Check out our quick 2-minute tutorial showing how to combine our brand-new EchoRemover™ plugin with AudioDenoise™ to fix both echo and noise in your audio inside Final Cut Pro X.
To learn more EchoRemover™, check out our EchoRemover™ page.
To see more AudioDenoise™, take a look at our AudioDenoise™ page.
Some of you have been asking: What advantages does AudioDenoise™ have over other denoise tools? What’s so special about it?
Check out our quick video to see three advantages of using CrumplePop AudioDenoise™.
To see more, check out CrumplePop AudioDenoise™.
AudioDenoise™ quickly identifies and removes problems like room noise, audio hiss and microphone noise from your audio. To see how AudioDenoise™ works in FCPX check out this brief video.
To learn more, check out CrumplePop AudioDenoise™.
Today we’re introducing AudioDenoise™ for Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere Pro.
AudioDenoise™ is a plugin that automatically removes many common types of audio noise from your video.
Room noise, microphone hiss, noise from a fan in the background – these are all distracting and annoying and can make our videos seem amateurish.
AudioDenoise™ can reduce or remove all of these types of noise. We’ve tried to make it as simple as possible, so you just drag and drop it onto your audio, and adjust the “Strength” slider to taste. If you want to target a specific type of noise in your video, just drag the playhead onto that area first, and then drop on the plugin. That’s it.
This plugin is a big deal for us at CrumplePop. It officially marks the beginning of a new effort we’re making in the field of audio for video. We believe that video editors need better audio tools. Specifically, audio tools that are designed specifically for video people. That’s what we’re going to bring you, starting with AudioDenoise™. More audio plugins are coming soon, including one or two that we think will blow your mind.
Working with stereo audio can be a difficult task. The amount of trust you place in your ears can leave your head spinning. Luckily Magnetic Stereo brings an easy to read visual component to stereo audio. In this quick tutorial, we show you how to visually see your unbalanced stereo channels and how to balance them with both manual and automatic controls.
If you ever edit video that was shot with a stereo mic (like the Rode iXY, Rode Stereo Videomic, Stereo Videomic X, the Zoom iQ6, or Zoom H4N field recorder), then you may run into a common problem: interviews that have unbalanced stereo channels. Magnetic Stereo, a plugin for Final Cut Pro X, fixes this problem by balancing your stereo automatically. Here’s a quick intro video that describes Magnetic Audio and its main features.
The corporate video sector doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being wildly exciting. It’s often associated with dreary talking heads, tedious soundtracks and uninspiring camera work.
At Tech TV we’re all about staying far away from that image. We’re an award-winning video production company based in the UK. We specialise in corporate videos that look great as well as being short, shareable, and straight to the point. We often work to tight deadlines and have multiple projects on the go at once, so speed is really important.
About a year ago, the company decided to make the switch to FCP X. We were already using FCP 7 but after the FCP X launch, we became interested in moving to the new software – despite the bad press it got on launch. It was initially a gradual process, starting with smaller projects with no defined deadline, but it soon became clear that there was no going back.
I joined Tech TV in January, just after the big switch. Having worked mostly with Avid during university, I expected my first assisting job to involve a lot of syncing, logging and waiting for footage to transcode, so I was pretty surprised to find out most of that wasn’t necessary with FCP X.
Our workflow really couldn’t be easier. We mostly shoot with the large sensor Panasonic AF-100 (AF-101 here in the UK) with prime lenses. We back up the cards on location to rugged hard drives then bring these back to the edit. It’s really easy to import the AVCHD rushes straight into FCP X through the import window. We can start cutting while the footage continues to import, quickly skimming through the event browser to pull down interviews and find our favorite shots.
“The great thing about FCP X is that it lets us start editing really quickly” says our Head of Production Matt Smith, “Some of the best ideas come in the edit, video is visual and FCP X is great at is visualizing how the shots are going to work together.”
I think the biggest test of speed was using FCP X for very tight deadlines like event wraps. We’ve now done a few events where we’ve managed to film, edit, colour correct, and add effects and graphics in a day. It looks great, and has been turned around in barely any time.
We do all our grading in FCP X using the in-built colour controls and make use of a few plugins for quick skin tone or white balance fixing.
“I use the colour correction tool all the time” our Editor and Producer Tash Jones says. “I use the colour mask to select and improve any colours that don’t look right, and I often use the shape mask to create simple vignette or a subtle sunset look.”
Something that has really changed the way we work is the amount of plugins now available for FCP X. We use them in pretty much every production; they allow us to make a creative edit quicker than ever.
We often take GoPros out on our shoots, and so we’ve found that the CrumblePop Fisheye Fixer plugin is fantastic – with a click of a button the image straightens out so it gives us some more flexibility with our shots.
“We’ve put the GoPro underwater and even on a centrifuge used for flight training” says Tash, “so it was whizzing round at some ridiculous G force, and the Fisheye Fixer plugin managed to sort the footage out, so we were impressed with that.”
We also make use of effects like glitch transitions, lens flares, light leaks and whip pans to give edits more pace and polish.
“The thing about corporate video is that often you haven’t always got amazing pictures to work with,” says Matt. “You often need something to help them come alive a bit.”
He adds: “Whereas indie filmmakers might have a nice landscape or studio set to work with, a lot of our ‘bread and butter’ filming is in a boardroom or office. That’s where Final Cut X and the plugins really come in, you’ve got a growing catalogue of stuff to use, so it’s really helped us create a more polished result.”
The software isn’t without it’s flaws, and we have had some problems with bugs along the way. There’s a particularly annoying one at the moment that tries to make all your key frame moves ease in and out, which it seems can only be fixed by toggling various options on and off repeatedly. Little glitches like that have been really frustrating, but with each update these things have been fixed and overall we’ve found that it crashes a lot less than other NLEs.
We honestly haven’t looked back to FCP 7 in a long time. In fact having worked at the company for just under a year, I can only recall two times we opened 7 and they were both to revisit old projects, which we then ended up 7toXing anyway.
It’s not going to win everyone over, but to be honest FCP X is perfect for the kind of work we do and our clients are happy because they get the professional look in half the time without the big production company price tag.
“I like to think of us as a very modern production company” says Matt, “we’re making a lot of stuff for mobile and social media. FCP X just seems to tie into that whole way of thinking.”
Roxanne Ibbetson is a Production Assistant at Tech TV, an award winning video production company based in London and Surrey in the UK.
Web series MTV Voices focuses on MTV’s global network of millennial journalists reporting on the subjects and issues that affect their everyday lives. MTV Voices editor Thomas Arnold took time to talk with us about his experiences with MTV Voices, Final Cut Pro X, and CrumplePop.
With content delivered from all over the world how does everything come together for MTV Voices? What does your average workflow look like?
MTV Voices is based in New York and London. I am based in NY. The interviews are done by correspondents all over the world. Most of them are volunteering and they have friends or shoot the interviews themselves.
Getting footage from the UK or NY is pretty easy but Ghana, China, The Middle East, South Africa, etc. proves to be more difficult. All of the corespondents upload the footage to us. At times this is an organizational nightmare. We have files coming in from everywhere and in every different way. Sometimes correspondents will send all of their files together, sometimes its one file at time. The footage comes in in all forms: highly compressed mp4, avi, any codec you can think of or never heard of. The files also come in every flavor of sizes and frame rates.
My first step after getting the footage is usually to convert the videos using MPEG Streamclip. This helps me get the footage in the same codec and size and makes editing a lot faster and smoother. On other projects I would let FCPX do this for me, but for this one the files are just so random it makes things easier if they all are uniform.
At this point I would start the edit. I use Vimeo to show rough cuts to the producers and creative director in NY and London. Once the cut is pretty solid, I start layering the grafx. All of which is done in FCPX.
What made you choose Final Cut Pro X for this project?
When MTV contacted me to do the Newscasts FCP X was out for about 6 months. I didn’t want to do the job in FCP 7. I knew that the program was on its way out and I needed to jump on to another platform. This was the perfect opportunity. I was trained on Avid, but most of my career I’ve been on FCP 7. I am not a huge Avid guy and despite all of the bad press I was intrigued by what FCP X seemed to offer. In my freelance work-life I am a one man band, shooting, grafx, directing, sound design and editing all fall on me. FCP X was designed for that work flow. I didn’t actually realize until I started working in it how true that really is. I was really excited by the fact that Motion was built into FCPX. I knew that these projects needed grafx, another thing that can be added to spice up the footage, and I know that they were going to be done by me. I know After Effects, use it a lot, but I am by no means an animator. I also don’t have the time to jump back and forth between programs so I wanted to stay in the editor. So to make my long story even longer I just jumped in and cut the first episode in FCP X. Honestly I was like, I can always jump back to 7 if I have to, or maybe i will do some of the effects in X and the cut in 7, or if doesn’t work out maybe I jump over to Premiere. After a few bumps on the way, the program is just SOOO INTUITIVE and FAST things just started clicking for me.
It’s funny when it comes to editing, there are all of these battles as to what is the better NLE. To me it’s the one that works the best with your brain, how you think. My whole career has basically been spent in the short form content: commercials, promos, mini documentary. Often the workflow is a producer providing me with a lot of material saying come up with something. So I often don’t have a script to work with. So when I edit I spend a lot of time brainstorming, I brainstorm on the timeline. I need the NLE to stay out of my way, move fast, let me just throw files around so I can see what is happening. I need to figure out what seems to be working then I build from that. FCP 7 was always that NLE for me. Also since the Motion is integrated into the editor I can do this on the grafx side as well all in the same app.
When I’m working I don’t want to think too much about technical issues. I just want to start editing. I often don’t even watch all the footage, I just start throwing clips down. I do eventually go through all of the footage though…that’s kind of important. FCP X really helps here. It does so much under the hood, it key-wording makes organizing my footage happen in matter of minutes. So to me a lot of the dead time of organization, trans-coding, rendering are all gone.
Even the “dreaded” magnetic timeline, when you get a handle on it is be pretty awesome tool. If you’re like me and constantly clicking and dragging clips around, the ability to move stuff and have the timeline repair itself and open up automatically really makes you move faster. Well for me it does.
It’s funny to me because the launch of FCP X reminds me a lot of the FCP Classic launch. Everybody called FCP Classic unprofessional, viewed it ore as a toy and it basically took over a huge part of the industry.
What made you think of using Red Giant Carousel, co-produced by CrumplePop, for the videos?
I started these videos right when Carousel was released. Seriously like the same day. When I saw the footage I realized I needed something to blend this stuff together. The camera work is not done by professionals, which I wanted to embrace (my producers will probably remember me bitching more then embracing, but I came around) but I also wanted to give the pieces a distinct look. To me Carousel made me think more of camera phone images than a slide projector. At the time everybody was using those hipstamatic effects on all of their pictures. I thought the idea of all of these people all over the world doing these interviews on their phones was kind of cool and was a way to embrace the range of production value. Then the look just kind of evolved as we started doing more newscasts.
The other big thing on choosing Carousel is that I was looking for a solution that I could do within the NLE. That was a huge factor in why I decided to do these projects in FCP X and use Carousel. I work full time as a writer, producer, editor at a Network during the day so all of MTV work for Voices is done in the mornings, evening and weekends and the turnaround time is usually pretty quick. FCPX and CrumplePop have helped me do that.
You said you’ve used SkinTone with this project? How did SkinTone help out?
To be honest, I just got it. For me it makes something that is rather difficult to achieve super easy. Especially on a lot of my work I am not going out to resolve very often. I really need it to be done in the editor. I also love the little box with the samples. Its a great way to really dial your tones in, which raises your production value so much with very little effort. It really goes along with the mantra of FCP X. The app and the plugins…we’ll take care of the technical stuff…you just be creative. Well thats how I feel about it.
Thanks so much to Tom for sitting down with us. You can check out Tom’s work at http://www.thomascarnold.com/ or his vimeo page.
I apologize to our listeners for being late getting this episode out. I got sick again and fell behind with my business and the podcast. The wait is worth it, though. Mike Carroll loves cinema and the craft of filmmaking. We love listening to Mike, in part because of his fountain of filmmaking lore and knowledge, but also because of his passion for the craft. After listening to Mike in this episode, you can’t help wanting to grab your camera and start making an indie feature with your HDSLR!
Listen along by clicking here (to download right-click and choose “save link as”)
Click here to subscribe in iTunes.
CARL 00:00 This is the Digital Convergence Podcast Episode 115. It’s Wednesday, March 20th, 2013. We would like to welcome you to another edition of the Digital Convergence Podcast, your talk show about photography, video and post production. This is episode 115, The Age of the Indie. The Digital Convergence Podcast is sponsored by CrumplePop, Film and Broadcast effects for Final Cut Pro. Now, today is a Digital Convergence team is Mr. Chris Fenwick of course–
CHRIS 00:42 Hello, hello, hello.
CARL 00:43 Hey Chris, and also Mr. Planet Mitch of planet5d.com in the forums of planet5d.com.
MITCH 00:50 Oh! You’re so sweet.
CARL 00:51 Yeah. So, I’m getting the hang of it. [laughter] And of course, we’re joined by Mr. Mike Carroll, the naked film maker and no–
MITCH 01:00 Yikes!
CARL 01:00 It’s not what you think. [laughter] He bares his soul for all, Mike. [laughter] It’s good to have you back on the show again.
MIKE 01:07 Oh, thanks so much for having me.
CARL 01:08 Man, we’ve been saying, we’re going to have you – of all the episodes, we’ve done – and don’t tell anybody, okay? But I think you were the most interesting person we had on the show. Just to let anybody know that we said that, okay? [chuckle]
MIKE 01:22 Of course. Well, I get such a kick when I hear you mentioned me on your show every couple of episodes, I feel like I should be sponsoring you somehow.
CARL 01:31 Oh, we can arrange that. [laughter]
MIKE 01:33 Okay.
CARL 01:35 We can definitely arrange that. No, it’s cool to have you because you up-heading me of what our convergence crowd is all about. You went out as an Indie filmmaker using the tools that are available and you created your own – not just one future film but multiple films and you’ve written a book. No, wait, you’ve written two books, but we’re going to get into that in a little bit. So we’re going to talk about that. But hey, I want to challenge our lustrous panel of cinematographers here. Okay, this is a music, this is a theme from either a TV show or a movie and let’s see if you can guess where it came from. Are you guys ready?
MITCH 02:20 Yes.
[inaudible]
CARL 02:58 All right, would you like to take a guess?
MIKE 03:02 That’s so easy.
CARL 03:03 Oh, no.
MITCH 03:04 Oh, no.
MIKE 03:05 It’s The Day the Earth Stood Still by Bernard Herrmann.
CARL 03:08 You have got it. Absolutely, and I knew Mike would get that one.
CHRIS 03:12 Actually I think the song is called Gort.
[chuckle]
MIKE 03:15 Gort Klaatu Barada Nikto.
CARL 03:17 There you go. And we’re talking about the 1951 version not the fake 2008 in the boot.
MIKE 03:23 Right, right.
MIKE 03:24 And you know what’s so unique about that score is that they didn’t have a studio orchestra.
CARL 03:31 Really?
MIKE 03:31 It was all done with the theremin.
CARL 03:33 Yeah, Isn’t that– I love the theremin.
MIKE 03:35 Yeah.
MITCH 03:37 I don’t know what that is.
CHRIS 03:38 You are a font of knowledge.
CARL 03:42 So theremin is this antenna thingy and you just wave your hands in front of it to produce different pitches with the sign wave that you hear. That weird–
MITCH 03:53 Really?
CARL 03:54 Whistling sounding thing. Yeah. Moog music still or used to make those things. I don’t know if they still do, but used to be able to get them from Moog.
MIKE 04:05 Really? I did not know that.
CARL 04:06 Yeah. But anyway, very good Mike. Man–
[laughter]
MITCH 04:10 Way to go Mike. I would have gotten that one wrong again.
CARL 04:13 What were you going to say Mitch?
MITCH 04:14 I was going to say the outer limits.
MIKE 04:16 Yeah, I was kind of going down that road too. But I think I have to resign from the show now, right? Is that correct?
[laughter]
CARL 04:26 No, no. The only one that we were going to fire you from is if you didn’t get route 66.
MITCH 04:31 Yeah.
MIKE 04:31 Oh, okay, good.
CARL 04:33 Anyway, it’s cool. Yeah, and you know that movie, the soundtrack was nominated. I don’t think it won, but it was nominated best original score. And the golden globe, I believe if I’ve got the facts right.
MITCH 04:47 Oh, you always have your facts right.
CARL 04:49 No I don’t.
MIKE 04:51 I’ll tell you, it is such a great score. I’ve got it on my iPad.
CARL 04:54 Do you really?
MIKE 04:55 Yeah.
MITCH 04:55 No wonder he got it. He’s a cheater.
[laughter]
CHRIS 04:58 No, he’s a real fan of cinema.
[laughter]
CARL 05:03 I do not know what Hollywood was thinking when they remade that movie with – who was that? Keanu Reeves. That movie was terrible, I’m sorry.
MIKE 05:15 Okay, here’s the lowdown. On moodmusic.com, you can buy a Etherwave Theremin Kit.
CARL 05:25 That’s cool. I still got.
MIKE 05:26 The build it yourself kit has an unfinished wood cabinet, prebuilt circuit board, several wiring points require soldering, not for the faint of heart. Power supplies included over 120 volts for use in US or Canada or 220 blah-blah-blah. The Etherwave Kit comes with a DVD containing two video tutorials. There you go.
CARL 05:45 How much is it?
MIKE 05:47 $359
CARL 05:50 Wow. Hey, does somebody want to buy me one of those?
[laughter]
MIKE 05:55 I think you might have to have a synthesizer to plug it into.
MITCH 05:59 Oh, gosh.
MIKE 06:00 Customize your cabinet with me–
CARL 06:02 Have you seen my studio?
MIKE 06:05 No, I don’t think so.
[chuckle]
CARL 06:09 I can handle that. That’d be cool. All right but this is not a music podcast is it? It’s about–
MIKE 06:16 This weekend move–
CARL 06:17 Making video, yeah. There are some cool stuff from Moog, but I have to do another podcast for that. [laughter]
MITCH 06:26 The Podcast King, Carl Wilson.
CARL 06:28 Right, yeah. Don’t feel like a podcast king as you can tell my voice is real froggy–
MITCH 06:34 Well, because you have been doing too many podcast.
CARL 06:35 is that what it is?
[laughter]
CARL 06:39 Oh well. So, everybody know what time it is?
MITCH 06:50 It’s time for old fashioned news from Planet5D.
CARL 06:53 Yeah, take it away Mitch?
[laughter]
MITCH 06:56 Making up my own story line there. I don’t have a whole lot of news this week. I think everybody is kind of in the loll before the storm of any bewitches two weeks , three weeks from now. I forgot–
CARL 07:11 April 7th.
MITCH 07:12 Yeah, so that’s about three weeks–
CARL 07:15 Well, technically, its April 6th, isn’t it? When it actually– I guess, they start having summer dance. but I won’t get there until the 7th.
MITCH 07:21 I think they are actually start on Friday or Saturday but any way [chuckle] there is also sort of stuff going on at NAB and I just ever barely scratch the service and by the ways, speaking of NAB, how is that for a Segway? I’m going to remind everybody that I’m going to be doing a live show every afternoon from 5 to 6 on the Teradek stage. I don’t have a link through that yet to where you can tune in but everyday will be having NAB wrap up show, but you can see me live. And we’re trying really hard to get Chris and Carl both on there.
MIKE 07:58 I’m going to be there in the audience watching for two days. [chuckle]
CARL 08:03 Hey, we’ll be the heck of course in the background, right?
MITCH 08:05 Yeah. I won’t doubt it. About the only exciting there was– I don’t know if I should say exciting, the rumor mill has the cannons going to announce a new camera tomorrow.
MIKE 08:16 Really?
MITCH 08:17 Yes, and it’s interesting and the kind of– I just don’t see the excitement over it, but the rumors are that they’re going to be announcing the EOS-B which is the name that was given to it on the leak by Best Buy. Best Buy had this on their website. I don’t know if even still there but it was leaked early. And the cool thing, quote on quote about it is the fact that it is smaller than a T4i and I already think that the T4i is too small but I have big hands. And larger than the EOS M which is the dash M is a Mirrorless camera. So this is an actual DSLR but it’s somewhere between the Mirrorless M and the T4i in terms of size. I guess there is a big market for small cameras these days which is – the only big appeal that I can see for it is got the same sensor apparently as the T4i, it does HD, video, digit 5 processor, 4 frames per second, the T4i does five. Base price is supposed to be about $799, which is really interesting because the T4i is currently retailing for about $650. So, we’ll have to see how this works out.
CARL 09:51 Where do you think these leaks come from Mitch?
MITCH 09:54 [chuckle] It’s really interesting on this one because the leak actually came from a website, alleged “legitimate website” [chuckle] I shouldn’t say that. Best Buy is legitimate, okay? [laughter]. Sorry, rephrase that. The question about why it was posted on this buy site. Did somebody screw up and post it early? I was recently told by – the guy is a BNH photo by the way, that they don’t get days and days of information early from folks like Canon and Icon and that kind of stuff. They sort of get it, half a day before. So they don’t have–
CARL 10:41 They have to scramble.
MITCH 10:42 Yeah, they have to scramble to get these things online. Just like I do, when I don’t get in the aid for the camera.
CARL 10:49 Do you think it really will be called the dash B or do you think that it was like a place hold their name or something?
MITCH 10:55 I don’t have a clue to be honest with you.
CARL 10:58 Interesting.
MITCH 10:59 It’s kind of interesting because the EOSM is mirrorless. I don’t know what the B would stand for.
CARL 11:06 Yeah, interesting.
MITCH 11:07 Earlier rumors where that it was going to be the seven DD, which would be replacement for the six DD, but this is no where close to the specs of that, so I don’t know. Just like on Mac rumors, there are people who love to make these things up to try to become famous and– [laughter] Same guys that write viruses and Trojans, and everything else seemed to get jollies out of making things up just to say, “Hey, I got my cellphone kind of rumors” or whatever even though they didn’t get your name in there.
CARL 11:44 Well, did you see that idiot before the 5D3 who posted a 5D2 with two XLR cables on the front of the handle?
MITCH 11:50 [laughter] Yeah.
CHRIS 11:52 Oh, wait. That was me.
MITCH 11:54 Oh, yeah, that was funny. I wonder why he did that.
CARL 11:59 Because he’s an idiot.
[laughter]
CARL 12:02 He wanted to be nerd famous.
MITCH 12:05 You can also now get – GH3 is become quite available now. It used to be in really low stock. So, if you’re looking for the Panasonic GH3, you can find those all over the place now, which took a long time for them to actually get it out, which kind of surprises me. It’s to the point now where some manufacturers are announcing this camera 6 to 12 months in advance and it just lays me.
CARL 12:34 I think that has to do with marketing and just trying to keep their name in front. If all their competitors are announcing something, maybe they just feel they have to be getting on the game.
MITCH 12:45 Well, but I’ve also been told that companies don’t like rumor sites because it “cuts down on sales”. People see the rumors and they go, “I’ll not buy something.”
CARL 13:01 Right.
MITCH 13:02 But now, for example, Canon released announced the 1DX, nine months before it came out. The 1DC was almost a year. Anyway, it’s just interesting the way that’s going to happen. Big news coming up in April is supposed to be the new firmware for the 5D Mark 3.
CARL 13:24 You know what? I totally forgot about that, the name announced that five, six months ago.
MITCH 13:29 Yeah, I think it was November and so we’re still eager waiting that.
CARL 13:36 That’s supposed to give us clean HTML.
MITCH 13:38 Yeah.
CARL 13:39 That’ll be cool. We actually bought one of the Kypros to do that, and then we’re disappointed that the new 5D3 didn’t have a cleaner to be able to record that way. So now, I get to use that for more stuff.
MITCH 13:53 Yeah, well see. I still don’t have a date on that. I’ve been trying to find that, but well see.
CARL 13:58 Okay.
MITCH 14:00 In terms of– One other interesting thing, which we debated before the show about whether this is actually a cinema pic or not, but I really enjoyed this.
CARL 14:11 It’s news now, so hit it.
[laughter]
MITCH 14:16 The DigitalRev website, they sell cameras, but they also have Kay, who does video reviews on YouTube and he’s got hundreds of thousands of followers. Periodically, get’s a famous photographer to shoot with a really crummy camera. And, he’s done it several times and it’s really fascinating. And this particular episode which I posted on my 5D couple of weeks ago, was shot by Vincent Laforet. And they gave him an – God, I forgot the name – Canon A2E and that they put a lens baby composer lens on it. It was just fascinating to watch Vincent shoot because – especially, in one section where he stood still for 10 minutes waiting for a pigeon to fly through the view because he had seen it happen and he wanted to wait until another pigeon or the same pigeon came back. And so he just stood there waiting and Kay was standing around going, “What are you doing?” [laughter] But in our fast paced world, it was really fun to see somebody slow down and actually wait for something to happen.
MIKE 15:39 It reminds me of what Rick Salmon says his workshops, he says “You don’t take pictures you make pictures.” That is what Vincent Laforet was doing. He was waiting for the opportunity. He anticipated what was going to happen and he put himself in wait for it. He made the picture. I always liked that little Rick Salmonism there.
CARL 16:04 This looks like an interesting bit. I have been watching it while you were talking. Pro photographer, cheap camera.
MITCH 16:11 Yeah.
CARL 16:12 [inaudible] very interesting and cool.
MIKE 16:13 The truth be told though, look how many of us – I look at my own – my 5D Mark 2 now is primarily a work machine. It’s not the machine that I turn to for fun as much as I used to because I love using my iPhone 5 as – for just fun photos, the fun things and then processing them on my iPhone. It is just the most fun thing in the world is to go to the park, take photos of things and then play in camera plus or – there’s all these different apps that you have to mess with. That’s a lot of fun to me. I like doing that.
CARL 16:57 It is amazing how much entertainment can be had in your iPhone.
[laughter]
CARL 17:05 What’s next?
MITCH 17:06 I’m done.
CHRIS 17:07 It seems like there should be a cut of music here.
[laughter]
CHRIS 17:13 I say it and it just happens, it’s magic.
MITCH 17:15 Your magic.
CHRIS 17:17 Scrolling through the show notes letting Carl cough on his own. Hey we should talk about Crumple Pop. I recently told you guys about being down in Santa Barbara working on a piece that I could not have gotten through without the Crumple Pop. I think they called it Split Screen X I believe?
MITCH 17:40 Correct.
CHRIS 17:41 Is that the one?
MITCH 17:42 Yes.
CHRIS 17:42 Yeah. I loved it. Very enjoyable to use. They always have a DCP discount DCP20 on their website for 20% off of anything from their site, but did you notices Mitch a couple of days ago, and actually I can mention this to Mike and Carl that a couple of days ago, I was going to bed and flip in to the news, thrill one last time and it’s not fair to give this now but I just thought it was interesting. They had a one day surprise sale, 40% off.
MITCH 18:18 I was going to mention that.
CHRIS 18:20 A bits to it.
MITCH 18:21 Well, the great thing about that and as much as some people don’t like mailing list, if you’re on their mailing list, they have done that several times. They have thrown up one day sales on several occasions but the only way your going to find out about it is either watch the Planet5D news or B, get on that mailing list because that’s where they show them. They pop up there.
CHRIS 18:49 I got it through the mailing list so mailing lists are not all bad people. Sometimes they can save you money.
MITCH 18:55 They could have saved you 20% more than the DCP20 code.
CHRIS 19:00 Is it 20% more or an additional 20%?
[laughter]
CHRIS 19:05 I’m sorry. I’m just arguing.
MITCH 19:07 All right math whiz.
CHRIS 19:08 Well, it’s hardly math.
[laughter]
CHRIS 19:11 It’s called sentence structure. Anyway we are big fans of Crumple Pop and you should be too. So–
MIKE 19:17 I know Gabe is going to be at NAB. They are not going to have a booth, but they are going to be there. So–
MITCH 19:22 Yeah. We got a hiccup.
CHRIS 19:22 Oh!
MIKE 19:23 Yeah. I look forward to meeting them. Yeah.
CHRIS 19:26 I would like to talk to Gabe about my time code plan and I would like him to build me.
MIKE 19:29 There you go.
CHRIS 19:31 Cool! Alright! What’s next?! Is there another sound effect? I can’t remember.
CARL 19:35 Oh! I can do that. I can do sound effects. Hold on. Alright. So. Joining us today is Mike Carroll the naked film maker who’s actually technically wearing clothes, but Mike, how did you come up with the name Naked Filmmaker? You were here before and you told us but tell us again.
MIKE 19:58 It’s a combination of things. The first thing is when everybody else I know makes movies they make them with the crew. Even friends of mine who I work with as camera man when they want to make a movie, they write it, they direct it but they get someone else to shoot it. And for me as a camera man, I can’t imagine anybody else looking through the lens except for me. So when I did something I used my news and documentary skills and that I write it, I shoot it, I direct it, I edit it, I do the sound. I put together the DVD. I do the poster. I do everything. And when I bend it screenings of other people’s films and a capital B – I thought it was a good story but the lighting could have been better or the sound was a bit weak in some areas. So they have someone else to blank, the camera man or the audio guy whereas for me, I have no one. No excuses.
CARL 20:59 Yeah.
MIKE 20:59 So and it’s – I look upon to this and artist do does paintings. They don’t have assistance doing the sketches and then someone else filling and the colors and all that. I do it all and when you see a film that you’ve done entirely by yourself, you have nothing to hide behind. So in effect you’re naked before the audience because all the judgment is on you.
CARL 21:21 There you go.
MIKE 21:22 And also it’s a play on the wonderful role nor titles in the 40’s and 50’s like The Naked City, The Naked Jungle, stuff like that because it gets a lot of attention.
[laughter]
MIKE 21:37 The two biggest first words in movies are either naked or last.
CARL 21:42 Really?
MIKE 21:43 The last picture show, the last mile. All of that, just type it in IMDB and there’s just a whole page full. So, I wanted to also play off in the word thing, but off course, if you type naked in the Amazon, you get an awful lot of books. And I wanted to have a title that would be very easy to remember. So not many people are going to remember my website, michaelfilm.com but if you say naked film making, no one is ever going to forget that.
CHRIS 22:13 Well, you’ve done well. [chuckle]
MITCH 22:16 Yeah, it works like a charm.
CARL 22:18 I’m actually checking on the Netflix as we speak.
MITCH 22:22 Don’t get destructed.
CARL 22:24 Well, I’m not going to get too destructed but I want to…
[laughter]
CARL 22:29 Oh yeah, there’s a couple right there. Netflix is, “Oh yeah, you’re right, couldn’t I? There’s a whole page. I’m on my Apple TV here, bump, bump bump.” Yeah, there’s quite a few. So, you were very kind to send us a copy digital of your revised book.
[laughter]
MITCH 22:53 Well, you have the only one who only have digital. I have not seen it in print yet either.
CHRIS 22:57 Oh is it too late to make corrections?
MITCH 22:59 No.
CHRIS 23:00 I find a couple of typos.
[laughter]
MIKE 23:03 E-mail me, I’ll fix them right away.
MITCH 23:05 I’m laughing because I did too.
[laughter]
MIKE 23:08 Please e-mail me, I’ll fix some. I did not–
CHRIS 23:10 No.
MIKE 23:12 I did not edit it myself.
CARL 23:14 Page 163, the word battery is spelled wrong, one.
[laughter]
CARL 23:18 Five words away from where it is spelled right.
[laughter]
MIKE 23:22 Live them alone.
CHRIS 23:24 No. Are you kidding? I would spell my own name wrong if I was not from mere repetition. If you recall, I tried to write a book a couple of years ago or co-write it and I was awful and I had to quit so now I’m amazed you pull this off.
MIKE 23:38 No. Well, on editing, that’s the one great thing about–
MITCH 23:42 I just pulled another one. [laughter] Sorry.
MIKE 23:46 See, you can not edit your own work. You can only do it so much. My wife reviews it after me and she is scrupulous. So I will go through it again. But the one nice thing about this is that the book– I can change it at any time. And that’s uploading a new file.
CARL 24:06 That’s awesome.
MIKE 24:07 So, those will be corrected by the end of the day.
CARL 24:10 So here’s the point people. If you want to get a rare – a copy of Mike’s new book with the typos, order it right away for an Amazon. [laughter]
MIKE 24:22 So when I wrote the first book, it was because– and thanks for having me on the show again. When you had me on last year, we talked all about making movies and how to make a films, or how I make films. And I should say that mine is not a how to book for everybody. It’s how I make movies and it’s for other people to take what they will, apply it to themselves, and take what you want and leave the rest. So, I’m not telling everybody this is what you do and all the other books are wrong. This is just how I do it. And–
CARL 25:02 I really appreciate that. Anybody who has watched my tutorials realizes that I’m showing people the way I do things. And I’ve had people write me and say, “You’re an idiot you should do this,” and I’ll go, “Hey, that’s a good point. I did not know that worked that way.” And in a lot of ways, the act of sharing is also a way of learning.
MIKE 25:24 Yeah, yeah. I take from everything and from the first time moment that I began discovering movies and becoming interested in them. I felt like a sponge absorbing all these different things. What makes this scene so good and was it the shooting or was it the editing? Why is the dialogue so good in this scene and then you watch another movie and it’s just completely unforgettable. So, I’m always watching and trying to grab what I can and learn how to make improvements, and also improve my spelling.
[laughter]
CARL 25:59 So, what are you working on now besides the book? Are you in the middle of another project, anything you want to tell us about?
MIKE 26:08 Oh, sure. I’m an open book. [chuckle] I’m always working on a lot of things. I’ve made two feature films, Year and Night Beats, also a full length documentary. They have all played in film festivals. The reason the book came about was that I had taught a couple of education courses through UC Davis University on film making. And I wanted to write a film book, but I did not know how to write. So what I did was I recorded the class, and then I transcribed it.
CARL 26:53 That’s clever.
MIKE 26:55 It’s time consuming.
CHRIS 26:57 Well you can pay people to do that now.
MIKE 27:00 Yeah, but that goes against my ethic of not spending money.
[laughter]
MIKE 27:06 I make a feature film for $10,000. I don’t want to pay anybody else. But you also learn by listening to how you speak, and I learned just how incoherent I could be by listening to my own lectures. So, I was benefited by editing. So, word processing was a huge help. The first drafted book, after I did it was 600 pages and I had over 200,000 words.
MITCH 27:39 Wow.
CARL 27:39 Wow.
MIKE 27:40 And I edit it down the first edition of make it filming making was 65,000 words. So I edit it, and edit it, and edit it. So I put the book out because I thought I need to generate some interest in the movies. I put them together as DVDs, full with extras and behind the scenes and audio commentaries, because if you make a DVD, it’s important to have more than just the movie and the trailer even if it’s a major studio film. If it only is the movie in the trailer, people don’t buy as many, whereas if you got a moderately interesting movie but full of extras, you get interest from people in buying that. So I always encourage people to put as many extras into it as you can. So I look upon the movies which are filled with extras and the book as a whole circle that if someone is interested in film making to find a book, then they’re going to be interested in seeing the movie so then they’ll buy the movies or buy a movie and check that out and vice-versa if they had seen the movie at a festival or heard about it to the podcast or check that out, or if they want to know more about film making then they’ll get the book. So it becomes a circle that feeds itself.
MITCH 29:06 And it made you incredibly rich, right?
MIKE 29:10 Well, it has made a couple of dollars. [chuckle] I will say this. I am very grateful that I have a full-time job, and that’s a job that I always wanted. Professionally, I’m a TV news cameraman for an NBC affiliate in Sacramento called KCRA, and it’s a dominate station. It’s a great job. I am so grateful to have it and I love doing it. So I make the movies as a creative outlet because I have always wanted to make a movie, and now you can make a movie. You don’t have to raise money. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on film. You don’t have to do all of that. And you can make a movie with the camera, so I got into it at the beginning of the digital wave. But as far as actually making any money with– I will say this, that when I first came out with the first edition of the book which was exactly three years ago, in March of 2010. For the first couple of months, I sold maybe 5 copies a month. At the most I sold eight. And I really was thinking, why did I do this? This was a complete waste of time. Nobody knows it. And I could not get any publicity. I could not get a magazine. I could not get anybody to even to put a review it or anything. To get any publicity is impossible. This show is the only publicity I’ve got.
MITCH 30:40 Really?
CARL 30:40 But then you were on the digital convergence podcast and salesman to the roof? Is that what you are going to say next?
MIKE 30:45 Yes. I started selling 10 copies a month.
[laughter]
MITCH 30:48 Awesome.
CARL 30:50 Hey, and I’ve gotten Amazon affiliates from that. So, that’s pretty cool. I know that you’ve been selling some.
MIKE 30:57 Well, what happened was that, starting at thanks giving, which is the beginning of the Christmas season, I went from selling 10 copies to selling a hundred copies.
MITCH 31:09 Oh wow. Great.
MIKE 31:10 That first Christmas. And then it would go down but maybe just to 30 copies a month or 50 copies a month, but what I was trying to get around to saying is that I’m not getting rich off of it, Mitch. But I will say that since Christmas of 2010, I have not paid a credit card statement with the money that I’ve earned as a camera man, it’s all been done from Amazon income.
CARL 31:39 Oh, very cool.
MITCH 31:40 Awesome.
MIKE 31:41 So, it’s been a help.
CARL 31:42 You must have been giddy crazy when you sold 100 copies one month.
MIKE 31:48 I was shocked and–
CARL 31:50 To go from 5, 8, and 10 to 100, good night!
MIKE 31:54 Well, here’s the deal. I’m in two local film making groups. Every city has a film making group. It’s just like SF Cutters and the Cutters in Atlanta. Every city has a film making club or whatever you want to call them. And I’m in two here, and I thought by the time I got to halfway through that first Christmas rush, I thought everybody that I know has already bought the book. Who are these other people?
[laughter]
CARL 32:22 I don’t have any more friends.
MIKE 32:23 I was out of friends after two months, that was it. And then Amazon has something that was never available to authors before which is called Amazon Author Central. And for as long as people have been publishing books, the authors want to know where the books are selling. And agencies and publishers say, “Well, that’s too difficult to do. We don’t have that information.” Amazon has the country and the world broken down into sections. So you can sign in to Amazon Author Central and see exactly where your books, DVDs, CDs are selling anywhere in the world. And when I signed onto it and I looked at it, I go, “Oh, my God.” I’ve gone outside of my zip code.
CARL 33:11 That’s a great thing there because we were talking this on the show last week when I mentioned that I’d work to help format a record label with a friend of mine and we did the normal middleman distribution thing. We had no clue our stuff was going to people. We’re going bankrupt. We did not get paid for the stock that we send out, even though, I do spot checks in the store. It’s great they give you that tool. This is what the whole publishing industry is up on errant right now.
MIKE 33:42 Well and it’s not – I don’t want to limit, since this is a film making program and the book is all about film making. I don’t want to limit that Amazon and Create Space is just about books. It’s also about movies. It’s about music. It’s about a variety of different things. So for filmmakers who’ve made a film that’s been in a festival but they thought nobody came knocking at my door to distribute it. You don’t have to worry about that because you can do it yourself and you’re actually much better off doing it yourself.
CHRIS 34:14 Is it hard to set up in Create Space to sell like a DVD or video streaming?
MIKE 34:21 Well, you have discovered that what last week when you went on, when you fill that out in five minutes, you were ready?
CHRIS 34:26 Yeah, did not set up any content or did anything to submit. [chuckle]
MIKE 34:30 It’s so simple and it’s simpler now than it was when I first did it three years ago. It is gotten easier and easier to do.
CHRIS 34:39 So what’s your take on the revenue sharing with Create Space?
MIKE 34:45 Oh yeah, you and I – we’re talking about that last week. My take on it is that– Let’s see… My books – the revise version sells for $14.95. I tried it. I don’t put anything out that’s over $14.95 because anything beyond that I think is no longer an impulse buy and I want to keep the prices as low as I can to stimulate people to not think twice. And also the Kindle versions are much cheaper. The price break on Amazon, it winds up being about you get just under a third of the retail cost of the book, unless, if I listed it in $20 and I’d make quite a bit more, but I try to keep it low. So my take on $14.95 is I make around $4. So it’s a small amount for me. But here is – and if I wanted to publish the book myself, make up 1500 copies or something like that and pay $5000 or $7000 and sell them only through myself as a store, then I would get what 50% or 60% of that. And likewise if I was had a movie and I was going to sell it for $14.95 or $19.95, I could make up a run of a thousand DVDs and then I could sell them all myself and I would have the lion share of that revenue. But at the same time, if you do that, you could wind up stuck with a garage full of boxes of your book filled with the occasional typo or with–
MITCH 36:32 You’re not going to let that go.
[laughter]
MIKE 36:35 Yeah, or you could have a typo on the back of your DVD box. You could have your name spelled wrong, which I did when I first was doing my first jacket. I got my dust jacket back on the DVD and on the back of DVDs, the titles of the credits are so small. You need a magnifying glass. It’s like a lawyer wrote it. So it’s easy to miss things like that. But what I’m getting is that you can have tons and tons of your books. I know several people that back when you would go out and shoot like the train show. In town, we have a big train museum and we do a whole special on a documentary on the train show because train nuts by every single thing about trains.
[laughter]
MIKE 37:27 And so he did a thousand VHS’ on them, and sold them and he still had a couple left. He sold them of a lot. But still there’s a couple left over. And my whole thing is that I don’t want to have the offer ahead. I don’t want to have the cost.
MITCH 37:44 Have you thought – there are websites like Cafe Press, where they will do the printing and they only print on demand. Have you thought about those things? Have you looked into that?
MIKE 37:53 Well, that’s exactly what Amazon does.
MITCH 37:55 Now? Okay.
MIKE 37:57 It’s printing on demand, and the prices are the cost are incredibly low. I can say that for a book it’s 0.13 cents per page. So, depending upon how long your book is that’s you can figure it out. If you got a 500 page book, it’s going to be $6 to print the interior. And then the jacket is another 30 of 40 cents because it’s a different paper and color and bound and all that.
CARL 38:30 That’s the quality compared to Random House or some other traditional printer here.
MIKE 38:38 You can’t tell the difference. It all gets down to – one of two things, either you– for a book, you either bring someone else in to as a designer, to design the page and the font and your header, and get the titles right and do the layout that way and an artist to do your jacket. Or you take more time but you do it all yourself using photo shop and word, which is what I did. Everything – the whole book is put together using Microsoft Word. I did not use In Design. I did not do anything like that. And then the jacket is done in Photoshop. And that’s also the exact same way that I do my DVDs – the jacket because when you buy a DVD from Amazon which is also printed on demand, you get a DVD jacket exactly like you would buy at Best Buy or something and it’s in the box and then the disc itself is also printed and you design all of that yourself.
MIKE 39:45 The disc art you upload as a JPEG, the jacket you upload as a JPEG. And for the DVD you mail in the DVD, at least, I did it last year ago. They might have it all set up so that you can upload it now. And they send you approved but it wise being exactly what you sent in. In fact now, what they have got it set up is that you can do check your proof digitally online and it saves them the printing time. It saves you the two or three weeks before you get the hard copy of the book. So, it’s much simpler and you can do it all yourself. It’s just takes a little more time.
CARL 40:32 Have you considered releasing your book as e-Books or do you?
MIKE 40:40 Well, I do Kindles. I do the Kindle versions. And one last thing just talking about going through Amazon, yeah, they do take a larger share. Then say if I was selling it myself, but at least as far as books go, I don’t want to have to shell out thousands of dollars and then be stocked with copies of the book that I can’t change. And also at anytime, I can change and modify the interior content of the book by fixing my copy in the file in Word and uploading a PDF, and then within 24 hours it’s in. It’s immediate. And you can also do that with a movie. If you have a movie on Amazon, you can add a new feature to it. Let’s say, you put it out the first time and nobody’s looking at it because it’s just a movie and a trailer. You can add commentaries, you can add making of, you can redo the dust jacket and upload all that and change it at anytime. And you also control the description that’s on Amazon about it.
MIKE 41:57 They take all of the work and effort out of it so, that you don’t have to go through the middleman. And they have the cost. When you set up project on Amazon whether it’s a book, a movie, a CD for music before if you were self publishing or so making a movie, printing a DVD, there would be an initial cost of $300 maybe to set it up, get it into their computer and stuff like that. With Amazon, the initial cost is zero. You don’t pay one penny. The only time I ever pay Amazon to see my book is when I pay the printing cost of a proof of a book and that I don’t pay any extra cost. I just pay the printing cost of the book and that’s it.
CARL 42:48 So basically, you almost have to buy your book to see your book.
MIKE 42:52 Well, exactly. [laughter] Yeah, but I don’t pay $14.95. I pay the printing cost, so they don’t even charge me for all of their other costs that were involved for boxing and packing and all of that stuff, no. It costs absolutely nothing to create a project if you’ve got a movie that is sitting around, it costs absolutely nothing to set it up and put it on Amazon.
CARL 43:21 I want to talk a little bit about a recurring theme in your book as I’ve been reading through it the last couple of days. You really are the hands on guy. I read the whole story about shooting the long monologue in Nightbeats, and the story of packing up the trunk, and driving over to the theater, and wrestling with the kid– Well, not the kids, the skateboarders turned out to be not a problem but the drunks at the pub nearby–
[laughter]
CARL 43:56 Yeah, giggling at you or making noises every time you did a take, but even down to the– I ran the cable across the parking lot and put the cones out. But it’s not even just in your shooting, but the I love the fact that you talked about– I used Y adapters so I can hear everything that gets recorded. And I have an instance recently with the producer, who traveled a great distance over the ocean to be a part of a shoot, and hired a local crew. So, he’s already not controlling that and they shot three interviews in England, and one of them came back clearly out of focus.
MIKE 44:44 Oh.
CARL 44:45 The poster on the wall behind the man. Sharp as a tack.
MIKE 44:48 Oh I hate that. [laughter]
CARL 44:49 Dude in the foreground, clearly out of focus. And it’s astonishing to me when people don’t take that hands-on approach. And I love the way every shot of you on the set, you always have your headphones on, and you’re never more than arms length away from the camera. It’s a real testament to your desire to control that. Now a lot of people see that as a power trip, but in your case, it’s – who else is going to shoot it? There’s nobody else on the crew. Of course, I’m going to have to shoot it. And I really appreciate that in what you’re getting across through all your stuff.
MIKE 45:39 Oh. Well, thanks. I shoot it because I’m the only person who’s going to understand what I want to do.
CARL 45:47 Right.
MIKE 45:47 And I don’t say that arrogantly, it’s that when I talk to film making groups, and I explain to them that every movie is going to be different. And when you look at filmmaker’s work, you wonder why is this movie look this way and the other movie cut. It looks nothing like it. Yes, you may have had a different cameraman but they also may have gone after a totally different aesthetic and I think every project needs its own aesthetic, so that it looks different. Otherwise, it’s a TV series where every episode has to look the same and I like having things looking different, even if a big proponent of shooting natural light. But you can – although, our movies have been handheld, maybe I want to use a steady pod and make it looks smoother, or maybe I want to a tripod more often or experiment more with wide angles because almost everything I shoot has been in telephoto.
MIKE 46:45 I want to do something that’s going to be visually intriguing for me. For instance, when I was shooting Nightbeats, we had one big night where we shot in the night club and we were shooting all of the music which was all done live that night. All of the songs is being done over one, two and a half hour straight and we had invited people and it was by far our most expensive night that we shot. And I had asked two of my fellow cameramen from Channel 3, who also had camcorders, if they would there in the film making, and they came and they shot behind B-role and shots of people and all. And their footage was all good, but each person had a completely different eye. And I was totally focused on what I was doing because I had to get all this stuff in just two and a half hours. And so I told–
CARL 47:37 Were you able to use– I’m sorry.
MIKE 47:39 I wasn’t able to use any of it. And it was all great footage, but it was all great footage from their eye. It did not match the aesthetic that I was going for.
CARL 47:49 Interesting.
MIKE 47:49 And you just kind of get that. That’s why if a director has a multiple cam thing, he’s over off to the side or maybe even in another room looking at a bank of monitors to see how it’s all coming across. For me, I don’t like doing that because I do one camera shoots every angle in the movie I shoot. And it isn’t from arrogance, it’s that I wanted to have a certain feeling, since I’m shooting tight shots, I know where I want to have the eyes go. I know how much of the forehead to crop. I want to follow a theme, but it’s also another thing that it’s just me and the actors. In fact, the camera becomes another character in the scene and that’s why I described it with my camera. You have method acting. I’ve got a method camera because I’m intuitively reacting to what the actors are doing. It’s another extension to that, and the actors like it that way.
CARL 48:46 Yeah.
MITCH 48:48 How often do you hear from people that sort of basically say, “Thanks. I’ve always thought that I had to have a huge crew. I’m glad to see somebody else doing it as a one-man band and doing everything.” Is it common or are you–
MIKE 49:06 No. I still get a lot of people saying, “Why did you do that? Do it that way. [laughter] They’ll say, “I understand how you can do that but I don’t have that kind of an eye.” It takes absolutely fanatical obsessive attention to detail and everything where if you’re focusing on a shot, you also have to be thinking, “Okay, where is the microphone cable?” Is that in the shutter? Or is– do you have everything set up so that nobody’s going to trip and fall. For instance, When Nighbeats was all shot at night, and people said, so you got black extension cables for your lights–
MITCH 49:46 No!
MIKE 49:47 Absolutely not. I had white, orange and yellow cables.
MITCH 49:51 At least people would not trip on it.
MIKE 49:53 I don’t want anybody to trip. I want everything to be seen in visual, but you also– I got road cones just from Home Depot, just to set up as a periphery, taking– A couple of times we were on active streets, but we’re shooting at 2:00 in the morning, so traffic was almost nothing.
CARL 50:14 Yeah, that’s the story I read about asking the skateboarders to leave.
MIKE 50:18 Yeah. Well, also, we were– one of the main characters in it played by my wife’s stepdaughter, Laurie. She’s a junkie stripper in it, who’s living on the streets, and so she wears a really wild outfit. Well, we would get cop cars coming through maybe a couple of times a night checking out the scene, but to their credit, they went around the road cones. So even police will respect a road cone if you put it out.
[laughter]
CARL 50:50 So there’s your hot tip for film making today. [laughter]
CHRIS 50:53 Carry some cones in your truck.
MIKE 50:54 You don’t need a perimeter, you just need orange road cones from Home Depot and that’s it.
MITCH 50:59 I was going to ask you if you were did permits.
CARL 51:01 No, no.
CARL 51:02 Oh no. [chuckles]
MIKE 51:03 A permit really is a studio company needs permit because what’s the permit for? It’s for parking and they have trucks. I’ve got a Toyota. My entire truck is loaded into the back of my trunk. So it’s all simple. And also in the new blog, I have lots of photos so the people can see what’s in the trunk of my car. People can see the gear that I take–
CARL 51:29 I love those photos. And to be clear we at the DCP, we are not offering legal advise so in your own community, you may want to consider looking into the permit thing but we understand. I think Mike you would say it’s easier to say to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.
MIKE 51:48 Yeah. Well, I would not be – if I will shooting in front of City Hall during the day time, I would get permits, but if it’s after hours and it’s start forget it, I’m going to be out there by myself and I have.
CARL 52:02 Yeah, it’s funny.
[laughter]
CARL 52:05 Tell the story about being– I don’t remember where you came from before you got to Sacramento but the story where you decided that you needed to buy your own tripod.
MIKE 52:17 Oh, yeah. Well, I was–
CARL 52:19 And I tell you that around the same era late 80s, I did something very similar than buy a tripod but I bought my own gear to help myself look better. Go ahead.
MIKE 52:34 And that’s what’s it’s all about. I was a beginning camera man in the business. Well, it was about three and a half years in. I started out in a mail room and then finagled my way into a job as a TV news cameraman at another station by sending somebody else’s tape in getting a job.
[laughter]
MIKE 52:57 I had to learn everything from scratch. Everything was learned on the job which I think is really how you learn everything. It was in a station that’s now a powerhouse in Kansas, KWCH. Once–
CHRIS 53:12 If I was the cameraman I would shoot stuff like this please hire me. [laughter]
MIKE 53:18 Exactly. Well, I said, yeah, I shot that went on a vacation release status by filling in. I said it was my own stuff. It was just not my own stuff, but it had my name on it. But anyway, a lot of the gear was old and poor or the newer stuff people would grab right away. So I had a really terrible tripod that I could not lock down on tension. The tripod was weighted for – let’s say a 15 pound camera, and I had a 30 pound camera up there. So if I tightened the tension, it was not going to hold, and if I started to move away, I could not let go of the pan arm or it was going to start to tilt forward and then the weight of the camera would crash it to the ground. So that was not good. I hated using it. It was an old rickety aluminum tripod. I could not pan without it shuddering. I had worked in L.A. where I had a brand new Sachtler tripod, which is what all the stations used.
MIKE 54:22 And God it was just a dream. You put this tripod out and it did not move. It was solid. You panned and it looked like it was on not just network TV, it looked like it was in the movies. It was just beautiful to use and a joy and I liked using it. So when I had the chance to go back to Kansas and become the Chief Photographer, so I did that, and I was back with this old crappy tripod. They said, “We saved it for you”. And I was like, “You really should not have.” Thanks for nothing. So anyway, what I did was I thought I need to invest in myself. The only way I was going to get better was if I started winning awards in photography. So I took out a loan against my car–
[laughter]
MITCH 55:11 You can do that?
MIKE 55:12 Well, back then I could. I don’t know–
CARL 55:14 Mike Carroll, the title pan DP.
[laughter]
MIKE 55:18 Yeah. I took out a loan and I bought a $3500 tripod. At that time, all of the tripod we use–
CARL 55:28 I got to stop you right there Mike. [laughter] This is so contradictory the way most people think I think because most people would have gone and got that loan for the camera without thinking about the tripod.
MIKE 55:42 Well, I’m talking about working in news where all of the gears are given to you.
CARL 55:48 Yeah, right.
MIKE 55:49 Unless you’re a freelancer, you don’t buy your own gear. And even then, some freelancers don’t because each organization you work for has a different type of camera that they use and everything is exactly the same. If you work for NBC you’re going to use this. If you work for CNN, you’re going to have that type of the camera and they all could be different. Organizations often will have the gear and just hire the DP to use on the freelance basis. I was a staff photographer in a small station. I’m now a staff photographer in a fairly large station and they provide all of the gear. It’s a different set up. But at the station where I was working at, which KWCH in Wichita, we still had some old gear. We were going through the switch to become the number three to becoming a number one which we did.
MIKE 56:42 But I needed to improve myself. I wanted to make my own work look different and better. And the only way that would work for me was if I had my own tripod and I was shooting on a tripod and getting those steady shots and really making it look – taking it to a higher level. So, I took out a loan. I bought the tripod, and then because you’ve invested these much money and you’re not going to let it sit on the back of your truck. I spent 3500 bucks. I got to use it on this story. So I would do that and I aggressively paid it off in about 6 or 7 months, so everything was clear. I did start winning photography awards and contests because of it. It did pay off and because of the reel that I put together–
CARL 57:30 This time of your own footage.
[laughter]
MIKE 57:34 Well, with the footage or the stories that I shot with the tripod I invested in, but using their gear and all of that. I got my next job and then I got the job here in Sacramento. And when I came here, we had good gear. We had Sachtler tripods. We had really nice cameras. I did not need my tripod anymore so I sold it. It was two years old, so I sold it and I got $1800 back. So I felt you buy good stuff and then you sell it, and you get some money back for it. And if I bought a cheaper tripod, I would not get anything, but I bought a name and the investment paid off in my career and it also paid off when I sold it.
CHRIS 58:20 And I think that is really the key is the investing in your career. Carl and I talked about this a lot how – the number one thing that you need to do in this industry and probably frankly in any industries, you really do need to invest in yourself. You need to– Learning is important. Sure, there’s plenty of gear and software to learn about, but there’s also business practices. It’s not fancy. It’s not exciting. It does not have a cool name but you do need to learn how to manage a business. You need to learn how to promote yourself and there are plenty of resources out there that allow us to do that, but we very seldom – do we see the need to invest in ourselves to make ourselves a better business person, as well as a better technician, or editor, or camera operator, or writer and that’s something that we should really consider doing more.
MIKE 59:24 It’s like we all have decent computers–
CHRIS 59:28 I loved the fact that you did the one whole movie on an eMac–
[laughter]
MIKE 59:34 Well, the eMac was a great computer at that time.
CHRIS 59:37 Really? An eMac? Okay. [laughter]
MIKE 59:42 Well, this goes to another part of my aesthetic, is that I make my movies as a one man, but I also make them with gear that anybody could get. I just describe that gear that I work with today. I shoot my paying job. I have $50,000 camera with a $20,000 zoom lens on it. I have a Sachtler which – the Sachtler that I bought in the mid 1980’s was $3500. Today, that would be a $13,000 tripod.
CHRIS 60:14 Yeah.
MIKE 60:16 So I used high-end equipment. My wireless microphone is $3000 that I shoot with at work. But now, when I make my films, I do not use any of my station equipment. I don’t borrow it. I don’t use it. I don’t want to have the liability, and I stress to other people don’t use your company equipment. Don’t deal with that liability because if it breaks so you’re stuck with it, and how are you going to explain for that.
CHRIS 60:44 Yeah.
MIKE 60:44 So I use my own gear. I have a Canon 7D now. I describe all the cameras that I made my movies with before. I use the Sennheizer Evolution series wireless mics which you can get for $500, $600, something like that and are spectacular. I’ve edited using– My film so far were all done using Final Cut. Starting with Final Cut when it didn’t have a number and then Final Cut 6 or 7 at the end. So I use everything that you can buy. I have microphones that– I do have high end shotgun microphones that I have bought from people that I get to know. But once you get into the circle of film makers, you meet people, who either they’re buying something new, and they want to sell some gear they have got or they’re getting out of the business. And they’ll say, “Hey, you want this?”, and they’ll give you a deal. So I’ve got a $2000 microphone, I paid $500 for–
CHRIS 61:44 Oh, I’m a big believer in buying used stuff.
MIKE 61:47 Oh, yeah.
CHRIS 61:48 I’ve got a Maki 1402, I bought for $200. It’s a 400– It was brand that this company, they bought it and they never used the thing. It was a no-brainer to buy.
MIKE 61:58 Yeah, and it’s all over the place. We were talking about San Francisco cutters, and tomorrow night Robert Delva, who edited the Black Stallion is one of the great films. He had sent me an e-mail that – when he was working at Disney, he was leaving the lot and they were throwing all of their 35 millimeter movie editors into the dumpster because they had gone digital. They were just throwing that stuff away.
CHRIS 62:30 Wow.
MIKE 62:30 And now I will say, I have a 35 millimeter movie [laughter] that belonged to Universal Studios. I paid $200 for it on eBay. I just wanted to have it as a piece of history. And also I’ve got C stands that people have given to me because they say, “I’m getting out of the business, or I’m retiring, I’m moving.” Here are my C stands. When you get into this and also if you’re a nice guy, people will give you stuff and they will give you some good stuff. I’m not saying that you should plan this is part of your business plan [laughter]. It’s part of it. This is just kind of a perk to doing something and being honest with people and mutual respect and people liking you.
MIKE 63:16 But let me add one other thing, if I could about we’re talking earlier about distribution and Create Space. For filmmakers and make stuff when I was on the first time, we got to the end and Carl asked me about where can we see our stuff. What’s the future? How do you get distribution? The big thing now is that people are still trying to get into film festivals to make movie thinking that– then they’re going to get picked up by a studio. Their movie will get distributed and play in theaters around. Once in a while, that happens. That happened for Lina Donna with tiny furniture but I don’t think that movie was distributed but I don’t think it made you any money. Usually, that will just happen once in a great wall wireless. You’ll have better luck with fine lottery tickets or something. Our company may see a great talent and buy their movie and distribute it but they’re just doing it to create relationship with the artist. That happens very, very, very rarely. You can’t count on it.
MIKE 64:25 When I was in my first film festival with my feature film here in San Francisco, the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, which is a great, great festival. There are a bunch of other movies that played there with me and really good films. And then six months later, I started seeing them in my local video store. And I would look at them thinking, “How did they get out?”, and I would look on the back, and they are all being self distributed. It was all – whatever the name of the movie was .com, and you go to their website and they were selling them all themselves and they managed to get themselves onto some catalog. So, that made me start thinking, and I started looking around, and discovered Amazon, and Create Space and how you could put your movie out as a DVD. And they also handle all of the streaming.
MIKE 65:18 So, if you have a film that you want to make or that you have made and you have played it in a festival, you can upload it to Amazon and you can upload anything. If they are going to look at it, just make sure that it is not someone else’s movie. Make sure that you are not uploading Steven Spielberg’s link in your title on it or something or some other very questionable material. But just make sure that you’re the copyright owner. And then you upload that, and then when you’re doing the DVD, you mail the DVD and they check it to make sure all the specs are right. And there’s also one last thing, which is the box, you check. Do you want it to be available for streaming, for rent or for purchase as to download? And I check yes and you determine how much you want to charge and they take 50% of that. So I charged $99 to rent, and $4.95 if they want to buy it as a download and its a 50-50 split.
MIKE 66:14 But the nice thing is that they take care of the cost for the streaming. I don’t pay anything for that. They do it all as part of their system. And I don’t know if they have got it set up now for HD. I’m sure that they will, if they don’t have it set up yet, but they take care of all of those cost. And final thing about that’s why I am so far only doing things through Amazon, trying to get to iTunes is very hard and there are a lot of people – they are called aggregator setter will try to say well, sign up with us and we’ll get you on to iTunes. I have not have luck with this people yet because they send me up their business agreement and it’s 20 pages long and right away that turns me off.
CHRIS 67:02 Right.
CARL 67:03 Yeah, we were talking about that last week, iTunes can be a difficult place to get your stuff distributed like that. I do have a question, though, when you set up to publish your video on Amazon, there’s no exclusivity there, is there? You could go to Vimeo on demand?
MIKE 67:23 No. Yeah, I can publish anywhere. In fact, Year and Dog Soldiers are after listening to your show talking about free and about uploading whole documentaries. There was the one documentary on the digital platforms and I can’t remember the title of it that you were talking about, where the company had put the whole thing up there free. That really inspired me. So I put Dog Soldiers and Year up on Vimeo for people to be able to watch free, to see what it looks like. And then if they want more, if they want the extras, then they can go to Amazon and buy the DVD and get all the extras. But I have decided put at least those two up free. I’m not going to do that with Nightbeats just because it has some mature subject matter and I don’t want people who are too young to click on it or anything. But I tried to be responsible that way.
MIKE 68:18 But the last thing I want to say about the benefits from me is a filmmaker or Creates Space is that I don’t have to do the sales. I don’t have to deal with the sales to next. I don’t have to deal with the states to say, “This is how much I own.” All the board of equalization at the– I don’t have to explain to the IRS at tax time. I brought this camera and this laptop to make this movie, and then will say, “Is it a hobby or what? If you put it up on Create Space, it is not hobby, it’s a business. And especially, if you’re making money if– Couple years ago, I went to– It was tax time and I was going to see my account and then he just look to me and said, “You’ve been doing this a couple of years now and the IRS is kind of wonder where it’s all going.” And I said, “Here’s this form that I just got from Amazon with how much money I made last year.” And he looked at me and said, “I never have to ask you this again.”
CHRIS 69:15 Right.
MIKE 69:16 It completely justifies it and there will be no questions ask about that, and it is completely regenerate and they take care of it. I don’t have to deal with it.
CHRIS 69:25 That’s cool.
MITCH 69:25 Great point.
CHRIS 69:26 I never hope point of this business that you need to understand taxes. I’ve had the discussion many time with young people when they first start getting involved in the business and freelancing and I tell them, I said, “I know you think you’re making tons of money, go talk to an accountant. Go talk to a CPA. Don’t do this Turbo Tax thing. You need to talk to somebody who understands what you can and cannot write off legitimately and frankly they will save you a ton of money.”
MIKE 69:59 Because the taxes change every year. There’s a new codes.
CHRIS 70:01 Yeah, and I’m sure many people would disagree with me there, but I’ve been using various CPA’s for the last 25 years and it’s always money well spent, I think.
MIKE 70:14 It’s good to be married to one too.
CHRIS 70:17 [chuckle] There you go.
[laughter]
MIKE 70:19 My wife is my chief financial officer.
CHRIS 70:22 Does she do all the taxes?
MIKE 70:23 She does.
CHRIS 70:23 Obviously.
MIKE 70:24 Yeah.
CHRIS 70:25 Yeah, very cool.
MIKE 70:26 Yeah, she does a good job with it too. But we never– The whole M game with taxes is not to pay anything, [laughter] or to pay your fair share, I should say. I suppose. But I get tickled at some people, they talk about having huge refunds. I never have a huge refund from the IRS or the state government because my end game is – I have no intentions to give the government a loan. I will give them my fair share for the services that I get but that’s it. I’m not giving them a free loan. So – but I have seen people who have started businesses who did exactly what you said Chris where they think they are making a lot of money and–
CHRIS 71:07 They go spend it all–
MIKE 71:08 Yeah, they go spend it all but they didn’t hold anything back for the cordially estimated taxes or corporate taxes or however they are doing it. And that’s not good man, and they go bankrupt.
CHRIS 71:20 Yeah.
CARL 71:22 Yup, and we are seeing a lot of companies go out of business with the latest article. Did you see this article, I think it was on Creative Cow?
CHRIS 71:30 Yeah.
MIKE 71:32 We took a lot of heat over our commentary on that.
CHRIS 71:35 Yeah. Well, we have opinions and everybody has one.
MIKE 71:39 It still boils down to poor business practices.
CHRIS 71:44 Absolutely.
MIKE 71:44 Making poor business decisions and if people want to take exception to that, I’m sorry, you are not going to be in the business very long. It’s just the way it is. Business is always been that way for thousands of thousands of thousands of years. If you don’t adjust with the times and you don’t exercise good business practices, you’re not going to survive. It’s pure and simple. I don’t care what people think on that. I’m sorry. I don’t want to see people mistreated. I don’t want to see people in unfair conditions. But you know what? You got to make good business decisions. I can’t believe I’m going off on a tangent like that.
[laughter]
MITCH 72:14 Let’s talk about something–
MIKE 72:15 I did not even cough once during that. [laughter] I think I got a cure. All right, we do need to move on, don’t we?
CARL 72:23 I believe we should move forward to our– Let me think now, Mitch mentioned the Vincent Laforet cinema/news story about pro photographer which you camera.
MIKE 72:40 So, you’re going into the cinema room?
CARL 72:44 Mike is one of the most sincere lever of film and the staff that I know. Mike, do you have anything you’ve seen lately that you would recommend people watching and why?
MIKE 73:01 Oh, gosh.
CARL 73:02 Either online or maybe a full feature release–
MIKE 73:07 I don’t even go to the movies anymore.
CARL 73:09 Really?
[laughter]
CHRIS 73:10 I don’t either.
MIKE 73:12 And when go to the video store, I don’t know what’s there. So, if I throw out an old title.
CARL 73:19 Okay.
MIKE 73:20 Because Chris you said you haven’t seen this before, The Black Stallion.
CHRIS 73:23 Oh yeah, going to go watch it.
MIKE 73:25 I think it’s just one of the most beautifully edited and photographed films. When I teach classes or speak to a group and we’re talking about editing, I always want the finale where the horse race at the end of the film because it is so amazingly done and so beautifully done that at the end of it, I’m literally in tears just that how beautiful it is. It moves me every single time and it’s the power–
CHRIS 73:53 Who directed that movie?
MIKE 73:54 Carroll Ballard.
MITCH 73:55 Who edited that movie?
S? 73:58 Robert Dalva. [laughter]
MIKE 74:02 When you look at it, it’s so amazingly done. It was made around the late 1970’s, 1978 or something. I just encourage people to go and see that. It’s considered one of the greatest children’s film but it’s so beautifully done that it’s adults can love it. It was produced by Francis Coppola. It has a score that it just gets you every single time from the right beginning to end. So I would like to encourage people to watch Black Stallion.
CHRIS 74:35 I promise you I’m going to watch you tonight before I go see Robert Dalva talk about it tomorrow night NSF Cutters. Mitch, you had your Vincent Laforet pic. Carl, do you have anything?
CARL 74:50 No.
CHRIS 74:51 Okay. I–
CARL 74:52 My brain’s not working today. So,–
CHRIS 74:53 No problem. Just last night I watched an amazing documentary. I had to buy it from iTunes. It was well worth whatever it was I paid for. It’s called Sound City. You may heard of this?
MITCH 75:07 Nope.
CHRIS 75:07 So, Sound City is a– It was produced and directed by David Grohl from the Food Fighters and he also was the drummer for Nirvana. Sound City was a recording studio in San Fernando Valley in the– It was built in 1969, I believe. It survived the 70’s, the 80’s, the 90’s, and I think just recently closed down or maybe there was one woman who’s interviewed was – who was credited as being the manager from 1991 to 2001. So, maybe it closed down in early 2000. But it’s fascinating. If you’re a lover of 70’s and 80’s rock, you’re going to hear some really great interviews and the number of performers that David Grohl got in it as interviews is amazing. And what was interesting about it is that David started the project to do a documentary about the mixing console in the studio A control room at Sound City. And it was an old Neve console and he ended– I’m not going to spoil that. Anyway, he starts the story about the console and the documentary just grew and grew and grew. But it’s a real testament to the– They talked a lot about the analog sound versus the digital sound, and like I said, if you’re a lover of 70’s and 80’s rock, it’s really awesome. I just watched it last night and I bought it because I had a feeling I was going to watch it again and again. So it’s what we’re checking out.
CARL 76:53 Neve is certainly an icon of sound–
CHRIS 76:56 Yeah, Rupert Neve. As a matter of fact, he grow ends up getting the this one low scene I will tell you. When the guy, the owner of the studio gives David the original purchase order that they – when they purchased the console. The console in 1972 I believe they bought it was $75000. And the guys says, “By comparison, I bought a house in–” What’s the canyon? The famous canyon? Anyway, right near there. He was, “My house cost half as much as that.” [chuckle]
MIKE 77:40 Oh well, to have a full console and Neve console– There’s no way you could afford that but a friend of mine had. He had two Neve channel strips.
CHRIS 77:50 Right, that–
MIKE 77:51 And that’s what we would use.
CHRIS 77:53 Yeah, in the post digital world, that’s what a lot of people do is to buy a single channel strip for their mic chain, and then record through that. But anyway, they talked about two inched tape. They talk about the end of two inch. They talk about the beginning of pro tools and in the early days they called it “Slow tools” [chuckle] but it’s a fascinating documentary David Grohl did a great job on it. Beginning to end, it’s wonderful.
CARL 78:23 I have to check it out. It’s good.
CHRIS 78:24 Yeah, you’ll actually really like it because it’s that era when you had your publishing company.
CARL 78:34 Hardware, software, anybody?
MITCH 78:38 I got nothing.
MIKE 78:38 Hey, I do have something that’s interesting.
CARL 78:41 That’s why we do the show. [laughter] What do you got?
MIKE 78:45 Well, I have not tried this. It’s just been announced but I am very much intrigued by this. The Wacom has a new Cintiq 13 inch tablet control. Have you ever used any of the Wacom tablets?
CHRIS 79:03 I have. Back in olden times of CRTs and 1024×768. I had a big 12 inch, 12×12.
MIKE 79:12 I used to use them. I got away from it a few years ago but now I’m intrigued because now it’s basically a 1920×1080 LED display with a 2048 levels of sensitivity. So you can angle this. And so you can actually draw on it as if it were you’re drawing on your monitor. Kind of like you’ve been doing with an iPad but iPad is not pressure sensitive.
CHRIS 79:37 Right.
MIKE 79:38 So I think that’s kind of interesting. I’d like to try it. It’s less than a thousand dollars and it’s a–
CHRIS 79:44 Is the model number on it?
MIKE 79:45 It’s called the Cintiq, C I N T I Q 13HD, and it’s compatible with both MAC and PC’s. So interesting device. I would love to try that.
CARL 80:00 Interesting. I just downloaded a piece of software for my laptop just a couple of nights ago and it’s called F.lux, F dot L U X. And I do not recommend putting this on any machine [laughter] that you do color correction on but essentially, what it does is it – your display kicks at daylight. It’s balanced for daylight and anybody who has ever tried to shoot computer screens will realize that they have to either blue gel the room or warm up the display which you will never get equal color temperature between your floor gram subject and the computer that they’re working on. So what F.lux does is it realizes that just physiologically, we as human beings, we are suppose to pay attention to the sun. And when the sun sets, the reason we have that golden hour is the color temperature of the atmosphere is changing.
CARL 81:03 And so at night time, to be staring into a 1920 x 1080 panel of daylight is probably not good for us. Just emotionally, or physiologically, or I don’t know how you would call it. It’s not good to be staring at the sun in the middle of the night. So what F.lux does is it realizes – you tell it what time zone you’re in and whether or not it’s daylight savings time or not. And as the sun is setting over the course of an hour, the color temperature of your display changes. And so again, you cannot use this while you’re color correcting because you need to have a consistent look. But on my laptop, which is mostly just a surf board for me, it changes the color temperature so that in at night time – and you can tell it how warm you want it to warm up the display.
CARL 82:04 But I got to tell you that when you’re just reading the news or surfing or whatever late at night, it changes. It’s different. It changes the viewing experience and the mindset behind it is that you will be able to sleep better and you’re not screwing with your body by staring at a little mini-sunlight late into the evening. But anyway, I have been trying it for a few days and I like it. I will say that it’s default setting at night. I want to say 4200 degrees Kelvin which I think is way too warm but that’s adjustable. You could say, “No, no, no, only change down to 5200 or whatever.” Actually, I will let you know what my setting is.
MITCH 82:49 Gosh, I can’t believe how expensive this is.
MIKE 82:52 It’s Grantola free right?
MITCH 82:54 Right.
CHRIS 82:56 There you go.
MITCH 82:59 I just downloaded it.
MIKE 83:00 What you could do is combine that with a timer on your laptop to automatically just shut it down. [laughter] Okay, time’s up. It fades and then boom. It goes off and says, “Well, that’s it. No more.”
[laughter]
MIKE 83:18 Yeah. I have mind set to about 5200, which is more– 5200 is closer to light–
MITCH 83:27 Yes. We care about organamics on the show. This is cool.
CARL 83:30 But anyway. Again, don’t do it on something that you’re critically working on color with but if you’re just reading the news and stuff, take a loot at it. I’m very intrigued by it. I’ve enjoyed it for the last few days.
MITCH 83:44 Cool.
MIKE 83:45 It’s time to wrapped up.
CHRIS 83:47 That’s it.
MITCH 83:50 I’m wrapping my gifts.
CHRIS 83:53 Sorry about that I had to deep switch.
[laughter]
MIKE 83:56 I’ve figured.
CARL Sorry about that. Hey, Mike. It’s been a tremendous pleasure having you on this show today.
MITCH 84:04 Oh, Mike?
CARL 84:05 Did we loose Mike?
[laughter]
CHRIS 84:07 I think Mike is busy downloading F.lux for his computers. We may have lost him.
CARL 84:12 He still shows he’s online.
MIKE 84:14 No. I’m here, I’m here. I just had it muted. I was correcting the spellings in the book.
[laughter]
MITCH 84:21 I haven’t sent them to you yet.
CARL 84:22 The whole point of this is we wanted to illustrate the new era of self publishing. He can be on a podcast, correcting the spelling and make that book available on Amazon.com or as we speak. How is that?
MITCH 84:37 Instamatically.
CARL 84:39 So, Mike, where can people find out about you and your new book?
MIKE 84:44 Well, you could just Google “Naked,” my name will show up on the computer. And then you can– There is my website which is nakedfilmmaking.com. It’s also mikecarrollfilms.com and nightbeats-movie.com. But by the names where everything in URL, everything back to the same website. So, you can find out things there.
CARL 85:06 Very cool. Sorry guys.
MITCH 85:11 No problem.
CHRIS 85:13 You can find me at chrisfenwick.com and Chris Fenwick on Twitter and also Chris Fenwick on Vine. Please, Vine is so much fun people, give it a try.
CARL 85:23 And Mitch, how about you?
MITCH 85:25 I am at–
CARL 85:25 How do we find your planet?
MITCH 85:27 forums@planet5d.com.
CARL 85:30 forums@planet5d.com.
MITCH 85:31 That’s all I do these days.
MIKE 85:34 And I’m croaking on Twitter.
[laughter]
MIKE 85:37 Croaking at the Carroll Olsen.
CARL 85:40 Let’s all thank Carroll for a digging deep to find the energy to get to the show because that’s just the way we are. We want to make sure you guys have a show every week. Thanks a lot Carroll.
MIKE 85:53 Hey, you guys are awesome.
CARL 85:55 Don’t forget to go to iTunes. Rate us there. That really helps. Tell your friends. Let us know about the show. If you like what were doing, send us a note. If you don’t like what were doing, don’t send us a note. We don’t care. No, I don’t need that.
MITCH 86:10 Is this mail thing on your site Carroll?
MIKE 86:13 Yes, I do. I do need to update it though because it’s now out of data, so I got to go fill it up.
CARL 86:19 Got you. Thanks for listening and I think this wraps up another episode of the Digital Convergence 115.
MIKE 86:31 Whoops. [laughter]
CARL 86:33 Whoops! And we’ll see you all next week.
[inaudible]
MITCH 86:45 I think there was a call–
CARL 86:46 I think so. I didn’t hit the switch. I didn’t hit it.
MIKE 86:50 It was very appropriate.
CHRIS 86:52 And fade to black.
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CARL 00:00 This is The Digital Convergence Podcast, episode number 113.
CARL 00:56 We’d like to welcome you to another edition of The Digital Convergence Podcast, your talk show about photography, video, and post-production. We’ve got a great show lined up for you today. This is episode number 113. Warning: speed change ahead. The Digital Convergence Podcast is sponsored by CrumplePop film and broadcast effects for Final Cut Pro and KRE8 Insights, helping talented and passionate film-makers become successful entrepreneurs. That means business people. Visit their website today for proven strategies that can help you grow your business at kre8insights.com. And the DCP team today is Mr. Chris Fenwick.
CHRIS 01:44 Hey now.
CARL 01:45 Hey, where are you today?
CHRIS 01:47 I’m actually sitting in my favorite room with the high bandwidth the big screens and I’m all good. I’m in Edit 2 at Slice Editorial in Oakland.
CARL 01:55 Wow. And Mr. Planet Mitch?
MITCH 01:58 Hello. Hello.
CARL 01:59 From?
S? 02:00 St. Louis. [laughter]
MITCH 02:02 No, I’m not from Britain.
CARL 02:04 Alright. Yeah. And also joining us today is the ever awesome Mr. Ron Dawson.
RON 02:14 Good morning everyone.
CARL 02:16 Yeah. You’ve been having connection issues today, and I’m talking about internet by the way.
RON 02:21 Yeah. Thankfully, Charter Communications is not one of your sponsors [laughter]. After today they may never be [chuckle], but–
CHRIS 02:32 Tell us how you really feel.
RON 02:32 I’m frustrated–
MITCH 02:35 Actually my Charter works really well.
RON 02:38 Good for you[laughter]. Rub it in. Salt, meet wound.
CARL 02:44 Yes.
RON 02:44 Yeah.
MITCH 02:45 I had all sorts of trouble with AT&T Internet, but that’s a whole other story.
CARL 02:50 Oh, well. It’s amazing that we’re even able to do this today.
MITCH 02:55 Or talk. [laughter]
CARL 02:55 It still– yeah talking that’s– speech impediments is something I have to work in.
S? 03:00 This week in meet your ISP.
CARL 03:02 All right, so before we get into our show, what was the film or T. V. show [inaudible]–
MITCH 03:07 Perry Mason.
CHRIS 03:08 I feel like Robert Wagner, ‘It Takes A Thief’. That’s my guess. Hence this “Oh, my gold. You”–
CARL 03:14 Robert Wagner?
CHRIS 03:16 Well, Robert Wagner–
CARL 03:16 How did you come up with that?
CHRIS 03:18 Well, wasn’t Robert Wagner in ‘It Takes A Thief’? I feel like it’s ‘It Takes A Thief’, that’s my guess.
CARL 03:25 Okay.
MITCH 03:26 Perry Mason.
CHRIS 03:28 My gold, somebody stole my gold.
CARL 03:29 I’ll give you a clue. Grace Kelly.
MITCH 03:35 Grace Kelly?
CARL 03:36 Grace Kelly.
RON 03:36 Is it a T. V. show or a movie?
CARL 03:38 Okay, I’ll narrow it down. It’s a movie. [laughter]
RON 03:42 Ah-ha, I knew it.
CHRIS 03:42 I mean, it’s not Robert Wagner, but it’s still ‘It Takes a Thief’.
CARL 03:45 I mean, but you should have known that with Grace Kelly. Did she ever appear in TV shows?
RON 03:49 I don’t think so.
CARL 03:50 I don’t remember. She may have, but I don’t remember.
RON 03:53 I thought you only did–
CARL 03:54 Okay, second clue is Cary Grant.
CHRIS 03:56 To Catch a Thief
CARL 03:59 What did you say?
CHRIS 04:00 To Catch a Thief
RON 04:00 Oh, is it ‘North By Northwest’?
CARL 04:03 No.
RON 04:03 No, that isn’t. [laughter]
MITCH 04:05 I’m just being really quiet.
RON 04:06 Wait, wait, wait, wait…
CARL 04:07 No. Chris, what did you say?
CHRIS 04:09 To Catch a Thief.
CARL 04:10 You’ve got it. ‘To Catch a Thief’, and the composer for that intro is Lyn Murray.
CHRIS 04:20 Lyn Murray. So, that was a Hitchcock film, right?
CARL 04:23 That was an Alfred Hitchcock film, yes.
RON 04:25 But so was ‘North By Northwest’.
CARL 04:27 Well, of course, but it wasn’t the movie that I played. [laughter]
RON 04:31 Do I get partial credit?
CARL 04:32 No, you don’t get partial credit. There are no par– of course, Chris was playing high stakes last week, because he was going to get fired from the show if he didn’t catch it, but he got it. That’s amazing.
CHRIS 04:42 Yeah, I got lucky.
CARL 04:44 Hey, and you won a gold star today, too.
CHRIS 04:48 And, my pay has been doubled. [laughter]
CARL 04:51 Yeah. Well, it’s been an interesting week for me. I hope it has been for all of you.
CHRIS 04:57 What’s going on with you?
CARL 04:57 Oh, my goodness. Well, I was in Chattanooga all day Monday, I think it was. I met with Chris Simmons of Kre8 Insights and 6 Strong Media. And, I also met with one of my Reets TV customers. I had a face-to-face chat. It is always good to do that, talk to your customers, get feedback from them. And the guy I talk with– I will share his name. His name is Ray Stevens. He used to play with the Saint Louis Cardinals.
RON 05:29 Wow!
MITCH 05:30 Wow!
RON 05:32 I just said that.
CARL 05:33 Yes, so that was pretty cool.
MITCH 05:34 There is an echo. [chuckles]
CARL 05:37 Yes, so it is always good to get some feedback about your product and it was very educational for me to be able to talk with him. So, that was my primary reason to go up there– is to spend sometime with one of our favorite customers.
MITCH 05:53 What is the link to a baseball player? Is he now doing damage restoration?
CARL 05:57 Yes, actually that was he was doing. Well, he has a construction company and one of their services is water damage restoration. So, you know…
CHRIS 06:08 Was it good feedback?
CARL 06:09 Yes, it was. It was very good feedback. I won’t share it here. [chuckle]
CHRIS 06:14 No, I know but–
CARL 06:16 But, it was. It was very constructive. I think it’s important that we as content producers, video producers– whatever we’re doing. It doesn’t even have to be video. Are we really in touch with what our customers want, what our customers need; what are their pain points? That’s just something I always wonder about. It has been a while since I had talked face to face and interviewed a Reets TV customer. So, it gave me an opportunity to do that and to get some good feedback. It told me that there was a lot of things where we’re doing right and then it gave me some ideas to improve what we’re doing.
CHRIS 06:58 It’s interesting for you because you’re dealing with the one on one, money out of pocket customer. I typically just deal with producers and large companies and stuff like that. It is different to get that, literally, the guy who’s going to pull out his credit card. That must be very interesting.
MITCH 07:22 So, was this an episode of Undercover boss? You went out in the field? [laughter]
CARL 07:27 Well sometimes it feels like shark tank, you– [laughter] He was very gracious and very helpful. I think that’s– take the time to ask for a council as it where from your customers. Ask them what you’re doing that works and ask them, what you would like to see. It may or may not– they’re not always right and it may not be right for all your customers, but it’s always good to hear what’s on their mind. What is their pain point?
CHRIS 07:55 Yeah. Yesterday, I was working on a piece for one of my clients and we were at a point where we had all the content laid out, and it’s just one of this big exotic after effects things, and I knew that we were starting to build a house of cards and I said to the producer, I said, “So, before we move forward from here we should probably get a buy off on what this content is because changing it after right now is going to be very difficult. Are you the person that’s going to make that final cost?” He said, “Let me get somebody down here.” He brings somebody in– like you asking for feedback, and I was awful. Because, we had totally missed the mark, we we’re not aiming at the right wall, and it was just– it threw our whole day into a tailspin. So instead of moving forward, in a very elaborate after effects project, we got the scanner out, went back to archive, and it was like– we went a totally different direction.
CARL 09:03 Yeah, but have you–
CHRIS 09:03 But had we not solicited or elicited that input, we would have made a huge mistake, so–
CARL 09:11 And see that customer’s going to remember you as the person that was responsive to their needs. Yeah, maybe you missed the mark the first go around, but what they remember is what you did to turn the ship around.
CHRIS 09:24 Right, right.
CARL 09:25 Yeah, the other thing that I did yesterday– yesterday, I spent at Walter Biscardi’s office. He and I have been working together on some stuff that we’re not quite ready to announce yet, but one of the big pieces of news that came out yesterday is that I found out that Marco Solorio is going to be–
CHRIS 09:48 Solo-rio
CARL 09:49 Solorio? I hope I–
RON 09:51 I think it–
CARL 09:52 He’s the Blackmagic Cinema Camera guy, right.
CHRIS 09:55 Yeah, he’s actually very close to me. He’s a from Walnut Creek, which is right over the hill from Oakland. I’d–
CARL 10:00 Have you met him?
CHRIS 10:02 I have. He came to Cutters on night. SF Cutters. Isn’t it Solorio.
CARL 10:08 Solorio. Maybe that’s it. Yes.
CHRIS 10:09 It’s one– Hence the name of his company, OneRiver.
CARL 10:14 Yeah.
CHRIS 10:15 OneRiver Media because his name is Solo-rio, which in Spanish means one river.
CARL 10:19 Yeah. That’s it.
MITCH 10:21 Oh!
CARL 10:22 Yeah. But anyway, he’s coming, he’s coming. And he’s also going to be doing a workshop at Biscardi Creative Studio which– two day workshop on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera.
CHRIS 10:35 Is Walter a fan of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera? Or is he just offering up his space?
CARL 10:42 Well, no one’s got to work with that thing yet other than people–
CHRIS 10:46 Marco. [laughter]
CARL 10:47 It’s got a lot of potential, I suppose, but I personally haven’t got–
CHRIS 10:50 Is it not–
CARL 10:50 I have not [inaudible].
CHRIS 10:51 Is it not actually shipping? Nobody has one in a while.
CARL 10:54 Well it’s shipping, but it’s– they’ve had some problems.
MITCH 10:57 Yeah.
CARL 10:58 But, I think you got to put it all into perspective because–
CHRIS 11:02 Camera-makering is hard.
CARL 11:04 Yeah. [laughter] These guys were so audacious to take on– doing what Canon, and Aerie, and Red, and all these guys have been doing it for a long time, and, “Hey, let’s try this.”
CHRIS 11:19 How funny you throw Red into that.
CARL 11:21 Yeah.
CHRIS 11:22 I mean, they’ve been doing it for six years, so…
CARL 11:25 Yeah, well, that’s 700 years in dog years, right? And so–
CHRIS 11:30 Time moves on.
CARL 11:30 Ah, well. Oh, the other cool thing is that at Atlantic Cutters, in March, will be Rob Ashe. He is the editor from Conan O’brien.
MITCH 11:41 Oh, really?
CARL 11:41 Yeah, he will be there.
CHRIS 11:43 That’s fun.
CARL 11:44 Yeah, lots of exciting things happening here.
CHRIS 11:48 We have really fun stuff coming up at the San Francisco Cutters. A guy named Robert Dalva, who – and I can’t remember what he did, but he’s a big name, if you Google-ize or IMDB him – he’s going to be speaking at the at the next March 21st SF Cutters.
CARL 12:02 That’s cool. Cool.
CHRIS 12:04 I will go IMDB him while you talk.
CARL 12:06 Okay. [chuckle]
RON 12:06 Hey, hey–
CARL 12:07 Go ahead, Ron.
RON 12:09 Is that Rob Ash? Is he one of the guys in that spoof video?
CARL 12:12 Yes. Yep.
RON 12:13 Which one is he? Do you know offhand?
CARL 12:15 He’s the tall guy. He is a very tall guy. [chuckle]
RON 12:20 Okay. That was a funny video.
CARL 12:22 Yeah.
RON 12:25 You said he’s coming to Atlanta Cutters?
CARL 12:28 Yeah, Atlanta Cutters, March 27th. It starts at 6:00. And here’s the sad thing, I’ve got a prior commitment, so I won’t get to go to this awesome event.
CHRIS 12:41 What happened?
CARL 12:42 Hey, Ron, go on my stead? How about that?
RON 12:44 I’ll look into that.
CARL 12:45 You go on my stead. Shoot some video and share it with the DCP crowd, and across some 180 crowd.
RON 12:52 Oh, I have to work?
CARL 12:54 Yeah, you’ve got to work. [laughter] What do you think? Man, everybody is getting a free ride here.
RON 13:02 No, actually, I’ll put it on my calendar and I’ll see.
CARL 13:02 I’m just teasing. Yeah. I would go. I would go. I would personally go if I could but I’ve already, I’ve already made commitments that I can’t get out of.
CHRIS 13:15 Here we go. Captain America, The First Avenger, Hidalgo, Jurassic Park III, October Sky, Jumanji.
CARL 13:24 I liked October Sky.
CHRIS 13:25 The Black Stallion. I’ve heard this guy speak before and he’s fascinating.
CARL 13:29 Yeah.
CHRIS 13:30 Very interesting.
CARL 13:31 Good story teller, huh?
CHRIS 13:33 Yes.
CARL 13:34 Alright, well let’s move on. What time is it?
RON 13:39 It’s time for sound effect.
CARL 13:41 Yeah. So Admiral Planet Mitch, what is happening in the world of video and photography?
MITCH 13:51 Well, let’s briefly cover the Blackmagic again, by the way.
CARL 13:55 Okay.
MITCH 13:57 Seeing as how you mentioned that there were problems. And, I find it ironic. I don’t know how fast time goes, but it goes really fast. Did you know that NAB is four weeks from today or yesterday?
CARL 14:13 Yes.
MITCH 14:14 And that’s when the Blackmagic was announced last year.
CHRIS 14:17 I know exactly where I will be in NAB, actually.
CARL 14:20 Are you going to be at NAB?
CHRIS 14:21 No, I’ll be sitting in behind a computer somewhere working because I have too much work. [laughter]
CARL 14:27 Ron, are you going to be at NAB this year?
RON 14:30 No, I’m not going to make it. It’s hard for me to get out there in Western Country. I hope to make it one of these days.
CHRIS 14:36 They have planes. [laughter]
RON 14:38 I know. The requirement is a long– like when I was in California if I wanted to do something like that, it’ll be easy to drive down and drive up quickly and–
CHRIS 14:48 Would you drive from the Bay area to Vegas?
RON 14:50 Yeah. I did. I would bring my family in tow. Yeah.
CHRIS 14:56 I mean, not about your family, but… [laughter]
RON 14:58 I think, yeah.
CARL 14:59 I’m still throwing some balls in my juggling act to see whether or not I can swing it and justify it. Alright–
MITCH 15:07 I’ll be there.
CARL 15:07 –so we totally derailed your conversation.
MITCH 15:10 No, that’s okay.
CARL 15:11 Go for it Mitch.
MITCH 15:11 I derailed my own conversation because I mentioned NAB. And it just blows me away that it’s been a year since the Blackmagic was announced. And like you said earlier that they’ve been having some problems getting stuff done. But the good news is that they have figured out what the problem was that we;ve discussed a couple of week ago with the infinite focus or the infinity focus, depending upon which way you want to say it.
CARL 15:39 Right.
MITCH 15:40 And I find it interesting that the result is that they built “some fair amount of tolerance” into their cameras to cater for still-lenses where the tolerances are different than cinema lenses. So, they tried to appeal to the masses and made things a little bit wiggly, I guess, is maybe one way to– [chuckle] a non-technical phrase. So, there’s just a little bit of tolerance issue. So, in order to get it fixed, you have to send your camera back.
CARL 16:20 Oh, wow. And how long is it away?
MITCH 16:24 They have not said that yet. So, that makes it very interesting, especially for customers overseas, because that could be quite awhile.
CARL 16:33 Yeah, yeah.
MITCH 16:36 Also, something that I neglected to mention last week – because I was just so dad gum busy focusing on the brand new Planet 5D forums–
CARL 16:47 Yay.
MITCH 16:50 Did you know that Nikon annunced– annunced. I have your problem, Carl.
CARL 16:54 Yeah.
MITCH 16:55 –announced a new camera last week, called the D7100?
RON 16:59 No, I didn’t know that.
CARL 17:00 No.
CHRIS 17:00 Yeah, I think I read about it on your webpage. Didn’t I?
MITCH 17:02 No you didn’t, because I completely bluplast it because I was working on the forum stuff. This is a very interesting body in a couple of respects. Number one, it’s a relatively low price. It’s only 1200 dollars. It’s also interesting that there’s no low optical– no – how do I say that right? – optical low pass filter. All camera’s have one of these optical low pass filters – also sometimes called an AA filter, anti-aliasing filter – to take away some of the alias issues like moire issues, and they’ve chosen on this particular camera to just not put one in.
CARL 17:51 So, the end result is you get better resolution in theory.
MITCH 17:55 Yes, sharper images.
CARL 17:56 But, what you might– if you us it for video, you might end up with more moire, is that correct?
MITCH 18:02 Very curious about the moire issue on this camera, yeah. Nobody’s had their hands on one yet, that I’ve seen. But, very curious about that.
CHRIS 18:11 Making the lines on your shirt are too close for TV that’s a moire. [laughter] That’s our own Dean Martin.
RON 18:24 That’s a good one, Chris. I like that. That was creative.
CARL 18:27 You want to do that again? Let me–
CHRIS 18:28 I’ve been singing that for 25 years, sitting in control rooms when people would walk out on the set, And I go, “No, no, you’re not wearing that coat.” [laughter]
MITCH 18:38 That’s a moire.
RON 18:39 That’s funny.
CARL 18:40 Out with plaid. So what’s the price point for this camera?
MITCH 18:45 $12, 000 which is pretty low?
CARL 18:48 Is it a crop sensor or full sensor?
MITCH 18:51 It is a DX format which is cropped in Nikon sense, right? It’s not full frame.
CARL 19:00 Right.
MITCH 19:01 I get really confused. I apologized, because I’m not a good Nikon boy yet.
CARL 19:06 Well, the last Nikon camera body I owned and still owned is a Nikon FM2.
S? 19:12 Wow.
CARL 19:14 I tell you what, it’s hard to find film for it. [laughter]
CHRIS 19:18 Speaking of which, I love this article on your site Mitch about ‘The Last Roll of Kodachrome’, it’s an interesting question. I didn’t read it but I just saw it posted there and I was like, “Oh, that’s a neat concept.” What would you do? What would you shoot with your last 36 frames of film? Very interesting.
MITCH 19:39 On that particular articular, I’ve thought about it several times since I put it up there. Gosh, all of a sudden I can’t come of those names, Steve, is that right?
CHRIS 19:51 Steve McCurry, yeah.
MITCH 19:52 Yeah, McCurry. Thank you. Went out and arranged a year before they stopped production to get the very last roll of Kodachrome off the production line. Now obviously you can still buy Kodachrome from places if you want, but I don’t think there’s any place to process it. So anyway, he had a year to think about it and it turns out, if you end up watching the video, he didn’t think about it very hard. He just knew he was going to do it. And then he took six weeks off of his regular work to go shoot the last 36 frames. Very fascinating story.
CARL 20:35 It’s amazing how having limits or boundaries, that type of criteria, affects your creativity. One of the hardest things– let’s say you’re a music composer and you’re using the latest synthesizer technologies that are out there. There are literally thousands upon thousands upon thousands of patches. Even in garage band and logic, they come with tens of thousands of different sounds, and loops and things like that and you just go nuts trying to figure out, ‘Which loop do I want to use to create this music band?’ You just go nuts with that because you have so many choices. And so when you limit your choices, it really seems to change the way you view the creative process.
RON 21:24 Do remember what sci-fi action movie had a kind of similar premise?
CARL 21:29 No.
CHRIS 21:30 About picking a synthesizer patch in a sci-fi movie?
RON 21:33 [laughter] No, about choosing what your last photos’ going to be.
CHRIS 21:38 Oh, no.
CARL 21:40 Oh! [laughter] Was that– we talked about it and I’ve already forgotten the name of it.
MITCH 21:46 We did?
CHRIS 21:46 Starlight Green?
CARL 21:48 No, it was a short film. [laughter]
RON 21:50 No, a feature film starring Gwyneth Paltrow. I think Judd Law is in it too.
CARL 21:57 That sounds like–
MITCH 21:57 Three Doors?
RON 21:59 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
CARL 22:01 Oh.
CHRIS 22:04 Well, that would have to assume that you actually watched it. [laughter]
CARL 22:08 Ron is the absolute master – trivia master for this type of thing, yes. That’s good.
RON 22:14 So, I didn’t get– I got North by Northwest wrong?
CARL 22:17 Yes. Well… [laughter]
CHRIS 22:21 What’s next?
CARL 22:22 Okay. [laughter] Is that it? In the news? [laughter]
CHRIS 22:25 No, I’m saying what’s next in the news?
MITCH 22:30 I briefly want to discuss this one. I find this interesting. I think it’s a no-brainer, but Canon rumors covered this story a couple of days ago. Canon has announced they’ve developed a new high sensitivity sensor and–
CARL 22:51 What?
MITCH 22:52 Yeah, I know. Of course they’re working on stuff like this, but I find it interesting that Canon actually took the trouble to announce it. This sensor that they’ve been working on– I’m sort of an old, amateur astronomer. I’ve been in the–[chuckle] yes I’m old, never mind. This video sensor can capture magnitude six stars.
CHRIS 23:20 Okay, what does that mean to normal people?
CARL 23:22 So magnitude six stars are the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye.
MITCH 23:28 Right, thank you
.
CARL 23:29 Assuming that you have good lighting conditions, which these days, there’s so much street lights, and that sort of thing that you’re doing good if you see second magnitude stars.
MITCH 23:40 And this one is even capable of going down to magnitude eight and a half, which is below what the eye can see. I’m just fascinated to see what they’ve produce with this, and supposedly, at the show yesterday – the Security Show 2013 – they were going to show some sample footage, and I’ve been hoping that we’d find it online, I haven’t found it yet. This was in Tokyo. I just found that fascinating.
CARL 24:13 Yeah.
CHRIS 24:13 Yeah, I mean, I was on set last week, and one of the guys had a 1. 2, I think, a 85 1. 2 lens, and I looked through it and I was like, I could already see more than the naked eye. It was brighter than just looking around the camera, it seems like. How do you make a lens– isn’t Canon making a .95 lens now? Did I see– was that a bad dream I had?
MITCH 24:45 It could be. I don’t know Chris, I’m not up on all the lenses, but… yeah. Of course they don’t say what ISO this was, but I am assuming it is relatively low ISO and–
CARL 25:00 Well, it does sound like all the technology is constantly changing in and improving for the better.
MITCH 25:05 Change.
CARL 25:06 Yeah.
MITCH 25:07 Changing? What an interesting concept. [chuckles] That is it. Let’s buy some lights.
CARL 25:15 Okay. Alright. So, it is time to take a moment to talk about our favorite Final Cut Pro-10 and Final Cut Pro-7, if we are still using that. Filter gurus, the CrumplePop, film and broadcast effects for Final Cut Pro.
MITCH 25:39 Sorry, I was early.
CARL 25:40 Oh, it is all right. I was late.
MITCH 25:42 You stuttered.
CARL 25:43 Yes, I stuttered. crumplepop.com– remember DCP listeners, you can all get 20% discount on all CrumplePop products, just use the coupon code DCP20 and one of the cool things is they are now hosting transcripts of this podcast and it’s taken a while for us to get there because transcription–
CHRIS 26:07 Scripts?
CARL 26:08 Yeah, transcription is hard. Oh, my good– but they are taking care of that for us, which is really, really nice. They just did the one that we did just a few weeks ago with Dale Granh, the Color Timer, so that episode is now transcribed and up on their blog.
MITCH 26:27 Is it?
CARL 26:27 Yeah. So, if you want to see, word for word, what we say, [laughter]– and you just take a listen to how this podcast goes, and how we talk, and how we talk over each other, can you imagine? We are a transcriber’s worst nightmare.
RON 26:42 Can you say [inaudible].
CHRIS 26:43 Transcribe this, transcribe this.
RON 26:44 What? What are you saying?
CHRIS 26:45 [inaudible]
CARL 26:46 See look at that–
CHRIS 26:47 We like talking over each other all the time.
RON 26:47 I couldn’t say all but Carl–
MITCH 26:49 Mitch, 1 minute and 31 seconds.
CHRIS 26:49 Yeah. Shouldn’t have said that. Good luck, but good luck with that.
MITCH 26:51 Yay! [laughter] This is great. I mean, they’ve got all my little quips in here. We’ve got only one ‘R’, not two. They’ve set, [inaudible] 2 minutes and 20 seconds.
CARL 27:01 I’m just totally speechless, but I am very grateful to Crumple–
CHRIS 27:03 [inaudible] this moment right now.
MITCH 27:05 Oh, this is great, ‘Mitch, at 2 minutes and 50 seconds, Yay!’ [laughter]
CHRIS 27:10 So, obviously, this isn’t automated, this is– [laughter]
CARL 27:13 There is no–
CHRIS 27:14 –Mechanical Turk, right?
CARL 27:15 Yeah, Mechanical Turk all the way. [laughter]
MITCH 27:18 This is great stuff. I’m so eloquent.
CARL 27:21 Hey, the other cool thing about CrumplePop is– remember how Dale was telling us all those cool stories. We had such a nightmare with Skype, so we didn’t get the half of it.
CHRIS 27:33 I know.
CARL 27:34 It was such a bummer because he was just full of experiences [chuckle]. But, Gabe has been doing a video series where he’s interviewing him. And so he talks about like color timing, his experiences on Private Ryan– he did share that on our show, but you can catch that at CrumplePop’s blog there.
CHRIS 27:57 I just also want to say that last week I could. not have gotten through the edit I did without CrumplePop. It was awesome. Really great. I used their SplitScreen X [inaudible].
CARL 28:10 I just got a– yeah, that’s a good– I use their products all the time. I mean, there’s not an edit session that goes by where I don’t touch something of theirs in my editing. So CrumplePop, check them out, crumplepop.com. DCP20 for your 20% discount. I got an interesting Skype message from– is it Planet Mitch? Somebody says, “Chris, am I cracking– crackling?”
CHRIS 28:43 Oh, crackling. [chuckles] I don’t know. I have no idea about your psychological backgrounds, so– [laughter]
CARL 28:50 No, I think that’s Mitch quoting from the transcript.
CHRIS 28:53 I got it, okay.
MITCH 28:55 Sorry.
CHRIS 28:55 Very good.
MITCH 28:56 I was laughing over that one too. Chris is so eloquent.
CARL 28:59 Well, we’ve– so moving on —
CHRIS 29:00 [inaudible]
CARL 29:02 Yes. [laughter] So moving on, one of the things I ask the DCP team yesterday, what should we talk about today? And, I think you’ve probably gotten the clue from the show title “Warning: Speed Change Ahead” and we’ve mentioned that word “change” a few times and I think that’s an event, not necessarily the word, but the event is very controversial. It’s something that people have a hard time with. And if we’re brutally honest with ourselves, we probably all, to some degree, have problems with change or accepting change.
MITCH 29:41 I do.
CARL 29:42 Yes. I mean, I get upset sometimes when– because things are normal. [laughter] The status quo, you don’t want it upset because it gives you a measure of comfort. It’s– It takes less effort to go through a routine than it does to think creatively. I’m just being brutally honest, sometimes I don’t like change. But, I’ve been very active in trying to figure out, always being alert to that road block, and then forcing myself to do something totally different to be more adaptable to that.
CHRIS 30:22 What kind of change are you talking about?
CARL 30:24 Well, I talk about different types of change. For example, just the way I work with video. For example, it’s– people are still struggling with this change from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro 10.
CHRIS 30:42 Or Final Cut Pro 7 to anything.
CARL 30:44 Or, to anything. Exactly. Or, the way businesses work. For example, there’s a huge market for people to do these video tutorials like I do. Owning the content versus doing client work. That was something I didn’t even think about three years ago because I was trying to do the normal thing of doing client work but now I’ve changed my model to own the content.
CHRIS 31:16 Yeah, I’m really envious about all that you’re doing with Reets TV, I think it’s brilliant. I think that you should be traveling around the country talking about how to do it.
CARL 31:24 [laughter] I’ll be glad to share it. What kind of change do you face?
CHRIS 31:37 Well, I think, we all face various types of change. There’s simple things. The change in the gear that we have available to us and the gear the we use. There is the change in the type of clients that we have. Sometimes, it’s important to move on beyond a client or I use the term fire a client and move on to something new. There’s the change in the type of people that you work with. Sometimes, your budgets are required that you change either up or down. Some people are really good at embracing growth up, I find it difficult.
CARL 32:23 What do you mean growth up? Why do you find that difficult?
CHRIS 32:26 Okay. So, here’s an example, for probably 15 years I had one DP I ever wanted to work with and it’s my friend John King. I didn’t even think about calling anybody else, “John, I need you to shoot something.” “I’m not available.” “Okay, I’ll move the shoot date.” [laughter] And John, through change and improving his life structure has moved on beyond shooting. And that was like really painful for me. Like, [inaudible] “Who do I call?” [laughter] Luckily, through my contacts with Paul here at Slice, he knew a lot more shooters than me. And so, I was like, “Who do I get?” He goes, “Oh, this guy’s good.” “Oh, but I don’t know him.” [laughter] There’s a great scene in one of the episodes of the West Wing, where it’s a flashback and they have to fire all of the campaign staff and Jed Bartlet is mad at Leo McGarry, because he fired all of the kids that he knew. He was like, “I don’t know any of these new guys.” But, being able to embrace the possibility of bringing on new talent is important. But, the main thing – when we were talking about this yesterday – the main thing that I deal with is – and it’s the big one right now – the death of Final Cut 7. And where do you go, what are you going to do? It’s interesting because so many people that I’ve been talking with, I’m realizing; one, how old I am, and realizing that some of these kids have not worked in this industry prior to Final Cut existing. And that’s kind of shocking. It’s like, “Uh, really?” I worked on 10 or 12 different edit systems before Final Cut. So, they’re looking at it, “What do we do?” I was like, “Well, you do what I did all through the 90’s and all through the 80’s. You’re always on a rotating tool set. You have to find a comfort zone. There’s a beauty of having a comfort zone with the tools that you have because the hunting and pecking for the buttons begins to dissolve away and the creativity really begins to flow.” And, it becomes much easier to work when you’re not hunting and pecking. But to assume that you will always use this tool this day, this month, this year, this career, is naive, and so I think that you always need to be taking a portion of your day or week or year and looking to the future. You know, what is next? What is the next plug-in that I want to learn? What is the next process that I want to master? What is the next application I want to dive into? And, what you do–
MITCH 35:26 [inaudible]
CHRIS 35:27 Go ahead.
MITCH 35:28 I’m sorry, I’m jumping in there, because I think one of the things that’s important for many people that I’ve learned over my 55 years – especially with software development – we had the same kind of changes that you’re talking about with Final Cut and editors, and the thing that always got me through all of those changes was that I kept saying to myself, “The process is still the same. I’m still doing the same functionality.” Yes, the commands are different, the keystrokes are different, or whatever, but if you can learn the basics of an editing tool, or a software, or a software language or just about anything. If you know those basics, you can simply translate in your mind, “Well, this is the way of doing it.” And this editor is not such a big transition.
CHRIS 36:22 Right. Right. I used to say to people–
CARL 36:25 There is something I want to say on that though.
CHRIS 36:28 Okay, go ahead.
CARL 36:32 I worked in software too and you’re right Mitch. There are processes that are the same. But I think the biggest revolutionary change in software was the change in process.
MITCH 36:46 Right.
CARL 36:47 Because for years, software development houses, corporations doing software projects, software development was considered a multi– not just multi-month, but multi-year development effort. And you had this waterfall cycle of development. Let’s go and write a 1000 page requirements document. And nothing happens until that requirement document is done. And then you would go through a change– a requirements review. And then everyone would approve. If there were changes, you went through a change order process where it would take forever to do that. And meanwhile, you had these clever bunch of kids over here just creating web apps in a matter of hours or days. They’re running circles around these companies that were so strongly entrenched in process. And I got to admit, I was one of those guys that was a very process oriented– and I fought it. I fought it for a long time. And then one day, I woke up and said, “Wait a minute. Why am I fighting this? These kids are making money and all I’m doing is spending money trying to reinforce an old way of doing something.” And so that was a– it was a pivotal point in my thinking, saying, “Okay. You know what? These so-called process experts, they’re not experts anymore. The emperor’s not wearing any clothes after all.” So now– [laughter]
CHRIS 38:16 This translates to video production as well. In the olden times, you wrote scripts, you read the treatment, you wrote a script, you have a storyboard of something, you planned it all out, you created your shot list, you showed up on location, you had a crew of ten people or whatever, and you started work. Well nowadays, everything is so compartmentalized and standardized. “I’m doing a customer testimonial. Got it. Dude, camera, audio guy, go.” And, just by giving it that title, customer testimonial, the guys know exactly what to shoot. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude sitting on a computer. Walking through door. Walking down hallways. Sitting on a chalkboard or whiteboard with his– blah, blah, blah.” And it’s going to be the same kind of stuff. And if you dig your heels and you go, “Oh, no. We have to work on this storyboard today.” The kids are going to run right over you. And–
MITCH 39:17 Well, I think– I’m sorry.
CHRIS 39:18 Go ahead.
MITCH 39:19 I think the thing that’s key there to me and to a lot of people, I guess – I don’t know – is that it feels, to me, the rate of change is accelerating rapidly. And I think Carl’s story and your story just eloquently that. For decades, it used to be, this is the way you write software. And now, things are radically different. Things change so much faster now than they ever did before. And that’s hard to deal with.
CHRIS 39:50 Yeah. And I think the key to it is, you could – at a certain age I think – I loved that, was it at AMC? Life Time? Who made the show– the TV show Men of a Certain Age? Did you ever watch that?
MITCH 40:07 Yes!
CHRIS 40:09 I loved it. I thought it was great with Everybody Loves Raymond and Scott Bakula and the other dude. [laughter] Sorry other dude I don’t remember your name, but you get to a certain age where you make a choice, you have to make a choice. It’s either I am going to say, “Yep, no, no. This is the way I do it, I’m done. I’m not changing.” and you can be that technological Statler and Waldorf sitting on the balcony just heckling everybody, saying, “Kids these day’s,” or–
CARL 40:43 I think I mentioned that on the show the other day, but Chris Simmons has a series called Expert Interrogation’s, and there’s this older guy on there who’s just – he’s just downing everything about YouTube. [laughter] He finally got booted from– he got booted from the chat room because he was such a downer, Debbie Downer on this thing.
CHRIS 41:05 What was his beef with YouTube?
CARL 41:06 Well he was just saying there’s no– “None of my customers have any need for YouTube.” or something like that–
CHRIS 41:15 That’s right. That’s because, your customers are now my customers. [laughter]
MITCH 41:21 How does [inaudible] by the way?
CHRIS 41:23 YouTube was 2005.
MITCH 41:25 Doesn’t it seem like it’s been around forever and yet it’s only…
CHRIS 41:28 Eight years old? Yes, it’s crazy.
CARL 41:30 Well, speaking of change– Ron are you still there?
RON 41:33 I’m still here. [laughter]
CARL 41:35 Speaking of change, where’s Ron? [laughter]
RON 41:37 I’m trying to be easy on the transcriptors so that…
MITCH 41:41 Oh, right.
CARL 41:43 Don’t make their jobs easy. [laughter] I mean, we love the transcriptors. Don’t get me wrong transcriptors. [chuckles]
RON 41:49 Right. My take on the whole change thing is that- I love what Chris had written in the– since everyone, I told– Chris, you need to make that a blog post.
CARL 42:02 I agree.
RON 42:03 It’s beautifully written. It can be [inaudible]–
CARL 42:05 [inaudible] blog post.
RON 42:05 But, this idea of change and embracing it is key. It’s not even so much technology that changes, I think that’s obviously something that changes and often times artists – particularly artists who are really married to or in love with their current technology – find hard to embrace technological change. But, there’s also changes in business processes. The way you look at marketing, the way you look at sales. Are you embracing that way of change? And, sometimes technological changes bring about business processes changes. So, the way you would go about selling your services, the way you would go about presenting your content or making a living, let’s say, in Hollywood, used to be one way but, because of the advent of online distribution and high-speed bandwidth, you now have the power to do things like what Ed Burns does – the film maker Edward Burns – he does everything. He creates a movie and goes straight to iTunes and straight to other VOD sites. So, he’s bypassing Hollywood all together. So, the way of doing business in Hollywood, let’s say, has changed because technology is changing. And sometimes when companies don’t keep up with that they fall behind. I mean, blockbusters probably a great example of that. [laughter] They took too long to change. And by the time they tried to catch up and offer things like Red Box or offer things like a subscription, mail and service like Netflix, it was too late.
MITCH 43:38 Yeah, they’re [inaudible].
RON 43:40 But, that doesn’t mean Netflix should rest on it’s laurels. I mean Red Box seems to have come out of nowhere in terms of it’s offering, and they’re already started offering a mail service now. And so Netflix, to their credit, they’re starting to do things differently. One of the big things that is huge for them is producing original content. Original T. V. shows, like this House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey, produced and directed Dave Fincher, a hundred million dollars invested. I mean, that’s huge. And, it’s become the number one show on Netflix. It’s entire season delivered at once. So, you’re not waiting every week.
MITCH 44:23 Really?
RON 44:24 Yeah.
MITCH 44:24 I need to see that.
RON 44:25 Yeah.
CHRIS 44:26 Oh, it’s really good. I watched it in a day and a half.
RON 44:28 Yeah, and so this idea of people absorbing content all in one sitting, versus having to wait week after week, that’s going to be a challenge to the cable programs and–
MITCH 44:41 Well, I think that’s really true too. I’m going to jump in on that, Ron.
RON 44:45 Yeah. Sure.
MITCH 44:47 My wife and I are both in that mode as well where we will wait until an entire season of a show is on DVD or now on Netflix before we even watch them. We’re not stuck necessarily on this, “Oh, I got to see this week’s episode.” Because it feels more– it’s more interesting to see them all at once or all within a week or whatever. So, I think that’s a very interesting motive that is happening now.
RON 45:17 Yeah. And, we don’t even pay for cable TV. It’s funny, I always get these offers from AT&T, U-verse, and they say, “You can get all these channels.” And I tell them, “We actually don’t watch TV.” And sometimes, they don’t know what to do with that. [laughter] I tell people I don’t watch TV, and they’re like, “Really, you don’t watch–” “No, we don’t watch TV.” I mean, everything I want to watch, I either wait to it on Netflix or it comes out on DVD. On rare occasions where I have to catch a TV show, I have friends. So, like with Oscars– a few weeks ago, I–
CHRIS 45:48 I liked Joey Tribbiani by the way. [laughter] Oh, not that friends, never mind.
RON 45:52 Right, right. You’re right. [Laughter] So, like I’ll buy a whole season of a show and then watch it in. The curviate is you have to avoid things like entertainment. You have to be careful when you read Entertainment Weekly or TV shows or get spoilers but–
CHRIS 46:11 The death of the water cooler moment. [laughter]
RON 46:12 Yes, yes.
CHRIS 46:13 That’s what– so what has changed in your business practices, Ron?
RON 46:21 Well, that’s a good question. I think one of the changes that I’m really trying to embrace is original content creation. I think that there are more and more companies that kind of doing it yourself. I mean, let’s see what the really higher upper epsilon of commercial video production where– you can’t make a 1980 — like that Apple’s famous 1984 commercial, you can’t do that by yourself. A lot of these commercials, you need a professional house that can make it. But a lot of companies, smaller, non-pot companies are learning, Final Cut Pro, and even iMovie and [inaudible] Lars, and they’re making their own little splash paid videos, and yeah, a lot of them are crappy but for them it’s good enough. And so, in last year you have access to those really high-end commercial outlets that’s affecting the smaller commercial video producer to get jobs. And so instead of complaining about it, I’m embracing it. So one, I’m adding more education to my content in terms of services. I want to start doing more education and teaching companies how to do it. So join them instead of complaining about it.
CHRIS 47:32 Are you saying that you are going to participate in more education or you are going to do more educating?
RON 47:38 Exactly. I’m going to do more educating. So working with– educating companies who do want to do it themselves and consulting them and saying, “Okay, if they’re going to do it anyway, let’s teach them how to do it right and let me get paid to be taught to them.” So, maybe they won’t hire me to make the video, but they will hire to teach them how to make it. Teach–
CHRIS 47:58 Interesting.
RON 47:59 So, that’s one way I’m changing my business model. But the other is, again, being inspired by people like Carl, producing my own content and using that as a way of eventually generating revenues. So that a few years down the line, I have a portfolio of original content that’s generating income every time someone buys it or downloads it or what. And so, I’m slowly moving in that direction. And, I’m willing to make changes in my business and in my career in order to allow for that to happen because I think that’s the way that it’s going. I think those are two ways in which I’m embracing change.
CARL 48:45 How about you Mitch?
MITCH 48:50 My life has been nothing but change, I think.
CHRIS 48:52 Totally. Mitch is like the poster child for the whole changing economy from–
CARL 48:59 As well as the reaction of hating change. [laughter] Not from Mitch, but from people who are affected by the changes that he, of necessity, is having to go through.
CHRIS 49:10 Well, I’m actually going back to just the whole changing economy when Mitch– I mean, Mitch had start – if people don’t know, and I’m going to tell one or two Mitch’s [inaudible] a little bit – Mitch started the website when he still had a full-time job because he just loved it. And then, he lost his job and he’s like, “Okay. Well–” And he just jumped wholeheartedly into the website and now makes a living from it or so I’m told.
MITCH 49:38 Yes.
CHRIS 49:38 But I’m– and so Mitch has made the change to this whole new– to me, I call it the internet economy. I mean, if it weren’t for the internet, you would have no business right now.
MITCH 49:52 Yeah. Absolutely.
CHRIS 49:54 And so to me, that’s an internet economy. I mean, I look at all the work that I’ve done over the years on my website just either pontificating or sharing or tutorializing or something. I’d be hard pressed to buy us all a sandwich based on the money that I’ve made off of it. So I can’t do it, you’re doing it, and it’s impressive. That kind of stuff impresses me. And then of course, like I’ve mentioned, the whole merging of the Cinema5D Forums into your staff. Yeah, that’s part of it too.
MITCH 50:29 Well, one of the biggest lessons, I think– and again, I’m 55 so I can try to teach the youngsters, right?
CHRIS 50:37 The kids.
MITCH 50:40 I really think that the people who survive change the best are those who don’t have an immediate knee jerk reaction and get all whacked out about the change. If you would just take pause, [chuckle] and think about it and let it– my wife has actually taught me this. I’ll give her the tutelage on this one. She used to tell me, “Don’t react to an email that upsets you right away. Sleep on it. Think about it.” And I’ve had to do that quite a few times in the last week.
RON 51:21 That’s a lesson I learned from my wife as well.
MITCH 51:23 Is it?
RON 51:24 Yeah.
MITCH 51:25 Great [inaudible].
RON 51:26 Yeah.
MITCH 51:27 So if you just take pause and don’t just suddenly go blasting, “Well, this is the worst thing ever. This is sucks. This is never going to work out.” The Cinema5D moved– the Forum moved, now again, the whole Cinema5D hasn’t moved. They’re still doing new stuff over on their website. Let’s make that clear, because I’ve been told I’m not making that clear enough. Cinema5D still exists. It’s just the forums that have moved over. But, in the week and two days since it’s happened. Everybody’s calmed down. People are contributing. They’re enjoying the threads. They’re sending emails saying, “This is great. We’re glad to have somebody focusing on this forum again.” So, the initial reaction is over, I think. And, life is moving on and people are adjusting.
CARL 52:21 I have a question. Maybe it’s related to this whole change issue but I’ve noticed a lot of people – and some of them are listeners to this podcast, I know – they’ve changed their avatars in Twitter to green. What is that about?
CHRIS 52:36 It’s a way of participating and not really helping.
CARL 52:39 Oh, no, no, no. [chuckle]
RON 52:40 I’ve noticed that too. [laughter]
CHRIS 52:44 It’s the, “Support the visual effects community.” After the Oscar’s, one of the– I think it was Life of Pi, it gotten zero recognition for it’s VFX and so all the– and then what is it? Rhythm and Hues, I think is the company that has filed for Chapter 11 in Effects House and they’re “Here it is,” all these movies that basically can’t be made without visual effects. And, the VFX community is complaining that they’re not getting any recognition or money.
CARL 53:21 Well, I thought they did get recognition for the Life of Pi.
RON 53:24 Yes, they won the Oscar for the visual effects.
MITCH 53:26 Yes, but now they’re going out of business.
CARL 53:27 Okay. So who’s fault is that?
RON 53:28 And yet the company–
CHRIS 53:30 Well, I would say [chuckle] it is the fault of the people taking the jobs. If you value what you do, you don’t take a job for less money than you feel you’re worth. And–
MITCH 53:45 I think the back-story there, if I could just interrupt, is that several companies are bidding for the visual effects on movies. And they end up underbidding each other, and therefore, they’re not making any money. But they feel like they have to have the jobs in order to keep their people employed. So they’re stuck in this circle of winning a bid, but not making any money at it.
CARL 54:08 Right.
CHRIS 54:09 [inaudible]
CARL 54:09 And so– go ahead, Chris.
CHRIS 54:11 So this kind of behavior is very short-sighted, because what it means is, as a person who needs– okay, so as a movie producer, if all you care about is getting, buying the space shuttle from the lowest bidder – that was the old joke of the astronaut thing, “Good grief, we’re sitting on top of this thing that’s about to take us into outer space, now it’s built by the lowest bidder.” – your providers will not be there for you long-term because you’re forcing them to take jobs at a rate that is not sustainable. It doesn’t allow for a long-term sustainability. And if that’s all you care about then that’s good for you, because you will work with company A on film A but by the time you get to doing film B, company A will be out of business. So you’ll have to find another company to work with because you didn’t pay the guy enough to keep his doors open. But it’s also goes down to– I really think it starts at the guy sitting at the mouse. Don’t take a job if you’re not making enough money for it. Find a better job. Find another job. Maybe you won’t be working on some Hollywood feature but it’s not good business practice to keep taking jobs that don’t pay enough. And that’s what ends up happening. So the green icon goes back to what would life be like without a VFX compositor. What would be all if everybody standing on green backgrounds.
CARL 55:57 Okay.
RON 55:58 And, I think, well, actually–
CARL 55:59 I’m sorry, Ron, go ahead.
RON 56:00 No, I was going to say quickly, regarding the Life of Pi, I think Life of Pi also won “Best Cinematography”, and since so much of that movie was VFX, I think maybe people felt like the cinematography got more press and more recognition for stuff that was really related to the visual effects. That’s what I think.
CARL 56:25 I don’t know the first thing about that movie, except there’s a tiger and a boat. [laughter]
RON 56:31 Well, here’s an interesting thing, I was listening to a podcast that’s for writers, it’s called The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, and he was interviewing the writer of Life of Pi – or the Life of Pi was one of the writer’s on the panel – and the writer was talking about– there was a question regarding the pre-production costs that are considered when you’re actually writing a script, and the producer was sitting with the writer, and they were going over this scene, and I haven’t seen the movie, but this is a scene where, I guess, a bunch of little meerkats are running around the island, and the producer was saying to the scriptwriter who wrote this scene, “Do you think we can reduce the number of these meerkats scenes, because every time we show one, it costs $23,000.”
MITCH 57:12 [chuckles] Yikes.
RON 57:12 And he was like, “Are you serious?” And she’s like, “Yeah. No joke. Every time there was a meerkat on the screen, it’s going to cost $23,000.” So, I don’t know. I thought that was interesting aside. And maybe it’s related to all of this – I don’t know – but I though that was interesting.
CHRIS 57:32 Is it because of the animal wranglers or these digital meerkats?
RON 57:36 These look– digital meerkats. No, these were digital– everything in that movie that was animal, supposedly, is digital. And, so these are all digital meerkats running around. And, so the visual effect shot– each visual effect shot with those meerkats was costing– would cost $23,000.
CHRIS 57:54 Wow.
RON 57:55 Yeah.
CARL 57:57 Well, this all goes back to our discussion. And I don’t want to put down any of the visual effects artists and people who do this. They do great work. But, I do see that a lot of people just do not have very good business sense. And, I agree with Chris. You have to price yourself right. I’ve bid on jobs and I’m not the lowest bidder, and I have been accepted as not the lowest bidder. [chuckle]
CHRIS 58:26 Right.
CARL 58:26 Because the company puts value on what I do. And so, now I’ve got a couple of points on the equation or variables in the equation there that says, “This is somebody I want to work with because they value my work.” And it’s going to be a much better experience as a result because you’re going to value what’s going in there. And I’m going to make a profit at what I’m doing. I don’t do low-ball stuff. It’s just not worth my time. I’m not in a charity business. I contribute to charities, but I am not a non-profit. [laughter] Does that make sense?
CHRIS 59:02 Not by design.
CARL 59:03 Yeah. Exactly.
CHRIS 59:04 I was dealing with a cameraman once who had given up– he was telling me a story about giving a bid to a client. And they looked at the bid and they’re like, “Are you kidding me? Is this– What is this like a hobby for you or what?” And, the client was actually appalled that the guy had bid something so low. And, you have to remember that sometimes bidding low puts a– it sets the tone for the relationship that you have with that person. And it also might mean that somebody goes, “Oh, obviously you don’t know what you’re doing.” If that’s all you think your time is worth, I want to work with somebody who respects themselves a little bit more than that.
CARL 60:01 But let’s turn it all upside-down now, okay? So, I agree with all that. But now, when I first started shooting video regularly, I was doing a lot of customer testimonials, interviews, the head shots, talking heads, that sort of thing. And now, there’s just a plethora of courses out there that one of our listeners– I can’t pronounce his last name. Jay Mutzafi, I believe. He has a course on doing iPhone– how corporate people, businesses can use iPhones to create their own videos. How-to videos. Man, you talk about turning a business model upside-down. [laughter]
CHRIS 60:41 Thanks Jay.
CARL 60:41 Yeah. But is Jay doing the wrong thing? I think Jay’s killing it, because he’s making money off this course and I applaud that. I applaud him for it.
CHRIS 60:52 And apparently off of this show.
CARL 60:53 Yeah. [laughter] I applaud– well, his courses was just featured on App Sumo, which is a company that does a lot of affiliate marketing to thousands of customers. And they’ve been immensely successful in the way they do their affiliate marketing. Where does that fit in? Is that a bad thing?
CHRIS 61:20 No. It’s embracing the change. If I think that I can continue to do exactly what I’m doing today till the end of my career, I’d be foolish. My career is taking– It’s interesting because I’ve been in the video production industry now, I’ll say for 30 years. The first professional thing that I tried to do was thirty years ago this Spring. I’ve seen my business change immensely over those 30 years. For the first, nearly a decade, I was just a for hire dude. A dude in a telephone. I would come in and push– I would push your buttons, in more ways than one. I would run your gear. Twenty years ago I started buying equipment. So it’s changed immensely and you have to be– you’ve one eye on the future and one eye on your desk. And every once in a while you can stop and reminisce about the past but you have to be looking towards the future and saying, “What are the trends?” “What’s going to be different?” “What can I do today to be ready for that?” But then you also have to be good at keeping your head down on occasion and just concentrating on what you’re doing. Otherwise what you’re doing today will suffer.
CARL 62:50 Doesn’t it seem like the persons or people who are being hurt the most or affected – I shouldn’t say hurt but, well, I guess it is hurt depending on how you bend with it – that’s being affected by change is the middleman. They’re being eliminated.
CHRIS 63:07 Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean the middle class is being eliminated. We have that issue too. Actually, I posted something on my blog a couple of days ago. It’s a fascinating after effects project but it’s also a very interesting story. It’s called– I call it, “Wealth is fleeting.” And its this info-graphic about wealth in America. It’s very interesting. I would recommend–
MITCH 63:30 Oh, no.
CHRIS 63:30 –you guys watch it. No?
MITCH 63:32 It’d scare me. [chuckles]
CHRIS 63:34 Oh, I know, it’s horribly frightening. It’s horribly frightening. But it’s a wonderfully created info-graphic too.
CARL 63:41 So, let’s leave something positive for their listeners though. It’s a given —
CHRIS 63:46 I’m positive about this leaving. [laughter]
CARL 63:48 –business model– all these business models are changing. What can we do to encourage folks to embrace it rather than be run over by it?
CHRIS 63:57 I think you have to find people that are ahead of you and doing well, and learn from them.
MITCH 64:09 Don’t suddenly react. Take time to think about the changes and embrace them as they come.
RON 64:16 Be open minded. Follow and look at trail blazers who are doing amazing things in your industry and see who’s successful in your industry and why they’re successful. Chances are they’re people who have embraced change, and use them as role models.
CHRIS 64:39 Be nice to kittens. [laughter]
CARL 64:42 And, on that note… [chuckle]. I’d like to talk about Kre8 Insights. If you want to get on the fast track to success in video production and film making, you need to check out kre8insights.com. It’s a membership site. In fact, our DCP listeners can get a free trial to that, 30 day trial. No credit card is required. You can take a peek inside behind the doors and see what Chris Simmons and Michael Gebben and all their experts that they’ve brought in talking about video business. And one of the things that they do is– I know Chris personally, he is a person who embraces change. And it’s a topic that comes up often within Kre8 Insight. And also on their podcast Expert Interrogations. Ron, you’re going to be on Expert Interrogations, right?
RON 65:39 Yeah. I think I’m scheduled for next Tuesday, and either I bought those about it. But it’s– obviously, I think you can ask any questions that are available, but I want to address and cover a lot of topics with specifically to finding, recruiting, and managing contractor help. Because, one, I think that’s a great way of being able to grow and expand your business, and two, it’s a great way to being able to help balance the workload and the backlog.
MITCH 66:13 Boy, do I need that.
CARL 66:15 Yeah. That’s cool. That’s going to be a cool topic. Yesterday, they had Brett Culp.
RON 66:23 Brett is awesome.
CARL 66:24 Yeah. I didn’t get to sit in live on it yesterday because I was away. But, you know what’s cool? They have instant replays, so you can check out the archives and see all the interesting people. I’ll give you one that’s an interesting one. I would encourage our listeners to go look James, the episode featuring James Wedmore, online video marketing expert. That one there is a million dollar episode.
RON 66:53 Yeah. He was on Creative Live a few or so months ago.
CARL 66:58 Yeah. He’s doing good. I got a lot of good tips out of watching that episode. I’m going to be on tomorrow, so I’d like to encourage all the digital convergence team if you can join us live tomorrow, that’s at– [inaudible] prepared. Let me–
MITCH 67:16 [inaudible] 2:00 Central?
CARL 67:19 It is. Mine is scheduled for 3pm.
MITCH 67:24 3pm Eastern. 2pm Central, right?
CARL 67:26 Yeah. Okay, yeah. So, 3pm Eastern, 2pm… So, it will be about an hour, maybe a little over an hour. You get to ask questions. I’ll be talking about my business model, plus whatever helps our listeners are interested in, but I will be talking a lot about doing– creating your own content and marketing that for your business.
RON 67:53 And what’s nice is, it’s free. I mean…
CARL 67:55 Yeah.
CHRIS 67:58 The interrogations thing is free.
MITCH 68:00 Right.
CARL 68:01 Yeah. Uses of–
CHRIS 68:01 [inaudible]?
CHRIS 68:02 Yeah, its– you have that, that’s not in the membership. That’s just free. You don’t have to be a member, but once you see this you say, “Wow! There’s a lot of cool stuff here.” So, anyway check it out, kre8insights.com. And, you can sign up for the trial at kre8– excuse me, I got to say this right – kre8insider.com/dcp, to get your free 30 day membership. Alright, awesome. A little bit of feedback. I got one question. And, it’s from Travis Wilbur. It says, ‘Any advice or methods on the best way to write scripts for clients, especially for short promo videos?’ No. [laughter]
CHRIS 68:54 I was just trying to be polite. I have plenty to say.
CARL 68:57 No, well–
MITCH 68:58 I mean, has he looked into programs like Final Draft, or Movie Magic Screenwriter.
CHRIS 69:02 [inaudible].
CARL 69:02 He doesn’t say– he didn’t say. That’s what he’s asking. What is the best way to write scripts for clients?
CHRIS 69:07 No, I think he’s getting at the content. I think what you- I don’t think he’s worried about what software he’s going to use, I think he’s trying to figure out how to garner content from a client, when you’re dealing with somebody– like he says here, a short promo videos. I mean, a lot of times we’re dealing with things that are contextually outside of our realm of expertise. I think one of the best videos that I personally have produced, was one I did for– actually Carl, it was the one that played– it was the opening video that you saw in Atlanta last year. And, the way I did that – I actually worked very closely with the VP of marketing for the company – and what I did is I said, “Look, I want you to write what you think you’d like to say to people in 90 seconds.” And he wrote down some stuff, and I took it, and then I changed it and modified it, and picked a few different words that I thought would fit better and then– he actually started it and we went back and forth a couple of drafts to the point where we got it to what you saw. And so, I think one of the best ways to deal with clients is to get their participation. You’ll– especially if your dealing with something that your not an expert in. Quite often we don’t have the time to become an expert in something.
MITCH 70:31 Yeah, tell me about it!
CARL 70:33 Now, how do you handle that Ron?
RON 70:36 So, assuming that’s what he’s talking about and he’s not specifically looking for– okay, what type of program do you use?
MITCH 70:41 How do I tab in?
RON 70:43 Right [inaudible]–
MITCH 70:44 I think, something that’s good to have.
RON 70:46 I think what Chris said is actually great. I, actually, recently, just did that. We need to do a voice over, a script for a recent project we finished. And, I had the client write the voice-over. And then I went in and I tweaked it and made it – for lack of better words – cinematic and story-driven and made it sound good. So, what I’m getting from the client, like a rough draft of what they would want to say and then you’re using your expertise as a story-teller or film maker to improve upon it. I have my corporate clients, commercial clients, fill out a form or questionnaire that answers questions like, “What’s your brand?” “Who’s the audience?” “What’s the message you want to get across?” “What’s the objective of the video?” I personally think the most effective videos are ones that have a very specific objective in mind, rather than trying to be everything. It’s a promotional video, and it’s an educational video, and it’s a client testimonial; now find one objective or maybe two at tops, but one primary objective. Like, ‘The purpose of this video is to have people click through the website.’ or ‘The purpose of this video is to increase buyer appreciation.’ ‘Purpose of this video is to get people to buy,’ whatever it is. And then I gather all that answers to all those questions. Now, can I use that to drive a script if I have a script? But frankly, majority of the work I do for my commercial clients is more documentary-based. And so instead of writing a specific script, I’m interviewing key stakeholders in the company, customers, that sort of thing, and I am taking all those interviews and sound bites in weaving them together in a way that sounds, to me frankly, more authentic than often times scripted videos may sound. I think having a scripted video can be a tricky thing if you don’t, one, have professionals who can actually deliver the script well. You’d be amazed at how stuttered a script can sound when you have someone who doesn’t really know how to eloquently recite it. So, sometimes I find it’s better to just have people talk about the product or service from their own words and then you kind of edit it to make it sound good. But, if you have to have a script, those are some of the things that I suggest.
CARL 73:14 Very good. My videos are very different. Well, I shouldn’t say very different. But they’re how-to’s, right? Tutorials is the kind of thing I do these days. So, our basic outline is: tell them what they’re going to learn, tell them why they need to know it and what the value is to them, then show them how to do it step by step, and then wrap up and say here’s what you learned and give them confidence that they’re going to be able to apply what they’ve learned. And it’s just bullet points. And then Jeremy does most of the script writing, so he’s got his bullet points that he talks from. Of course he knows the subject very well. So I really don’t have to do any scripting, to tell you truth [laughter]. He does it, and I look it, I review it and say, “Yeah, let’s make this change here,” but he does the bulk of the work and does a good job with it.
CHRIS 74:06 I have a good money making tip when it comes to things like this. A lot of times you’ll run into a client who, like Ron was saying, what is the primary objective of this particular video? And this is what happens a lot; “Well, we want this, but we figured it’d be nice if it did this, this and this too.” And all of a sudden your message gets watered down because you’re trying to say four things instead of one.
RON 74:30 Right.
CHRIS 74:30 What actually works really well at that point is to say– is to tell them, and to inform them how their message is going to get watered down and get confusing, but while we’re here and we’ve got all this stuff let’s make that other video. Because you’ve already started the relationship, you’ve already– you can shoot three or four videos in a day, so let’s expand the scope of this purchase order and maybe we can do a video for that department and one for this, instead of trying to do everything in one thing and having it lose it’s effectiveness.
RON 75:11 Yeah, I’ve used that really well–
CHRIS 75:12 You can use that as an up-sell.
RON 75:14 Yeah, I’ve used that effectively in my business. Up-selling…
CHRIS 75:19 Up-selling sounds dirty but that’s basically what it is.
RON 75:22 Well, it’s like, “Do you want fries with that?” [laghter]
They’ll hire me to do a traditional promo video, and then I’ll do exactly what Chris said–
CHRIS 75:36 Would you like to super size your video?
RON 75:38 Yeah, how about we tack on two additional client testimonial videos. They’re not as “fancy” as the main video. They’re kind of stand alone supplements, or rather complimentary videos to the main one. And, add 5% or 10% or more to the bottom line contract by the additional editing work for those videos. And, they don’t necessarily take a lot of extra time. It could be as easy as you grab a one minute sound bite and you just add an opening and a closing to it and you add an additional $500 to a $5000 contract. And, to the clients it’s like– it may not be any skin off their teeth adding that extra budget and you get 10% more money [inaudible].
CHRIS 76:27 We had Peter Dupre on the show awhile back, and he has a thing on his website and going to put this in the show now. Where he explains how he can turn one video into multiple media clips for somebody’s website. And, it’s a really good strategy of his that he uses with his clients all the time. And, I will put that link in the Media Creations Strategy in the show notes. I’ll mail that to you.
CARL 76:53 Excellent. Those are good tips really–
CHRIS 76:56 Free stuff for our listeners, no extra charge.
CARL 76:59 Mitch.
MITCH 77:00 I want to throw in just a tid bit, which I find interesting how things always appear at the same time. I just got a press release the other day from a gentleman who has created his own service which is script-writing. And, he’s at dr-script.com, that’s dr-script.com. So, it’s an option if you’re not really good at writing stuff he can help you write stuff I’m sure.
CARL 77:27 Cool. Cool tip. So we’re coming up on an hour and a half —
MITCH 77:34 Really?
CARL 77:34 Yes. This an hour podcast, but it’s never been an hour. [laughter] So, we need to move on. Ron, do you have a product pick or tip that you would like to leave our listeners today?
RON 77:46 Not one that comes to mind. If I think of one…
CARL 77:54 No problem. Put you on the spot.
CHRIS 77:56 [inaudible]
CARL 77:58 Alright, Chris. Tell us what you want?
CHRIS 77:59 Is it product pick? Is that we’re doing now?
CARL 78:02 Yes. I forgot to do sound didn’t I?
CHRIS 78:05 Yeah, I can’t–
CARL 78:06 I just totally threw you off–
CHRIS 78:08 Now, I got it. I got it.
CARL 78:09 Good. Now, we’re on the mood. Okay.
CHRIS 78:11 Well, I was over a client the other day – just yesterday – and they were setting up this– they were mocking up a video testimonial booth that they were going to do at some event where you just walk in, and push a button, and go [inaudible], and you do your little thing. And, they lit it with this really cool Rosco light panel, and there’s a ton of LED panels out there. I just bought a new ring light for our DSLRs, which cool, but this Rosco thing was awesome. It was like a little– imagine like – wonder what that’d be – about a quarter inch thick piece of plexiglass that just glows bright, and that’s all it was. It was just fantastic. So, I have a link to it in the show notes, it’s called the Light Pad HO. I don’t know why it’s called HO, but there will be a link to that in the show note. Very cool.
CARL 79:05 Very cool. Yeah.
CHRIS 79:06 It’s just this piece of plexiglass that just glows. Very, very interesting.
CARL 79:11 Awesome. Awesome. Okay, Planet Mitch.
MITCH 79:14 I posted something the other day that was sent in by one of our new bloggers, Kevin – I’m never going to get his last name – Aldamar. And, he has been using a Canon X Series 3– I’m sorry, X Series, 3X’s Giro. I can’t talk today. Now, I’ve never used one of these, and it’s fascinating because he does a lot of work like, driving– shooting a car commercial or something. If you’re driving in a car and they’re driving a car and you’re trying to film them, you’re film is going to be shaky because, there’s no way you’re going to get that thing to be solid while you’re in a moving vehicle, especially moving fast. So, he wrote this guest post about using this new Canon X Series, 3X’s Giro, which he got from LensPro ToGo for a couple hundred bucks for a couple of days to smooth out his video while he was shooting. So, I thought that was pretty cool.
CARL 80:16 Excellent. Hey, I’ve got a fun one. I haven’t done a product pick in a long time. But, you know how you go to a trade show or some event wearing a name tag?
CHRIS 80:27 Yes.
CARL 80:28 There’s one that’s a video badge. Have you seen this?
CHRIS 80:31 I’ve actually created video for those before.
CARL 80:34 Get out of here.
CHRIS 80:35 Yeah.
CARL 80:36 It’s called the video promo badge.
RON 80:37 Really?
CHRIS 80:38 Okay.
CARL 80:38 Yeah. It’s 150 bucks. You wear this thing. It’s about the size of a name clip and it’s got the video on there. What better way to draw attention to yourself and look like a geek? [laughter]
CHRIS 80:50 No kidding. My wonder was, they were– the video I created was to be worn by the people that manned a particular booth.
CARL 81:02 Exactly. Yeah.
CHRIS 81:03 And I was like, “Really? Do women want people starring at their chest even more?” [laughter] I just thought it was really odd.
CARL 81:11 Yeah. Oh, well.
CHRIS 81:13 And then, the worst part about it is I actually had – because of the client – we actually had to put a lawyer disclaimer as part of the badge.
MITCH 81:23 Oh, no.
CHRIS 81:24 I kid you not.
CARL 81:26 A lawyer disclaimer?
CHRIS 81:27 Yeah. Like–
RON 81:28 But–
CHRIS 81:28 “Because the content on this video badge has been approved and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Yeah, ridiculous.
MITCH 81:34 Oh, my.
CHRIS 81:34 I kid you not.
CARL 81:36 I can see us using it at Reetz TV when we go to a trade show.
CHRIS 81:41 Yeah.
CARL 81:41 Yeah. See, all our sales people would be in the booth, will be manning the booth and see little Reetz TV events going on. Of course, it would be hard to hold a person’s attention while you’re trying to talk to them. They’re watching your lapel badge.
MITCH 81:56 My eyes are up here. [laughter]
CARL 82:00 Oh, well. That may not be such a good pick, but I thought it was such a noble, noble idea. I’ve never seen these things before.
CHRIS 82:07 I actually did the video. I want to say about two years ago now, they’ve been around. They’re probably just more affordable so we’re starting to see more.
CARL 82:16 Yeah, about 150– I bet they’ll come on down, especially as they come up with those new materials, LED type materials that’s just on a flexible sheet and that sort of thing, use very low power.
CHRIS 82:29 Yeah. That’d be pretty cool.
CARL 82:31 Well, Chris is there anything you have not shot video for?
CHRIS 82:35 Well I didn’t shoot– This was all an after effects project actually.
CARL 82:38 Okay cool!
CHRIS 82:39 It was an animated thingamajig.
CARL 82:41 Alright, well let’s wrap up the show guys. So, Ron really appreciate you being on the show with us today talking about change.
RON 82:49 Yeah, I love having– love you having me on [laughter].
MITCH 82:54 Nobody can talk this way [laughter].
CHRIS 82:55 Thanks for inviting us to your show Ron [laughter].
CARL 83:00 So, what can we expect when crossing the 180?
RON 83:05 Well I’m excited to have– have you heard of Freddy
W?
CARL 83:10 Yes, I have.
RON 83:11 Yeah. Well, I got a tweet confirmation from him to be the guest for my 100th episode, so I sent a tweet out to him saying, “I’d like to have you on.” He Tweeted back, “I’m down.” Now, it’s just a matter of actually trying to wrangle that in–
CARL 83:28 Wait a minute. So, “I’m down” means “Yes” or “I’m sick”? [chuckles]
RON 83:33 No, I think it means “yes”, as in I’m down
.
CHRIS 83:35 I’m down brother. [inaudible]
RON 83:36 Yeah, exactly.
CARL 83:37 I’m trying to improve my vocabulary here. [chuckles] I want to get with it here.
CHRIS 83:41 Yeah.
CARL 83:42 But cool.
RON 83:44 Yeah, but this Friday I have Salomon Lightelm, who is an amazing film maker out of Australia. A lot of people out there I’m sure have seen his work. He’s done some really cool stuff with Twixtor and he’s worked with the guys out of ‘We Are Variable’ in New York, and he’s going to be on this Friday. Definitely worth listening to his stuff if you like Salomon Lightelm’s work.
CARL 84:08 Very nice. Planet Mitch, what could people find out about you and what you’re up to?
MITCH 84:13 I’m purely up to the forums at Planet5D.com.
CARL 84:17 Hey, what’s trending on the forums right now?
MITCH 84:20 Anything I say. [laughter]
CARL 84:24 I was trying to be serious here. Is it Blackmagic Cinema, is it Canon 5D Mark IV, an Nikon 70 100? I don’t know. What are people talking about?
MITCH 84:39 I think it’s still very difficult to get people talking about some of the lesser known brands. Even though the Blackmagic’s got a lot of conversation, its traffic on the forums is pretty low. Most people are still talking about Canon, making movies with Canon H DSLRs. But we’d like to expand that of course. We want people to talk about Nikons and Panasonics and Sonys and Blackmagics and whatever else they’re using.
CARL 85:08 Yeah, cool. Okay. Chris Fenwick?
CHRIS 85:11 You should go to my website because I have fun stuff on it. Actually, I just posted a couple videos yesterday about–
CARL 85:17 Those were hilarious.
CHRIS 85:18 The Oreo Separators.
CARL 85:20 Oreo Separators. OSM baby.
CHRIS 85:23 Yeah, I call it OSM. It’s an acronym. Anyway, really funny stuff. Go check that out, and there’s some tutorials too, so chrisfenwick.com and Chris Fenwick on Twitter. And, go check out Vine on your iPhone. I think I mentioned it last week didn’t I?
CARL 85:38 Yeah.
CHRIS 85:38 The Vine app. I’m really digging Vine. It’s really fun. Six-second videos. You can have multiple shots in it. You have to shoot it basically in the camera. There’s no post-production, and it’s just, they’re fun, they’re fun.
CARL 85:53 You know what, I should have downloaded it and did a Vine video of this podcast being recorded.
CHRIS 85:58 Or one of cutters.
MITCH 86:01 Six seconds worth?
CHRIS 86:03 Yeah, it’s really fun. So basically you turn on the camera and if you touch the screen, it records. So you can say, “Okay, here I am walking into the room,” touch, let go. That’s your establishing shot. Then you walk in, you go, “Oh, two people sitting down.” Touch, let go. “Oh, and now, let’s hear what this person has to say.” Touch. And it shows you a progress bar, you’ve used this much of your six seconds. And then when it’s done, it ends up making a six second animated gif loop with audio. I don’t know if it’s a gif. I don’t know what it is. But it’s a little six second loop. And some of the people that make really clever Vines, they kind of play on that loop thing. So where is the beginning, where is the end, I don’t really know, it’s kind of fun. It’s the Matrix.
CARL 86:51 Very nice. All right. You can find me, Carl Olson, at digitalfilm.tv. I’m on Twitter as ‘the Carl Olson’, O-L-S-O-N. Remember tomorrow I’ll be on Expert Interrogations at 3pm Eastern standard time, Expert Interrogations. So join us there. Ask your questions, I’ll try to answer them. So that should be fun. I have to admit, I have to get my little butterflies flying in my stomach in formation, but I’ll be okay. [Chuckles]
CHRIS 87:27 You do it all the time.
CARL 87:28 Yeah. And let’s see, what else? I guess that’s about it. So I do want to thank our sponsors at CrumplePop, film and broadcast effects for Final Cut Pro, and KRE8insights.com, helping talented and passionate filmmakers become successful entrepreneurs. Visit their website today for proven strategies that can help you grow your business. KRE8insights.com. That’s KRE8insights.com. Do continue to leave us feedback in iTunes and rate us there. We really appreciate everyone’s support of that. Keep spreading the word about the podcast. Share it with a friend, or share it with someone who’s not a friend. [Laughter] Just share it with someone you think would appreciate just hearing a bunch of guys sit around talking about about the fun topic of film making, video photography, the business op, and change. Right?
CHRIS 88:29 Yup.
CARL 88:30 Yeah. Okay. And continue to send us your feedback and your questions. We love those. We’ll save them for a future Q&A episode. Well gentlemen, I think that’s about everything. Congratulations on finally guessing the mystery movie theme from ”To Catch a Thief’. So anyway, I think I’m going to start looking in the Amazon prime library for another good movie to watch this evening. So go format your SD or CF card, charge up your batteries, clean your lenses, dust off your script, and get out there and make your movie, folks.
CHRIS 89:11 Later.
CARL 89:13 Bye.