Tilt Media Blogspot

Link: http://www.tiltmedia.com/news

Good news in this economy is great. We got a call a while back that the Wisconsin State Journal wanted to do a feature story on our Madison Wisconsin video production company. It all started when my commercial realtor, Chris Caulum sent them a press release after we signed on a new building.

They bit.

A few weeks later we had a great write up in the paper and really captured what we've been up to for the past few years. We didn't let the poor economy stop us from continuing to be diversified in our services and to continue to exceed our client's expectations.

Take a look. Be inspired. Think positive. Then go after it.

RJR

We have gotten hard drives from several of our clients so we can transfer footage for them. In many cases they are USB drives, and although they are the least expensive, they are also the worst choice for copying and storing video files.

USB is great because it is universal and allows manufacturers to develop inexpensive products. It is not a great transfer protocol for large files, however. Firewire (especially Firewire 800) is specifically designed for this task. Drives with a Firewire interface are only a bit more expensive than USB drives so look for those if you are planning to copy large files.

Even better, and gaining ground, is the ESATA interface. Although these drives will require a power source (many USB and Firewire drives can run on bus power) ESATA drives need an external source. Other than that an ESATA drive can provide up to 4 times faster file transfers than even Firewire 800, making it the best choice for editing right off the drive.

You will need an ESATA card since most computers won't have an ESATA port built in, but it's worth the time you will save copying files.

Leave the USB-only drives to consumers....if you are a video professional go for the Firewire 800 or ESATA drives for sure.

Here's why rates are both necessary and impossible. We have two methods to come up with an estimate for a given project. One is to estimate hours based on similar projects we have done and apply our rates. The other is to compare the project we are estimating with similar projects and come up with a cost per finished minute for the video.

Our rates are derived partly from market value (what our market will bear) and calculations that will allow us to run a successful business!

But an estimate is just that...so what do you do if the project goes over the estimate? Better question...why does this happen?

Here's the rub. We estimate based on pretty general ideas on what the creative will look like. Once we get into a project we may discover a new interesting approach, or worse, find out our original approach takes longer than we estimated.

From the client side, they expect the estimate will prove accurate. And I suppose most clients expect that their expectations will be exceeded! At the same time it is my guess that in almost every case our clients have a pretty good idea what they have to spend on their project. They rarely tell us, but we wish they would. It would be much easier from the outset to know what the client's budget is and plan a creative strategy to meet that amount.

Almost never happens.

I might have a grand vision of what my kitchen remodel might look like but I also know I only have $8000 to get it done. I get estimates from several contractors, but once the contractor gets started, surely certain aspects of the project change. They only estimated, after all.

The process of formulating an estimate is quite an in-exact science. The two most important factors to lock step with an estimate is to know how much the client actually has for a project and make accurate estimates based on previous projects we have done. Er, then add in 20% and hope for the best!

: ) Rich

Link: http://goodstock24.org/

Pro bono. Freebies. Favors. Good idea? Maybe not if you read the latest posts on the Creative Cow Business and Marketing forum. http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/17/867618

Perhaps they never heard of Goodstock. Right here in Madison, smack in the middle of the old friendly Midwest, is where you will find this pretty astonishing event. Founded by the folks at Knupp & Watson it is a 24-hour, 'round the clock event in which the entire agency pulls an all-nighter to complete projects for local non-profit organizations. Radio. Print. TV. Web. You name it. It's an advertising love fest where the end result is…more good.

They involve the nonprofits throughout the process. They educate them. They create between 30 to 40 projects, from kick-off to completion. Then, they collapse. Well actually, first they present all the newly created materials, hot off the presses, ready for broadcast, DVDs brochures, Web sites and the like to the proud recipients.

And this year Tilt Media stepped up to shoot and edit four great video projects...two TV spots and two longer form videos. From shoot to completion we worked thru the night and in about 19 hours pulled off 10 minutes of finished video ready for air and DVD. Whew.

Duke Studell stopped by the studio as well to cut one of the video pieces and we hunkered down and made Tilt Media video headquarters for the Goodstock event. It was truly exhilarating! All four of us working thru the night hours, never stopping, shooting video at 3 am, scanning graphics at 4 am doing music searches, not to mention playing along with Andy Wallman's quick wit and just holding it together until the work was done...
'er right around 11:15 am Friday, just 45 minutes before the showing!

Goodstock is truly good for Madison. This year Knupp & Watson pulled its resources together to help 14 non-profits who truly needed their help in this economy, and we were honored to help out. In the end they were some of the best projects we have done this year and we did them in under 24 hours.

Just shows what you can do when you have a great team, determination and a great cause.

Visit the Goodstock site for more information.

Thanks Knupp & Watson for really showing all of us how it's done.

RJR

I have an old Media Center PC with a Pentium 4 processor running XP. It's the only PC I have at the office and it's getting tired, especially as we ramp up PC encoding tasks. So I went out looking for a replacement.

I got a Costco card recently so while browsing around I saw a pretty good deal on a Dell quad core AMD with 8GB of RAM for about $800 with monitor. I got excited. There were HP and Compaq models that compared to the Dell to choose from as well. They each had slick looking shiny black front panels, but upon closer inspection, I noticed everything was flimsy plastic. Front ports included two USB, a headphone and a mic jack. No firewire. On the back two models had what they call "integrated" graphics. Two of them had a single VGA monitor plug, and since we run two monitors on everything, it was inadequate. It was not clear if any of the models had PCI slots inside to add a video card.

Can you get a quad core PC with 8GB of RAM for under $800. Yes. Will it be flimsy, poorly built and not include a lot of essential options. Yes indeed.

Actually I was quite disappointed. Back home I went online and after about 45 minutes found a decent PC, and with all the options we have come to expect with our Macs, it came to about $2900 with no monitor, comparable to most Mac desktops.

Apple products have always had impeccable build quality. They are solid, well thought out and high quality. Every PC I encountered really felt cheap with profit taking precedence over quality. And even though the $2900 beauty I found online received 4 1/2 stars, users complained of drives that didn't work, bad RAM and other issues. Really? 4 1/2 stars? I didn't buy.

Back at Best Buy the sales guy was having trouble looking up some stats on the AMD versus the new Intel i7 processors online with one of the PC's. "Let's go over to the Macs" he said. Off we went and got the answers we needed. In the end, he convinced me to wait about 2 weeks for the new models loaded with Windows 7 to come out.

I'm guessing more plastic crap.

RJR