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Scott Simmons wrote an open letter to cameratechs, Please label tapes and disks: An open letter to DPs, camera ops, DITs. He pleads to label tapes/harddisks in the following matter:

a descriptor of the project

date of acquisition

resolution w/ progressive or interlaced

frame rate

acquisition codec

camera used

contact information for questions

notes

So a tape label might look like this:

Fluffo corporate video
6/25/09
1080i
29.97
HDV
Canon HV20
Michael Bey cell 555-1212
director shot 24p

All pretty reasonable, and should be adopted as common practice. Actually, I would suggest adding ratio, operator and sound information.

Download the pdf

I prepared a simple form in the popular .pdf format that you can download here: Tape card

I also added a line for ratio, pre-filled some standard values, and added some info as to sound. Feedback is very welcome!

You can print out a couple of these sheets, cut them in fourths and have them in the camera bag. Even when you are in a hurry, you can quickly give valuable information to the hard working editor. (If you have an inkjet printer, it might be an idea to get those labels photocopied, so that they will survive the rain you and your camera will have to endure.)

…and since we are into co-operation: An open letter to editors

Dear editors, it would be great if you could give us camerafolk some feed-back about the raw footage. Both what you liked (we are humans, too), what is useless, what would make your life easier, and any other form of constructive criticism. (And if you could make a copy of the finished edit in the highest possible quality, you are entitled to some serious cameraman love )

As a follow-up to yesterdays’s post on Clients not paying, here is one from the writer’s perspective – but that one works just as well for any one who has ever worked for “deferred payment.” I’ve done that mistake as well, and of the maybe dozen (mostly short) films I’ve done that way, I ended up getting paid exactly zero times. And I have never met a single sould who did end up getting some money from a deferred payment job.

If you need the experience, you may consider working for free – just do not fall for the production assistant’s crap promising money down the line. If a film by chance should turn out to be a financial success, any self-respecting producer will immediately start a new production company, sell all rights to the film to this new company, and can rake in all profits.

And when it is time to make the next, proper budgeted, film, guess who they will not call? You. Because if you work for free, you can’t be any good, right?

Harlan Ellison with sharp, sharp teeth

Ellison is a veteran Hollywood writer, and even he get occasionally asked to do freebies. Here is an extract from the documentary “Dreams with sharp teeth”

If you are intrigued as I was, have a look at the well made trailer:

It made me order the DVD.

Before Graeme Nattress started at RED he was very well known for making exceptional plug-ins for Final Cut Pro. To celebrate his interview in the Digital Producer Magazine, Graeme currently makes his Bleach Bypass filter available for free. You can read the whole article to find the link, or click here. Installations instructions are on page two of the interview.

On a current job the client wants the videofiles on an external harddisk in FAT32. One of the problems with FAT32 is of course that it doesn’t allow for file sizes of 4GB or bigger, which translates to roughly 20min of DV material, and less on better codecs.

One way would of course be to use Final Cut, iMovie or QT Pro to mark each 15 minute segment, and export that to the external harddisk. This means a lot of button pushing, when there are hours of material to be transferred.

Doing a longer search on Macupdate did not come up with any easy solutions. So here is a step by step guide for non-geeks. Those who know their way around UNIX will probably know of a quicker solution…

Solution

1. Fire up OSX’s Terminal (Go to programmes > Utilities > Terminal, or just do a search from Spotlight)
2. Enter this command (copy & paste works; this will make the Finder restart and then display also hidden files): defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder
3. Download the manual install version of QTCoffee – look for the .dmg file, or the “manual install package”.
4. Open the disk image file (double click on the just downloaded file.)
5. Open the QTCoffee folder.
6. Open the bin folder
7. Open a new finder window (pressing Command-N or from the file menu)
8. Open your system disk
9. Open the bin folder
10. From the other finder window, drag the file “splitmovie” to the newest window
11. In the Terminal enter defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder This restarts the Finders and hides the system files again.

Now you are done with the installation part. Now, if you want to split a video file, simply enter the following code into the Terminal: splitmovie /volumes/sourcedisk/original.mov -duration 10:00 -self-contained -o /volumes/targetdisk/split.mov Sourcedisk is the name of the disk that contains your source footage, target is the name of the targetdisk and duration is the length of each segment (in this case 10:00 minutes). Afterwards you can drag and drop the split files from the finder.

If you need to split AVI files, you can have a look at Explicit.

I always find it tedious to keep all my software updated. AppUpdate is a free widget that scans your harddisk for programes, and then checks the versions number against a list on Apple’s software directory, MacUpdate and Version Tracker. Once it is finished — and this goes surprizingly fast — you are presented with a simple list that shows all available updates, with links to the respective download pages. All for a very affordable 0 Euro/Dollar/Yuan.

Further soft

Georg Kaindl, the programmes, also makes a little widget for the iPhone/iPod Touch that quickly checks the TV schedule of Austrian TV channel ORF, for whom I have worked a couple of times. Another iPhone App makes for quick getting-around in Vienna (which is a phantastic town, with more than enough historic places).

For the financially challed film producer, Good Music often is out of reach. There are many so-so sources for CDs full of royalty free music (we own a huge library of those and hardly ever use it – unless we need something cheesy).

Then there are places where you can preview and download music for a fixed fee per piece (Shockwave Sound and Q Music being my preferred ones), and then there is our dear Kevin MacLeod. He offers his collection of music free, as long as he gets credit in the film. If, for some reason, you cannot or do not want to credit him, you can pay a little fee (30 USD).

And now music artist Moby has made his own mini-website where he published over 60 tracks that can be used free of charge for non-commercial productions (commercial productions have to pay a standard fee, the full amount of which will be donated to a good cause). Here’s the incredibly blurry announcement:

A good while back I posted a list over (then) available cool domain names. Most have been taken by domain sharks in the meantime. Here is a new list, this time with a twist: To avoid that they are snapped up by people who have no interest in using them, I have become a domain shark myself. But a low budget one. Each domain is available for 50 bucks, which won’t make me a internet millionaire, but will cover my expenses. If needed, I can help you get started with your own blog, by setting up your very own WordPress installation, and/or — for a fee — I can do customized work.

Available .com domain list

So, without any further delay, here is my new list of cool & available .com domain names:

• antidivine.com
• chiefest.com
• eyeish.com
• firearmed.com
• godred.com — must be perfect for a Red One owner/operator
• noodleism.com — for believers in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
• normaliser.com
• roxanes.com — if your name happens to be Roxane
• surfmanship.com — isn’t that one just cool?
• tridaily.com — if you plan to blog three times per day
• untakeable.com

Just leave a quick comment if you are interested, and I get back to you. (The e-mail address you leave will only be visible to me.)

Picture credit: Slap upside the head

These past weeks I have worked on a couple of web pages. In the course of it I came across some helpful sites that I want to share with you.

Flash files (from good to awesomely mindblowing)

Flash Den is a relatively new site, offering mainly Flash files. They have all from small pre-loaders to full webpages. And most of them of an exceptional quality.

In addition they also have royalty free music loops, some video files and graphics on offer. Plus a few fonts. But their main business is Flash.

Stock Photos (affordable)

iStockPhotos offers royalty free photographs for all kinds of usages. You can chose the size of the picture you buy, and a photo can cost just above $1. They have gained both size and quality, but unfortunately have increased the prices, while lowering the pay-out for the original photographers.

Still, you can easily browse for hours in their exhaustive library, searching for subjects, themes, emotions, colors, even whitespaces. Additionally, iStockPhoto also offers graphics, good vectors, cheap videos and lower quality flash files. One nice feature is that you can save interesting photos in your own lightboxes, leaving them for purchase at a later point. Or you can share your lightbox with a client.

If you have some good photos rotating away on your harddisk, you can start selling those pictures at iStockPhoto. Hey, you even can get some of my photos there.

Ajaxising (without knowing Ajax)

For the portfolio section of our new webpage I used a donation-ware component by Kevin Miller, called LightWindow. Besides adding that Ajax feel to your website (opening links without having to re-load), it also enables you to play back pretty much any media format around. Lots of options.

And if you use it, send some PayPal love to Kevin, so that he can get his well deserved Power Book Pro.

Shopping Cart (open source)

If you need a cart system for your website and you want to avoid having to pay hundreds of dollars in royalty payments (and probably some monthly fees), Zen Cart is definitely worth a look. Though it has a somewhat messy admin interface, it leaves you space for many tweakings. There are numerous extensions available, such as plug-ins, language packs, buttons and a couple of free templates.

See it live on our company’s brand new (and Norwegian language) shopping site.

Content management (minus the pain)

Now 1 1/2 years old, this blog has always run on WordPress. Though I’ve had some Windows like experiences, by and large I am impressed by this powerful — and free — tool. So impressed, that I have used it as the CMS for our new webpage.

With the new version of WordPress, I can even be lax with using links. A page that is really located at, say, www.abitofmagic.no/english/services/eng-crew can also be reached by www.abitofmagic.no/eng. The magic happens without me having to do anything.

Of the many good plug-ins around, the one I want to mention today is WordPress automated plug-in, which takes the pain out of upgrading your blog. Which is especially nice when the frequency of those updates increases, and exponentially higher when you have more than one copy of WP running. I’ve used it on most of the 5+ WordPress sites that I maintain, without a single glitch.

Graphic Freebies (quality, not quantity)

One of my favorite blogs on graphic design, BitBox, regularly offers high quality freebies, be it web 2.0 buttons, high res Photoshop brushes or vector graphics.

Photoblogging (free)

Pixelpost is to photos what wordpress is to writing. One great software to easily, yet beautifully, churn your digital photos into an on-going on-line publication. Lots of followers, translating to many exciting add-ons. Recently they also took the important step of easing the process of upgrading to new versions.

For fun, I am occasionally posting pictures on my pblog over at visualnary.com

Gems from the Web:

• Inter-city beauties: 1927 – A Site posting 100 year old photographs, one per day. This one shows beauties from 1927.
• Afterglow: Home of Icon Designer & Illustrator Cian Walsh – Nice collection of icons from Ireland
• Animated cursor flaw discovered for Windows – Seems that MS is still sloppy… The update to this story centers on some important points which again call Microsoft’s security practices into question.
• Take Action: Pamela Anderson’s Explicit New Video – PA runs a petition agains KFC because of their alleged cruel tratment of chicken

Gems from the Web:

• Checking the back focus – A brief explanation alongside a printable siemens star for easy back focus calibration.
• ISO 12233 Test Chart – Resolution test chart for HD
• Video Resolution Test Patterns – Nice collection of downloadable test patterns for video cameras
• bartek:bargiel : iGTD – Freeware organizer for the Mac
• MacUser: Want to download YouTube videos? Kiss them – Simple way of downloading YouTube videos that are worth keeping
• MacUser: 10.4.9 brings new phone sync compatability – …but my p990i – the so-called top-of-the-line phone from Sony Ericsson – still does not sync.