If you’ve been shooting for any length of time, you’re already familiar with the basics of lighting. You’ve heard enough about the classic three-point lighting set-up to last a lifetime. But while good lighting is easy with a little bit of knowledge, GREAT lighting takes a lot more preparation. Videomaker has an essential video training toolto help you achieve the best lighting for your production – Advanced Lighting for Video will help you negotiate even the trickiest, most unusual lighting situations.

But there are some lighting situations that you probably thought you’d never encounter. That’s when you need Advanced Lighting for Video. How do you light a commercial product so that people want to buy it? How do you light the inside of a car so that your audience can see what’s happening? Advanced Lighting for Video is the consummate guide to navigating the toughest, weirdest lighting dilemmas.

Setting Up a Studio – What do you need when you’re setting up a studio? Learn what to look for in size, electricity, and sound.

Studio Lighting – Your studio lighting can look professional quality with the right lamps, fixture types and room dimensions. We’ll show you how!

Product Lighting – You want people to buy your product? A little lighting know-how can go a long way toward making anything from a basket of fruit to a used car look irresistible.

Lighting Car Interiors – Inside a car is one of the hardest spaces to light for video. Learn how to light it right inside a cramped space where big lamps won’t fit!

Lighting Night Scenes – Outdoor night scenes can be tricky because bright obvious lamps can easily ruin the illusion. We’ll show you how to use a light touch so your audience won’t wonder where the light is coming from.

Lighting Wide Shots – Lighting a wide shot is difficult if your lamps can’t reach the entire area. We’ll show you how to solve this problem, so that your widest angle shots still look uniformly good.

Professional-looking lighting is within your grasp when you absorb the knowledge on these DVDs. Learn how to conquer any mishap when you have Advanced Lighting for Video. It’s the essential lighting tool for every videographer who’s serious about taking pride in their craft.

To learn more, visit Advanced Lighting for Video!

So you want to make a documentary? We’ve all heard that before.  Just as we know that all the greatest writers are supposedly too busy hanging out in coffee shops and bemoaning the difficulties of writing to actually write, all the greatest documentarians are too busy worrying about where to start to actually, well, start.  When I was a kid, I used to love watching nature documentaries on PBS, all about the ocean floor or the rain forest or, especially, dinosaurs.  For years, though, I thought that a documentary HAD to be about some exotic faraway locale, that you had to travel to, say, the Gobi Desert or the Marianas trench, and that they always had to be about weird animals.  You might have the same problem, you’re too convinced that documentaries have to be sprawling, complicated affairs to realize that they’re actually pretty simple.  All you have to do it break it down!

Yup, it’s simple if you just break down the documentary process.  For example, take a look at Videomaker’s premium documentary series, now available to buy as one complete set at a $60 discount.  This DVD series divides up the daunting documentary process into four tidy little segments, so that you won’t get too overwhelmed.   All you need to worry about are four little things:

1) Documentary Storytelling: There’s good fodder for a stellar documentary anywhere.  Maybe you know a person with an unusual story to tell or maybe there’s a local landmark that you’ve always been curious about. Some of the most compelling documentaries come from personal stories or family histories, or dramas that, in the grand scheme of things, might not really be that dramatic. The incidents might be small or mundane, but if they communicate bigger, universal themes, they can touch people in ways that more polished but less intimate documentaries fail to do. For example, “The King of Kong” is a documentary about one man’s fight to become the world champion at the video game Donkey Kong. Most people would dismiss that as a silly goal, but the filmmakers were able to use his quest to tell a universal story about every man’s desire to leave his mark on the world.  This DVD shows you how to find the deeper meaning in even ordinary events and how to determine whether there’s enough meat in a story to be worth your time as a documentarian.

2) Documentary Funding: Yeah, so we’ve already established that you don’t have the budget to go down the Amazon. Unfortunately, even a modest documentary needs some budget and you don’t want to be stuck spinning your wheels because you can’t think of a way to get your hands on some cash.  Well, before you resort to robbing a bank, pulling off a daring international diamond heist, or something equally drastic (Pro tip: Don’t do that!), you should probably take a look at this DVD. Documentary Funding gives you helpful, practical and, above all, proven suggestions to get some cold hard cash to back up your documentary dreams. This feature looks at finding sources for funds, writing a thorough prospectus, knowing the details of an accurate budget sheet, organizing a successful fundraiser, editing a demo reel that impresses, and presenting the techniques of an effective pitch.

3) Documentary Equipment and Crew: Remember how we said you’d need money to shoot your documentary? Well, here’s where that comes into play. You may be able to cajole some friends into helping you out and you may be able to borrow your neighbor’s old camcorder for free… but let’s face it. You know you get what you pay for when you rely on the kindness of strangers (and friends).  If you’re going to make a documentary, make it good.  Cutting on necessary expenses always impacts the result and not in a good way. This DVD offers you tips on how to choose cameras, audio gear, lighting gear and accessories, and tips to finding and working with a professional crew. These tips will get you on your way to making a great documentary.

4) The Documentary  Shoot: And now that you’ve got all that preliminary planning and pre-planning and pre-pre-planning out of the way, it’s time to go out on the actual shoot.  This is where it all counts. The shoot is probably the most fun part of making the documentary, because this is where you really get to see your vision come together.  If you picked a good subject, you should feel re-newed excitement when you revisit the stories that originally sold you on it.  Conducting insightful interviews, setting up good lighting and audio, and getting location access are all part of the process here!

So there you go, the entire documentary process, all in four easy-to-digest chunks.  Now you better start filming, because, when you watch these DVDs,  you’ll no longer  have the excuse that you don’t know how to start.

Let me first start out by saying that if you haven’t yet heard, Videomaker is finally drawing on their more than 25 years of experience in video production and producing some new intensive workshops on topics ranging from Advanced Shooting to Green Screen and Special Effects. This is good news for people who are looking to quickly learn about many specific topics in video. If you haven’t seen it yet, the list of workshops can be found here.

While putting together these workshops, and to serve our attendees and readers as best we could, we decided to back up many of the points we cover in each teaching session with short examples from professional films, television, and documentaries. We figured what better way to learn than to study from examples of professional work? At the same time, we decided to future-proof ourselves and take as many of these clips as possible from Blu-Ray sources for a full 1080P experience. While that sounded great in theory, in actuality, it was tougher to accomplish than winning the World Cup. Sure, there were a ton of great tools out there that could rip a disc to an MKV or an AVI which could play back on a computer, but the problem we ran into was that our editing software did not support either format well and the AVIs usually had broken indexes. Additionally,when importing into our editing software it either wouldn’t import at all into our project, or the audio would be about as out of sync as a bad dancer.

Since MKVs are just containers for H.264 video and DTS or AC3 audio, our first thought was to just strip the container from the video and audio and then rejoin the two tracks together, saving us time by not having to re-encode. Much to our chagrin, we found it incredibly difficult (not to mention time consuming) to demux the file into audio and video sources and then remux, or combine, them into an H.264 file. In fact, because the H.264 stream was so high from these MKV sources, most muxing software wouldn’t even allow us to combine the video and audio at all, and there was no codec that could read the native .h264 file besides. Even if the audio source was DTS, our video editing program couldn’t read it. This process put us back to square one more times than even the most avid mathematician would care to count and eventually became so frustrating that we decided to scrap the idea all together.

Now a short word on the legalities of copying DVDs is in order at this point. Basically, in order to comply with U.S. law, any clips a person takes must be used in a way that stimulates creativity for the enrichment of the general public and not to just “supersede the objects” of the original for reasons of personal profit. Also, the clips need to be fairly short in length (i.e. ~30 seconds or less) and not harm any profits that the distributors and/or producers of the film would have made otherwise. Essentially, you shouldn’t be giving a free screening of films to others. This is more or less the rules that fair use follows. Of course, if you are using this software to back up your DVDs or Blu-Rays for personal use, that would also be lawful under current law until you begin to distribute it to others or use it for profit. However, it is always advisable to check out current law first before doing any of these activities to make sure you don’t get into any legal trouble. Wikipedia has some great articles on the legalities of ripping DVD discs and Videomaker has put together a great list of articles on how to stay legal as well so check them out.

That being said, our solution was to watch the disc in it’s entirety on our Blu-Ray players. Note the timecode, and then go back into the movie and use a great piece of software called Pavtube to rip the clips into an .mpg format that worked natively inside of our editing software. The clips turned out beautifully since there were so many options for raising the bit rates, dimensions, and frame rates of the video, and took very little time. The program also had just about every format imaginable to convert to and allowed users to type in timecode to mark in and out points in the video, which saved a ton of time and effort. It was also possible to copy the entire disc this way, but just expect it to take a lot longer depending on the length of the film. Now it should be said that on my Mac, it was possible to use MactheRipper and MPEG Streamclip to do the same thing, but I really liked decoding and converting my video using the same program on the PC. I’m not going to lie, I wish I could say that the Pavtube software was free, but for only 50 dollars, this program was well worth the headaches it saved when copying discs for editing. While I’m sure there are other software solutions out there that can do the same thing as the software we found, we were just hoping that we could save you the headache of downloading some of those shady programs that may not work the way you imagined!

Just recently, a team at the University of Tokyo found that using titanium oxide could allow optical disks to store 5,000 gigabytes of information. Honestly, that’s astounding. At the same time, a lot of people’s minds began buzzing with the implications. With these discs, Hollywood studios could release entire television series such as Lost and 24 plus bonus content all on one disc. Video games could finally fit huge engines and graphics all on one disk. Finally, studios could include super high resolution video on their discs so that people could see the movie in its fully rendered glory. However, let’s stop for a moment to take a quick poll. How many of you even own a Blu-ray player? If more than one of you out of 10 raised your hand, congratulate yourselves on being ahead of the curve. Though a majority of people still get their movies and television series delivered to them by optical media, it seems as if new media such as Blu-ray simply can’t pick up steam. A Harris poll taken last year showed that only 7 percent of Americans owned a Blu-ray player. Even though Blu-ray offers more than twice the resolution of standard definition DVDs and a higher quality sound, Americans still aren’t sold on the idea. Of course, this begs the question: why?

Popular reasons include the extra price of Blu-ray discs and that some people are happy with things just the way they are. However, there seems to be an even bigger reason behind all of this. Let’s take one last poll. How many of you watch movies or television online? If more than half of you raised your hand, then you would fall in line with research recently done by shopping site Retrevo. The study found that 51% of people in all age groups watched at least some of their television online. With these facts, the question becomes this: when the internet offers both free and cheap high quality video content all without having to leave your La-Z-Boy, why would anyone want to invest in a Blu-ray player or a Blu-ray disc? The answer might be that for most people there are no better alternatives for watching high-definition content on their internet-free TVs. However, with products such as the Apple TV, the new Google TV, Roku, and of course, the HD rich cable set top boxes, it is evident that hardware manufacturers and cable providers are betting that pretty soon, you won’t have an excuse not to.

The only real problem I can foresee with Internet TV is the fact that bandwidth is notoriously spotty with many internet providers. Also, no software or hardware provider has yet mastered the user experience with Internet TV. Often, they’ll make the experience too much like the internet itself (and no one wants to type on a keyboard), or they’ll make it too much like a TV which is very limited in its function. However, one day when a company finally gets the balance of TV and internet just right, Internet TV could be the biggest revolution since cable.

From an Aleratec Inc. press release.

Aleratec Inc., leading developer and manufacturer of “Prosumers’ Choice” solutions for the USB, Flash, HDD, Blu-ray, DVD CD, duplicating, and DVD/CD publishing markets, introduced today a new stand alone (SA) robotic disc duplicator. The DVD/CD RoboRacer SA is the 3rd generation of the highly successful RoboRacer DVD CD duplicator series and is a fully automatic, stand alone DVD CD duplicator with a 100 disc DVD copy or CD copy capacity. Stand alone means no computer is required and customers can load it with a source disc and up to 100 blank DVDs or CDs and it will produce 100 DVD or CD copies completely unattended. Read the rest of this entry »

According to a recent report from the good folks over at Nielsen, the number of households with an HD television has doubled over the previous year, to 23.3%. They predict with now almost one quarter of TV’s in the USA as HD, the demand for HD content will continue to expand dramatically.

What does this mean for independent video producers? Well, if you’re still shooting in SD, you may want to be looking at upgrading your equipment, not just as a future proofing idea, but in a 25% of my viewers will want to watch this in HD today idea. Even if you’re already shooting in HD, the picture is not so rosy when it comes to distribution. Blu-ray disc penetration is still at a paltry 8-9% and a large majority of those are Playstation 3′s. Standard definition DVD’s still are found in 91% of all US households, so you end up with the awkward situation of having an beautiful HDTV connected to a plain old DVD player in many homes.

Perhaps the future of HD distribution is not to be found on shiny plastic discs, but delivered at home directly via the internet? Openfilm, Vimeo, and now even YouTube have gotten into the HD distribution  game, it will be interesting to see how the direct line into the home plays out.

One thing is for sure: twice as many people as last year are bringing HDTV’s into their homes, and they’re going to want to watch something pretty on it.