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™.
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.
Josh Becker is a DOP and animator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is a regular contributor to the CrumpleBlog. Check out Josh at joshbecker.net and facebook.
As a freelancer, I tend to wear a lot of hats. One day it’s a web video that will be compressed online, the next it’s documentary that needs to meet broadcast spec, and another it’s a stylized product shot that requires a high frame rate with RAW quality. While there are some great cameras in the sub-$15000 price range, I’m not aware of any camera rigs under $35,000 that can accomplish what the FS700+7Q combination is pulling off.
Pretty much everyone is familiar with the FS700, Sony’s mighty sub-$8000 camera that put slow-motion capabilities in the hands of the everyman. Released in the summer of 2012, the camera was equipped with a 4K sensor but was limited to capturing 1080p AVCHD to an SD card or a Sony Flash Memory Unit, with frame rates up to 240fps. Of course, the high frame-rates also came with a “gotcha”: an 8-second limit, due to the camera’s internal buffer that holds the footage before writing it to the SD card or FMU.
Fast forward to November 2013. Convergent Design had announced the Odyssey7Q monitor/recorder earlier that year and after some manufacturing setbacks, units were finally trickling in to dealers. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an Odyssey7Q in early December, so I have watched this baby learn to crawl and now finally begin to stand.
The Odyssey7Q, to get the most out of the FS700, requires the FS700 to have firmware v3.0, which comes with the FS700R model or can be added by sending an older FS700 to Sony and paying an upgrade fee. This enables full functionality of the camera’s 4K sensor and RAW output from the 3G-SDI port, unlocking a whole slew of capabilities.
It’s a brand new camera. Sure, it’s the same FS700 you’ve seen in the hands of action-sports shooters or on indie music video sets but what’s happening under the hood, specifically in the guts behind that beautiful 7.7-inch OLED screen of the Odyssey7Q, is all new.
The FS700 sends the following RAW signals:
In addition to capturing all of these signals, the Odyssey7Q has the ability to receive the FS700’s 4K RAW signal and compress it to an amazing 10-bit 1080p ProRes HQ file, which is virtually free of any aliasing and moiré. More specifically, it clears up a really ugly issue that the FS700 had when recording internally with AVCHD, check out the left edge of the water being poured. A picture is worth a thousand words:
Over the last 8 months, I’ve used the Odyssey7Q in a lot of shooting environments and conditions. From the sub-zero temperatures of the Minnesotan tundra to Dominica’s 16-mile Boiling Lake hike. Since the day my Odyssey7Q arrived, I have rarely shot without it.
To begin, the Odyssey7Q has an outstanding 7.7-inch OLED monitor built into it. The capacitive touch screen allows you to toggle focus enhancement tools, waveform monitors and histograms, and exposure tools. In the past several months, aside from a few specific instances, I’ve set aside my Alphatron EVF in favor of viewing from the Odyssey7Q monitor. Part of that is due to the fact that the monitor will need to be attached regardless, the other is due to how Odyssey7Q exposure/focus tools make shooting so much easier.
Now for some drawbacks: I tend to treat the FS700+7Q as a single unit, in my mind. But the reality is that you’re using two devices to capture your image. That’s two menu systems to figure out, two batteries to go dead, two sets of preferences/settings to keep an eye on. If you want to switch from “4K to HD” shooting to 2K 240fps RAW mode, you have to not only change the mode on the FS700, but you will need to navigate a few layers deep in the Odyssey7Q settings menu to put it into RAW mode.
Now, the FS700 isn’t up for any awards in ergonomic excellence and unfortunately the Odyssey7Q won’t change that. While the Odyssey7Q is smaller than the official Sony RAW capture solution, it still adds some bulk to the already awkward FS700.
Here are a couple of projects I was the DP on, where we used the FS700+7Q combination. First, is project I shot on the island of Dominica, where I was constantly shuffling through different modes to shoot 4K RAW, 2K RAW, and 1080p ProRes, depending on what we were trying to capture.
Another recent project was shot completely with RAW, the first installment of a three-part ode to summer titled, “JUNE.”
I guess what it comes down to for me, as an owner/operator, is having a weapon in your arsenal that can adapt to nearly every situation you throw at it. Just as I may need to rent or borrow a power tool for a special DIY project, I may need to rent special cameras or gear for a shoot. But having that perfect set of tools on hand that will accomplish 99% of your tasks can be a huge advantage. I checked out my FS700’s “operation time” clock, and had I been renting my FS700 instead of owning it, the usage time would have been roughly $23,000 in camera rental costs alone. Considering that a portion of those hours were racked up from people renting the camera from me, I would say that the camera has well paid for itself.
After months of using the FS700+7Q, I’m confident that it can handle essentially any shoot I throw at it.
This week, Convergent Design released the latest firmware (v. 2.10.141) for the Odyssey7Q monitor/recorder. Among many new features, Sony FS700 users were given a nice surprise: The ability to capture a 3.7-second burst of 120 frames per second in beautiful 4K RAW.
From the Odyssey7Q, you end up with a folder containing 440 CinemaDNG files. Played back at 23.976fps, that’s slightly over 18 seconds of smooth 4K.
A detail worth mentioning is that this is the only mode of capturing FS700 RAW with the Odyssey7Q that can use the “End Trigger” activation. For those who are unfamiliar: End Trigger mode constantly rolls footage to a buffer inside the FS700 and pressing the record button will actually capture the 3.7-second window that occurred before you pressed record. To many, this feels like some sort of witchcraft time travel. It is great for unpredictable events, maybe you are waiting for a bird to fly away. Rather than rolling for several minutes, you can simply hit the record button the moment after the bird flies away.
On the Odyssey7Q, RAW slow motion was a double-edged sword. You had the range and quality of RAW plus the ability to record until your SSDs were brimming with footage, but without end trigger you could end up rolling footage for several minutes before those birds flew away. If you aren’t rolling while it happens, you won’t get the shot. And when 1TB is a measly 20 minutes of 240fps, you could be in for a data management nightmare.
The new 4K 120fps burst helps bridge the tradeoff that was common before: resolution vs. frame rate. Prior to this firmware release, increasing the resolution from 2K to 4K resulted in a drop of maximum fps from 240fps to 60fps. Now, although only for a 3.7-second window, there is a new sweet spot for getting full 4K resolution with a taste of that addictive slow motion. And think of all the storage saved!
I took the new firmware out for a spin and grabbed a couple quick shots using the 4K 120fps burst. Nothing fantastic, just a few situations where you may want the extra resolution of 4K, the safety of End Trigger, and a touch of that sweet, sweet slomo. I settled on four shots: A bird grabbing some take-out, a bee in my yard, firing up some charcoal, and sinking a two-pointer.
And rather than cutting down each shot to the “good” sections, I opted to leave all 440 frames in, to illustrate exactly how long of a shot you end up with while using the 4K RAW 120fps burst. The basketball shot is only 220 frames, as it was shot using End Trigger Half mode (only fills half of the buffer).
Here is a preview on Vimeo:
Below, I’ve rendered out ProRes HQ files, processed as BMD Film (flat) through DaVinci Resolve. Regarding the RAW files: each burst of 4K 120fps ends up as a 5.91GB folder. I’m not currently planning on uploading the RAW files because that’s pretty chunky.
ProRes HQ – Bird 1.76 GB
ProRes HQ – Bee 1.61 GB
ProRes HQ – BBQ 1.74 GB
ProRes HQ – Basketball 931 MB
(NOTE: Clips are for testing/educational use only.)
With each firmware released for the Odyssey7Q, more power is unlocked from the FS700. With this combination, we can now capture 4K RAW at 24/30/60/120 frames per second (120fps limited to burst mode) and 2K RAW at 24/30/60/120/240 frames per second. In addition to RAW, the Odyssey7Q has the power to take in the 4K RAW signal and use all of that information to create an incredible 10-bit 1080p ProRes HQ files that has virtually no aliasing or moiré, up to 30fps.
Future firmware updates will include 4K ProRes, freeing us from the massive file sizes required of the RAW DNG files. We also have custom LUTs to look forward to, as well as 10-bit 1080p ProRes HQ up to 60fps.
I’m excited to see the future development of the Odyssey7Q and utilizing all of the power that it has unlocked from this camera. Thanks to the whole Convergent Design team for creating such a great device. I know I’ve given Mitch and Andy at CD an earful in the past regarding features, bugs, and updates, but without the hard work of them and their whole team, these capabilities would have never been unlocked.
Josh Becker is a Director of Photography and animator located in Minneapolis, MN. Check out Josh at joshbecker.net and facebook.
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.
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 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.
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 number 114.
CARL 01:01 Today is Wednesday, March 17, 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 number 114, Vimeo On Demand. The Digital Convergence Podcast is sponsored by CrumplePop Film and Broadcast Effects for Final Cut Pro and the DCP team is Chris Fenwick of chrisfenwick.com. Hello, Chris.
CHRIS 01:34 Hello, hello, hello.
CARL 01:37 Yeah, it’s good to have you on and Mr. Planet Mitch.
MITCH 01:39 Did you say March 17th in the introduction?
CARL 01:42 Did I say that? Today is not March 17th, isn’t it?
MITCH 01:46 No.
CHRIS 01:46 It’s the 13th.
MITCH 01:48 It’s the 13th. I’m like, “There’s no way it’s that far in the month”.
CHRIS 01:51 And did Jonah say March 17?
CARL 01:52 Oh, my goodness, I got to redo that whole bit.
MITCH 01:57 No, don’t bother.
CHRIS 01:57 It’s fine, everybody gets it.
CARL 01:58 Yeah.
[laughter]
MITCH 01:59 It’s real, baby. It’s real.
CARL 02:03 Okay, it’s Wednesday, March 13, 2013 and I’m Carl Olson and this is the Digital Convergence Podcast in the future. That’s how good this goes. So, so, so, gentlemen why–
MITCH 02:14 At least I’m listening.
[laughter]
CARL 02:15 Yes, you are. Very good. My staff of copywriters and editors just let me down today. Alright so what film or TV show is today’s mystery theme from? Mr. Planet Mitch, do you know?
MITCH 02:30 I wrote down Bonanza or Gunsmoke.
CHRIS 02:33 Seriously?
[laughter]
CARL 02:38 You are going to be fired. Go ahead Chris.
CHRIS 02:42 I can name that tune in one note. It’s Snuffy Walden and it’s the West Wing.
CARL 02:47 That’s right, and he won an Emmy for that, back in 2000.
CHRIS 02:51 I would hope so, it’s awesome. And I am a gigantic West Wing fan.
CARL 02:58 Yeah, it’s a great opening sequence, it really is. Have you noticed how a lot of TV shows now, they’ve reduced the opening titles to just a seven or eight second bumper, or something like that?
CHRIS 03:13 I think as an editor, one of my favorite things is when a show has legs, you know the West Wing ran for seven seasons. I really enjoy watching the opening title sequence evolve over time. Oh, they added a shot, oh, they added a character. Sometimes they’ll just add a single shot. There’s a great – in the – this is West Wingy nerd stuff, I won’t go into it, never mind.
[Laughter]
CHRIS 03:41 There was a point where Donna and Josh are talking about picking a new stamp. And Donna comes into Josh’s office and reads through all the reasons why they should put this one guy on a stamp. And she finishes her little dialogue with “I think we should put him on a stamp.” And Josh, who has this huge crush on Donna, who is his subordinate, looks at him and goes, “I think we should put you on a stamp.” And she just has this really delightful little smile, and, well, a few episodes later, they incorporated that one reaction into the title sequence. And I love seeing little things like that, just as an editor, how people – how they go about adding and modifying, and I enjoy that.
CARL 04:29 Yeah. I think that’s a cool feature because it sets the stage for what the story is, and if you’re new to it, in just a few seconds you kind of get the feel for what the tone, and what the show is all about.
CHRIS 04:41 Yeah, it was about halfway through season two when they added that shot of Donna in.
CARL 04:46 And it’s fun to listen to the music themes as they evolve, too. Think about one of the longest running series in television history, which is Doctor Who. You go back and listen to one of the original episodes, at least those that have been preserved, you hear the element of the theme, and today it’s very different, but the core components are still there. Anyway, it’s pretty cool. I like this. I like movie themes.
MITCH 05:19 I think–
CARL 05:19 I just wish they wouldn’t get any shorter. Of course, I guess it’s a reflection of today’s society whose attention span is extraordinarily short. And I like things that linger and are cerebral. I don’t know. Anyway. I’m a different generation, I suppose.
CARL 05:36 Well, in today’s episode, we are going to talk about latest in video and photography news. Also, we’ll talk a little bit about how the DCP gang is heading to NAB. And then we are going to talk about the age of Indie Film and content distribution. Has it arrived? Vimeo on Demand is certainly making waves in the news, yesterday from South by Southwest their announcement there. Of course we’ve seen that coming, because they hinted at it a bit. But we’ll talk about that later in the show. But first, we want to go to Planet Mitch–
CARL 06:14 –in the Planet 5D Newsroom. So what’s happening Mitch?
MITCH 06:23 I love that song. [chuckles] I’m humored by my own music. I don’t know. I wanted to cover a couple of things with NAB coming up. Starting April 7th, I think is the Monday that it starts – it’s that second week in April. So it’s coming up and you know what that means. We’re going to talk about gear for the next month, right? So I thought I’d talk about some gear. [laughter]
CARL 06:51 Sigh. No.
MITCH 06:53 Well, actually–
CARL 06:54 Gear is fun, that’s why you go to NAB. It is a gear show.
MITCH 06:58 Is it? I though it was a networking show. That’s what I’d go for. Any how, I thought I’d highlight a couple of projects that are still pretty dang gum quiet, but I think they’re interesting. And most people probably haven’t even heard of this one because I don’t know how to pronounce it right. There’s a project called “Apertus” or “Apertoos”, that is an open source cinema project. It’s actually been going on for over seven years now, but it’s really kind of barely heard about. And their plan is to create – and then they say open source – it’s not like it’s going to be a free camera. You’re going to have to buy the gear. But you can buy this camera, theoretically, relatively inexpensively, and all of the software that’s going to drive it is going to be open source.
MITCH 08:01 They’ve just launched a brand new website – is at Apertus or A-P-E-R-T-U-S.org, if you want to go check that out. They are planning on doing a– releasing a camera this – I shouldn’t say this fall – they’re planning on funding it this fall. They’re planning on it being a Nikon F-mount, a Super-35 APSE kind of size and a 4k Sensor down-resing to 1080. They’re planning on doing 4-4-4s for the – what’s the word, I’m not thinking of the right word – color space. But it’s an interesting little project if you want to follow along. That’s available right now that you can read about.
CARL 08:54 Where are they in development of the cameras that they are designing?
MITCH 09:00 They are pretty far along in terms of their design. They don’t have a prototype yet. They have some sample images of physical parts they prototype but they don’t have the whole thing put together yet. And if they’re going to go out and trying to do funding and I’m assuming they’re going to do Kickstart or something like that this fall, they’re still pretty early in the phase, but they have done some testing with gear. And they have actually shot a movie with a really really rough prototype that looks nothing like the prototype they think they’re going to go with in terms of camera body. So they slap the chip on a body around a board and that kind of really difficult stuff. So there still an early developments but it’s very interesting project.
CARL 09:57 I just went to the website. So some of the specs for their Axion camera – the specs that they’re shooting for – is 4K resolution, super 35mm sensor.
MITCH 10:06 I said that.
CARL 10:07 A global shutter up to 15 F-Stop dynamic range, eye speed at full resolution, cinema DNG raw recording, well below $10,000 target, price and crowd funding in 2013. Yeah, you said that part too.
MITCH 10:29 It’s just an interesting little project that’s out there thought people might be wanting to know about.
CHRIS 10:34 I’m skeptical.
CARL 10:38 Why are you skeptical, Chris?
CHRIS 10:42 We’ve seen this in this last 12 months with the Black Magic Camera. We talked about it last week – what did I say? Camera makering is hard because there’s all this trouble with the focus and the blooming or whatever. I think what Red did a couple but it’s now what six years or seven years ago when they said, “Yeah, I’m going to make cameras.” “Yeah, I know you’re not.” What they did was really, really hard and it was a big huge uphill battle and they have a lot of money behind it and I think a lot of people see that and they go “Whoa! Well they did it and we can do it too” and I don’t know if they know hard Red worked at it and–
MITCH 11:24 Well, just to cut you off – because I can because I know I can squelch you with this Skype connection – These guys have been in business “since 2007” so they’re not just a fly by night thing that just happened. They’ve been around the block. But they aren’t majorly funded which is the issue.
CHRIS 11:45 That’s a huge issue.
MITCH 11:46 Yeah.
CHRIS 11:48 It’s a gigantic, “Oh but by the way, we don’t have enough money could you send $20 in an envelope to your Paypal account or something.” I don’t know.
MITCH 11:58 I didn’t say it wasn’t going to work. I just said it was interesting.
CHRIS 12:10 I think that we talk primarily to content developers and I think that sometimes we’ve said this before in the past. “You know what, we have great little movie making machines in our pockets”, half of us. And a lot of times “If only I had the new Canon E-15.5 to 47mm Similen, then I could make my movie”. Well, okay. I don’t know. I just – I get tired of gears.
MITCH 12:43 That’s a great segue.
CARL 12:47 Whoa, whoa, whoa. I do want to make–
[laughter]
MITCH 12:48 Okay.
CARL 12:49 –one other point about the Axiom now. And I understand, when you’re – they’ve got this motto, which is keep it simple. So they say the features are reduced to the absolute essential core. No luxuries. So, for example, we chose the lens mount that is the simplest and easiest to implement from a technical point of view, and I think this is the flaw in all engineers’ thinking. Because they always think in terms of implementation from a technical point of view. This is a customer point of view, is what you need. But anyway, you know what they chose?
MITCH 13:25 I said it already. The Nikon F-mount.
CARL 13:26 Oh, I didn’t hear you say that part.
[laughter]
CARL 13:30 Man, I don’t know where my ears were. But yeah, when I–
MITCH 13:32 That’s okay.
CARL 13:33 So, that’s the simplest. But I wonder from a cinematic standpoint, is that a good choice? Because virtually everything that’s available to the cinematographer is a Canon mount, or something like that.
MITCH 13:49 Yeah, I agree with that. I found it interesting, I published an article a couple of days ago and I borrowed the information from Indiewire, who went to the film makers at the Sundance 2013 film festival. And they asked them what camera they were shooting their films on. Okay, so these are the films that made it to Sundance. Now this goes right in to what Chris was saying about gear that we have, and I just found it fascinating. And you can see the entire list, we’ll have this in the show notes linked to the Indiewire article.
MITCH 14:33 Let me give you a summary, now I didn’t count up all the movies, but there is probably close to 75, 80 movies on this – maybe 100. I should have counted them all. They didn’t give me a number at the top. Anyway, 15 were shot on Airy cameras, 15 were shot on Red. Red 1s or Red 1X or MX. Zero were shot on Scarlet which I thought was rather interesting because everybody keeps talking about the Scarlet is the camera of the century – some people do. Four were shot on the OutgoPro, two were shot on the Panasonic AF100. Two were shot on FCARL00 from Sony. Six were shot on the Sony F3. So what do you think the majority of cameras that were used? Tatada. If you add up all the Canon HDSLRs, there were 26 movies shot on HDSLRs. Now people keep telling me, “Oh, HDSLR is dead. Nobody shoots on HDSLR.” It seems to me that that list is pretty significant right there for movie makers. All of those 26 cameras – 25 of those films were shot with cameras that cost less than $3500. One of them was shot on the 1DX. So that’s the 26th.
CARL 16:04 So there was no iPhone or Androids?
MITCH 16:06 There was one iPhone in the list and like I said, there were four shot on the GoPro, what’s that $300. iPhones that cheap. There were three shot, I forgot to mention on the Canon C300. So those are obviously relatively expensive, but the vast majority in this list were shot on relatively inexpensive cameras.
CARL 16:38 Well, HDSLR is still alive and well.
MITCH 16:45 I just found that very interesting.
CARL 16:50 Alright, it’s time to talk about our sponsor, CrumplePop Film and Broadcast Effects for Final Cut Pro. You can find more about them at crumplepop.com. They still are providing a 20% discount on all CrumplePop products. Simply use the coupon code DCP20, DCP20. I was speaking of NAB.
MITCH 17:17 Yeah, are you going?
CARL 17:20 Definitely. This is the first NAB that I’m going to.
CARL 17:24 Chris, are you going?
CHRIS 17:25 I’m going to get down for a day. So Hopefully we can organize and do a show together while we’re there.
CARL 17:32 That would be cool. That would be cool if we can pull that off.
MITCH 17:35 I–
CARL 17:35 It’ll just be cool to have everybody in the same room at the same time. [laughter]
CHRIS 17:42 Yeah. 20,000 other people but other than that it’ll be fine.
MITCH 17:45 So the story that Carl is kind of hedging around is that Planet Mitch, that’s me, has hooked up with the folks at Tera Dec who do a live-streaming broadcast. This year they’re using U-Stream and Michael Artsist, who is gotten himself hooked up with the Tera Dek folks, has asked me to co-host with him the final hour-long show of each and everyday, and that’s Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday because I’m leaving early on Thursday, the wrap up show. So I will be on every afternoon from 5 to 6pm. What time zone are they on in Vegas?
CHRIS 18:35 Pacific.
MITCH 18:36 Are they in Pacific? Okay. So look that up. I’ll have to make sure of that. From 5 to 6 pm we’ll be on. And I am trying to get Chris and Carl and me all on at the same time sometime during one of those three days. So we don’t have a time set for that yet, but we’re working on it. So you guys should be able, if everything works out, to see the three of us live together on TV, internet TV, which will be really cool.
CHRIS 19:08 Very cool. Oh I am sorry. Yeah Nevada is Pacific. Yeah. Sorry.
CARL 19:13 So it is Pacific time. Okay.
MITCH 19:14 Thanks for looking that up.
CARL 19:19 So it’s a wrap up show or will we have a specific theme to talk about or how would this work?
MITCH 19:26 The 5-6 show is a wrap-up show to talk about what’s happened during NAB that day, what we seen on the show floor. What I am trying to do is get you me and Carl, Chris on for a special show somewhere before 5 to 6. Michael wants to do the wrap-up show without guests if we can handle it. We’re just going to sort of talk about what we saw. So we’re working to fill you and the DCP team in an hour slot somewhere alone turn one of those three days, which is still undefined.
CARL 20:03 Oh, very nice. Well, we’ll have more information when it’s available.
MITCH 20:08 Yes, keep an eye.
CARL 20:11 So, there’s been some interesting developments. One of the shows, I think, I may plan on this next year, is this South by Southwest show. Have guys ever been to that?
MITCH 20:22 I have not.
CHRIS 20:22 No.
CARL 20:24 To me that’s an interesting convergence type of show or event because it’s having to do with entertainment and social media, and technology and how all of these things are converging to bring people together. Build communities and software and just a lot of cool stuff has been announced at South by Southwest. Yesterday, Vimeo officially announced Vimeo on Demand.
CHRIS 20:53 Get out.
MITCH 20:54 What’s that?
CARL 20:55 Yeah. I know it’s old news because it happened yesterday. But I think this is an interesting development and I think we are going to see more and more of these type of announcements come out from other hosting platforms. But according to Vimeo’s blog they announced a new service, it is called Creative Services, a suite of features to help creators make more money by making great video. Then, we have talked about this on the show before there was the tip jar, so it is voluntary donations, if some people choose to use that and then came movies. So those were things they selected and made available for a certain price. They had I think like, I’m trying to see here, okay, yeah, it says 6 featured length films that have never had a home on Vimeo before. So now they have made it available to everyone that has a Vimeo Pro account. So basically you take – you have a movie whatever length, whatever it is, and you can say I want $4.99 for every play for this one video. What a cool idea. What do you think about this Chris?
CHRIS 22:20 First of all, is it per play or do you buy it for a period of time?
CARL 22:27 Excuse me I just have made that clear, so it’s a viewing period. So there is a period. You can make it available for 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, up to one year. I don’t know why they have an indefinite where it’s just open forever, unless it is a bandwidth thing. But you can download it. So if you make it, you can specify whether or not it is a downloadable video. So if a customer of your video wants to watch it later beyond that period and you allow that feature to happen then they can download it and play it on other devices.
CHRIS 23:00 Or on a plane where you don’t have–
CARL 23:02 Exactly.
CHRIS 23:05 I think we saw them sort of testing this with the tip jar. They were testing their financial part of the deal. It is very much similar to the way– prior to Apple going live with the iTunes store, they started sharing movie trailers online and in doing so they were testing, if you will, their backbone, their [inaudible] backbone for distribution of large amounts of data. I think this is what Apple should have done three years ago. Is given me, little guy with a camera, the ability to sell my content and not make it a nightmare to get through the thing. I think Vimeo has got a great tool here and I think that they are very much going to ingratiate themselves to the Indie film market in doing so.
CARL 24:04 Well the terms are very generous on the revenue split, it’s 90-10, so the artist keeps 90% of the revenue after transaction–
MITCH 24:13 After transaction fees. Yeah, I saw that.
CARL 24:15 I do wonder what that means. What are transaction fees for this? I have not been able to find what that is.
MITCH 24:23 Well if you go through PayPal, then Paypal charges 3% for every transaction, so I guess they’re just trying to clarify that if you’re using a payment service to collect the funds–
CARL 24:39 Well they handle all of that, they don’t give you the option to specify what the payment service is.
MITCH 24:44 Okay. I didn’t look.
CARL 24:46 Yeah, you’re going to be using their back end for everything.
MITCH 24:50 So they’re still going to charge you transaction fees is what they’re saying, but we don’t know what.
CARL 24:55 Yeah. We don’t know what that is, but the revenue split after transaction fees is 90% and they keep 10%. I can’t imagine that the transaction fees would be very much though.
MITCH 25:06 No.
CHRIS 25:07 I hope not. I mean. I was thinking–
CARL 25:10 Go ahead Chris. I’m sorry. We cut you off.
CHRIS 25:13 I’d say it could be one of those hidden cost things. Like when you buy stuff on TV. “Please send– Act now.”
[laughter]
CARL 25:20 That’s where you make all your money on shipping and handling.
MITCH 25:23 Yeah.
CHRIS 25:25 I’m looking at the cost. So Vimeo Pro is 200 bucks for a year and you get 50 gigabytes of storage. What do you think of that? Do you think that’s a– How does that…?
CARL 25:38 Well, I think that’s pretty generous. I don’t think most people will ever hit that limit. I certainly would. In fact I have already exceeded that. [laughter] I have 65 gigabytes of video currently in my product.
CHRIS 25:53 On Reets?
CARL 25:54 On Reets. Yeah. 65 gigabyte.
CHRIS 25:58 Are the movies that you are selling through Vimeo on Demand, do those come from that 50 gigabyte hole? That 50 gigabyte docket?
CARL 26:11 I would think so. There’s nothing here that specifically says that, but I would think because they’re requiring you to have a Vimeo Pro account that it does count against your storage.
CHRIS 26:22 Kind of cool for Vimeo because they basically charge you to store your movie then you sell it.
CARL 26:32 And everybody else does that too, so it’s nothing new.
CHRIS 26:35 At Sliced we have, we just crossed over the 300 gigabyte capacity of our online distribution tool that we use. So 50 gigabytes looks paltry to me. But, I understand, I think for most people it’d be great.
[laughter]
CARL 27:00 I love that. Oh man, so it seems paltry. But you’re not a normal user.
CHRIS 27:06 Right.
CARL 27:07 So you’ve got 300 gigabytes online that’s available at any given time?
CHRIS 27:16 Yeah, there’s 40– oh, I was going to look for you. There’s something like– where’s that window? There’s like 4,800 files I think that we have stored that are all available through our– so what we use at Slice, we have a custom made back in PHP server tool, I guess, I don’t know what you’d call it. It basically we have a dedicated server hosted at a place called Hurricane Electric which is in the South Bay here and they’re a very high end server farm. And actually we just upgraded from 300 gigs to a 2 terabyte server, so we have a capacity for up to 2 terabytes now. And if we’ve written custom software that has multiple levels of password protection and we have different types of accounts that we give our clients and they can view our producer and you work at Slice, then you have your own login which gives you access to all of your product projects and then you have another level of password per job that you can pass off to your clients.
CARL 28:37 So it’s a home-grown drop box essentially.
CHRIS 28:40 Yeah. When we when we built it DropBox didn’t exist and there are other things. But I’ve looked at other solutions and I just I don’t like all of the branding and logos. It’s not to say it doesn’t work well, I’ve dealt with a lot of people that use even Vimeo Pro or Vimeo Plus or whatever where you can password protect things. But I don’t like the idea of sending my client to Vimeo to see my work it just feels weird to me. You know we like the fact that everything is branded Slice and you go to the Slice editorial website. And the other thing is that in some instances certain types of clients are behind firewalls that don’t allow them to go to quote unquote “entertainment sites.”
CARL 29:33 Yeah. That’s something we’ve run into. One of the things they do is like we use bits on the run so that users RT and P are streaming through video streaming but some over zealous IT guys will block the port for RT and P streaming, so you can’t watch Youtube or anybody else that uses streaming video. We’ve had two or three occasions where we’ve had to tell the folks well you know, you need to go to your IT guys and say “Hey. Open up the port” so that they can stream video, because that’s what we did is streaming video.
CHRIS 30:13 Yeah. So we have – you know I think I’ve talked about it in the past – one of our clients is Charles Schwab and they are a financial company and the security in this building where I am actually at right now is unbelievable. I mean the digital security. They can’t even stick a USB stick in their computer. It’s to the point the security is so tight that it is to the point where it hinders the way people do work. You say “Well I cannot do that. Well what’s the decision. I don’t know.” [chuckle]
CARL 30:46 Well I think we’ve kind of deviated from what the purpose of Vimeo on Demand is. And so what I am thinking is Vimeo on Demand is probably a good option for someone that doesn’t have deep pockets to create their own hosting service or go through the traditional distribution channels like trying to get to Sundance and you know trying to do something with one of the Hollywood big five studios. This is your opportunity to put your short, put your documentary, put your film, whatever – a feature film or short – in a place where most people are going to have a reasonably good viewing experience. You are not going to have to set up payment processing and all of that. You are just going to create an account for $199 and they do a 90/10 revenue split after whatever the transaction fees are. That’s fairly simple so all the work that really remains for you as an independent producer is to create the marketing material and creating the traffic to that particular video.
CHRIS 31:57 What I’m looking forward to seeing is the first Vimeo on Demand hit, that sort of “go-to” thing. It’ll be like The House of Cards is for Netflix, where people stand up and go “Oh, this is totally cool.” And everybody’s like “Have you seen the series? It’s really great. You have to go and check it out.” That’s going to be really interesting to find out what that first hit is because I think this really is – this is incredibly awesome. I think you blog it or posted it on Twitter yesterday where it said Hollywood is shaking in their boots or something.
MITCH 32:38 What about iTunes? Isn’t that a viable thing that’s been around for a while. I know Edward Burns and this put out movies on iTunes. I think it’s maybe harder to become accepted than Vimeo’s thing, but that’s been around for awhile.
CARL 32:56 Yeah, I think it’s really hard to accept to accept it actually. To actually sell your content through iTunes and the revenue split is not as generous. It’s a 70/30 split.
MITCH 33:06 Right.
CARL 33:08 Yeah. You can. A musician friend of mine is selling his music on iTunes.
MITCH 33:11 The big advocate there is that iTunes has heck of a lot of pre-authorized credit cards and they have a huge market already in tow.
CARL 33:23 Yeah. I know mine it’s taking quite a hit because I do a lot of impulse buying. But usually it’s like $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, those type of things.
CHRIS 33:35 Let’s have a race. Let’s see who can get something on Vimeo on Demand for sale. We’ll see how long it takes to do that, and then we’ll also see how long it takes to get the same product on iTunes for sale. I’m–
MITCH 33:51 How are you going to do that?
CARL 33:53 I’m going to bet you that Vimeo on Demand is going to be a whole lot easier experience in that sense.
MITCH 33:57 Oh yeah.
CHRIS 33:59 If this thing is a functional product, I could have a tutorial for sale before the end of the day.
CARL 34:04 Exactly.
CHRIS 34:05 Lunch.
[chuckles]
CHRIS 34:09 Except I have a lot of work to do today.
CARL 34:11 You know, I was very excited when iBookStore came out because – or iBookAuthor came out – because I thought, “Wow, this is a cool app. It does a lot of cool things. This is the kind of experience that I would love to create content in this.” But the terms are onerous!
[chuckles]
CARL 34:29 I have no guarantee that if I put a paid product out there that it’s going to be accepted. And then it’s limited strictly to the iOS platform. I don’t necessarily want to be limited to the iOS platform.
MITCH 34:43 No you’re not. Back up. You are not limited. You can sell your book any way you want to.
CARL 34:51 If I have multimedia content, I have an interactive book, it’s only going to be in the iBookstore.
CHRIS 34:58 You can create a separate version if you want and sell it wherever you want, but there aren’t any great tools to do that.
CARL 35:06 Right.
MITCH 35:10 I will go back to what I said a minute ago though, the opportunity of the massive market with iPads and iPhones and all these other iDevices is so much bigger than what Vimeo has access to or any other platform. So if it’s a pain to get through, I think it’s worth trying. Edward Burns certainly is making money selling his movies that way.
CARL 35:44 Wait a minute, how is he selling it?
MITCH 35:47 Through iTunes.
CARL 35:47 Through iTunes? Yeah?
MITCH 35:48 Yeah.
CARL 35:51 Well, I don’t know. I wonder – I’d like to find out what Michael– we’re gonna have to have Michael, I keep saying this, I am going to have him on the show.
[chuckles]
CARL 36:04 I know he’s updating one of his books and I want to talk about that when he’s ready to talk about it but I see this Vimeo on Demand is something that’s ideal for someone like Michael Carol, who’s been on this show, who’s created his own independent films.
MITCH 36:22 Yeah.
CARL 36:23 I think this is a great opportunity. And I really think the friction is a whole lot less in the iTunes store. I’m not denying that there’s some people making money on the iTunes store but you’re not tied to anybody other than Vimeo. The whole point is to eliminate as many middlemen as you can. Of course, technically Vimeo is a middleman.
MITCH 36:44 Yeah. What’s the difference between that and iTunes?
CARL 36:47 I think it’s just easier.
MITCH 36:50 Okay it’s easier but —
CARL 36:49 It’s a whole lot easier.
MITCH 36:50 But there’s still a middleman compared to Apple is the middle man. What’s the difference?
CARL 36:55 Apple’s taking 30%. Vimeo’s taking 10%.
MITCH 36:59 There is a cost difference, but it’s not like there are three people you got to deal with in the iTunes store. It’s just Apple.
CARL 37:07 Just Apple. [Laughter}
CARL 37:12 I’ve got to disagree with that respectfully because I think there’s a lot of arbitrariness in the Apple store. You know, they might have someone in the store, they might say– that’s what happened to Don McAllister. He had these tutorial apps that were combinations of features and video and they would not let him publish this. They would not approve his apps after he spent thousands of dollars producing these things. Because they called them movie and I don’t remember corresponding with Don. I said “Well, you know Rick Sammon does this. He’s been doing this for quite some time” and I sent him links to Rick Sammon’s apps because they were primarily videos. Why did Sammon’s apps not get rejected but Don McAllister’s did.
CHRIS 37:57 Favouritism.
CARL 37:59 I don’t think it wasn’t even favouritism. It’s just this guy sitting in this cubicle, going through it, he was having a bad day or maybe his worldviews are little different than the guy over here or the gal over there, reviewed Don McAllister’s stuff. Its arbitrary and if you are going to spend thousands of dollars producing content for a specific platform and then they rejected it. That’s the problem. If I know going in what the real rules are then I’m willing to spend the money. I’ve developed an iPhone app awhile back and I tell you the biggest stressor about that whole stupid app was we didn’t know if the money that we spent was going to pay off or not. It was like playing the lottery.
MITCH 38:47 Sorry.
MITCH 38:48 Yes, I agree, there is a big problem there.
CARL 38:52 So anyway I think Vimeo on Demand removes a lot of the friction of the Apple iStore – the iTunes store. I think that’s the kind of thing that’s going to work for independent filmmakers now.
CHRIS 39:04 iTunes is the Walmart of digital distribution.
[laughter]
CARL 39:12 I think that’s good analogy.
[laughter]
CARL 39:14 Because, have you ever seen the supply chain demands that Walmart put on vendors?
MITCH 39:19 Yes.
CARL 39:20 They’re onerous.
CHRIS 39:21 Very much so. And I think that it’s the same thing – Mitch makes a good point. Yeah. But you’ll have so much more traffic on iTunes, and yeah, that’s totally true – just like being able to sell something inside a Walmart. Now, you might turn a much bigger profit if you say, well screw it – I’m going to sell it at Walmart, but I’m going to set-up a folding table at the edge of their property when people come pulling into the parking lot.
[chuckles]
CHRIS 39:51 Yeah. You’re the guy selling stuff on the street corner at that point, and even though you might a better profit — so Vimeo is not a guy on a street corner, but it’s not the Walmart of iTunes.
MITCH 40:03 Yeah. That’s good analogy, Chris.
CARL 40:07 I wonder how long it will be before YouTube makes this available to everyone.
CHRIS 40:12 And this is what I mean about– I’m looking forward to see the go-to, runaway hit that everybody’s talking about. To the point where my brothers are going, “Oh yeah, there’s this thing called Vimeo. There’s this really great show, you should go check it out.” Because they’re not digital junkies like I am, so they’re not on the bleeding edge of all this stuff. That’s what Vimeo needs. And frankly, what they should be doing, is they should be doing like what Netflix has done, with House of Cards, and they should be producing their own content that they’re selling, and showing people, “Look. This is what could be done.” And they should go get a David Fincher, or whatever, and do something that’s really gigantic and huge. And it would be the number one way to advertise the possibility of what Vimeo On Demand could be.
CARL 41:07 That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
[Laughter]
CARL 41:11 Well, then the other distribution option for independent filmmakers as well as book authors, as far as that goes, is CreateSpace on amazon.com. Have you ever used that?
CHRIS 41:25 No.
CARL 41:26 Okay. So CreateSpace, self publish and distribute your books videos and music on demand. I first heard about this through Phillip Hodgetts. He wrote a book – I feel bad because I can’t remember the title of the book now – it’s been a few years ago but he was an early adopter of CreateSpace. So he was on demand printing of books. Of course, now you have Kindle and digital distribution that’s available to you as well. And CreateSpace, it’s very easy, in fact, I did it this morning. I just, “Well, okay. I’m going to go create a CreateSpace account.” So I went up and I had it set up in about five minutes. Put in all my account information and so forth and I’m ready to upload something, I just don’t have anything to upload to it. Now, their royalty structure though, I think is I don’t know… I’ll read it to you. It says this is what their press is, it says “You earn a royalty every time customers buy or rent your title, you receive 50% of the purchase or rental price of your title.”
CARL 42:40 That’s awesome. Isn’t that?
[laughter]
CARL 42:45 It will give you some money. Of course if it’s a digital product, then alright. I don’t know, but that’s a huge cut of what you’re selling, 50%.
MITCH 42:57 Do you remember our conversation about iStock Photo, a couple of weeks ago? 20% is what you get there.
CARL 43:04 Right.
MITCH 43:05 Horrible. I’ll take 90%, thanks.
CARL 43:10 But there’s a lot of people that are making money writing eBooks for Kindle and putting — I don’t know about the video content per se but I know the big fad right now is create Kindle Books and I have to admit I’m a consumer of Kindle Books even though I don’t have a Kindle.
CHRIS 43:29 Let me ask you a question then, so by doing the CreateSpace account it gives you a place to upload content for sale and what your saying is that content appears in a typical Amazon search?
CARL 43:45 Yes. That is what you’re buying.
CHRIS 43:50 At 50%?
CARL 43:51 At 50%. Part of digital distribution. But a lot of people are selling stuff on Amazon.com.
CHRIS 44:01 I buy it. I buy stuff on Amazon all the time.
CARL 44:04 I do too. I rarely go into a bookstore. Yeah, that’s a true statement. I rarely go into a bookstore, but I went into a Barnes & Noble the other day because I was killing a few minutes of time after meeting with one of my clients. And I just went in there and said “You know what, I haven’t bought a magazine in years” and there was an article – I think it was Wired magazine – I was going to pick it up. It’ll be fun to just read hard copy for a change. So I went to the cashier. There was about three people in line. So I waited five minutes past.
CHRIS 44:45 No way.
CARL 44:46 Yeah, five minutes past. No movement in the line. The woman is at one cashier and she’s just chit chatting with the customer taking her sweet little time.
[laughter]
CARL 44:57 A couple more minutes passed and I said okay, I’m quickly reaching the point of– you know the problem with lines is you get committed. You feel like okay. I’ve committed this much of my life so I’m sticking with it. No I didn’t. I just I just said forget it. I put it all back up – of course I was a nice guy, I actually went back and restocked which I shouldn’t have done.
MITCH 45:20 Oh. You shouldn’t have done that. You should have just walked over and put it on the table and said “I’m sorry I don’t have time to wait for you.”
CARL 45:27 So you know what I did? I went home. I went to the newsstand on my iPad and I bought that magazine and I actually ended up buying it for $4.99 versus the $7.99 I would have paid in the store. So they gave me a bad customer experience that just really turned me off, and so I just went home. Then they wonder what’s happening with their businesses. Why bookstores can’t stay alive. They’re not adapting to the times. I know they’ve got the Nook Reader and all of that kind of stuff, but come on you know give a good customer experience if you want to do the hard copy stuff.
CHRIS 46:03 Just the other night I walked by a Barnes & Nobles and–
CARL 46:06 And walked by it. Yeah.
CHRIS 46:07 There’s one in that mall right where I live. Here’s another interesting problem so you know in California real estate is so expensive that you pay for everything and the Barnes & Nobles in a mall that has a paid parking lot so you have to pay–
MITCH 46:26 Oh good grief.
CHRIS 46:28 –an hour or whatever the parking lot. And I walk by the Barnes & Noble and I thought – interesting that you say this Carl – because I had the exact same experience thinking “You know it might be nice to go check out the magazines.” I used to spend so much time perusing magazines. I walk by and I go “You know the car’s two bucks an hour. No, I got to get back to the car.” The very fact that I would have to pay rues– well no, I don’t think so.
CARL 46:57 A musician friend of mine, several years ago, we worked on releasing a – I guess we were early adopters – We were a little bit ahead of our time because we created a record label. And our goal was to – we were going to eliminate the middlemen, like private music, RMI and all those guys – So what we did is we went in and said we’re going to print our own CDs. We went in and did everything ourselves and then we became the distributors. [chuckles] Printed 40,000 copies of CDs and it may seem like a lot or maybe it was just really optimistic, but this guy had sold hundreds of thousands of copies. So there’s no reason to believe that he wouldn’t sell these. But what happened is he did in fact sell them. But he never got a dime for any of them.
CHRIS 47:51 Why?
CARL 47:53 To Barnes & Noble and Borders. Because the only way you can sell to Barnes & Noble and Borders back in those days is you had to go through another middleman. And so that distributor would sell to the bookstore inventory and then he would invoice the bookstore. The bookstore wouldn’t pay the distributor, and the distributor wouldn’t pay the artist and then the distributor would file bankruptcy. And so we had all that inventory. They were sold because I would go into all these stores. I was doing spot checks. They had us well stocked. I could go into any Borders, Barnes & Noble, CD Warehouse, wherever, BestBuy and I’d find our CD in there. But we didn’t get money for those CDs.
CHRIS 48:46 Selling off the shelf?
CARL 48:47 Yeah. They were selling off the shelf. They had bought the inventory but they hadn’t paid for the inventory and they never did.
MITCH 48:54 Great.
CHRIS 48:55 Looks like a good business to be in.
CARL 48:59 Yeah, it’s a great business. So you wonder– how did I get off into this, we’re supposed to be talking about indie distribution.
[laughter]
CARL 49:05 But you see the old model, it benefited a few. But see today– and we may complain about this 50% thing with Amazon, but at least Amazon is not really stealing your stuff, no one can steal it. They buy it, they bought it and you’re going to get a cut, even though it may just be 50%. It’s better than what we got with Barnes & Noble and Borders which was zero. A big fat zero.
CHRIS 49:36 So what you’re saying in essence is that there is injustice in the world.
CARL 49:44 Oh did I say that? There will always be that, won’t there? You just got to figure out how to eliminate the bits and pieces that will screw with you there.
CHRIS 49:58 I feel like selling something on Vimeo On Demand.
[laughter]
CARL 50:01 You should.
CARL 50:02 Let me ask you another question. Do you think Netflix could be a viable distribution platform for indie producers?
CHRIS 50:11 Interesting question. Yeah if they wanted to deal with the accounting. That’s really the issue with these things and Apple always said that the reason they didn’t let indies use iTunes is that they didn’t want to deal with the accounting but that’s not entirely true because they’ll gladly take my money $0.99 at a time, why won’t they give it to me $0.99 at a time.
MITCH 50:32 No Carl, Netflix would be horrible because they don’t have individual pricing. It’s just basically you pay a flat fee per month. If my movie were watched how would I get a chunk of that money?
CARL 50:52 Well there’s a blogger his name is Jason Brubaker and he has a cool website that I just discovered it’s called Filmmaking Stuff. And he has an article called “Sell A Movie To Netflix.” Now this published back in April of 2011 so I don’t know if this is still current or not. But he makes his point. He says in the world of Indie filmmaking, it sure seems like Netflix has become the holy grail. But after working with several other filmmakers on their distribution strategy, I really do not think Netflix offers the Indie film maker a viable option for distribution. And part of the problem, he’s says, just getting your movie in their database. How do you do that? Who do you contact? How do you just get it in there?
CARL 51:37 It seems to be like Apple’s store, it’s kind of arbitrary, who gets in and who doesn’t. And then he says, even if you are fortunate enough to get into their database, you still need a gazillion people to ask for your movie in their Netflix queue. And then this will influence the actual amount of money Netflix will offer you.
MITCH 51:58 Right, so that’s the difference. It would be more like a true distribution deal where somebody says okay, your movie is worth $500,000 for me to try to distribute.
CARL 52:10 Right.
MITCH 52:11 As opposed to a one piece at a time thing like Vimeo.
CARL 52:14 Yeah. Okay. So that doesn’t seem like an attractive option. It would be cool if you could do that. I imagine it’s the same with Hulu and Roku and some of these other services, which I have no experience with, whatsoever. I’m really out of my league talking about this, because I have no experience with any of them. And I don’t have anything that could go on any of them.
MITCH 52:35 Well, I think the major advantage and excitement about Vimeo and iTunes is the fact that you can get your movie up there, that you don’t have to sell it to anybody, that you can sell it one piece at a time. You don’t have to do a $500,000 deal with iTunes, in order to have it published. That’s the big advantage.
CARL 52:57 And that’s all I know. I think it’s a pretty cool thing.
MITCH 53:03 It is. It should open up a lot of movie options for people to sell their movie to five people, and they’ll say “Hey, look, I’ve got a movie that people have bought.
CHRIS 53:18 I’m interested. So two-hour listeners here is our task. Find something that you want to sell on video-on-demand, Vimeo on Demand, and let us know. I want to buy something that’s worth watching.
MITCH 53:31 I’m going to put Incident on Marmont Avenue up there.
CARL 53:35 There you go. Try that, and see what happens. So what would you price it at?
MITCH 53:41 Barry is in Hawaii right now, I can’t talk to him about that. [laughter] I’m jealous, can you tell?
CARL 53:47 You’re mad Eddie. Well, you’ll get over it when he gets to town.
CHRIS 53:52 No phones in Hawaii?
MITCH 53:53 No.
CARL 53:54 No. He’s mad, Eddie.
MITCH 54:00 Realistically because it’s a 15-minute short, in comparison like a rental on iTunes is $5, right? Which I think is ridiculous for a full-length movie, of course, this is more of a purchase as opposed to a rental, isn’t it?
CHRIS 54:24 Yup.
MITCH 54:25 And so that’s different.
CHRIS 54:27 And have it only available for X number of days.
CARL 54:31 I’m thinking 150 bucks.
[laughter]
MITCH 54:37 That’d be a great price if I want to sell it zero times.
CHRIS 54:42 So what have you did to movie and ended a bit behind the scenes and a technical how to, how you work with, how you got your actors, big name actors. How did you work with them? How did you direct them? How did you produce it? How did you choose the music? How did you go through the editing process? What were the trade-offs? What was…
MITCH 55:01 That’s the ebook I’m working on.
CHRIS 55:02 Oh. Okay.
CHRIS 55:04 Now it becomes a school.
CARL 55:05 Yeah, exactly. Vimeo on Demand is one. You’re putting a price tag on one individual video. I could use Vimeo Pro and I know someone who does that already and they’re having good success with that. So I could do that, but because I have so much of the video [chuckle], I would probably– and also I want some really detailed analytics because I want to know where people are – how they’re watching the video, where we’re losing people. I want to see what the engagement is on the episodes that we do, because that helps us do better, make better videos knowing where people are dropping off. So I am seriously looking at Wistia.com for our product. So our version 3.0 of [inaudible] TV I may switch from Bits on the Run to Wistia because of the analytics that they have and plus they’re less expensive, a lot less expensive.
MITCH 56:09 Smart and simple video hosting. Maybe they would sponsor our show.
CARL 56:15 Nice. That would be nice. I like the way – they got a lot of cool stuff going on. The other thing in Wistia is that you got a lot of call to action themes and the player is very good and I love the quality of their video compression. Bits on the Run is so stinking ugly I just I don’t what it is and they are not growing I don’t see any technological advancements with the Bits on the Run it’s kind of like they have been there for all this time and they are not — As far as I know I don’t see any improvement. There hasn’t been any changes to the analytics there hasn’t been any changes to the quality of the videos and my bill – just gives you the idea of how expensive this can be in January this year I sent them $816.49.
CHRIS 57:07 That’s awesome.
CARL 57:09 So now I’ve got to renew. It’s mid March and I’ve got to refill up and spend another $800-$900.
CHRIS 57:21 And is that because of the bandwidth that you’re being charged for.
CARL 57:21 Yeah. Because I’m streaming almost 200 gigabytes every thirty days and that only goes up as we get more subscribers. So that’s a good problem to have. The subscribers are paying for it. Now, I’m at that point where okay, Bits on the Run– at the time when I chose them, there weren’t really a whole lot of options out there. See now there are a some options, there’s iPlay or HD is out there. They have a good quality conversions. They have a nice player. They have RTMP streaming playlist and they’re only 30 bucks a month. I would have to pay a little more to use them because I exceed their normal parameters of hosting. I could go with them. But Wistia has been just knocking it out of the ballpark, man. I signed up for a trial with them and their quality is just superb and I love their player. And I love their support, they’re very responsive. Whereas Bits on the Run, I can be days before I hear something from somebody.
CHRIS 58:27 It’s an interesting note about providing a product or a service is that in today’s day and age where everything works so quickly, we look for change. We are expecting improvements, we have come to assume that things will get upgraded and when they sit stale for a period of time we get antsy.
CARL 58:50 Well I guess we’ve beat this up a good bit. I guess we need to move on. It’s about time to wrap up the show.
CHRIS 58:57 Mitch, aren’t you a Drobo user? Don’t you have a Drobo?
MITCH 59:01 I did. I dropped the Drobo for a Thunder Tube’s G-RAID when I upgraded my iMac.
CHRIS 59:10 That’s right. I remember now.
MITCH 59:13 It’s still sitting here on my desk as a back-up actually. I actually use it as a back-up but I usually don’t have it plugged in.
CHRIS 59:19 We’re getting another iMac today. It’s supposed to be in the mail.
CARL 59:24 Cool. I have a Drobo Elite that has an ISCSI interface so I use ISCSI which is basically the ethernet cable.
CHRIS 59:34 How’s that work? Can you edit off of ISCSI?
CARL 59:36 No. No. It’s never lived up to its dream or its promise. In fact it took about a year for them to finally get the drivers fixed so that you would have transfer speeds that were not glacial. USB2 hard drive would just run rings around the Drobo and it use to just annoy the daylights out of me.
MITCH 60:04 I bet.
CARL 60:05 But now it’s relatively fast, but I say relatively, it’s not – there’s no way you could edit from it. I can’t. It’s just won’t work. I’ve tried it. It’s a miserable experience.
MITCH 60:18 Well, I’ll never go back now that I’ve done Thunder Tubes. It’s amazing the speed this thing has.
CARL 60:27 Really awesome isn’t it?
MITCH 60:28 Yes.
CHRIS 60:28 Yeah, the Pegasus that I have, the R-4, is just been – that is my work drive. So these where the project reside. The Drobo serves as a intermediate archive if you will. And then the individual bare metal drives are my back-ups and several of those go to the – you get rotated out of the vault at my bank from time to time.
CARL 60:51 Cool.
MITCH 60:54 Mine go to my mother-in-law’s house.
CARL 60:57 She runs? [chuckle]
CARL 61:00 Always make sure you got a copy somewhere that’s not in your house, right?
MITCH 61:02 Yeah.
MITCH 61:04 Amen to that.
CARL 61:06 Alright guys. It’s been, kind of a fragmented interesting show, right?
MITCH 61:13 Right. They’re always interesting.
CARL 61:15 Yeah. So, Planet Mitch where can people find out about you?
MITCH 61:20 The forums at Planet5D.com.
CARL 61:21 Alright, Mr. Chris Fenwick.
CHRIS 61:24 You can always find my stuff on my blog, chrisfenwick.com. And you can follow me on Twitter at @chrisfenwick, and I’m also on Vine because everybody should be making little six second Vine movies.
CARL 61:40 You’ll become a better movie maker if you do.
CHRIS 61:43 Yeah, that’s interest – there’s some – actually on Vine, there’s a feature called ‘Editors picks’ or ‘Favorite’ or what’s popular right now. And there’s some really creative stuff, people have taken that six second limit and done some clever things, so.
CARL 61:55 That’s cool. That’s cool. Alright. You can find me at digitalfilm.TV, as well as gainfullyemployed.TV. And on Twitter as The Carl Olson, that’s spelled O-L-S-O-N. And we want to thank our show sponsors, Crumplepop Film and Broadcast Effects for Final Cut Pro. Please rate us, leave us feedback in iTunes and we certainly–
MITCH 62:19 Tell your friends. Tell your friends.
CARL 62:19 Yeah, certainly do that. Appreciate everyone listening to the show. We’re up to episode – yeah, this is episode 114. We recorded it March 17th in time warp. [chuckles] Well, March 13th, but we really thank everyone for joining us. Join us next week. There are more stuff to talk about. Send us your questions, we’d like to do a list your question show. So, just send, if you got something you’d like us to comment on or research. We’ll give it our best shot. So go out there and format your CF card, your USD card and charge up your batteries and clean your lenses, get them all nice and sparkly and dust off your script. Write a script, you got be better than that. Just get out there and write a script. Get our there and make a movie. Well, gentlemen, I think that’s a wrap.
In this episode we answer listener questions:
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CARL 00:00 This is the Digital Convergence Podcast, Episode 111. [music] We would like to welcome you to another exciting edition of The Digital Convergence Podcast, the number one talk show about photography, video, and post-production. This is Episode Number 111, “Where’s my Jetpack?”
MITCH 01:07 How was timing? [laughter]
CARL 01:10 The Digital Convergence Podcast is sponsored by the following fine sponsors: CrumplePop, film and broadcast effects for Final Cut Pro.
MITCH 01:48 You didn’t pause. [sound effect]
CARL 01:50 Alright.
MITCH 01:51 I have to send it back today.
CARL 01:53 You’d better get an audio recording of that, so we can have it.
MITCH 01:56 Yes, sir.
CARL 01:59 The DCP team today is Mr. Chris Fenwick of Slice Editorial and Chrisfenwick.com, constantly cranking out a lot of cool content there. Your latest, we saw, was the Sparse Image tutorial.
CHRIS 02:13 Even if I can’t spell it.
CARL 02:16 That’s alright, but you can talk.
MITCH 02:18 Yes, he can talk alright.
CHRIS 02:21 I’m not good with the words.
MITCH 02:22 It was really well done, Chris.
CHRIS 02:23 Thank you.
CARL 02:24 It was. It was nice and I want your template for that, for Final Cut Pro 10.
CHRIS 02:30 I will make that available as a thing to download from the place on the deal. [laughter]
CARL 02:36 We’ll have a…I think it’s called a hyperlink to a download file to this whatchamacallit on the “inter-tubes” called a website, is that it?
CHRIS 02:48 Something like that. I’ll make it available on the Inter-tubes.
MITCH 02:50 And it will be on the show notes?
CARL 02:52 Show notes?
CHRIS 02:56 When I have the time to make it available, it will be on the same link as where the video is.
Currently, it’s at the top of Chrisfenwick.com but you can put a direct link in the signature.
CARL 03:07 Very good and we also have Mr. Planet Mitch there, planet5D.com. What’s happening in your world, Mr. Planet Mitch?
MITCH 03:13 I’m taking a drink, caught me. I thought Chris was going to talk a little bit longer, there.
CHRIS 03:20 I did not realize that Mitch had a drinking problem.
CARL 03:24 So guys, that intro that I played before the actual show intro, did you guess where that was from?
MITCH 03:33 It had to be Irwin Allen.
CARL 03:35 Bingo, yes. Irwin Allen.
CHRIS 03:37 Land of the Giants?
CARL 03:39 No.
MITCH 03:40 Lost in Space?
CHRIS 03:42 No, it wasn’t Lost in Space.
CARL 03:43 No, it’s very close.
CHRIS 03:45 What was it?
CARL 03:46 It is The Time Tunnel.
MITCH 03:29 That was my other one.
CARL 03:51 We’ve actually talked about that on this show before.
MITCH 03:52 Yeah, we did.
CARL 03:53 Yeah, well they’ve got all 30 episodes on Hulu right now, and when you’re sick you don’t feel like doing anything. So, I came across The Time Tunnel.
CHRIS 04:02 You’re watching 50-year old television?
MITCH 04:04 Oh, god. I love it.
CARL 04:05 Can you believe it is 40 years, almost 40-something years old. But, I love the phrases in there. “Maximize Retrieval Power! Maximize Retrieval Power!” I just love all this stuff. “Do you have a fix on Doug? No, I don’t have a fix on Doug. Well, Increase power.” The solution is to increase power for everything. I just love it. And then you got that great, big sage Air Force computer that was used in the Irwin Allan set for Time Tunnel.
Even after all these years, and you know it’s outdated because you got tape reels running. Every time they come to a historical scene, Haywood Kirkland, he’s the Colonel that’s in charge of the facility, and he’ll say, “Okay, we need to input into the computer, where we are. Where are we?” I’m thinking, today we would say,” Google that.” [laughter]. What does Wikipedia say about the Earl of Huntington? Oh, yeah, he’s the basis of the legend of Robin Hood. Oh well.
CHRIS 05:11 The Time Tunnel, 1966-67.
CARL 05:15 Yeah, it never ended. It didn’t get renewed a second season.
CHRIS 05:18 Well, they don’t need to because they can just go back in time and redo the first season again.
CARL 05:23 You know, back in 2002, they did a pilot to do a re-boot, but it didn’t take.
MITCH 05:52 I saw some behind-the scenes on The Time Tunnel. It’s funny, because we were just watching it a month-and-a-half ago. My wife got me into this. She wanted to see Gidget. We looked up Gidget on YouTube and then to make a long story short, we ended up on The Time Tunnel. Anyway, long story short there. There’s some cool behind-the-scenes stuff on YouTube. You should check it out on The Time Tunnel.
CARL 05:56 Yeah. You could see the genesis of that movie that came out a year or two ago about…what was it called? “Cowboys and Aliens.”
MITCH 06:02 Yeah.
CARL 06:03 There was one episode in there that was very cheesy. But I said yeah, so that’s the genesis of that movie. You see, there is nothing new under the sun.
CHRIS 06:12 Sure, nothing.
CHRIS 06:13 No originality in Hollywood at all.
MITCH 06:15 Something like nine plots or something like that, ever?
CHRIS 06:17 That’s it.
MITCH 06:18 Yeah.
CARL 06:19 Hmm.
MITCH 06:20 Hmmm. End of the show, there you go.
CARL 06:24 That’s it. We don’t have anything else to talk about.
CHRIS 06:27 We want to thank the sponsors and thanks to all the listeners. Send us your viewer mail. Later, bye. [music]
CARL 06:40 Oh, my goodness. There’s a lot going on in video world.
MITCH 06:44 There is a lot going on and I want to thank you, by the way, for grabbing a whole bunch of news items that we may or may not have cover. I want to start off with something that’s not on your list.
CARL 06:57 Okay.
MITCH 06:58 I teased last week about some big, new announcement and it still actually hasn’t been officially announced yet, but the contracts are signed and work is actually going on. I have told the other party that I’m going to announce it on today’s show.
CARL 07:16 Oh, cool.
MITCH 07:17 Whether he’s cool with it or not, I don’t know, but it will be announced officially on planet5D and on cinema5D later Wednesday or Thursday.
CHRIS 07:27 But we’re going to talk about it today on our show?
MITCH 07:30 Yeah.
CARL 07:31 Let’s do it and I think you just gave us a clue.
MITCH 07:35 A clue…I was wondering if anybody was paying attention.
CARL 07:37 You gave us a clue and I wonder if our listeners picked up on that.
CHRIS 07:40 Was it the clue, “the other party?”
MITCH 07:43 No, I mentioned a website name in my…
CARL 07:46 Cinema5D.
MITCH 07:48 Actually, a lot of people get confused between planet5D and cinema5D, and I’ve actually on videos before , said cinema5D instead of planet5D.
CARL 07:59 You’re kind of following Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich idea, there. You knew you would always assimilate cinema 5D. You thought it and it became so real to you that it actually happened. You don’t even know how you got there.
MITCH 08:13 It is happening. It is happening. The announcement is that cinema5D and planet5D are sort of going to become one. Cinema5D is actually going to still exist. But Sebastian, the owner, is moving on to do different things. He has got some plans for cinema5D’s future. He will not be doing news. He is going to be doing something else, which I have to let him announce. But, in order to facilitate that, I’m taking all of the forums and the video log. All of that stuff is coming over to be a part of planet5D, which I am incredibly excited about.
CARL 08:54 Very cool.
MITCH 08:56 Planet5D is just like massively increased in size.
CARL 09:03 Your gravitational pull has increased.
MITCH 09:06 Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. Yes, our gravitational pull has increased threefold and we are now a bigger planet.
CARL 09:14 Very cool.
MITCH 09:16 I’m very excited about that.
CARL 09:17 It kind of reminds me of that movie that had…what was his name? Maximallion something or another.
MITCH 09:23 Smart?
CARL 09:25 No.
MITCH 09:26 Maxwell Smart…
CARL 09:28 It was a horrible movie though, I’m sorry. The Black Hole, that’s it. I was just thinking of gravitational pull, never mind.
MITCH 09:37 That is actually, hopefully. Well, not hopefully, it’s going to happen this weekend. We’ve got a couple of bugs still to work out in terms of the data. We’ve been working on it for a couple of days.
CARL 09:51 Will this be a sub-domain of planet5D.com or will it be a separate website?
MITCH 09:56 No, it will be a subsection of planet5D.com, and I would give you the URL but then people would start going there and it’s not got live data on it. It’s got some bugs and stuff, so I don’t really want people going there yet.
CHRIS 10:10 We can wait.
MITCH 10:12 This weekend it will happen.
CHRIS 10:14 That’s so cool. I think that’s awesome.
MITCH 10:16 It is awesome, thank you. I’m super excited to have 28,000 new members of planet5D. We do have a forum and it gets a little bit of traffic, but it’s never reached the critical mass that cinema5D did. I applaud Sebastian and the entire crew over there for making cinema5D such a wonderful place to be.
CARL 10:41 Will you be integrating the old forums from Planet5D into your new one?
MITCH 10:47 Actually, I’m not. I’ve toyed with that idea, actually, but what we’re doing is we’re taking the cinema5D forums and we’re putting it on a new, more robust forum software called V-bulletin, which is what’s causing some of the little minor issues that we’re going to have to deal with. For example, passwords do not come over. When you come over to the new forum, you’ll have to reset your password right off the bat, which is a little nit.
CARL 11:21 You probably should do that anyway.
MITCH 11:23 That’s right, very good point. You should do it anyway. But, we’ll also have a way to register via Twitter or Facebook, so new users will just simply click a button or two like they’re used to doing, if they associate their Twitter account with some other application. Twitter and Facebook are becoming the universal logins.
CHRIS 11:46 Yeah, that’s weird. Is that a real thing?
CARL 11:50 What is that? Is that an OAuth or whatever they call it. It is strange.
MITCH 11:55 Yes, but it makes it really easy as opposed to people having to put in a userid and a password and their address, and whether or not their mother’s maiden name is purple or green or all that stuff. You just simply click a button and say yes, I authorize Facebook to make a connection between these two places and you’re happy and you go on.
CARL 12:17 Now, what can we expect in the forums? Let’s say some of our listeners have not taken advantage of forums. What can they expect in your new forum and why should they go there?
CHRIS 12:31 Because it’s awesome.
MITCH 12:34 Because it’s the fount of all knowledge of DSLR video and…
CARL 12:39 It’s the fountain of youth for camera users.
MITCH 12:42 The aim of most forums is to be a place where people go and find the answers or ask questions or tell people about projects they’re working on. Any kind of thing that’s related to film making, we aren’t going to just limit…and this has been true for both planet5D and cinema5D for a while. There is a bigger world than just shooting video on DSLRs. So, there will be…
CHRIS 13:11 Huh?
MITCH 13:12 Yes, I know, Chris. Thank you.
CARL 13:15 I think that’s a very good point, and I think I’ve even noticed that in some of the blog posts that you’ve been making, you’ve really been addressing a lot of the still photography world, which I think is great. In fact, when this podcast started I truly envisioned it being equal parts video and photography, because we’ve gotten really heavy on the video side.
CHRIS 13:36 Right. You shouldn’t have let me on the show.
MITCH 13:38 Well, there’s a reason for that. There has been a lot of interest in that.
CARL 13:43 Well, yeah.
MITCH 13:44 But at the same time, I don’t want to forget the photography side of it, because I personally love photography. I want to grow that section of the forum as well. There’s always been on cinema5D, a photography place, but it doesn’t get a whole lot of traffic. It’s going to be a little bit of an evolutionary kind of thing to try to add additional pieces as people get involved. But, we certainly want to make it obviously bigger and answer more questions for people. Most people that are in this space right now do both things. They shoot video and stills. I don’t want to ignore the stills altogether. Go ahead.
CHRIS 14:26 You know what I really like about your site, Mitch? It’s personalized and it’s curated. I don’t know if you remember this, but back in the olden days of like Mac Groomer sites, you’d go to the different sites…I still have all these tabs on my laptop here. There’s probably 10 different…there used to be like Crazy Apple Rumors, and Loop Rumors, and Apple Insider, and Mac Observer. Back before the invention of the RSS Feed, they were really unique and they each had their own personality.
But, after the invention and the proliferation of RSS Feeds, they all started to read exactly alike. People were just writing little scripts that says go get this RSS thing, and then float into my style and have it be part of my page. I like your site because when I go to it, I know that you’ve sifted through it and decided whether or not I should see it. I actually like that. I don’t know how to describe it but there’s like a comfort zone. This is going to be good stuff, because I like the way that Mitch…I like your take on things, and it doesn’t feel like I’m reading just another RSS Feed.
CARL 15:46 I think one of the cool features of some of Mitch’s articles is, it will say…I’m talking about him as if he wasn’t even sitting here on this show.
MITCH 15:57 My wife does it all the time.
CARL 16:00 But, he’ll say I talked to…I don’t know. I can’t think of the name right off the top of my head. Let’s say David Sheman, photographer. He’d say, I talked to David and this is what he had to say about this particular photo or this particular film. I like that. It’s not like he’s really editorializing a whole lot. He’s just saying, “Hey, here’s what this artist said,” and passes it onto us and I think that’s pretty cool.
MITCH 16:30 Thanks, guys.
CARL 19:32 So, good stuff. Well, this is exciting. You’re taking on the forum part of cinema5D. Now, cinema5D will continue as a website under its current…whoever owns…I forgot.
MITCH 16:45 Sebastian.
CARL 16:46 Sebastian, he has different plans for what that’s going to be. It will be interesting to see what that is. The meat of the website, the forum is going to be under the universe of planet5D.com.
CHRIS 17:01 That’s very cool.
MITCH 17:02 That is very cool. Thanks, guys.
CARL 17:05 Hey, I understand the Canon C300 can see again.
MITCH 17:11 It is, it can. I’m a little confused by this and I apologize. I told Carl earlier in email, I’ve been kind of out-of-pocket in terms of news the last week or so, because I’ve been working so hard on this whole forum thing. I actually thought there was a firmware release a month, month-and-a half ago that fixed this purple fringing thing, but it’s at least become very popular in the news circles.
CARL 17:42 What happened I think, if I’m reading this correctly, some did get it earlier. They sent their camera in for repair, those who had a notice of a problem. When they sent their camera in for repair, then Canon just quietly updated the firmware to handle that particular problem. That’s kudos to Canon for taking care of that.
MITCH 18:08 You know, that makes a lot of sense, because that’s what the article that I posted from Paul Joy probably two months ago, said you’re right. That’s how he found out about the firmware. In my mind, it was released already.
CARL 18:19 Yeah. That’s a camera I would like to try sometime. I just can’t afford that. I can’t justify it. I’ll have to rent it sometime.
MITCH 18:27 Even rental feels can really get to you if you’re not careful.
CARL 18:31 I think we mentioned this a couple of shows back. That’s a camera that’s in hot demand in rental houses, so it does command top dollar.
MITCH 18:38 Right.
CARL 18:39 Anyway, it would be fun to try it, I guess. Oh, well. So much for that. Has Jim Jannard lost his stinking head?
MITCH 18:51 No, I don’t think so.
CARL 18:52 Tell me why.
MITCH 18:55 What a set up.
CARL 18:57 No disrespect to Jim Jannard, even though he doesn’t respect us.
MITCH 19:05 That’s for sure. I don’t think he’s lost his head in terms of, he believes he has a patent and the patent office apparently says he has a patent. Excuse me, I’ll switch.
CARL 19:22 The patent office has told two different…two entirely unrelated vendors that they both have the patent to the podcast to podcasting. I just wonder how in the world that’s going to play out.
MITCH 19:35 Well, we’ve talked about that before. The patent office, potentially, is really screwed up at this point. What are they going to do to fix it? I don’t know. Because, you know, we all think that they seem to give away patents for the first person who comes up with an idea or maybe this third person that comes up with the idea that bothers to spend the money to get it “patented.”
CARL 20:05 What we’re talking about here is RED is suing Sony and what are the cameras…I can never keep track of these cameras. The F16, F5…
CHRIS 20:17 F5, F55, F66 or something like that?
CARL 20:22 Yeah, okay, that’s it. What they’re doing is, is it’s the way the Sony camera handles their raw processing, so I guess RED is saying for 4K, they’ve got their own, unique proprietary thing that makes their raw so rock-n-raw.
MITCH 20:40 Which they call RED Raw.
CARL 20:41 RED Raw, yeah. Sony is infringing on it. I guess what makes this whole lawsuit thing so bodacious, as we would say here in the south, is they want Sony to go back and destroy all these cameras.
MITCH 20:59 Yeah, right.
CARL 21:01 What’s that about?
MITCH 21:05 I don’t know. I think that part of it seems sensationalism to me.
CHRIS 21:12 It gets them in the news. A lot of times, these patent lawsuits are more about getting people in the news. Yes, they’re trying to make money or save the money that they’re making. I think the whole patent world is ridiculous and it frustrates me. The one that is of more interest to me right now is the one that’s going on about this company in Texas that’s suing all the podcasters.
CARL 21:44 That one’s really…that hits home a little bit.
CHRIS 21:47 That hits a little too close to home. They’ve already settled with, I think it’s Discovery, and essentially, do you think the Discovery network is going to roll over like that? They’ll go,”Yeah, yeah. We’ll just give you a bunch of money, just leave us alone.” See, I don’t think that is what’s going on. I think what’s happened with this podcast lawsuit…what’s the name of the company? I can’t remember. I don’t know. I Google-ized but I can’t read and talk at the same time. But essentially, I think what they’ve done is you send out the letters to the biggest offenders or the potentially biggest whales.
And then, when one of them responds back, and I think this is fairly well known that this happens a lot in these patent lawsuits. They say, “Look, I’ll tell you what. You and I, let’s just tell everybody we’ve settled and we won’t charge you anything but we’re not going to talk about this settlement.” By doing that, they immediately have more clout with the next guy. “Well, hey, Discovery settled so I guess you’re going to have to settle, too, for only a million dollars.” Or whatever. I think that’s what’s going on. I know that Adam Corolla was sued.
CARL 23:13 I don’t think he’s settled, though.
CHRIS 23:15 No, he hasn’t.
CARL 23:16 Isovolta Media is the current company that’s doing this.
CHRIS 23:20 Right. It’s a big deal. I mean, it could change the ubiquitous name of podcasting, if all of a sudden you have to have a special license and pay a fee. It’s not good. It’s not good.
CARL 23:38 The other thing is, for some time we’ve lived behind the umbrella of Apple and Google because they take some of the heat of this. They’re not going after iTunes, which is the distribution mechanism for this. They’re going after the individual podcaster.
CHRIS24:00 Right. That’s where it probably smells much more of these patent trolls. They go out there and chase this stuff down. They’re better off trying to settle with 50 people than trying to settle just with Apple. You don’t want to pick a fight with Apple.
CARL 24:20 This thing is so broad and so vague, I don’t know how it got approved. It’s called Method for Providing Episodic Media Content. A personalized media service provides, for example, user customization of radio channel selections, immediate availability of multiple preprogrammed and/or customized channels. The ability to intersperse different types of content including periodically refreshed information content. Availability of personal radio functions on devices such as car audio systems, PDAs, SmartPhones, MP3 players, etc.
Available channels include preprogrammed channels selected for the user based on an interest profile, user-owned content, user-specific ,recorded content. It’s everything that goes…it goes back to my old 1972 Nova that had the little push button selectors on there, right? So now they’ve got to go after GM all the way back to 1972, to my Nova because I had personalized FM and AM radio selection tuner buttons on my radio.
MITCH 25:31 And they’re going to destroy the car based on RED’s lawsuit.
CARL 25:35 Yeah, that’s right. So, go destroy my old ’72 Nova.
CHRIS 25:40 If this was such a big deal, why are we waiting to 2013? The patent was filed in 1996. Podcasting became a thing in 2004, 2005? Why has it taken them 9 years to get around to this?
CARL 25:58 Exactly. It was filed in November of 2003. It was granted in 2009, which I do not understand. Why did it take six years to grant the patent?
MITCH 26:12 That vague of a patent?
CARL 26:13 That vague of a patent, so they granted it. It must have been 4:45 in the patent office. Oh, man, I need to get home to my…you know, rubber stamp – boom. It’s done.
CHRIS 26:33 This Week in Law with Carl Olson.
CARL 27:31 I’m not a lawyer, man. This is affecting a lot of people. Even in Reets TV, we’ve got customers being affected by patents there, over this stupid idea that somebody can actually patent the idea that…let’s say, you got your shirt wet. What does your wife say? You’re getting ready to go out to the restaurant, your shirt’s a little wet…
MITCH 26:58 She says, “That looks sexy.”
CARL 27:00 Yeah, right. She pulls out the hair dryer and says, “Here, honey. Let me take care of that.” She takes the hair dryer and blows that. Did you know that’s patented now? The idea of directed heat on a water spot to dry it. That whole concept is patented.
MITCH 27:15 What? Absurd.
CHRIS 27:22 Here’s an absurd patent. Clear Channel tried to patent the idea of recording a concert live and selling a CD as you walked out of the concert venue. Because basically what they were going to do is multi-track and mix down a two-track version of the show, and have a bank of burners to just go bzzz, bzzz, and you could buy a CD of that concert as you walked out of the venue. Clear channel tried to patent. I don’t know if they got away with it. They have enough money, they probably did, to patent that as an idea so nobody else could…what? Make a recording and sell it quickly? What is the patent? You can’t record and sell fast, that’s my idea. [laughter] Yes! It’s unique, totally unique.
CARL 28:12 Alright. We’ve really gone down a really bad rabbit hole, and I set a bad precedent for that.
Let’s end on a bit of a high note.
MITCH 28:24 A high note?
CARL 28:25 A high note.
MITCH 28:27 Our stock note. [laughter]
CARL 28:31 We did run with the lead, right?
MITCH 28:32 Yes, we did.
CARL 28:33 Okay, that’s pretty cool and everything else was downhill from that point on.
CHRIS 28:39 What’s the next story you want to talk about?
CARL 28:40 I want to talk about these reduced pricing on these retina display Mac Books.
CHRIS 28:46 That sounds like a good deal.
CARL 28:47 This is a pretty good…
CHRIS 28:48 Can I get some money back?
CARL 28:50 I doubt it, but if you’re going to buy a Notebook now, this is pretty cool.
CHRIS 28:55 It increased its…it said it was also more something…more retinas or whatever? What is the…it’s more than a lower price, it’s more stuff, too. What was the upgrade?
CARL 29:12 I’m looking at a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro now starts at $1,499 for 128 gigabyte solid-state Flash storage and $1,699 for 256 gigabyte storage. The higher end model also includes 2.6 GHz Intel core i5. Of course, I would do a build-to-order and get an i6. Of course, I don’t know if you could do that with a 13…15 is i7. Of course, rumor has it that Dino, we’ve always gotten rumors wrong on this podcast. Well, anyway. Everybody wonders where in the world is the MAC Pro. It’s in the 15-inch core i7 MacBook Pro.
CHRIS 30:09 It is a speed boost.
CARL 30:10 Yeah, it’s a speed boost.
CHRIS 30:12 Wait a second, with a higher end version getting bumped up to 2.7 GHz quad core…mine is a 2.7 GHz quad core that I got last summer.
CARL 30:28 But, yours was a build-to-order, right?
CHRIS 30:31 Yes, but you’re saying the build-to-order is even more than that now?
CARL 30:34 I don’t know. I don’t know.
CHRIS 30:36 We can consult the book of knowledge.
CARL 30:39 You know, I’m not real good at keeping up with this because once I buy the gear, I use it and…
CHRIS 30:44 You stop shopping?
CARL 30:45 I stop shopping, man. I don’t look, even though I have a podcast where we talk about hardware and all this kind of stuff. But the 13-inch MacBook Pro, I think it was $1,700 originally. So, you’re saving roughly $200 now for the same model.
CHRIS 31:03 Yeah, I did the speed. But when I bought mine, I got the right-hand column and all the stuff that you can get. Then the build-to-order bump-able version is actually now 3 gigahertz i7s. Yeah, that’s cool…and cheaper.
CARL 31:20 Yeah, cool.
[music]
CARL 31:29 Alright. Let’s take a moment and talk about our friends at CrumplePop, film and broadcast effects
for Final Cut Pro. A couple of weeks ago, we had Dale Grahn, color timer, on the show, remember
that?
MITCH 31:43 Really? I must have missed that.
CARL 31:45 You must have missed it. Of course, poor Dale. We had a horrible time with Skype.
MITCH 31:54 Oh, I remember that.
CARL 31:55 Oh, my word. Two hours to record one hour of content. He was very, very gracious, but Gabe is releasing some video interviews that he did with him. The latest one, if you go to CrumplePop and go to their blog, Dale spends a couple of minutes talking about his experience working at Pixar. Anyway, you’ll want to check that out.
MITCH 32:18 Will you put a pause on so I can go watch that?
CARL 32:21 No, you’ve got to go catch it later.
MITCH 32:23 Okay.
CARL 32:25 Anyway, just remember there’s a whole plethora of stuff to just take your Final Cut Pro job to the next level. There’s the Color Suite, $299, that includes ColorKit, Grain35, Overlight, HalfLight, and if you use our discount code, DCP20, you can get 20% off that whole package. Is that a deal or what?
CHRIS 32:53 Yes.
CARL 32:54 What would that be? That would be 60 bucks off, right? Almost $60.
CHRIS 33:00 Yeah, and again I’ve said this a million times. The two things I like most about CrumplePop…three things. Stuff looks great, it’s competitively priced, and they have great online tutorials. When you get the plug…I can’t tell you how many times I bought a plugin because I saw the demos, “Oh that looks great.” Then you get the plugin and, “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
CARL 33:23 Yeah, there’s one plugin that they have that I have not tried and I want to. It’s called the Fisheye Fixer for GoPro. Have you guys tried that?
,
CHRIS 33:34 I don’t have a GoPro. I have no need to…
CARL 33:37 Here’s want I want to do. I want to get that DGAI Quad Copter. It’s $700 and I want to put a GoPro Hero3 on the bottom of that thing, so that’s another $300. I might just get that this summer. You know, I used to be a helicopter pilot student. [laughter] I was just a few hours away from getting my license until I was reminded of my mortality.
MITCH 34:05 Really?
CARL 34:06 Yeah, so I like helicopters.
CHRIS 34:08 I remember going into a hobby shop about a year-and-a-half ago when these people started doing this stuff and I was like, “So, I have an eight-pound camera and I want to fly it under a helicopter.” And he goes, “That’s a real helicopter.” I go yeah, “Yeah, what would that cost?” And he goes, “Have you ever flown a helicopter before?” I said, “No.” He said, “You don’t want to do this.”
CARL 34:29 Yeah. [laughter]
CHRIS 34:30 You do not want to do this.
CARL 34:33 I’ve done aerial photography out of big helicopters, and it’s not an easy thing to do because of the vibrations. They really are jumping around a lot.
CHRIS 34:43 I would like to hear from any one of our listeners that have used that AR Drone that you can buy on the Apple store. Has anybody used it? Send us a letter or voicemail on Carl’s site and tell us what you think of it.
CARL 34:56 Yeah, that would be cool. Anyway, eventually I’ll get that and I’ll share my fun experience. You’ll get to see my first video which will, no doubt, be a tumbling wreck as it goes down into Sweetwater Creek in Atlanta.
CHRIS 35:09 Or how about this? Get a piece of paper and with a Sharpie write, “I love DCP,” and then post it somewhere, and then fly your AR drone right up to it so you can read the, “ I love DCP.”
CARL 35:22 I love it. That is the DCP Challenge.
CHRIS 35:26 The DCP Challenge brought to you by the DCP.
CARL 35:28 I should have talked to Gabe about coming up with a giveaway for that, you know?
CHRIS 35:33 Ah, very cool.
CARL 35:35 Anyway, let’s move along. You know how sometimes we’ll say things in absolute and it will always come back to haunt us?
MITCH 35:45 No.
CARL 35:46 Yeah, like say something is impossible. You know, the danger of saying something is impossible is someone’s going to prove you wrong very quickly, right?
MITCH 35:54 I did that, too, this week. Let me hear yours.
CHRIS 35:57 I’m looking at the show notes trying to figure out where you’re going with this.
CARL 35:59 Well, no. I think last week I made some snide comment about no one’s doing SD anymore in video, standard definition. So, our friend Mike Carroll, The Naked Filmmaker, he says, “Well, this is interesting. A South American film called No up for best foreign language Oscar and The Forerunner is the telling of a TV ad campaign for an election in Chile in 1992, that overturned Augusto Pinoche. To capture that period, it was shot on an old analog video camera at 30P in 4.3. Talk about a tremendous step backwards. He sent me the trailer to that.
CHRIS 36:47 The question is, was it purposely shot that way or was it because there were going to have so much archival footage that they said ah screw it. Let’s just make it 4.3…
CARL 37:00 It was evidently purposely filmed that way, because it’s not so much period pieces as it is actors. You go watch the trailer, you see it is definitely a feature film. Anyway, so never say never, right?
MITCH 37:17 That sounds familiar.
CARL 37:19 Guys, have you ever started a feature film and you ran out of money?
MITCH 37:24 Can we back up before you go on?
CARL 37:26 Sure.
MITCH 37:27 Speaking of things that I’ve said on the show and have to retract…
CARL 37:34 Never, not you.
MITCH 37:37 Yeah, I was using my smartLav from Rode the other day and I was recording something using my iPhone. Do you remember it connects to your iPhone?
CARL 37:47 Yes.
MITCH 37:52 I recorded about five minutes worth and I went back and opened my phone and I said, Oh, because I had it on vibrate. Obviously, I didn’t want it ringing during the show if it happened to ring or whatever. Guess what? The recording cut off as soon as the phone call came in.
CARL 38:04 From what I understand, that cannot…
CHRIS 38:08 You have to use airplane mode.
CARL 38:09 Yeah, you have to go to airplane mode. You cannot short circuit a telephone call.
MITCH 38:13 I was wrong. I am sorry.
CHRIS 38:18 I kind of thought that might be the case, because I actually use the voice memo thing quite a bit. I’ve been sitting there, recording my thoughts or my voice memos, whatever, and had it abort the recording because a call is coming in. That actually kind of makes sense.
MITCH 38:35 Yeah, it does, but I was wrong and I confess.
CHRIS 38:39 I wish I had a Rode Lav, Rode. I know you’re listening because you’re big buddy friends with Mitch and he’s here. I would use it Thursday night when I’m working at where I’m speaking at the SF Cutter’s meeting.
CARL 38:56 Now, the recording app, will it work with any mic or does it have to have the Rode Lav mic?
MITCH 39:02 I’ve been told, and now I have not tried this so I will disclaimer it But, I’ve been told that it works with other mics. I don’t think it really knows.
CARL 39:12 A couple years ago I bought a special cable. It was $20, this is about two years ago. I still have it. It basically takes stereo down to mono and works with the four sleeves and the connector to the iPhone. Then I have an R. Statica, a Lav mic. Excuse me, “Lav mic” which is $17 on Amazon.
MITCH 39:41 Cool. There is a free version of the Rode Rek App called the Rode RekLite, go download it.
CARL 39:48 I’m going to try that, so that’s great. A lot of good options there. I saw this cool poll you can get for your iPhone. It’s got a little tripod mount on it and you can hold it out in front of you, as you’re walking, and you can take video of yourself as you’re walking and talking. Let’s see if I can find what thing is called.
CHRIS 40:12 You know what I want?
CARL 40:14 It’s called the iStabilizer ISTMP01 Smart Phone monopod. It’s $34.95. This is pretty cool.
CHRIS 40:23 What was the model number?
CARL 40:25 iStabilizer ISTMP01, Smart Phone monopod. You can find it on Amazon.com
CHRIS 40:33 I’m waiting for the version 2.0 upgrade.
CARL 40:35 I’m sure. Boy, do we digress, huh?
MITCH 40:41 Yikes.
CARL 40:41 Back to my original question. If you run out of money shooting a feature film, what did you do?
CHRIS 40:48 I got the IS Stabilizer MS. I could finish the movie with my iPhone, of course.
CARL 40:55 I saw this story on the Mac Rumors about this director ran out of money. I guess that happens to a lot of directors, right? He was shooting in super 8 film, which is obscenely expensive these days. Just even for Super 8 film stock. But he said he ran out of money and so he bought this app for a dollar, which I actually had for some time. It’s called 8MM Vintage camera. It is a pretty good little app, though I do prefer FilMiC Pro. I think it does a better job. It has more features suited to the serious iPhone videographer.
MITCH 41:35 This is a great story.
CARL 41:37 Yeah, it is pretty cool.
CHRIS 41:46 As the show deteriorates, we start reading our browsers. [laughter]
CARL 41:51 This is what we do for fun, right? I mean, come on.
CHRIS 41:55 Come and listen to our show while three guys…
CARL 41:58 You know what an expert is? An expert is a person that knows one thing more than the other
Person he’s talking to. If I’ve read it in the browser before you have, I’m an expert, man.
CHRIS 42:08 Yeah, an expert. In these days, an expert is someone who can use Google efficiently.
CARL 42:15 Go on back to The Time Tunnel.
MITCH 42:20 I’m reading ahead, though, so I’m on the next part.
CARL 42:21 Please, just Google it.
CHRIS 42:23 I actually discovered a new website. It’s called Alta Vista and it is what’s called a search engine.
CARL 42:30 Is Alta Vista still around?
CHRIS 42:31 It is.
MITCH 42:32 Oh, yeah.
CHRIS 42:33 You can type questions and queries into it and it will come back…
CARL 42:38 Get out of here, it’s still around. That’s the first search engine I ever used.
CHRIS 42:41 And it comes back with information from the Internet for you.
CARL 42:46 Digital Convergence Podcast.
CHRIS 42:51 It will take you to Apple.com
CARL 42:52 Wow.
MITCH 42:54 Sue them.
CARL 42:56 I’m in the number one spot for Digital Convergence Podcast.
MITCH 43:01 Great.
CARL 43:02 Of course, wouldn’t I be, right?
MITCH 43:03 There’s only one, right?
CARL 43:05 Yeah, that’s it. Alta Vista, I may just start using them instead of Google.
MITCH 43:13 Bing.
CARL 43:14 Hey, Mitch, you came up with this great, great chart since we were talking about…
MITCH 43:20 You jumped way ahead.
CARL 43:21 I did.
MITCH 43:22 I was reading the next article on your list.
CARL 43:27 That’s the way my brain is today. You know, after you’ve been on antihistamines for a week-and-a
half, you’ve been sick and stir crazy, you just absolutely go nuts.
MITCH 43:36 Yes, I love this chart, too, by the way. It’s very interesting. I’ve also had somebody…
CARL 43:43 So, the name of the chart is?
MITCH 43:46 Film Industry by the Numbers. It’s one of those little info-graphics that somebody put together back in 2010, so it’s actually a little bit old.
CARL 43:57 There was a big sigh from Chris. What’s the deal?
CHRIS 44:01 Oh, I was looking at the time lapse, Enclosure to Exposure site.
MITCH 44:07 See? We’re all over the place.
CARL 44:09 OK, we’ll get back to that in a minute. That is pretty cool for instructables. Okay, Film Industry
by the Numbers.
MITCH 44:16 As with any info-graphic that you find on the web, if you don’t know a 100% whether or not the data’s accurate, and I’ve had a couple of people post on the blog that this graphic was shown to have some inaccurate numbers in terms of revenues and stuff. So, it’s interesting. Make sure you take it with a grain of salt.
CARL 44:41 Well, you would have to because none of these companies are going to release their information. Also, the revenues continue to grow, at least for people like Warner Brothers and Paramount and Sony and all that, because they’re going to continue to get revenue of the movies that they’ve created. So, it’s kind of hard to say.
MITCH 44:58 There’s a section down at the bottom that had a little bit of trouble that says breakdown of your movie ticket and 45% goes to the theater and 55% goes to the studio. To the left of that, they show you a studio breakdown, but they talk about advertising production distribution and actors. Those numbers don’t add up to a 100%. They add up to 55% which doesn’t make any sense.
CARL 45:29 That’s bad math.
CHRIS 45:32 Hold on, hold on. What they’re saying is if you remove the yellow 55% studio and applied it next to the 45% theater fees, that 55…
CARL 45:43 Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it.
CHRIS 45:46 It’s a sub-breakdown.
MITCH 45:48 Yeah, but it says 17% is set production. Does that mean everything involves production or is that
just set production?
CHRIS 45:57 I’m sure it’s…
MITCH 45:58 And why is actors separated? Where are the directors and food service and everything else go? Is
that part of the 17%? I’m just a little curious about that chart.
CARL 46:07 I wonder if the…
CHRIS 46:09 Well, we should call Irwin Allen, get a Time Tunnel episode back up, go back to 2009 and we could
ask.
MITCH 46:17 But, it’s an interesting chart.
CHRIS 46:19 Yeah, it’s very cool.
MITCH 46:20 It makes you think. Especially, I like the part about, I’m going to interrupt, Carl…where it says if you take a family of four to the movies, the average family pays $28. If you go to a baseball game, you’d pay $94 and $280 if you go to a football game. I thought that was pretty cool.
CHRIS 46:38 Yeah, it’s awesome.
MITCH 46:39 What do you want to say, Carl?
CARL 46:41 I don’t know how they come up with $28.72 being average admission, because the tickets are expensive these days.
MITCH 46:50 Well, it was 2009. Let’s not forget those.
CHRIS 46:53 And they were also saying somewhere on here, it said the average ticket price was $7.50 times four…and if you’re not eating. Maybe they’re assuming you’re sneaking food in in your purse.
CARL 47:03 Do you think that theaters will continue to be a viable source?
MITCH 47:09 Alright, let me tell you this. We have a theater, probably several…I just found out about this, but one of the large, 16 theater…
CARL 47:20 Megaplexes.
MITCH 47:21 …megaplexes has just converted to a total, sit-down eat movie theater.
CARL 47:28 Yeah, that seems to be a trend in the metro Atlanta area as well.
MITCH 47:30 Yeah, that’s nice. We went in and did that. Now, I did not particularly care for paying $9 for a hamburger, but the whole experience was very nice. I enjoyed being able to just sit there and eat instead of having to go to a restaurant first or after, depending upon what time you go. Have a beer, whatever while you’re sitting there watching the movie. That’s pretty cool.
CARL 47:54 Yeah, so I would say going to the theater, you do experience a film in a very different way…
MITCH 48:02 Boy, that’s for sure.
CARL 48:03 …than you do at home.
MITCH 48:04 I’m sorry, I was surprised that there weren’t more people making chewing noises. It was rather
quiet.
CHRIS 48:14 Quiet food only.
CARL 48:16 Do you think the more money people spend, the more well-mannered they might be in that setting? I don’t know.
MITCH 48:25 I was surprised, but I’m always surprised by this. We went to see “The Hobbit” and there were
three children behind us under the age of six. Like, why are you bringing these children to this movie? People, are you…? They didn’t scream throughout the whole thing, which is what I expected. They were very well-behaved but I don’t think that bringing kids to “The Hobbit” is the right thing to do, because there’s all sorts of gore and stuff in there.
CARL 48:59 That is what Chitty-Chitty-Bang Bang is for.
MITCH 49:02 That’s right.
CARL 49:03 Or whatever the current is today. My wife and I rarely go to the movie theater anymore, because
the last few times that I’ve gone, it’s been a dismal, dismal experience. People are rude and it’s
not just one or two people. I mean, it’s the audience is…many people are just stinking rude. They’re having conversations, they’re just…I don’t know, I don’t like it anymore.
MITCH 49:37 My wife and I have a patent on something that we’re going to revolutionize movie theaters with.
CHRIS 49:44 The box seat?
MITCH 49:45 No. [laughter]
CARL 49:46 If you had the code of silence, that would be pretty cool.
MITCH 49:51 We want to bring our own headsets and just plug them in like you would on an airplane or
something, so you get a large theater experience.
CHRIS 50:01 With the noise cancel. Yeah, maybe that would improve it. But, part of the experience of going to theater, like if the audience is in tune with the movie and they’re respectful…let’s say you’re watching a comedy, when they laugh you laugh. Or something funny or something ridiculous happens, we all…you know, you respond to it. But, what you have today in the theater is they’re texting, they’re talking on the telephone, their stinking phones are going off. They’re yelling and cutting up, they’re having conversations. They’re constantly getting up in front of you, going back and forth. They’re not experiencing the movie, they’re just into themselves.
CHRIS 50:41 They’re just out for the evening.
CARL 50:42 Yeah, but it used to be when people went to watch a movie, you experienced the movie together. You laughed at the same things. You know, it was just kind of a different experience to me. I don’t do well with rude situations, so I just don’t do it anymore. Maybe every once in a while.
CHRIS 51:03 It may very well be that part of the problem is that you’re just growing out of it. I do agree that people are changing and having this Internet in your pocket changes the whole world that we live in. But, younger kids are going and like Mitch said, maybe if they’re paying more, though, they’ll respect the experience more. I think there’s a lot to be said for that. I think when you go to the larger theaters where the prices are eight, nine bucks you tend to have a more serious audience.
If you’re going to the smaller theaters or the second-run places that are playing the movies that opened five months ago, it’s a different audience. A lot of different types of groups and venues, they weed out the riff raff by raising the prices and you end up having a better experience. I’ve always thought I would love the opportunity to have valet parking, have a reserved seat, a box seat where I had walls around me, but still had…I’ve got to go against what Mitch is saying about the headsets because you want that surround sound. Like, oh that stuff is behind me.
MITCH 52:16 Right.
CHRIS 52:17 But, if I had a box seat where it was open to the theater. I got the main thing and maybe I had my own surround things in my box, and then add on to that a little push button waitress service with food and snacks so you don’t have to get up, I would pay $100-$150 for a box with 4 seats in it. And if I wanted to, I could push another button and a little glass partition would slide up and remove me acoustically from the main theater if I wanted to sit there and talk. I’m telling you, that to me would be the ideal movie-going experience. Plus, you wouldn’t have to wait in line for an hour just to get one of the…because they’re only six seats I’m willing to sit in in the whole theater, I’ve got to get one of those.
MITCH 53:05 If I can interrupt, Carl. That’s one of the experiences with this theater in St. Louis. You can reserve your seat online…
CARL 53:15 Awesome.
MITCH 53:16 …and pick which seat you’re exactly going to get. They’re assigned seats.
CARL 53:18 Oh, wow. I’m coming to St. Louis to see movies from now on.
MITCH 53:21 I think I like that aspect of it a lot.
CARL 53:23 A couple of other interesting numbers here. It talks about top earners in Hollywood for 2009. Michael Bay…Transformers 2, yes. Steven Spielberg, 85 million. Roland Emmerich, 70 million. James Cameron, 50 million. Todd Phillips…Daniel Radcliffe…Ben Stiller, how in the world did he…he’s 40 million dollars. Are they mixing actors along with director producers here?
MITCH 53:59 It doesn’t say what…
CARL 54:01 How did Ben Stiller beat out Tom Hanks?
MITCH 54:05 Yeah, that surprised me. I would think Tom Hands would be work…it sort of depends on which
movie you’ve got coming out when, I’m sure.
CHRIS 54:13 You’re right.
MITCH 54:15 Those are some amazing numbers. Man, little Harry Potter guy making 41 million dollars.
CARL 54:21 It’s still a big industry, employs a lot of people. It says the American Television and Motion Picture Industry supports 2.5 million jobs, which includes over a 115,000 businesses. What I do think is suspect is this number. It says production worker average salary is $74,400 with 41.1 billion in total wages.
CHRIS 54:57 Wait, do you think that’s high?
CARL 54:51 I do. I don’t think a lot of people are making that kind of money.
CHRIS 54:55 Hold on, wait a second.
MITCH 54:57 That’s all counting the movie theater clerk guy.
CARL 55:00 No, no. I understand. If you live in California, especially if you live in the L.A. Basin and you’re making $74,000 a year, you’re on the verge of homelessness.
MITCH 55:10 Right.
CHRIS 55:12 That’s not much money. I couldn’t live on $74,000 not living where I live.
CARL 55:20 That would be tough.
CHRIS 55:22 Let me take that back. I could, but I would have a radically different lifestyle.
CARL 55:24 Yeah, I guess that’s a good point. Most of these jobs are probably in California for this. Although, Atlanta is beginning to be the scene for a lot of movies being filmed here, so a lot of production work is coming to Atlanta as well. Anyway, of course this is the home of CNN, TBS, The Weather Channel, and other types of broadcasts.
CHRIS 55:55 Did you hear this news story, just the other day, about all the editors from The History Channel’s Swamp People reality show walking off the set?
MITCH 56:04 No.
CHRIS 56:05 It has to do with the IOTSI, I think it’s the local 700. I think it’s in the south, actually. All the editors decided they were going to walk off because of some negotiating issues with the unions or the producers not allowing them to talk about joining in the union, or something like that. 16 people walked off the job yesterday.
CARL 56:31 Well, they knew there was 16 more behind them.
CHRIS 56:35 Absolutely, and to the producers of Swamp People, give us a call at Slice Editorial. We will staff up and build out. We will cut your show. We don’t want to be union. We don’t want to work on union gigs. We will gladly cut your show.
CARL 56:50 Come on, and I’m not taking a position one way or the other, but Georgia is called a ”right to work” state which is a euphemism for, “I can fire you for any reason whatsoever.” I mean, that’s the reality of it. That’s why a lot of these jobs are coming here to Georgia, because Union does not have much clout in the state of Georgia.
MITCH 57:18 We have a movie coming to St. Louis in a couple of months. I’m going to try and get involved with
that.
CARL 57:24 Oh, very good. What’s it called?
MITCH 57:26 I don’t have the foggiest idea anymore.
CARL 57:30 So, you just dive right in to anything that comes along regardless of…? Just teasing. I’ve got to move on. This show is…I need to talk about another sponsor here. We need to talk about Kr8insights.com. Have you guys…?
CHRIS 57:45 Sound effect?
CARL 57:46 No sound effect.
CHRIS 57:48 Say it again. Say it one more time.
CARL 57:49 Kre8insights.com. [sound effect] You can take your business with the next level if you join their membership site, right? Seriously, if you do want to get on the fast track to success in the video production and film making industry. You might even come to know these terms like ”right to work states” and things like that. What’s above the line, below the line, writing video proposals. Anyway, you need to check out Kre8insights.com. There’s an insider community there, where people just like yourself are posting messages, their experiences, asking questions.
I was looking at it just the other day, and I noticed there was this one person who was talking about their proposal for shooting a television ad. The person responded to the advice that was given, and they actually ended up making a lot more money by applying what was suggested. Now, I’m not making a statement that your income is going to go one way or the other with this, but any time you educate yourself about business it’s going to affect your bottom line. If you apply what you learn, it’s going to affect your bottom line in a positive way.
I was just listening to an artist, just the other day, they were talking about, “I can’t stand business.” It is absolutely hated. It was a photographer, actually. “Just can’t stand it, hate it, hate it, hate it.” I think, “Wow, that’s a really bad attitude.” You might as well learn to enjoy it, because you can be just as creative on the business side of developing your business. I think if you join Kre8insights.com, you’ll see that there’s a lot of good information there. It’s practical. Their Expert Interrogation series is very interactive.
If you’re ever able to catch that live, I would suggest doing that. There’s a chat room for that as well. DCP listeners can join up for a free 30-day membership. You can test drive the membership risk-free for 30 days, and no credit card is required. So, you can access just about everything. About the only thing you can’t get are the e-books, and that’s understandable.
The membership is $24 a month or you can join for a $197 for a year, which is significant…[cough] Excuse me. I didn’t hit the cough switch fast enough. Anyway, $197 is a significant discount over paying for it monthly. Either way, it’s a good deal so I’d check it out. Kre8insights.com. The discount is available at Kre8insider.com/DCP for Digital Convergence Podcast.
[music]
CARL 01:01:00 That makes me feel so good to hear that. I know, I let it go but I was dancing in my chair. Have you ever done chair dancing?
MITCH 01:01:08 I do it all the time because I sit
CARL 01:01:10 I’m just rocking because we got some good feedback this week from our listeners.
CHRIS 01:01:17 Does anybody who works on the show Swamp People at work listen?
CARL 01:01:22 I don’t know.
MITCH 01:01:26 Chris is desperate for work, okay?
CHRIS 01:01:28 Actually, I’m not. I just would love to cut a show and…
CARL 01:01:34 Chris wants to cut for Swamp People, people. [laughter]
CHRIS 01:01:39 Wait…hold on, maybe I should watch an episode first. Maybe it’s a stupid show.
CARL 01:01:44 I have no interest in reality TV. Oh, well.
MITCH 01:01:51 John Grisham says…
CARL 01:01:53 My voice is about to go…why don’t you just say it?
MITCH 01:01:55 One of the podcast guys really like how you have a combination of hosts, especially Mitch, asking
different types of questions from beginning to expert. I put that “about Mitch” thing in there, by myself. “I always like learning from other shooters, editors in terms of creative approaches, business, technology. You guys do a great job, keep it up! Signed, John.”
CHRIS 01:02:19 John Grisham, isn’t he an author? Or, that’s Grimson.
MITCH 01:02:24 Grisham…
CARL 01:02:26 Grimson.
MITCH 01:02:27 Did I say it wrong?
CARL 01:02:28 I wish…John, I wish you’d left your URL, because I would have been more than happy to tell
everybody about your company. Anytime you send your feedback, put your URL in there.
CHRIS 01:02:39 I think his URL is gmail.com. Oh, wait, that’s gmail. Never mind. We do appreciate the comment.
MITCH 01:02:48 Should I read his phone number out loud so everybody can call?
CARL 01:02:50 No, no, no. That would not be nice. That would be really bad. We appreciate that, John. Thanks for
listening to the show.
CHRIS 01:03:00 Area code 615, though. Where is that?
CARL 01:03:02 How do you guys feel about that answering questions and learning from others? I know that’s one
of the reasons I started this podcast. I learn so much from listening to our guests, and also you guys, too.
CHRIS 01:03:24 [laughter] Also? You know what? I think that you can equally learn from listening to experts and also listening to non-experts. I think some of the best things that I learned when I was getting into
television, I learned by watching mistakes on television. Like you’d see something happening, and
your mind would go, “Oh, that’s how that works.” I mean, one of these days I am going to do a
blog post about a mistake that I saw on the evening news once, and how it totally changed my
outlook of how to do a simple thing like putting a box over an anchor’s shoulder, you know?
Listen to experts, listen to people that aren’t experts because you can weed through and go, “Oh,
that’s interesting, yeah. That’s totally not the way to do that, so what would be the right way?”
CARL 01:04:26 I think that’s a good point. You think about Thomas Edison and his journey to perfect the electric
light bulb.
CHRIS 01:04:35 Wait a second, can we pause for a while? I want to think about Thomas Edison. Okay, I’m done, go
ahead.
CARL 01:04:41 Good. So, he tried thousands of different materials. Thousands of different bulbs. But were they
different? I don’t know. All kinds of different stuff inside the bulbs. Finally, he came up with the
light bulb and our lives have never been the same sense.
CHRIS 01:05:02 Okay, just so you know.
CARL 01:05:07 What I’m trying to say is he failed thousands of times to have the success that we benefit with
today.
CHRIS 01:05:15 You can watch entire episodes of Swamp People on YouTube. [laughter]
CARL 01:05:25 Is that kind of like a Creole type show or Cajun…?
CHRIS 01:05:31 It’s these guys, that they go out…
CARL 01:05:33 Alligator hunting?
CHRIS 01:05:34 Alligator hunting. They’re like the redneck version of The Crocodile Hunter.
MITCH 01:05:40 Did you guys ever see…I’m way off topic here…there was a show and I don’t remember what it
was called, reality show where they took some Hoosiers from Georgia, but they were rich and
they put them in Boston or some place.
CARL 01:05:55 We’re still reeling from Honey Boo-boo.
MITCH 01:05:57 Oh god, it was hilarious.
CHRIS 01:05:59 Is Honey Boo-boo from Atlanta?
CARL 01:06:01 It’s from Georgia, oh my word. Let’s get back to something good here. Martin Friedrich
says, “Dear Carl, Chris, and Mitch, just wanted to let you know how much I love your podcast. I
really appreciate all the time and effort you put into this. I travel quite a bit and just today, your
latest episode helped me over a long flight. I myself am a professional photographer in Munich,
Germany and since the arrival of the 5Dmark 2, rediscovered my love for telling stories with the
help of moving pictures. I am quite converged by now.
CHRIS 01:06:42 That’s awesome.
CARL 01:06:43 ”So, thanks again and keep it up.” Have you guys clicked on his link? Is it Marin Friedrich?
CHRIS 01:06:52 I’m going to say “Friedrich.”
CARL 01:06:54 Okay. So, let’s spell it out. M-A-R-T-I-N F-R-I-E-D-R-I-C-H.com. Go check out his photography,
it’s awesome.
MITCH 01:07:05 I want to know if, the bit about how it helped him over a long flight, if that means we put him to
sleep, so he could sleep through the whole thing. [laughter] Sorry.
CARL 01:07:19 Do you listen to podcasts when you fly?
MITCH 01:07:23 No, I don’t.
CARL 01:07:24 I don’t ever watch the movies on the plane. I don’t ever do that.
CHRIS 01:07:31 It’s a horrible experience. The audio is so bad.
CARL 01:07:35 Sometimes, I’ll listen to a podcast or two while I’m flying and it’s a pretty cool…it’s just a
cool experience, I think, to do that. I was down in South America and I listened to you guys when
you carried the load while I was away. That was pretty cool. Can you imagine? I’m walking along
Lago Llanquihue or walking out to the hill country there. I’m listening to the podcast as I go for my
long, long afternoon walk. It’s pretty cool. So, we have an international audience. We just want to
express our deep appreciation.
MITCH 01:08:21 Martin’s got some great stuff.
CHRIS 01:08:22 It is.
CARL 01:08:23 That’s some awesome, awesome photography. I’m just blown away.
CHRIS 01:08:27 I want Martin to contact me and tell me how he did the titles in The Crane, which is on his home
page.
CARL 01:08:34 Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ve got to take a look at that, I’m sorry…
CHRIS 01:08:38 It’s just a very cool site. Thank you, Martin.
MITCH 01:08:42 Thank you, Martin.
CHRIS 01:10:27 I’m still digging on Martin’s stuff here. [laughter]
CARL 01:10:33 He’s a good photographer.
CHRIS 01:10:36 You know, good framing is something you can’t teach anybody, you just can’t. It’s just there. You
either have an eye for it or you don’t.
CARL 01:10:45 I don’t know. I think you can be taught if you have the passion to develop that framing, that eye
For it. I think you can. I don’t know…I guess some people are more predisposed toward it than
others. To me, there’s an 80/20 rule among people. I think for a long time, The Apple Microsoft thing was a reflection of that. Maybe not so much anymore, but I think there’s a small percentage of people who have an eye for the aesthetic and then the rest don’t care.
CHRIS 01:11:25 [laughter] I like it.
CARL 01:11:28 Right? I mean…it’s not a slight.
CHRIS 01:11:29 Absolutely.
CARL 01:11:33 It’s just the way…we’re all wired a little differently, I guess. Okay, guys. Cinema Room, I just
conveniently passed that up. Mitch sent me this cool link. I’ve always wanted a jet pack. Of course,
the problem with the Bell jet pack is it only lasts 20 seconds.
MITCH 01:11:56 Yikes.
CARL 01:11:57 You only have about 20 seconds and I think there’s a couple of vendors that have actually made
custom jet packs that go for 30 seconds. It’s pretty cool to see those work, but that’s not a whole
lot of time to fly. Here we are 2013 and I just wonder where in the world is our jet pack? I want to
put a GoPro on my helmet and have a jet pack and just fly all over the place. But now, I guess
there is a place we can do that. Devin Graham, videographer, film maker. Devin Graham
highlighted. You want to tell us about that, Mitch?
MITCH 01:12:33 I love Devin Graham and I’m going to try and get him on the show some time. I’ve swapped
emails with him before and he’s interested but we just haven’t worked out a time. He’s a young
kid that’s really making a name for himself over on that YouTube thing.
CARL 01:12:51 He’s out there doing this, that’s why we can’t pin him down. This guy’s out there seizing
opportunity left and right.
MITCH 01:12:58 He puts out a movie a week and he also puts out a “behind the scenes” with every one now,
which is really kind of awesome. Primarily, he’s shooting on HD SLRs as well as things like the
GoPro. So, he got in contact with these guys who have made this thing called the Fly Board which
is a water-pump kind of thing that apparently, they don’t really describe this, but apparently it
hooks up to a Jet Ski which is where the engine, I think, to suck the water up is. You strap your feet
in this thing, flaunt yourself up in the sky and you can do some maneuvers, and they show people
doing little dolphin trick, kind of things, which is really kind of awesome. You don’t get to fly
around, Carl, like you would like to, above the trees, around the world. But, it’s a good start, I
think.
CARL 01:13:57 So, the fly board basically combines two fears into one – fear of water and fear of flying. [laughter]
It’s awesome to watch the video. Basically, just picture this board strapped to your feet with these two jet nozzles at the bottom of it and out shoots this water with enough thrust that you go airborne.
MITCH 01:14:21 It’s really cool.
CARL 01:14:22 It lasts as long as the Jet ski has gas to run the water pump.
MITCH 01:14:26 Right.
CARL 01:42:28 Of course, I did notice in the training bit where they talk about you’ve got to watch out for the guy
in the Jet ski.
CHRIS 01:14:34 I would imagine.
CARL 01:14:36 No kidding. You’ll not only kill him, you’ll kill yourself in the process.
MITCH 01:14:41 Yeah. I can see it as a dangerous sport.
CHRIS 01:14:44 Oh, yeah.
CARL 01:14:45 There’s another variant of this water jet pack. It looks like the more traditional jet pack. You strap
on this thing on your back. It’s got the nozzles that shoulder links so basically, you are using center
of gravity being positioned high up around your chest area. So, you’re going to have inherent
stability, relatively speaking, with the jetpack than you are with this. This is like you’re trying to
stand on something as the floor moves.
MITCH 01:15:16 Right.
CARL 01:15:18 Now it’s like an elevator moving back and forth. It takes a great deal of coordination to do that.
MITCH 01:15:24 The one you’re talking about I’ve seen before as well, with the jet pack on your back. Their little
motor that sucks the water actually travels with you, so you can move pretty far with that thing.
CARL 01:15:35 Yeah, and you’re not limited to that 20 or 30 second rocket flight with hydrogen peroxide, going
over a silver catalyst mesh, generating this extremely hot steam.
CHRIS 01:15:51 Wow, you have obviously researched this a bit.
CARL 01:15:53 Oh, man, I love jet packs. [laughter]
CHRIS 01:15:57 I just want a car that folds up into a brief case like George Jetson had.
CARL 01:16:01 You know, that’s what my wife says all the time. She says she’d like to have a George Jetson car.
She’s close, she has a Toyota Scion. If I put a couple stubby wings on it, it probably would fly. Alright, we’ve got to wrap this nonsensical show up here. Did you guys have any picks, product picks or tips that you wanted to talk about this week?
MITCH 01:16:25 I do, as a matter of fact.
CARL 01:16:27 Okay. What is that?
MITCH 01:16:29 A company sent me this a couple of months ago. I’ve been toying with it off and on. I’ve talked
about before, the folks over at Cinetics created a thing that was called the CineSquid that you could suction cup a camera to a window or to a car and shoot some stuff. They’ve taken the same upper parts and put a little base to it that they call a CineSkate. They call it the CineSkate Pro. The thing I like about it is it’s adaptable. You can use several different configurations with the same kit. They just announced the CineSkate Pro and they’ve got a great little promo which makes me laugh every time I watch it. We’ll post the link to their promo.
CARL 01:17:22 Very good. I’ll be glad to do that. How about you, Mr. Fenwick?
CHRIS 01:17:28 I think I’ve mentioned this, I may have mentioned it.
CARL 01:17:32 The Swamp…
MITCH 01:42:22 [laughter]
CHRIS 01:17:34 Swamp people, contact me at chrisfenwick.com. No, I’m going to make a recommendation. I think
recently I mentioned that I am retiring my first USB mouse I ever bought.
MITCH 01:17:46 No.
CHRIS 01:17:47 The Logitech mouse I bought back in 2001 I believe, and I have moved to another Logitech mouse
and it is the M500. I will say the thing about mice is they’re very particular, they have to fit your hand. It’s the point where you touch the computer. The M500 has a really cool scroll wheel that has inertia so when you flick it, you can scroll through a long page very effortlessly. It also has a little clutch on that scroll wheel, which is a little push button above the scroll wheel, where you can turn the inertia off so it only moves when you push it. But I have literally, for over a year, been in the market of finding my replacement mouse, because my old trusty, USB Logitech is starting to die and I am all over this Logitech M500. It feels great. The inertia wheel is awesome. It’s got a good weight. It’s not so small that it feels weird in an average size hand.
CARL 01:18:59 Do you have any problems with tunnel carpal or anything like that?
CHRIS 01:19:05 On my mouse hand, no. Oddly enough, I do so many keyboard shortcuts that I have been getting
some carpal tunnel issues in my left hand, believe it or not. Primarily, because on a Mac you use your thumb on the command key. Now, imagine going like command H to hide something or command G to group something, and you notice the way your index finger wraps over your thumb, and your thumb sort of collapses underneath your palm as you reach over for that, that has been giving me some problems. But, I sit and then I heat it and then I ice it, and then I heat it. You go back and forth while you’re watching a half hour of TV. I have a double-sided bucket with ice on one side and hot tap water on the other side. That actually does a whole lot to repair the hand.
CARL 01:19:55 I used to have a lot of problems, especially in the shoulder. I guess it was because I was
subconsciously holding my arm up. I don’t know what I was doing when I would use the mouse.
CARL 01:20:06 Your right shoulder?
CHRIS 01:20:07 Yeah. It would just drive me insane. I would get so sore, so for the last two years I’ve been using
the Magic Trackpad. I don’t even use a mouse. I don’t even have a mouse. I use the Trackpad for
everything, and I love it.
CHRIS 01:20:23 I do not condone that behavior.
CARL 01:20:24 I know you don’t condone that behavior, but it’s awesome. With practice, you get very accurate
with it.
CHRIS 01:20:32 I got this thing at Office Depot or something.
CARL 01:20:36 I got mine at Apple, so there.
CHRIS 01:20:37 Wooo.
CARL 01:20:39 Well, that’s cool. Check that out. I’m not arguing that it’s not…
CHRIS 01:20:44 I know. I won’t take offence. It’s just a mouse, Carl. You’ll still be my friend even if you do use a track pad.
CARL 01:20:50 I’m glad we got the air cleared on that. I was getting worried.
CHRIS 01:20:54 I want to read a quote in closing, if we’re close to closing.
CARL 01:20:55 Okay.
CHRIS 01:21:00 I got this from…the guy’s name is Massimo Vignelli and he was in the 2007 documentary called Helvetica. In that movie…which is all about the font and the importance of the font throughout the history of topography. If you haven’t seen it and you care even…if you’re one of those 20% that Carl mentioned earlier that actually cares, watch this movie. It’s fantastic. Have you guys ever seen it?
MITCH 01:21:26 No.
CARL 01:21:27 I have not seen it in its entirety, no.
CHRIS 01:21:30 I love it. Anyway, Massimo Vignelli, he was featured in the film. He says, “The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness.” I think as artists and as cinematographers and as editors, that’s what we do. We fight against that 80% that say, “Oh, that’s good enough.” It’s like no, I don’t want it to be good enough. I want it to be better. Sometimes, you just have to do that. It might mean putting in a few extra hours, even if you’re not going to get paid for it. But, that’s what we do in this business, is we fight for that extra 20% or that extra 10% or maybe even that extra 5%. That is what I would like to leave us with.
CARL 01:22:11 Wow, what an awesome note to leave on. That is so good. I like that. Chris, where can they find out about you and your other witticisms?
CHRIS 01:22:24 Chrisfenwick.com and we mentioned it earlier, go watch the tutorial I just posted today or last night about how to use a Sparse disk with Final Cut 10 and how to set one up. It’s good stuff.
CARL 01:22:38 Alright, very good. And it is good. I watched the tutorial early this morning. Very nicely done. Alright, Mr. Planet Mitch?
MITCH 01:22:46 Some place called planet5D.com with new forums, ever expanding universe.
CARL 01:22:52 Again, when will that happen? When will we see the new forums added?
MITCH 01:22:56 This weekend some time.
CARL 01:22:57 Excelente, excelente. You can find me at DigitalFilm.TV and I am also on Twitter pretentiously as The Carl Olson, so that’s probably the best way to track me down. [laughter] I’d like to give a special thank you to our sponsors, CrumplePop, film and broadcast effects for Final Cut Pro. And we’d like to ask you guys to please, please continue to rate us on iTunes, leave feedback.
MITCH 01:24:10 Tell your friends.
CARL 01:24:11 Tell a friend, yeah. Tell a friend you found this fun little podcast and have them subscribe to it and
listen to it.
CHRIS 01:24:18 Go to your local Apple store and subscribe on all of the demo machines.
CARL 01:42:26 You’ve done that too, huh?
[laughter]
CHRIS 01:24:30 The things we do for marketing.
MITCH 01:24:32 It only lasts a day, guys. Come on.
CHRIS 01:24:35 But you can go back tomorrow and do the same thing.
CARL 01:24:37 That sounds like Pinky and the Brain. Okay, so continue to send us your feedback and your question. Before long, we’ll have another Q&A show like we did last week. It’s pretty cool, huh?
CHRIS 01:24:48 Yep.
CARL 01:24:49 Wow, I guess that’s about it, guys. It’s time to take The Time Tunnel. We’ll jump ahead and we’ll do another show seven days from now. Thank you for listening. [music] Maximize retrieval power!
“All you need is six buttons,” he said. “We can revolutionize the industry.”
It was a bit hard to believe. Color grading was a highly technical, semi-mysterious science. Power windows, HSL keys, tracking masks, eyedroppers, scopes, giant control surfaces in dark suites – our understanding was that you needed power tools to even play the game. A lot more than six buttons.
Nevertheless, it was difficult to discount what Dale was saying. Dale Grahn was a color timer – the film world antecedent to the digital colorist. And he wasn’t just any color timer – he had crafted the look of Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator, Munich, and hundreds of other films. When Apocalypse Now needed to be re-timed for Apocalypse Now Redux, they went to Dale Grahn. When Steven Spielberg needed a color timer, he went to Dale Grahn.
Dale doesn’t immediately slice up the image and start tweaking it. As a color timer, you don’t have those tools. You have to look at the image as a whole, and work with it on its own terms. It’s an absolutely, fundamentally different way to look at an image. Sometimes, that’s a lot more limiting than working with digital tools. Power windows are handy.
Often, the best way to approach these questions is to get back to basics. With, for instance, just six buttons.
“The goal is to learn how to think color,” Dale had said when we first met. It makes sense to us now.
This is just our first collaboration with Dale – we also have some some very exciting tools for film and video editors in the works. For now, we hope you enjoy Dale Grahn Color for iPad. With the app launched, we finally have time to site down with a hot chocolate and try to figure out why, in that one lesson, Dale added those two points of cyan…
To learn more check out http://www.dalegrahncolor.com