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.

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

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 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

Get a load of this paragraph from the September 2009 issue of Wired magazine.

"Cheap, fast simple tools are suddenly everywhere...the low end has never been riding higher. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high quality."

What a tragedy if this article were speaking about video production. Close call...it is actually referring to the latest Flip video cameras, where their feature sets don't match the big boys', but their ease of use and price point are breaking sales records. In fact the Flip products are the best selling video cameras in the US.

But we have seen a trend to the low end in video production too. Everyone thinks they can shoot their videos with a camera they got at Best Buy. And everyone is an editor, now that tools are available with every Mac or PC sold. DVD creation is a few clicks away. The thinking is that since the tools are there, anyone can do it.

Well, rarely.

We will continue to distinguish ourselves from the rest with solid experience and talent...and tools, of course. But the goods we are selling are more the intangibles, the skills that allow us to tell stories in more compelling ways. Being able to integrate the tools and tell your story. And to dance around with all the flavors and formats that video comes in these days. And we'll stand by every edit we make, well placed and thought out, every last one of them. We won't compromise our quality even if the trend is toward cheaper and faster.

It's just not our style.

RJR

If you are a full fledged, card carrying audio pro, do not read this post. It is intended for us lowly editors out here who need a quick and easy way to level out all our voice tracks because their levels are all over the place. A soft spoken school teacher, a big burly construction dude, and a guy who ends his sentences in a whisper, but blasts out certain syllables.

The "easier than one click" solution? Simply....Levelator.

Cut your interviews. Export the file into an Aiff audio file from the timeline. Open Levelator and drag the clip to the Levelator window. That's it. No...really. That's it.

Is it perfect? Well, nearly in my opinion. Audiophiles might besmirch it's true capabilities but in our tests this program is the bomb!

RJR

In our first installment of Freebies I have to kick it off with my all time favorite...MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5. How did they do it? All this functionality, settings for days, batch processing, presets, Mac and Windows, exhaustive format support...whew!

This is a must have utility for video file conversion,DVD ripping (legal only) and all around video converter. It won't replace your favorite encoding app, but it is a tool you will soon wonder how you got by without it.

RJR

I was so used to making a selection from my layers and saving it into the Alpha channel and then saving out a PICT with alpha that I didn't realize this great little shortcut that does not require anything to be pre loaded into the alpha channel. This PNG method also takes any layer styles like drop shadows along with your graphic.

Very sweet little tip....thanks to Dale Doebert who pointed this out to me the other day.

RJR