Take a sneak peak behind the scenes at the HDM/Lovestruck studios, where we will share tips on workflow, organization, communication, transportation, and more! Of course. we can’t forget about the toys! You will get a glimpse of what goes on inside the walls of our Southern California production house, meet our full time staff, and maybe learn some tips along the way!
We shot and edited this in an afternoon, so naturally there is a lot we could not touch on. Feel free to ask questions!
We are very excited to announce another addition to our IN[FOCUS] 2011 lineup – the brothers Bui, Lan and Vu. In inviting these webvideoDSLRworkflowphotographic consultants to our gathering, we are continuing to bring together a “meeting of the minds” across disciplines to share with you how you can supercharge your business in solid, inventive ways.
The Bui’s will also be conducting a hands on photographic lighting workshop attached to our event on Sunday, January 23rd from 1-7 p.m. For existing photographers and beginners dipping their toe into the photography world, you will learn how to use off camera lighting, natural light, and flattering angles to create the “perfect headshot.” Registration goes live Wednesday, so stay tuned to our twitter to get the first word and to learn more about the workshop.
Since I’ve been following what the Bui brothers do for a long time, I could gush quite a bit about them – but I’ll let them speak. Read their bio below:
[NAME] The Bui Brothers, Lan and Vu Bui
The Bui Brothers are photographers and cinematographers specializing in online media and promotional photography. Vu and Lan Bui both started personal videoblogs in January, 2005 and have created hundreds of episodes of online content for Noodle Scar, the [b] school blog, and Ask Dane. As early adopters of creating video with DSLR’s, the Bui brothers, along with Smashface Productions, shot the first US television commercial on the Canon 5D mark II.
On the photo side, they are called upon to create promotional and conceptual photography for many web and television personalities such as iJustine, Ask a Ninja, Veronica Belmont, and Felicia Day.
With their expertise across the disciplines of DSLR filmmaking, videoblogging, and photography/video lighting, the Bui Brothers have been invited to present at SXSW, The Photog Retreat, Converge, PhotoCine Expo, and Pictage Partnercon. As entertaining as they are informative, the Bui Brothers communicate both the artistic, the futuristic, and common sense-tistic in a unique and engaging manner.
[CRAZIEST EXPERIENCE ON THE JOB] “We were hired as Directors of Photography for a short. Throughout the day the director kept disappearing right before we started to shoot a scene, so we went to the producers and got them to straighten him out. Right before the next shot, he came up to us and started talking about how we needed to move things along because the day was almost over…? Then he says, “We can’t take any more breaks because we are running out of time…so I’m going on a smoke break and we’ll shoot the next shot when I’m back.”
[Our SERVICES STAND OUT BECAUSE] “We love to try new things… like when no one was using the 5D mark II for video we shot the first US broadcast TV commercial with it (in auto because it didn’t even have manual setting at the time!!!). We are not afraid to try new and unconventional things… like how we use glass table tops or chairs as sliders or dollies.”
[ENJOYS SHARING EXPERTISE ON] “We love to share our lighting techniques because it seems like everyone asks us how we light things… we also enjoy sharing our marketing techniques because you can make more money relatively easily in almost anything you do… as long as you properly market it. We also speak a lot about DSLR gear… both for photos and video. People want to know what to spend their money on… and although we believe you can do great things with literally ANY gear, there are things that will make the path a little easier.”
[A HINT AT MY "GATEWAY TOPIC" IN 3 WORDS OR LESS (OR IN HAIKU)] “Video =’s Money!”
Hey there interwebs! Eric Kmetz here to talk about drive management and how to keep your sanity in doing so.
As video professionals, it’s pretty safe to assume that we don’t store all of our footage, audio, DVD menus, render files, exports, etc, etc all on ONE hard drive. There are two reasons we don’t want to do this. The first is that I’m not sure they make a hard drive large enough to hold all of that data, and the second is you just would not want to put your entire business in the hands of a single hard drive. So, here we are with a ton of hard drives and no idea how to keep track and organize them. What I’m going to do is give you a few quick tips on making your drives more organized and structured.
The first and most important you will want to do is develop a system. Different people will have different methods for organizing their files; however it really comes down to personal preference and what will make you most efficient.
One way to organize is to store certain types of files on specific drives. So you have a set drive for your render files, a drive for exports, etc. Another approach is to organize based on projects, so you keep all files pertaining to a certain project on the same drive. Personally, I like to incorporate a mixture of the two. As much as possible, I will keep files for a project on one specific drive. This makes things easy when switching between open projects because I only have to connect one drive.
There is an exception to this rule. Since we have made the switch to shooting entirely on DSLR’s, we no longer have the luxury of having mini-DV tapes as a backup for our footage. Because these files cannot be recreated like DVD menus and FCP files, all raw footage is treated differently then other files. When copying over files from CF cards, I will put them on drives that are specifically for captured footage. These drives are then backed up onto a second drive and those backups are stored in a fireproof safe. By doing this, we minimize our risk of losing any footage as much as possible.
Regardless of what method you choose when developing an organization system, the most important thing is that you stick to it! Create a manual to keep the procedures consistent throughout the company.
Now that you have a fool-proof system in place, you are going to need a way to keep track of what files are on what drive. It’s quite annoying and inefficient to search through drive after drive looking for one specific file (and then not finding it on occasion). That’s where a disk management program comes in.
For those of you on a Mac, I strongly recommend that you check out DiskLibrary. When I started at Epic, this was the very first recommendation I made for the company. This program will allow you to catalog every hard drive or DVD that you have, so you can browse the list of files on the drive without connecting it to the computer! For more on DiskLibrary, watch the video that accompanies this post. I go into a little more detail on the program, and how it can help you.
One final piece – RAID’s. There are two main types of RAID (or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks), RAID 0 and RAID 1. A RAID 0 array is known as a striped raid. To put it simply, this takes two identical hard drives and combines them into one drive. So two 500GB drives become one 1TB drive. The data is then written onto both drives sequentially, and therefore increases the speed and performance of the drive. I would not recommend creating a striped RAID set using external hard drives because of the increased possibility of data corruption when drives are moved. A good place to incorporate this is your computers internal hard drive (if possible).
The other type of RAID is RAID 1 or mirrored RAID. A mirrored RAID takes two identical hard drives and creates one single hard drive. The data is then written identically onto both hard drives. The drive can continue to operate and data can be accessed if one of the hard drives fail. It is important to note that using a mirrored RAID can become complicated if data is written to one drive while the other is not connected, thus degrading the RAID set. In short, mirrored RAIDs are not the ideal solution for data backup.
Well, there you go kids. I hope this post has helped you sort out the best solution for managing and organizing your hard drives. As always, if you have any additional questions feel free to email me at eric[at]epicmotion.com, or reach out to me via twitter, @erickmetz.
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