and her friends received strange notices from the hacker posing as her. Read that scary account here.
I, for one, am signing off FB for now, I have other things to do than talk about myself all day. (As, ironically, I write this blog about myself!)
We just now received word from Canon that manual exposure firmware updates for the 5D Mark II DSLR camera will be coming soon. Canon says the new firmware update is to accommodate the many user requests they’ve received for manual exposure control while using the 5D it in video mode.
Manufacturer of unauthorized Mac clones 
A British taxi dispatcher is getting a lot of attention at the international 
ZDNet has posted a story on 
Ok. Gear up… it’s time for readers to confess their errors in a public arena – the annals of Videomaker magazine and website for possible entry in our annual “Video Horror Stories”. The rules are simple: tell us in 500 words or less about that time when, as a video producer, things that could go wrong, did go wrong… and how you remedied it, (if the footage was salvageable that is!) Did you show up to the chapel without fresh videotape? How ’bout that time you dropped the camera and broke the viewfinder, but still had to shoot the interview with the CEO of the company that hired you? Don’t forget that time you were stuck in the rain at a high school football game, how did you protect the camera? 
The good folks over at 
Anyone who knows me knows that I constantly rant about the blatherings on social networking sites. People who so mistrust the whole Big Brother concept and identity theft woes seem to think nothing of posting everything from extremely personal data to photos of their kids on a social site that is completely run on automation. And they connect with unknown strangers who connect with unknown strangers who connect… etc, until they have a huge pile of virtual friends who in the real world they might not have given out their name to, much less their home phone number.
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