As wedding season chugs on and weekend after weekend you are accumulating more and more video files from the weddings you are shooting, what is your storage solution for all of that data? Do you have a safe and reliable system to store all of that footage? Or are you living on a wing and a prayer that the stack of portable hard drives in your office doesn’t fail? How are you dealing with multiple editors working on multiple projects? Do you have a central space where everything gets stored?

These are the types of questions that can keep wedding cinematographers up at night if you don’t have a solid system in place. We all battle the bulge so to speak of how to store the massive amounts of data that we shoot. Take a look the system that Serendipity Videography has implemented as their storage solution. Whether you are a volume shop or a boutique studio it is a solid option for your studio no matter the amount of weddings you shoot a year.

TarynP

Taryn Bills attended Arizona State University and graduated Cum Laude from the Walter Cronkite School of Broadcast Journalism. She worked in community relations at the Phoenix NBC affiliate, then moved on to an account executive position for Infinity Broadcasting where she discovered her passion for Sales and Marketing. After 3 years she left radio for a 3-year stint in pharmaceutical sales, during which time she and her husband started Serendipity Videography. She has served as the sales and marketing director of award winning Serendipity for 6 years as well as with their baby sister company Simply Cinema. When she is not busy growing her own businesses, she offers marketing and consulting services for various companies who need assistance in growing their brand and increasing their sales.

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G’day, blog followers!

Jet Kaiser here today to share a little time/money saving technique for us event filmmakers.

Those that are using DSLR’s know that it can be a pain to locate clips and stay chronological when editing from multiple cameras. When you transcode your footage, the original date created time is terminated since it is a newly created clip, making it impossible to view the clips chronologically once in FCP. Batch renaming your clips prior to transcoding will ensure that your clips stay together just as they were shot. When you are editing, you will have all you ceremony footage together and the toasts and dances from all angles will be sequentially and chronologically numbered to the precise second.

Batch renaming workflow is as follows-

1. Back up the footage!
2. Place all of the footage from all your cameras into one folder (some might choose not to include prep footage with the batch considering their might be footage from 2 different locations that you might not want to be sequenced together).
3. Using a renaming program, batch rename all the clips together while the files are arranged under “original date created”. Renaming a file does not change the date/time created (shot), only the name.
4. Transcode files as normal (MPEG Streamclip, Compressor)
5. Import in FCP

First and foremost, this workflow has increased our delivery times and has saved us a lot of time searching within our FCP browser to find related clips. Batch renaming clips might not be for everyone, especially those using the EOS plugin within FCP. I have not found a way to log and transfer renamed clips using this plugin.

Download Many Tricks’ Name Mangler

Thoughts? Comments? Am I out of my mind? Let me know (in the nicest way possible) by commenting below.

Bye!
Jet Kaiser
Jet Kaiser Films

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

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Dead Pixels are frightening. It’s not if, it’s when. When will your camera, whether it be an older 3-chip camcorder or a brand-spanking new DSLR, lose one of it’s many precious picture elements?

Back in October 2009, I was excited about the release of the Canon EOS 7D and I purchased one right away. It was a perfect new addition to our camera family but after 3 months of using it something dreadful happened. Three white, stuck pixels started to form during an all day wedding shoot. Since the 7D’s LCD screen is only capable of showing about 50% of the 2 million + pixels that make up a full HD image, we didn’t noticed the faults until reviewing the clips in 1080p the next day. The 7D was sent off for repair while we were left with footage that needed repaired as well.

There are many methods on how to repair a dead or stuck pixel, but that’s a post for another time. In this post I am interested in showing you a great solution for repairing dead pixel footage rather than repairing the camera’s sensor.

The solution for Final Cut users is Reincarnation from Digital Heaven. Reincarnation is a plug-in for Final Cut Pro that does what it what is claims by “Bringing dead pixel back to life.” Reincarnation copies the information from the nearby functional pixels to mask the dead/stuck pixel area. I’ve decided not to create a tutorial on using this software because a very worthy tutorial has already been produced by its creators.

It sells for $59 at the Digital Heaven store and is definitely worth looking into whenever one of your camera’s pixels decides to give up the ghost.

I appreciate your comments

Jet Kaiser
Jet Kaiser Films

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

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I’m a big fan of saving time. Digital Heaven has produced a helper application called Loader for Final Cut Pro users that helps us do just that. It’s very simple and worth looking into.

Jet Kaiser
Jet Kaiser Films

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

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Color grading is a necessary step in making our wedding videos look more like films. Are some of you skipping this step? Not sure what color grading is?  Even worse, do you know what needs tweaking but just don’t take the time to do it?

I’ve been using NewBlueFX as a quick and powerful tool to get my films to pop for about a year, now. (Ray Roman and Adam Forgione also use this powerful plug-in to get their amazing coloring in their films.)  Up until I used NewBlueFX, I was using Magic Bullet to do my color grading. Magic Bullet is great, but the render times were KILLING me. I needed something quicker for my Same Day Edits.

Color Fixer Plus, a filter part of NewBlueFX’s first (of now 4!) Video Essentials collections came to the rescue. It’s part of a set of 10+ filters that includes things such as “flash remover, detail enhancer and many more that I use on a regular basis.

It’s so easy to tweak the film gamma and color saturation of your clips with this tool, and in this industry, if you can save time, you save money! Check out the video sample above to see what my clips look like after I drop the “Color Fixer Plus” filter on my clips. If you want to learn more, definitely head over to their site, http://www.newbluefx.com/ for more details. And you also need to check out their new facelift filter! It removes wrinkles!

On a side note, I am also thrilled that NewBlueFX recently came on board to be a new sponsor of my videographer coaching site because these folks have saved my butt in the editing suite countless times.

“Head Coach” of Wedding and Video Pros
Matt Davis
Life Stage Films + Video Business Coaching

Matt Davis

Matt Davis (coaching at lifestagefilms.com) of Life Stage Films has been described as the “head coach of wedding videography,” providing one-on-one business coaching as well as group coaching webinars. A featured speaker at both WEVA 2009-10 and IN[FOCUS] 2010-11, as well as a multiple CEA award winner and 2009-10 EventDV 25 All-Star, he is based in Wilmington, N.C.

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Do you use ISO? No, I’m not talking about adjusting your camera’s gain, I’m talking about ISO image files.

An ISO image (International Standards Organization), also known as a disc image, is a file that stores data that is used for optical media. An ISO image is basically a container that holds all the data (video & audio tracks, menus, navigation & behaviors) that makes up your finalized DVD. ISO images are a great way to store your completed project.

We use Adobe Encore CS5 to author our Blu-rays and DVDs and I highly recommend it. I see Encore (and other DVD authoring programs such as DVD Studio Pro, Sony DVD Architect, etc) as a program solely for authoring, not burning. Just like the author of a novel doesn’t print his own books, we avoid burning our optical media within our authoring software. You are much more likely to encounter errors while burning if you burn within the authoring program instead of software design for burning.

OUR PROCESS:

After building our DVD project in Encore, we use it to build an ISO image. We then open the newly created ISO image with Toast 10 Titanium Pro and burn it to Blu-ray or DVD.

After burning the Blu-rays or DVDs for our clients, we burn one extra copy for our own physical archive (yes, we have a library made up of all our past weddings, it’s kind of like our trophy case) and then we store the ISO image inside our client’s project folder on a hard drive.

If the client wants to order more copies in the future, we can easily bring that ISO file back into Toast and burn any amount necessary. We do continue to store the Encore project for 6 months in case there is an issue within the navigation, typos or what ever might need revised. ISO images are easily managed, as there is only one file per project to worry about.

On a side note, please don’t rush your burners. Always burn your DVDs as slow as possible. The faster you burn the more chance you have of errors in playback. This is no different than driving a car, slow and steady. Just like momma always said, “Slow down!”

In future posts, I plan on getting a bit more in depth with our authoring and storage workflow. Stay tuned!

Jet Kaiser
Jet Kaiser Films

Jet

Jet Kaiser saved up enough money to by his first camcorder at the age of 14 and he's been creating films ever since. He eventually created the Indianapolis-based, Jet Kaiser Films where he collaborates his with his lovely wife, Dani. Together they produce cinematic, story-rich, "motion pictures for those in LOVE™ "

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Click here to view the embedded video.

If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed for me over the past year, it’s my admiration and love of ShootQ! If you have heard me speak you know how much of an evangelist I am for this amazing and indispensable piece of online software.

The reason I love it so much is because as a creative professional and small business owner, my customer service and my time are the most important things to me. ShootQ gives me both! Sometimes, words are cheap, so I just wanted to show everyone out there first hand, whether you already use ShootQ or not, how ShootQ can help your business organize your leads and clients, your packages and your contracts, financials and forecasts, and how it creates “workflows” for you so you are always on top of the tasks that need attention now.

I’ve even heard from some of you, saying you have ShootQ, you can see the potential, you just don’t know where to start. This video shows you the “backend” of Life Stage Films. I hope it helps you understand the power of this amazing software. Let me know if it helps you!

“Head Coach”
Matt Davis

Matt Davis

Matt Davis (coaching at lifestagefilms.com) of Life Stage Films has been described as the “head coach of wedding videography,” providing one-on-one business coaching as well as group coaching webinars. A featured speaker at both WEVA 2009-10 and IN[FOCUS] 2010-11, as well as a multiple CEA award winner and 2009-10 EventDV 25 All-Star, he is based in Wilmington, N.C.

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Hey there kids!

If you are shooting video using any of Canon’s DSLR cameras, check out this video! You are going to want to know how to use this plugin for Final Cut Pro…it has some interesting features that are worth taking a look! You can download the plugin here.

Catch ya on the flip side.

E

Eric Kmetz

Eric Kmetz is the lead filmmaker for Epic Motion, based in Detroit, MI. Named one of the 2010 EventDV top 25 filmmakers, Eric has been a full-time wedding filmmaker since 2009. In his spare time he devotes himself to being as kmawesome as legally allowed. Furthermore, 83% of people agree…he's the bees knees. True story.

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IN[FOCUS] Screen Calibration from Northernlight Filmworks on Vimeo

Greetings from the Hoosier State!

As visual artists we need to make sure we are using all our tools properly to ensure our images are the best they can be.  One way in which we can achieve the best imagery possible is to calibrate our monitors, an oft overlooked step!

In watching this video, you will see how easy monitor calibration is to perform and how much of a difference it makes once performed.  The software we used was Spyder2express.  We purchased it at Fry’s Electronics for approximately  $80.  We did discover that if you have a dual monitor system connected to your editing station, you will need to use the Spyder3Pro.  You can find it at Calibration-Direct for $129.95.

We also asked our friend Steve Zugelter of Studio Z Films to give us his input on monitor calibration.  Here is what he had to say,

“What’s the sense in doing any kind of color correction or grading if your monitor isn’t displaying the images correctly?  For me, monitor calibration is one of the many steps in filmmaking.  We balance the colors in our cameras, why wouldn’t we do the same in post?  Its one more step, but its a vital one in making sure the images you produce are shown exactly how you wanted.  I really believe that the colors and tone of each clip and each film convey a message and if we’re sending the wrong message its confusing to the viewer, much the same as speaking a foreign language to someone that doesn’t understand it. Since I’ve started calibrating my monitors, I’ve noticed a huge difference in how my films look.  I now calibrate them regularly to ensure they are where they are supposed to be and that nothing has drifted.”

Well put, Steve!

We look forward to your comments and experiences.
Jen and John, Northernlight Filmworks

John and Jennifer Moon

Hello In[FOCUS] Reader,

Welcome to the 2nd installment of Organizing Your Workspace!

Our organizing bible is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. He has by far the most in-depth and complete organizational concepts that we were able to find, so much so, it would be the longest post in IN[FOCUS] history if we tried to teach you everything we’ve learned. In part I, Corbin and I shared with you exactly how far we had to go to increase our efficiency by organizing our office and workflow.  Today, this will be more of a teaser for the 3rd and final installment, but also an overview for what you can learn when you read Getting Things Done or listen to the audiobook.

Here are just a few of David Allen’s life-altering strategies and some examples (at the bottom) of how we are implementing them:

The Major Change: Getting Everything Out of Your Head

The Two Key Objectives:

• capturing all things that need to get done out of your mind and into a trusted, logical system
• disciplining yourself to make quick decisions about all the inputs you let into your life, so you’ll always have a plan for next actions that you can implement at any time.

Your Daily To-Do list doesn’t work:

• calendars should be sacred, everything for your day should be able to be completed
• not completing the day’s tasks and having to move them to future dates is unproductive and demoralizing
• the very heart of his Daily Action Management Organization are your calendar and Action Lists

Collecting All Your Life Stuff, So You Can Get It Out Of Your Head:

• every open loop is in your collection, so it’s in your head
• have as few as possible in-baskets, but as many as you need
• empty regularly by reviewing them all

Collection Tools (Your In-Baskets):

• physical in-basket
• paper-based note taking devices
• electronic note taking devices
• recording devices
• email

The above bullet points are the tip of the iceberg from the wealth of knowledge we’ve received from David Allen’s program. Here’s how Corbin and I have implemented it thus far:

• purchased 2nd editing system: MacBook Pro
• bought the latest version of Final Cut Pro Studio and maxed out our RAM for faster editing
• upgraded to Leopard Mac OS
• bought large and small notebooks for more comprehensive note taking
• upgraded our digital calendar and in-basket with Entourage
• organized our GoDaddy email
• said goodbye to our outdated PC and networked our Mac Pro and MacBook Pro with an Airport Extreme
• upgraded our business cell phone with a Verizon EnV Touch
• purchased Quickbooks for easier bookkeeping and bill pay
• hired Donna and her team of We Keep Books for training in Quickbooks and to catch our books up for the year

Our upcoming goals to accomplish a more carefree, efficient life:

• desks with greater workspace and storage capacity
• physical in-baskets
• large paper filing system
• shelving for closet, The Container Store can customize to fit your storage needs

In the third and final entry in this series, we will show you how we executed what we’ve learned from Getting Things Done and how it has benefited our workflow and business!

Dave and Corb, Soulbox

Dave and Corbin Baxter