Bill Cammack » editing

KR3TS 20th Anniversary Dance Showcase

Bill Cammack — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:36:25 +0000

KR3TS (Keep Rising To The Top) Dance Company is performing its 20th Anniversary Dance Showcase on April 8 & 9, 2011.

Visit kr3ts.com to purchase tickets or call +1.646.302.1817.

Here’s a video I edited from dance practice:

Youtube Link => youtube.com/watch?v=A7vUJymfUyE

Song: KR3T’s (kr3ts.com)
Artist: Yannie Falcon (Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | MySpace | Reverbnation) Ft. C-Nos
Video Edit: Bill Cammack
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Final Cut Pro 7

Bill Cammack — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:02:03 +0000

Check out Final Cut Pro 7! Very Nice! :D

~Bill Cammack
Video Editorial

“Street Game” Production Notes

Bill Cammack — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:13:09 +0000

Street Game Production Notes

I just completed a 5-part audio project entitled “Street Game”. The episodes are embedded here, in chronological order. Playing Episode 01 will play all five in order:

Frank, one of my top commenters on my DatingGenius dating blog was the inspiration for this particular project. I rarely find comments amusing, funny or progressive compared to what I personally know about “the game” (getting girls, whatever), but I found myself consistently laughing, learning and THINKING after I would read Frank’s comments on my blog posts. I was reminded of back in the day when my friends and I would spend hour upon hour kickin’ it about what we learned in the trenches with chicks, coming up with new techniques and throwing out techniques that TOTALLY didn’t produce for us! :D I wanted to bring the flavor of that to the net, and I got way more than I expected.

Part of the point of DatingGenius is to let women in on things that guys MIGHT be thinking about them so they have a better idea of what might have just happened to them in their relationships. I already know all this stuff, so there’s no benefit to *me* in telling YOU about it. If I just wanted to have fun conversations like I used to back in the day, I wouldn’t have bothered suggesting doing a podcast to Frank. I would have just talked, and none of youse would have ever heard any of this stuff. We’ve BARELY scratched the surface of topics to discuss, yet we’ve produced 68 minutes of content if you listen to Episodes 01 – 05 back to back.

I’m *VERY* happy with this project so far, and I never cease to get laughs from listening to the episodes, even though a) I was involved in the actual conversation and b) I was the one who had to edit them, so I’ve heard this material at least five times each. One of the things about editing is that the more you listen to something, the more you become immune to the events & punchlines. For some reason, that didn’t happen to me with this project. :D

Technical Issues

“Street Game” was recorded using Skype and a cell phone. I was on skype, using a microphone and Frank was on his phone. Being on the phone instead of sitting in front of a microphone caused two problems (which was my fault, because I was in such a rush to do this project that I selected this format).

#1, Recording this way meant that we had to rely upon the reception of the phone to provide a clear signal. Many times, a clear signal wasn’t present, and some of Frank’s comments were inaudible and I couldn’t retrieve them through editing.

#2, Not sitting in front of a mic meant that Frank’s volume levels were inconsistent, even if the signal itself was good. That was easily dealt with by normalizing the audio, but it’s not the optimum condition under which to record a podcast.

I would still record podcasts using this technique, however I’m aware now of the extra time that it adds between recording and posting the audio to the net. I’d rather avoid that extra time, but it’s completely manageable, and I’m 98% satisfied with the quality of the audio from Frank’s side.

From my side, I should have run my mic through my noise gate before recording it, but I didn’t have time to patch the gate in before recording. This was a project that I had discussed with Frank ahead of time, but the urge to make it happen appeared, I contacted him and ~ an hour later, we were starting the recording. That’s why I say I “didn’t” have time.

Since I didn’t use the noise gate, I had to use a software gate after the fact and also monitor the stream for areas where the gate didn’t catch random sounds/breaths/etc. Had I gated it properly from the giddyap, I could have skipped the noise reduction process as well as the normalization process. The gate would have handled the noise reduction and the compressor/limiter would have handled the volume peaks (making sure there wasn’t so much difference between the loudest and softest audio on my track).

Content

Content-wise, I didn’t take very much out of this conversation. Most of my edits were taking out extraneous noises and shortening distances between where one of us would finish a point and the other realized the point was made. The goal of this project was to give the listener a fly-on-the-wall perspective on a conversation between a couple of guys that felt they both had something to bring to the table as far as the dating scene.

The reason I felt this was unique was that most people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and have ZERO real-life experience to back up their ideas. My experiences and Frank’s are in the same arena but from slightly different perspectives. I consider myself to be from the trenches, but I could tell from his comments on my blog that Frank was way further in the trenches towards the enemy lines… if not BEHIND ENEMY LINES, IN *THEIR* TRENCHES!!! hahaha :D I felt like I could learn things from listening to what he had to say, myself, and not only wasn’t I disappointed, as you can tell from the “tapes”, I had a mind-expanding experience, listening to what Frank was telling me.

This was not a “show”. This is why I didn’t bother to make intros or outtros or talk about websites or subscriptions or sponsors. I wanted to get the material out there for discussion/feedback and then decide which direction I wanted to go with audio. Also, the “Art” of the project includes what I chose to leave in the production, which is mostly everything. I took out some sections where I was trying to figure out what I was trying to say and going “um, well, you see, it’s like, well, what I mean is…”, but other than that, the conversation is mainly completely intact.

If you have feedback, positive or negative, please leave it in the comments below, as it will help me figure out what I want to do going forward in this medium. If you have specific comments about individual episodes, each one has its own entry @ billcammack.com/category/datinggenius/streetgame/, so feel free to click on the link and leave a comment there so we can have relevant discussions to each particular section.

Miscellaneous

One of the things I found about recording audio vs typing text is that without being able to see what you wrote, you can’t be sure of how much of your point you’ve expressed. This entire conversation was freestyle. Frank and I went from topic to topic, and for the most part, we were on exactly the same page. I realized, while editing “Episode 05: Who Should Pay For The Date?” that I made an error in expressing a point and Frank and I actually discussed two different topics simultaneously. :)

At 12:23, I talk about putting a gal in cab home after an evening together. What I failed to say was that I was talking about sending her home AFTER having a good time with her AFTER going to dinner. Since I didn’t say that, Frank rightfully felt like I was talking about the gal leaving directly from dinner. Interestingly enough, the same principles apply in both situations, but there’s an entirely different dynamic with a gal that’s interested in you and is at least emotionally intimate with you and at most physically intimate with you, and a gal that just showed up to get a free dinner and get tipsy off your dime.

I didn’t really understand some of his statements until my third or fourth time through the episode, where I realized he was talking about her leaving right after dinner. I left the conversation in, because it still works and it’s still relevant along the lines of that overall situation.

Also, any of y’all ladies that would like me to take you out to Wendy’s, let me know, so I can practice my menu lines! ;)

~Bill

Twitter: BillCammack
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Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”

Bill Cammack — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:32:52 +0000

One of the things that makes me who I am as a video editor is that I can visualize aspects of the project that haven’t occurred yet. When I see a scene or a picture, I know how it will work (if at all) with other footage I’ve seen. When I hear something, I know what I can use it for. Basically, I create the video while I’m reviewing the footage and then I basically trace what I already saw instead of building a video from scratch and wondering whether it’s going to work or not.

There are a lot of elements that go into making a video that don’t become important until the final output, yet if you don’t pay attention to those elements ahead of time (known as pre-production), you may end up needing to re-do all the work you just did. Elements include frame dimensions (16×9 vs 4×3), frame size (in pixels), data rate, codec, font, font size, lower 3rds, drop shadows, transitions… For just one example, if your video is going to be seen @ 320×180 (width and height, in pixels), you’re going to want to deal with your font sizes differently than if you were going to present in 1280×720 HD (high definition). If you act as if you’re going to output in HD, you might have to change all your titles when the client sees them in 320×180, because they can’t be read.

The reason I bring this up is that this ability increases my efficiency. I know the questions to ask ahead of time so I don’t waste time. Also, I can see my way clear through to the end of the project. I can basically “see” the finished video as if I fast-forwarded time to when I was finished. This is because everything goes onto a “checklist”. If I know what the video dimensions are, I can visualize the size that the final output will be. If I know the font, I can imagine what the text will look like…

OTOH… If I *DON’T* know what the background color is… That becomes apparent to me in my visualization and I ask the client if they want to use a background image or they have a specific color in mind. Same thing for font color or music selection. I have a good basic idea of what’s missing and what I need to figure out ASAP in order to efficiently get the job done.

What does it look like when I don’t know an aspect of a project? It looks…. blank. It looks like nothing. I can’t really explain it. It’s just a lack of data. It’s like in the movies when they’re trying to solve a mystery and you flip to the page you need and it’s torn out of the book. You can’t visualize what’s on the page, because it’s not there, other than perhaps a torn border on the inside.

What do I do when I have zero information? If I’m working on something for a client, I’ll ask them, and the project can resume when they figure it out. If it’s something I’m supposed to be in charge of, then I have to go through the process of research and selection, similar to Time, Part 04: â€œSpend Your Moneyâ€.

The reason that post is called “Spend Your Money” is that there are some things that it’s not worth your time to do. In the time you wasted reinventing the wheel, you could have cleared your desk of other projects and invoiced clients for your time. In that particular case, I searched all over creation for a better solution than was presented to me by a professional and then ended up buying that exact same application anyway, AFTER wasting a bunch of time.

The way I felt when I was trying to find a better solution was the same way I feel when I have no information about an aspect of a project. It’s basically that you’re in the dark and have no clue at this point in time how you’re going to get from point A to point B. IMO, That’s the time that you want to subcontract:

Main Entry:
2subÂ·conÂ·tract Listen to the pronunciation of 2subcontract
Pronunciation:
\ËŒsÉ™b-ËˆkÃ¤n-ËŒtrakt, ËŒsÉ™b-kÉ™n-Ëˆ\
Function:
verb
Date:
1842

intransitive verb
: to let out or undertake work under a subcontract transitive verb 1 : to engage a third party to perform under a subcontract all or part of (work included in an original contract) â€”sometimes used with out 2 : to undertake (work) under a subcontract

The goal of subcontracting is increasing your efficiency on a project and most likely your ROI as well. For instance, I don’t do 3D Modeling. If a client wants a 3D model as a part of their video, there’s NO WAY I’m going to waste MY TIME figuring out how to do it and slooooooowly creating what the client wants with my lack of skill. Nope. I’m going to query people that I know that do that type of thing, check their availability, their interest, the date on which they feel they can deliver the video and how much money they would need to do that. If the client gave me a definite budget for that section, that will be one of the first things I mention so that if the number’s too low, whomever I contacted won’t waste any of their time thinking about a project they’re not going to do anyway.

If there isn’t really a budget for an addition to a project and there’s not going to be enough money for me to bring someone in that knows what they’re doing, that aspect of the project gets VETOED. Period. It’s not happening. “Your budget doesn’t allow for this”.

The reason you want to veto these things (and sometimes the entire project, if the client can’t understand budget constraints) is that in the time you wasted making that model, you could have finished the entire project using skills that are actually in your repertoire. Actually, there’s another option. Bounce it back to the client. “If you want this part done, have it done yourself and get it to me in 1280×720, Apple Intermediate Codec (or whatever) and I’ll cut it into the video.

On top of that, when you work more slowly and you’re not getting paid by the hour, the time you’re spending is becoming “worth” less and less to you and you’re decreasing your own rate. At the same time, if you ARE getting paid by the hour, I think you STILL want to subcontract, because a lot of customers return not only because of your pricing and attention to detail, but also because of your speed of delivery. I think it’s better to spend some of your project’s budget to get a better product than you would have delivered and get it way faster from someone who knows what they’re doing. Also, it’s good business. When you look out for people and pass them work, they’ll look out for you through passing YOU work they find out about that isn’t in their realm of expertise and also by going above and beyond to provide you with excellent work, completed on or before your proposed deadline.

All of this stuff needs to be worked out during pre-production, and you need to put down in writing what you intend to deliver to your client and approximately when. This comes in handy when, down the line, they go “Oh… Can you make it like this?” or “Oh.. Can you change that?”, because they get to see very clearly what you agreed to in the beginning, and you can explain to them how much extra it’s going to cost them to make these changes or bring in subcontractors to replace that photo montage wth a 3D model.

Of course, there are lots of other aspects to deal with. Website creation. CSS Coding. Video Compression for web, television, DVD, etc. Publicity. Community Growth & Management… All these areas and more can bring your production to a grinding halt, so you might want to consider making professional alliances and subcontracting. If you can make a video but you’re not good at making websites, hire someone else to do it. If you can make the site but not tweak it, hire someone to code. If you can get a video to look good in its native format but you’re no good at compressing video for the web or DVD, hire someone else to do it. If you spend all your time creating your show and you have no time to have a presence on your social site and interact with your community, hire a community manager and have them create a list of things for you to do or respond to so you can efficiently maintain a presence and make people feel like they’re actually communicating with YOU and not just on some fansite.

So take a long, hard look at your projects to see if there are areas where the time you’re spending isn’t worth the money you’re getting for that time. Get in tune with your actual strengths and weaknesses in your chosen field. Search for areas where you’re just not that good, and you should really hand the ball off to someone else who can do the job better than you can. Seek out opportunities to turn those empty spaces in your business plan into something that makes sense as far as your ability to complete the project on deadline and within your budget constraints.

~ Bill Cammack

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Talkin’ LOUD, and Sayin’ NOTHIN’! (sayin’ nothin’)

Bill Cammack — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:27:11 +0000

Please keep your eye on the ball, people. Wake up. Stop letting people tell you gibberish that clouds your minds to the facts, if you’re going to hire them to work for you or even associate them with your brand.

Some people in this space are always “Talkin’ LOUD, and Sayin’ NOTHIN’!”. The funny thing about this is that since for the most part, there aren’t real professionals in ANYTHING strewn across the Social Meda Expert world, the only thing that businesses have to make their hiring decisions on is what people tell them who know only marginally more than they do to begin with.

As an example, let’s look at the video aspect of Social Media. Basically, video on the net is an extension of the fad of emailing jokes to people in the mornings. You would come to work and turn on your computer and there would be several jokes emailed to you from people that thought the jokes were funny. Eventually, this style of passing an email from person to person was termed “viral”, and the goal became to make “viral videos”.

Once YouTube came around and other online video hosts, the natural extension of email jokes was videos of kids falling off of skateboards and breaking their faces or some other kind of goofy, talentless video snippet that caused people to go “Oh wow. That was interesting. I’m going to make sure all my friends see this”.

This garbage became the state of the art in viral videos. People began scrambling and falling all over themselves to duplicate the “popularity” of viral videos, because the more people that saw these things, the more hits they got, and the more hits they got, the more people could sell ads on the pages. The bottom line, therefore, has always been profit.

The other benefit turned out to be “visibility”. People began to incorrectly associate the number of hits a video would get with how “popular” the content creator was. This is obviously ridiculous, because someone could get a million hits for an unedited video of a dog on a skateboard and someone else could get 50 hits for an uploaded news piece that could very well have ran on broadcast television. Once again, “the bottom line” wins out, and the person who can deliver the million garbage hits is seen as more useful, because they might be able to duplicate that on your project.

A couple of problems with this is that a) a lot of the comments on YouTube are negative, so the number of hits isn’t an indication of fans in the first place, and b) a lot of people were “juking their stats” and clicking on their own videos to make it look like a lot of people were watching them when they really weren’t. By juking stats on YouTube, they were able to catch the eye of the people in charge of “featuring” videos (placing them in a list which indicated that these videos were worth watching), which got them even more views. The cycle continued as people would subscribe to the jukers, making it easy for the same people to get featured over and over.

Eventually, people started wanting to use video for business. They didn’t know what they wanted to do, but they knew they wanted to be involved. This led to the question of how to find people that knew how to do videos and the only parameter they had to go on was number of hits or supposed “popularity”. Aiding them in figuring out who was a “good” videomaker was the presence each person had on Social Media apps & sites. Thousands of people cannot be wrong… right? :/

So now, you have several ways to tell who should be doing videos for your company and who should not… Except all of your parameters are based on NOTHING that indicates skill AT. ALL. Since you don’t have any video professionals in the field, there’s nobody that can EP (Executive Produce) your videos. Therefore, the people doing the hiring of content creators are ABSOLUTELY CLUELESS about what a good or even a DECENT video is, the people in charge of signing the checks are similarly clueless, and nobody in your company knows that you’re hiring a CLOWN to supposedly enhance your site with video.

Here’s the problem. Even though you can trick people into visiting your site with one or two boring, poorly shot and barely-edited videos, people get the picture after that and stop watching. Unless you got your ROI from those brief visits, your money went down the drain. On top of that, the videos that were created for your site were NOT viral. They failed even to meet the bottom-line business reasons why you commissioned the work in the first place.

Another problem is that just because someone has a bunch of friends & followers, that doesn’t mean they can convert. If you have 20,000 Twitter followers and you post that you’re doing a live show and 19 people show up……. If you have 60,000 Twitter followers and feel the need to hide your view counts on your show because they were steadily maxing out in the double digits before you hid the stats……..

On top of that, you’ve now put someone who knows NOTHING about entertainment or immersion in charge of an aspect of your brand that’s supposed to be entertaining AND immersive.

Also, who is it really that’s coming to your site to see the work that this person did? Most likely, it’s the people that were already following them. It’s not anybody new, because new people would be attracted by VALUE and QUALITY. Since neither exists in your show, it’s clearly only the fanboys that are showing up, so you’re preaching to the choir. “The choir” isn’t very likely to buy whatever your sponsor’s selling, because they already own it because they already heard the content creator’s opinions about what to buy on some other site.

How to get around this? Let it go. Just let it go. If you’re no good at doing video, do audio. Remember radio? That’s for you. Sit down in your house, turn on your microphone and run your mouth. Don’t try to do shows you don’t know how to edit. Don’t try to do live shows unless it’s time-sensitive information and you’re sure that people actually care about what you or your guest have to say RIGHT NOW. Set up an audio stream on your website, add a text chat and go for it.

From the company’s side, do some research for a change. Look at some SAMPLES of people’s work before you hire them. If you can’t FIND any samples, they probably don’t exist. If you can’t FIND anyone who’s willing to admit they did business with a supposed video producer, those clients probably don’t exist either.

Also, make sure you find someone who knows the difference between a good video and garbage. Don’t just put the person who’s the least retarded in Social Media in charge of hiring a content creator. There’s a reason why that person’s videos were garbage in the past. If they bring the same sensibilities and crew to your company, look forward to more of the same garbage, except on YOUR dime this time.

If you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all. Save your company the money, spare the public the time it took them to figure out that your show wasn’t worth watching, and spare your BRAND the embarrassment of people wondering why the lunatics are running the asylum.

~Bill Cammack

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Bill Cammack » editing

KR3TS 20th Anniversary Dance Showcase

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“Street Game” Production Notes

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Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”

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Talkin’ LOUD, and Sayin’ NOTHIN’! (sayin’ nothin’)

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