Capria TV
A surprising number of HDTV owners don't view any HD content on their sets... and other interesting tidbits.
By Janet Lafleur | March 25, 2008
ABI Research released some highlights of its recent research on HDTV adoption and the viewing habits of Americans. While 41% of Americans have HDTV's, only about half of those HDTV receive any sort of an HD signal. While it might not be too surprising that only one out of Americans can view HDTV in all its glory, it's shocking that another one out of five think they are watching HD when they are just watching a blown up SD image. Lay the blame at the feet of the cable companies. I've been to several living rooms where what's sold as HD looks indistinguishable from an up-converted standard definition DVD. This isn't something I want to be pondering at 2:00 AM as we're perfecting the look of my next HD production.
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On zealots, Kool-Aid drinkers, and the like
By Janet Lafleur | March 24, 2008
Any journalist who has ever written anything even slightly critical of Apple has suffered the wrath of the small, but vocal Apple zealotry. The same goes for the Red camera. In days gone by Media 100 users could get quite agitated as well. Among my colleagues it's a running joke. If you want to boost your numbers, criticize Apple or Red. Today's Boston Globe featured an interesting blurb on the phenomenon. Farhad Manjoo has released some excerpts of his forthcoming book, True Enough.
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XMiL Sequencer offers a way for Avid editors to preserve Red metadata throughout the offline process.
By Janet Lafleur | March 21, 2008
Rainer Standke, longtime participant on the FCP-L and Avid-L2 mailing lists, editor, and software developer, has released XMiL Sequencer. This handy utility allows editors to import file-based camera originals, such as QuickTime movies created from Red's R3D files, into Avid environments while preserving all necessary metadata.
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Broadcast networks charge advertisers more to reach fewer viewers. How long can it last, and what does it mean for independents?
By Janet Lafleur | March 20, 2008
Anyone making a living in video would do well to read this special report on the future of advertising by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It succinctly explains how television advertising rates continue to rise even as viewership declines dramatically. Even before the writers strike threw an anvil to an industry trying to tread water, the numbers were telling:For the first 11 weeks of the 2007-08 television season, prior to the effects of the fall 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, Nielsen data show viewer declines for the crucial 18-to-49 age group of 19.4% for NBC, 16.7% for CBS, 10.5% for ABC and 28.6% for CW. Only Fox improved, with a 3.4% gain.The trend is clear. Broadcast television is fading. Audiences are gathering information and getting entertained elsewhere. With broadband penetration now over 50% in the US, web video may be at a long-awaited inflection point.
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Q: Can Media Composer at $2,495 compete with Final Cut Studio? A: It doesn't have to.
By Janet Lafleur | March 17, 2008
Avid's finally taken the action many have been calling for. It's decided to simplify its product line, dropping Xpress Pro and lowering the price of Media Composer. Details here.The consensus in various forums and mailing lists is that this is another example of too little, too late from Avid. I respectfully dissent. Too late? Only time will tell. Back in May 2006 I suggested it was time to put Xpress Pro out to pasture to gasps from Avid marketing types in the audience. Too little? That's harder to say. By maintaining its distance from Final Cut Pro in terms of pricing, Avid is saying that it doesn't compete on price with Final Cut Pro. Now Avid has to articulate its justification for that strategy.
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Mobile video's not hit the mainstream... yet.
By Janet Lafleur | March 07, 2008
A Pew Internet and American Life Project survey on mobile and wireless usage contains few surprises. Traditional television's importance to the average American is diminishing while dependency on mobile phones and internet access grows. For the first time, a majority of Americans with mobile phones said the devices would be very hard to give up, yet only 43% said television would be hard to give up.
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Unlike NBC's use of the internet as a minor league tryout space, Disney-ABC create content exclusively for IP and mobile.
By Janet Lafleur | February 29, 2008
The Disney-ABC Television Group announced the launch of Stage 9 Digital Media yesterday. Stage 9's mission is to bridge the gap between user-generated content and broadcast network programming. (I thought that's what Fox does.) Still, there's quite a space between cats using the toilet and Scrubs. First out of the gate is "Squeegees," a series exclusively distributed on YouTube. The formula might work. "Squeegees" does have higher production values than most anything else featured on YouTube. Its lower production costs allow for more experimentation, and its web presence allows for instantaneous data measurements of audience size, length of visit, and click-through. Networks now have the means to get more young talent in pipelines.
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Quarterlife premieres tonight. A not very successful web series jumps to network TV.
By Janet Lafleur | February 27, 2008
Quarterlife is a series about those people you couldn't stand in college and didn't care what happened to them afterwards. As Friends proved, that can be a successful formula. What makes Quarterlife interesting is that the series, originally rejected by ABC, began its life on the web. What makes it really interesting is that it wasn't terribly successful -- many episodes drew only 100,000 or so viewers.
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It's time for Apple to embrace Avid's codec strategy
By Janet Lafleur | February 25, 2008
Apple's ProRes codec is great, boasting great images and manageable files sizes, but its wider adoption is hampered by its proprietary distribution model. When Apple got into the editing business at the turn of the century it was a very different company. Avid had threatened to abandon the Mac platform, and Apple wanted to continue selling high end workstations to the professional video market. Few dared to imagine that Final Cut Pro would eventually challenge Avid as the dominant professional NLE. While I've been quite pleased using ProRes 422 as an editing codec, I've been hampered in adopting it in a wider range of tasks. Visually, ProRes compares well to Avid's DNxHD family of codecs, but unlike DNxHD ProRes is Mac-only. I can't send a ProRes encoded QuickTime file to a PC for encoding, as a source for After Effects work, or import into an Avid or Premiere Pro system. Because Avid's DNxHD is cross-platform, and Avid has a track record of supporting legacy codecs in later revisions, I have used all manner of Avid codecs for archiving purposes.
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With lots of bandwidth on the auction block, IPTV may become viable.
By Janet Lafleur | February 25, 2008
Last week Harris released the results of its survey of broadcasters making the switch to DTV. U.S. broadcasters said they expect to meet the FCC-mandated Feb. 17, 2009 deadline. That frees up a whole lot of spectrum -- 60 MHz in the 700 MHz band -- with companies like Apple and Google, gobs of cash in hand, to grab a chunk once it hits the auction block. This is the kind of stuff that usually flies under my radar, but it got me thinking. Should Google, Apple, or even Micro-hoo! opt to build a nationwide WiFi network, opportunities for independent video distribution will abound. Devices like the iPod Touch will make mobile video a reality as 3G operators like AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon cling to outdated broadcast models for mobile video distribution.
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By Janet Lafleur | February 14, 2008
Ever need to convert a puny JPEG or GIF of a client logo to EPS so you could scale it up? Adobe Illustrator's Live Trace will do the job, but I don't always have access to Illustrator on the client's NLE. This handy web application does the trick quite nicely.Update 2/27/08: Vector Magic has officially moved away from Stanford and is operating independently at vectormagic.com. It is no longer a free service, though the first two image conversions for new account holders are free.
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By Janet Lafleur | February 12, 2008
Yesterday Avid announced the appointment of Kirk Arnold as the new Executive Vice President and General Manager of the pro video unit. Most customers won't know Arnold. Once againCEO Gary Greenfield has hired from outside the video industry, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. A former colleague of Arnold's at NerveWire told me, "If Avid is looking to create/expand their professional service offerings then Kirk could be a good fit." She is known among colleagues for her energy, approachability, and leadership skills.As NLE software and hardware become commoditized, professional services (consulting) is exactly where Avid needs to go. Of course this is also a somewhat disappointing announcement to many Avid users and customers as Arnold is taking Graham Sharp's position. Word from Avid yesterday was that Graham is remaining with the company, but his role is to be determined. Ideally Sharp would maintain a leadership role in product development while Arnold concentrates on expanding professional services. Farewell Xpress Pro?Sharp's most notable move during his year or so heading up pro video was pulling Avid out of IBC and NAB. It will be interesting to see if that remains Avid's strategy along with other initiatives in the works by Sharp. One well-placed source recently told me that Avid was set to announce the consolidation of the Media Composer and Xpress Pro lines (a move long overdue) with the cost of Media Composer software dropping by half. Xpress Pro and Liquid customers would be given $500 upgrade options. Some hardware was also going to have price cuts, with Adrenaline HD dropping below $20,000. If Avid's putting more of an emphasis on professional services for large installations, these moves still make sense. The question becomes: How much development resources continue to be given to Media Composer? The upgrade offer for Liquid users leads me to believe that the Pinnacle line might sold off.
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By Janet Lafleur | February 08, 2008
Both Apple and Avid cited the same reasons for taking a pass at this year's NAB convention, claiming they can spend valuable marketing dollars meeting customers in smaller venues. Avid expected to spend $6 million in Vegas before pulling the plug, averaging just about $60 per attendee. Taken at face value, the companies' decisions make sense. Let's face it. How many of us get any information in the booth that we can't get online from our hotel rooms? Booth presentations are so tightly scripted that by Wednesday my colleagues and I have most of them memorized. There's nothing to learn in the booth, and quite often the presenter knows nothing more than the script. Those offices camouflaged within the giant set pieces throughout the booth are another story. That's where the suits court the checkbooks. Avid's booth attracts checkbooks. Last year Avid may not have made any groundbreaking announcements at NAB, but tumbleweeds certainly weren't drifting through the booth either. Sell a couple of dozen Interplay installs, a hundred or so Unity Isis systems, and, more importantly, get a bunch of qualified leads for large facility installations, and that $6 million isn't too badly spent. Is there another reason why Avid opted out? For Apple, the overwhelming bulk of its sales are $1,300 boxes of software, and while a goodly number of broadcast executives come to kick the tires at the Apple booth, they must driven to distraction by the ironic t-shirt, thick-framed glasses, iPod-toting crowd three deep at every station. The Apple booth at NAB in recent years looks more like the Apple Store on Black Friday than a gathering of broadcasters. In fact, even Apple's big Sunday press conference has taken on the personality of a rock concert. Nearly everyone attending NAB can attend the press event. It's hard not to get invited. The place is loaded with giddy fans. Every announcement is followed by wild applause. Even features that have been in competing products for years are received like the heralding of the invention of the wheel. Don't get me wrong. The products are worthy, it's just the crowd often doesn't understand why. Apple's wildly profitable. An annual $6 million expenditure on Kool-Aid isn't likely to get investors complaining. So why did Apple pull the plug?
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By Janet Lafleur | February 04, 2008
As a consumer device, Apple TV is a typical first generation technology endeavor. Basically Apple took the iPod formula and applied it to IPTV -- create a basic, no frills piece of hardware in an elegant wrapper, but give it a best in class UI.This approach worked for the iPod because an easy to use MP3 player had an easily understandable value proposition to consumers. People wanted these devices, but the market was doing a terrible job meeting those needs. The iPod swooped in and took control of the market.There's not a lot of pent up demand for an IPTV device because No one knows what IPTV is. Very few people want another set top box (STB) clutter their living rooms. Video on demand (VOD) and pay per view (PPV) are doing a solid job of filling Apple TV's niche. There's always NetFlix.Mike Curtis did a nice review on the latest Apple TV update, and linked to some interesting information on Apple TV as a consumer device. No need to recap that. Instead, let's look at what Apple TV's success or failure means to independent content creators.IPTV can be the great equalizer for independents. It has the potential to distribution affordable for even the smallest players. Unfortunately the iTunes store is not independent-friendly. Apple's been unwilling to adopt the Amazon and Yahoo! models of renting space to retailers. If you're not big media, you're not welcome in iTunes -- unless you're willing to give your content away. That means adopting an ad-based model, and that means more work for the independent producer.Enter the Open Television NetworkThe recently launched Open Television Network takes care of all the e-commerce infrastructure, so independents can sell content for download. Once an Open Television account has been created, to the user, it's just like buying through iTunes. Very elegant.The content owner supplies his or her own storage, gets a listing in the Open Television index, and is free to market independently. To date it's the most open, elegant, and affordable means of delivering IPTV content available to content owners. Open Television takes a very reasonable 15% cut of sales. Try getting a deal like that with a traditional distributor.Whether Open Television becomes the dominant platform or not, it has opened up IPTV to the independent.
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By Janet Lafleur | February 01, 2008
It seems appropriate to begin my tenure at a startup with a little advice to others embarking on a startup. Employment in the video industry has always been a little more fluid than in the economy at large. Many of us have been freelancers, solopreneurs, permalancers, or whatever you like to call it for so long that we forget what it was like to take the leap (or get pushed). For very few has the journey gone as planned. For most of us that's exactly what makes it impossible to imagine going back to the 9 to 5, or, more accurately, the 9 to 9 grind. This blog will focus on the business of video. Since I've spent most of my career in post production there will be a lot emphasis on editing, motion graphics, delivery, and distribution. I am an entrepreneur at heart, and that bias will show. Sometimes the horizon will be more distant - pondering things like mobile video, IPTV, and participatory media. Most of the time, though, I'll be writing in the present tense. For those just starting out on their own, the first few months can be an emotional rollercoaster spanning the peaks of exhilaration over unbounded opportunities to the troughs of concerns over the bottom line. To ease the period of transition I give you these bits of advice. 1. Have a business plan. Don't even think of starting a business without one. Business Plan Pro is a great piece of software that will walk you through the process. Treat your business plan as a living document. The media industry moves fast. Even the best business plans can be outdated in a few months.2. Don't entertain the fantasy that you work for yourself. You work for your clients, and with luck you will have a lot of them. When you punched the clock for the man, you had one boss. Now you have many, and they don't care about each other's needs. Learn to manage your time and client expectations. In the long run it's worse to overbook your business than to underbook it.3. Control costs. You've heard the adage: A dollar saved is a dollar earned. It's not. Income is taxed. In the US, a dollar saved is roughly equivalent to a $1.35 earned.4. Cash flow is king. Until you absolutely know your equipment needs, you're better off renting. It also frees you from the responsibility of maintenance. It's the rare videopreneur who has a stable of clients all needing the acquisition and delivery formats. If you do need to buy, finance your purchase. Interest rates are creeping down again, and I'm starting to see business credit cards with 12 months/no interest offers again. If you can't pay for it in 12 months, as a startup you probably have no business buying it.5. You don't need a fancy website. You need a simple, clean website. No splash screens. If a client wants to see your creativity, he or she will go to the portfolio page or request a reel. Everyone hates splash screens. You hate them. So why will anyone like yours? The most important thing is to have your phone number on the homepage.6. Don't spend a lot of time on a reel. Spend time on many reels. Get all your best work together. Compress it for the web and DVD. Create template web pages and DVD menus. When a client requests a reel, grab the three or four clips most pertinent to their needs, and build a custom web page or DVD.7. Don't spend a lot on fancy business structures. Sure, LLC looks really cool on a business card, but in most cases a simple subchapter-S corporation will meet your needs � shielding you from liability while passing profits and, more importantly, losses through to your taxes.8. The first thing you'll miss about punching the clock (aside from punching out at 5 PM) is that steady paycheck. It's getting harder to collect net 30 invoices. Most large companies are paying invoices net 45 these days. Gauge your cash flow needs. When you need cash sooner, offer discounts to clients who pay early. A 2% discount for paying within 10 days often works.9. Never, ever stop selling. Set aside time each week for sales calls. Existing customers are your best leads. Stay in contact. Earlier in the week is better for sales calls. Never sell on Fridays. Do you want to be called by a vendor as you're trying to wrap up your week?10. Stay fresh. Set aside a couple of hours of creative playtime every week. Learn new tricks. Research new technologies. We work in the coolest industry in the planet. Enjoy it. You'll be surprised how much of what you tinker with during your mandated downtime ends up in client work.And of course - hang out here at PVC. Chris and Trish Meyer, Adam Wilt, Mike Curtis, Mark Christiansen - all under one umbrella. How much more do you need to keep abreast and amused?
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By Janet Lafleur | January 26, 2008
As noted nearly everywhere motion graphics artists congregate on the web, QuickTime 7.4 and After Effects don't play nicely together. Apparently Apple's movie rental DRM scheme is the culprit. Any QuickTime render from After Effects that requires more than 10 minutes will generate a permissions error.
There are two obvious options to address the issue: Downgrade to QuickTime 7.3 Render an image sequence and then piece that sequence together in either QuickTime Pro or After Effects.
I'm not a huge fan of downgrading because you just never know if you're going to break something in the process. If 7.4 is working for you aside from this pesky After Effects error, you might want to try this work around. It adds an extra step in After Effects, but it works. Follow these steps:
When it comes time to render your After Effects composition, take that composition and nest it in another composition with the same settings by dragging the composition to the New Composition icon in the Project window. Select the original composition in the project window. Go to the Composition menu and select Pre-Render. The original composition has now been added to your Render Queue. In the Render Queue, edit the Output Module settings so that you are creating an image sequence. (I like .psd files for this because the file sizes are reasonable and the files are written quickly.) Now add the new sequence with the original sequence nested in it to your Render Queue. Set its Output Module to the desired QuickTime settings. Since this sequence will render in much less than 10 minutes, you should have no problem getting a valid QT movie out of After Effects without reverting to an earlier version of QuickTime.
This adds just a couple of minutes to your total render time, and you can leave After Effects to do its thing with a long render without having to manually piece the image sequence together in QuickTime Pro.
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