andrgl

I think your grading is awesome and the camera moves are sweet. The codec dying is just part and parcel with having everything in focus. (And to be honest, the video consumer usually doesn't even notice.)

Damn. What a ****ing location and awesome composition.

OliKMIA's video really highlights the problem of these types of low-end, fixed-lens drone cams. Too much is in focus, too much movement. Trying to stuff too much information into a tiny online codec. The end product falls apart, even hosted on vimeo.

Yeah, sharing the channel and the exact idea with this forum, scares the shit out of me. I used to be like that IRL, but realized how much time and effort it took to get where I was. That said, I bet a lot of people are skilled enough here to beat out my work. I don't mind sharing my train of thought, how I worked out what might be successful. Basically: there's only so many ways to earn revenue on the net. I don't want to sell a product or service. And I don't want to rely on AdSense***. That left a few avenues open. (Seriously, research it: it's a list of 5 or 6 things you can do.) I spent months researching the perfect storm of audience, easy competition and highest return on investment. My first year I dropped 20k on the business without earning a cent. Looking back now it's no big deal. Back then I was going to bed every night thinking I was wasting my time and money. Fortunately I love my day job and earn a decent salary. The sacrifice was huge; I ended up losing touch with friends and family, and a serious relationship I was in imploded. Every free moment I had was spent on the idea. And sometimes when I completely burned out, I'd just lie in bed, regretting starting and wish I could wind back the clock. Now it's on autopilot. I could sit back and stop creating content and earn for a few years. But I can produce videos in only about 3 days (fortunately I work 4 days/10 hr weeks.) The pressure in my life is to come up with the next idea. Fortunately I cleared the: what if my next idea bombs? Should I just invest my money? -- hump. ***Relying on AdSense is definitely doable. The only problem here is you need to hit mass appeal, and have to be attractive to advertisers. My bet is that most of the "niches" are occupied. I'm thinking shit like, fashion, make-up, motive, firearms, sports... and who knows. There's a lot of room here. Originally I tried to cash in on doing "canon" stuff from large IP. It culminated into scantily clad women, doing Star Wars, Star Trek, Mirror's Edge, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fallout, etc... this actually excluded me pretty hard from AdSense, (cellphone gaming apps LOVED to advertise on my stuff tho.) So I thought I could sell tie-in products. Biiiig mistake. The last thing you want in your mail is correspondence from a big law firm. To be honest, this is the way to go if you want to do creative stuff with no other monetization tie-ins. Find out how to uniquely entertain the largest pool of eyeballs, with content advertisers will be fighting over to play their material on. Then when you hit enough viewers, start creating even higher quality material and put it behind a paywall. What exactly is the niche here? That's for someone to figure out. The shitty thing, is when you realize what people want to watch and can earn you money, isn't your creative idea. It more than likely won't even be something that personally interests you. You have to harness that enthusiasm for success and funnel it into what generates revenue. Exercise your creativity there and you'll mop the floor. I liken it to Wedding events. I'd wager most people wouldn't want to do wedding gigs for their job. That said, if you approach the work with the same level of enthusiasm and creativity you would your personal project, you'll have a damn good chance at success. Selling Out is the smartest thing I ever did.

I've managed to build secondary income from YouTube. If I continue to grow at the same rate, I'll out earn my day job in a few years. It's taken over two years (started in Jan 2014.) Managed to do it without running a single ad on my channel. Is it what I originally set out to do? Nope. But I learned to pivot and "sell out". My first few ideas were idealistic. But they had no market. Totally unviable projects. You have pander, especially to your strengths. I realized an opportunity and exploited it for gain. The experience has made me humble to be honest. When I hear or read someone's idea, I hope they succeed. There's nothing like grinding out a win. That said, my experience has made me shrewd. I am very critical of my own ideas. I very rarely entertain things that I'm interested in. Instead, I consider projects that know I can outcompete others at. I still expect to fail, but everything I do is so thought out. The work isn't fun, earning the revenue is what I like now. Business income is damn sweet too. Camera gear, computer hardware and other things can be written off. The money is burning a hole in my bank account, if I don't spend it, I hit a higher tax bracket. --- As an aside, I started out in video doing real estate spots. High end stuff. Know a few realtors. I shot HDR style for a unique look. Also aped some strobe-like compositing with a motorized slider and head. Was able to do multiple takes and stitch the video together. I burned out after a year of working whenever I had spare time. Used the earned cash to start a studio. Hit YouTube with a sorta of video pinup girl channel. Stupidly used big IP. Quickly got slapped with a C&D notice. (Don't fuck with big corps, especially if your selling your take on their TDs.) Sulked. Raged. Considered selling my gear. Learned about monetization. Did some research and found an epic opportunity. Spent a lot of cash up front and slooowly began to earn.

Wow!

I seriously thought you we're describing union shows at first.

Thanks for sticking up for us shooters Andrew! Instead of acting like some corporate stooge.

Yes. I used a Nebula 4000 and ultimately a PC to program movement. http://www.basecamelectronics.com/serialapi/ Doesn't support enough weight (I use zoom lenses and need motorized zoom and focus controls.) Modifying a larger gimbal seemed like too much work. Currently building my own 2-axis head with high torque motors. Goal is to support a max weight of 25 lbs. Having the prototype frame machined currently. Hoping to have a 'final' version in a month or two. I've looked at what's commercially available. But I've come to realize that building it myself, I have complete control over hardware. Last year I spent 3 weeks analyzing the IO from a Edelkrone motorized slider, so I could tie it in with the Nebula. Such a waste of time.

Terrible. I use a 3930K (admittedly an older 2011 socket CPU, but still packs a punch,) and 980 Ti with Resolve. h.264 stutters while scrubbing. 4K RAW or ProRes from the Production Cam with noise reduction, and usually a dozen or so nodes of correction? Scrubs buttery smooth, never drops a frame on playback.

I think Geoff's point is valid. The wider I'm forced to go, the slower the lenses become. Obviously not an issue if you want deep DOF. But some of us love wide and shallow*. *So much so that I'll usually cheat and dress the BG with oversized items so I can push it back even further in my shot.

Er, all inclusive of course. Monitor, SSDs, batteries, rails, remote, etc. How much is the Raven or W kitted out?

Used Epic with the Mysterium-X sensor. That's what I have my sights on currently. Rented a kit last week. Blown-the-fuck-away. You're right Oliver. Dat redcode is so thick and dense. Fuck it, even at $20K, it's a cam I can use for the next decade: 16-ish usable stops with HDRx. 120 FPS 4K, RAW format... Bonkers.

Nope, it's a beta test unit. He confirmed it in the comments.

I take back my original negative post. This thing is awesome, thanks for keeping us in the loop Aaron.

Thanks but there's no silver bullet. Those key frame distances and astronomically large bit-rate astronomically wouldn't have worked for my video. Lesson learned: need to experiment prior to delivery and be prepared to upload 10-20 different version. No exaggeration. It's about a full day's work to find the right settings.

Well, after a sleepless night I managed to upload a severely compressed h.264 file that managed to avoid any noticeable macroblocking during motion. The trade off is losing quite a lot of fine detail, so I added some sharpening and got a middle of the road image. Problem is that we'd have to delete the current video and re-upload, losing the views and risking never getting them back.

Ah shit, I got excited for a moment thinking that a YouTube Red subscription would unlock some higher bit rate uploads. Thanks for the tip, I'll keep my eye on that option.

Catch-22: upload to Vimeo, no one discovers it. Upload to YouTube, tons of views. These aren't corporate or business gigs. They're creative works I do mostly for fun versus the small sum I ask for. I appreciate the helpful comments but it's not a fixable situation until iOS and Android get delivered VP9. I'm sure eventually the codec will be rolled out everywhere. Just needed to vent. It's just a shame to see a natural, contrast-y, out of focus background macroblock to shit because the h.264 encoder sucks so bad at YouTube.

Optically I love 'em. I find them sharp wide open. Too bad they're so old DXO doesn't have any reviews. Well, one of the Bourne films were shot on rehoused copies, so they must be good. So I guess if you don't mind them being used (pretty sure they've been out of production for a long while,) they're great lenses. My only two niggles are: I sometimes struggle with the 28-70mm to create shallow depth of field. I don't think it's a reasonable complaint, but it's how I feel. (The Sigma 18-35mm f1.8 has really spoiled me.)The 80-200mm is a beast to rig and has a pretty long minimum focus distance: 5ft/1.5m.

Glad you got one with a Nikon mount. Try to see if you can snag a Nikkor 28-70 or 80-200 with broken AF. I've seen many hover around 300-500 USD where I live. I'm currently trying to find a good second hand production camera. Thinking of either getting a Red or Sony so thanks for the insight.

I fucking hate YouTube and am done working with clients wanting to use it. That's my New Years resolution. Don't get me wrong. I love it as a monetary platform. I almost-maybe-kinda make a living off a few channels I run. But as someone trying to deliver a great product it makes me want to cry. Feed it whatever the fuck you want: DNxHDProResHigh bit rate h.264Crazy compressed formatsAbide a 100% to the recommended spec It does NOT matter! The YouTube encoder will take your work and compress it to shit. Case in point, the last shot I delivered looks awesome on desktop and laptops. It was encoded right out of the gate to VP9. Video has netted twenty-ish thousand views. A few night ago I get an e-mail from the client complaining about how the video looks. Sure enough, YouTube is delivering h.264 for iOS and Android. The 1080P looks like complete crap. Macroblocking, banding and tearing EVERYWHERE. Knock it down to 720P and it's perfect.

Got a chance to play with an A7SII. Dayum. Kids these days. It's such a monster camera: good auto-focusadaptable mountpivoting monitorDSLR body (small, low weight, easy to rig)outrageous low-lightgood dynamic rangecheap mediain body stabilizationIt's the real deal for any indie and shit, if the codec didn't suck and gurgle it'd be a hell of a production camera. You have to be ballsy to want to shoot log with 8-bit. Unless you're some sort of Johannes Vermeer-esque maestro of grading, it's not worth the risk of getting it wrong. Shame Sony has to protect it's FS line, otherwise they could ape the GH4 and give us 10-bit output.

No he doesn't. The difference between 4K and 1080 ProRes is merely data rates. He already has an SSD work drive, problem solved. A quad-core sandy bridge and a 1GB video card will preform admirably for simple edits. (30 layers in AE and 10 nodes in Resolve are a different game.) Render times are a waste of diminishing returns. I'd much rather invest in suitable RAID storage to speed up my post-ingestion work flow. I wouldn't spend a dime on current era Intel chipsets. They're overpriced and under-engineered given the lack of competition from AMD. HEVC isn't client or web deliverable. I'd forget about that codec for the time being and simply batch process uploads from an NX1 with a script.