The problem occurred when we looked into what wrappers we can use for the files. Supported wrappers were .VOB, .TS & .MPG. So the usual workflow of using .MOV was straight out the window, and to add to the confusion, .VOB and .TS formats cannot be exported from Adobe Media Encoder……. or can they?

Here’s the workaround we eventually found.

Export your video out of whatever program you’re using (in our case, it was After Effects CS4).

Open Adobe Media Encoder and drag and drop your video into the window.

Choose the Format as MPEG2 and the click on the ‘preset’ setting (by default it’s ’1440 x1080i 25 High Quality’).

In the Preset window, choose your basic video settings as necessary (width, height, audio, etc).

Click on the Multiplexer and choose ‘TS’ for the Multiplexing option and OK (you may want to save this preset if you’ve got to convert a lot of footage).

Render – this should produce a video file with the file format of .m2t – if you need a .ts/.mts file just rename the suffix.

In the case of using the BrightSign unit, we had to download their software BrightAuthor which of course only works on a PC….. Using this we could create the playlist once we’d renamed the files to .ts wrappers and then published it to the SD card. After about 1 minute of waiting after turning the unit on with the SD card in (the screen is blank which is useful…. but give it time…) the video appeared and has played perfectly since.

For those of you who’ve been around the internet for a while will probably have come across the 37signals blog “Signal vs Noise“. For those of you who haven’t, 37signals are the guys behind market leading software packages “Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack & Campfire” and THE go-to guys for studying how to really do business and get away from the problems that cause over-budget/over-deadline issues. The book is basically articles from the SvN blog and you can get it via PDF ($19) or read online (free) as well as the paperback copy but in my effort to prize my face from the glare of a monitor, I went for the book.

The main reason for picking this up, apart from following the SvN blog for a while, is that I’m due to start developing a web application myself and nearly every I spoke with online recommended this book before I start the actual work (read: the stuff that costs money and not just time). I must admit so far, they were all right. This book gives clear, intelligent tips and guides to the process behind making a web app. Not really the technical aspects of it but more notes on how they operate and how you can succeed without hiring hundreds of staff and spending hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars.

My favourite article so far is summed up nicely – “Build half a product, not a half-assed product” – it’s better to role out a product that works but has scope for adding other features at a later date, than rolling out a product that does everything, but does so badly.

I’ve got a few more books I’ll bung reviews up that I’ve worked through, please let me know below what you guys/girls think.

View the article here

The basic premise for 5 second projects are that you create an animated piece lasting 5 seconds around a central theme and upload them to let everyone else see your work. It drives you to quickly create something that’s throw-away but still requires you to think about a concept and finish it through to the end result – I highly recommend if you’re working the field of animation, or just looking to start, get involved in this.

Took about an hour from start to end, working in Photoshop to deal with the elements (old screenshots and sprites) and animated in After Effects. Audio was boshed together in Premiere from some old 8bit game samples I had. Finally rendered in H264 QT using Adobe Media Encoder.

If you like the clip, please click “Like” on the video!

Here’s a quite effects and equipment test I did alongside Andy and the crew from Fortress Island Films.

Muzzle flashes/cartridges and comped-in explosion were my responsibilities but not colouration I hasten to add – this definately needs some work but for a few days playing around, it looks alight. Oh and the ident was quickly made for FIF as well…

Stay posted for the final piece when it comes up online.

A lot of the time someone will want to develop an idea that has had all the large details mapped out but none of the small details. Take a leaf out of 37signals book (literally) – it’s better to make half a product than a half-assed product. Especially now when you realistically only have one chance to capture someone on your site and keep them coming back. If they’re confused and don’t know exactly what your product/site offers, chances are they will forget about it and move on.

Taglines

When someone approaches me with an idea (or rarely, if i come up with one myself) I like to think of it as a film. In the movies, films are sold purely on a tagline/strapline. This is a signal sentence that quickly explains roughly what you should expect. If someone asked you what ‘Alien‘ was like, you’d quickly be able to get across the idea by replying “think of it like Jaws in space”. This is known in business circles as a “high concept pitch“.

If you can grab someone’s attention in one sentence, you have a chance that they’ll be interested and therefore remember it. If you need a massive page of text and diagrams to get across a concept, then chances are that you’ll fail to get the public’s attention and therefore views/sales.

So next time someone comes to you with a great idea ask them to come up with a tagline for it – it doesn’t have to explain in great detail what your idea does, just get someone to ask another question about it.

Here’s a quick tip that James from JimAndTonic (who’s renting a hotdesk in The Observatory at the moment) let me know today after we were scratching our heads for a while. If you use the Stroke effect (or similar) to trace a line around a mask/path that joined up, but the start point needs to be changing to another point, this is how you make that happen.

As per the picture above first use the Arrow tool to click on the point that you wish to make the first point. Then goto the Menu and click on Layers -> Mask and Shape Path -> Set First Vertex. This sets the active point as the first point. Voila!

A simple thing that’s has confused me on more than one occasion, so hopefully this will be useful for you fellow AE monkeys.

But the problem is if many, if not all, modern creative freelancers are acting in this way, then they are all competing on the same level i.e. the same weight class. This can be especially true considering the steep decline of the ‘traditional’ agency model which we are all seeing almost worldwide.

I think the approach you should be taking is the reverse.

Be a Heavyweight, move like a Lightweight.

If you can gain a massive amount of skill in a lot of areas and be flexible enough to operate quickly in a lot of areas you’ll create more business and a bigger and better name for yourself. Now I’m not saying that you should be an expert in all areas of art/design/development/etc but knowing what goes into most steps really helps in others.

I’ve found that in my experience with low-budget film-making, that you’re much more likely to be hired for a crew if you can turn your hand at most things instead of just saying ‘I can only work the follow focus, sorry I don’t know anything about audio levels”. In the design side of my work I’ve definitely got work out of being able to quickly ‘bug test some php’ or ‘recreate a logo in the right format’ instead of relying on other people to sort these problems while I concentrate purely on the motion side of things.

I think it boils down to the following.

The more strings to your bow, the further your arrow will fly

So don’t worry about trying to compete with the big guys, and just invest in yourself and your skillset and this will lead to more work, a quicker workflow and happier clients.

Introducing the Moviepeg.

A hunk of rubberized plastic with a notch out of it which your iphone fits. Thats it. A single piece of material. No chips or buttons or extra features. And that’s a big refreshing change from all other iPhone accessories as usually they try to fit everything into one product, but as with most things it’s much better to pick one problem and solve it than try to solve many and fail in all.

My thoughts on where it could be improved are as follows:

• Why are there not more colours available – for something that could be easily mass-produced in any dye, why limit it to 6?
• Why not offer corporate branded options – I know many clients would love to be able to give these out as it’s something that you’d never chuck out.
• £4.99 (+ P&P) seems a bit steep – I’d not think twice about ordering several (for office, home, friends, etc) if it was half that price or at least customisable for that amount.

So these are not really improvements on the product itself, but the choice offered to the customer. All in all, the best solution I have seen so far for a problem that’s been apparent for 2/3 years now – Well done to the guys & girls at magneticNorth.

P.S. Just found out via their twitter that it’s only the first week of trading, so hopefully my points above will become reality in the near future. Also I can understand the price if they’ve got so much coverage before shipping!

In the meantime if you follow me on Twitter you can see what I’m up to on a day-to-day basis, and see me share gems I’ve discovered online, such as this great advert for Pedegree dog food (shot on a 1000fps Phantom camera)!

Watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves. I’m not sure this is true. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you watch the dollars, you don’t have to worry so much about pennies.

An unusual take on this old saying, but if you read the rest of his post he makes a good point that sometimes it pays to take a big risk if the rewards are worth it. Of course the example he gives of not worrying about slighty more cash for a distracting ad for your blog, is more about keeping your good image rather than money issues. Check it out – most of his blog could be stated as tips that are only useful when you’ve got hundreds of thousands of subscribers and the renevue that brings, but the odd gem does provoke thought.

A few issues with the camera due to the rubbish lighting in the room and on the first day there was no audio feed from the board so I had to use a shotgun mic, but in the end you’re always going to be fighting issue like this when working a big conference.

The videos will be cut up and made available via the Jersey Finance TV website.

As with anytime a prospective client contacts me about a project, I wonder how they got my details and whether a previous client recommended me (to thank them next time & for a bit of self gratification). So when I received an email out of the blue from a local company looking for a motion piece to replace an older Power Point presentation, I started wondering.

Funny thing is that nearly every client who comes to The Observatory looking for various things is usually very interested in the whole ‘Get rid of Power Point, Get an Animation instead’ option when we offer it to them, but it’s something we haven’t actively advertised for the same reasons as why our site isn’t up yet – lack of time! Apart from being impressed that a local company is embracing new media approaches, I was slightly confused as to how they had got my details.

It’s a small world

Turns out the client was a good friend of a brother of a previous client who I’d done a website for years ago. When checking out the website, he’d looked at the footer and noticed my link to my site and decided to have a look. Which led to seeing one of my older ‘pitch’ projects and decided that this form of presenting would be useful.

Sign your work

When I developed sites in the past, I always believed that putting a huge link of DESIGNED BY THIS AWESOME PERSON was tacky and usually takes away from the brand/design of the site. But after doing a couple of websites for small business’ they were all insisting that I put a link to my site somewhere.

So I now but ‘site by bearpig’ in the site’s footer using the following settings:

• lowercase
• font-size 10
• secondary colour taken from the site
• no hyperlink decorations apart from a hover-over colour change.

This way if people are looking for the details of who built the site they can find them, but only if they look for it. This seems to work a lot better than the ‘shouting from the rooftops’ method of big text links or logos or banners.

So my advice would be to sign all your work because you never know when a future client will see something they like, but remember:-

Don’t let it destroy the design.

The problem is that these days the more efficient of you will have systems in place to automate a lot of your business which is fine until everyone else in your industry starts using the same systems. When this happens, all that precious personality of yours goes out the window.

Loosing that personal touch

A good example of this would be the use of expressions in After Effects, which are perfectly fine to use when animating as they cut down on time and usually give good results. I’ll admit I use expressions a fair amount in my work. You might be on a project that just doesn’t have the timeframe or budget to allow you to spend hours tweaking each and every keyframe and therefore these expression can take a lot of work off your hands. But using expressions like ‘wiggle’ can never replace that secret x-factor that spending time to keyframe manually brings to the work, because it give personality to the work – your personality. And this is part of why you were hired in the first place.

Even if you take this way of thinking into another piece of software, my advice would be the same. Don’t hide who you are.

Automate the legwork

My invoicing software (GrandTotal – check out my review here) allows for automated email messages to clients when you send out the invoices/estimates which can fill in the details in a mail-merge method. This can be great for saving time, but I use the message as a framework for the email and manually type or change as needed. If I’m emailing a client that I’ve known for years and I’ve on first names terms with, I can amend the email to be more casual than if it’s the first time I’ve contacted a client. Whether the client is bothered about getting an automated message or a personalised one, I’d much rather that they have a personalised one as it gives a glimpse into who I am. Which hopefully will lead into them picking me over the next guy.

Other reading

• Check out Gary Vanyerchuk’s book ‘Crush It!‘ for some very good insights about how to use your DNA to do better business
• Nick from greyscalegorilla.com explaining why expressions are making everything look the same.
• Proof that humans don’t trust seemingly automated communications.

How do you add your personal flare to your everyday business practises? Comment below and let me know!

-Bearpig-

So you’ve inherited a project and you’re trying to work out where a certain expression is or an effect is being applied, but you can’t see it on any of the layers. This caught me out the other day until someone reminded me to check for Shy Layers which of course was the answer. Layers can be made shy (icon looks like a face peering over a wall) which hides them from the timeline when the ‘Hide Shy Layers’ button is clicked – this is usually used for when you’ve got hundreds of layers in one timeline and you want to only see a few.

More info on Shy Layers can be found here (courtesy  of Cassidy Bisher).

2. Not using Vectors

If you have a logo that’s been rasterised and you’re scaling it up or panning in with a camera you’ll realise that the edges will loose the crispness and it’ll look a bit rubbish, which clients don’t tend to be fond of. The easiest way to sort this issue is to open the vector version of the logo and import each mask into a seperate solid layer depending on the colour. As long as the ‘Continually Rasterise’ icon is click on, your masked solids will remain crisp and clean.

3. Rendering at the wrong format/resolution

A friend of mine once said that he tries to keep the workflow of working with digital video in as little steps as possible, so he’s not degrading the source data too much. Although in these days when you can link AE compositions directly into Premiere, his advice is still worth listening to. If you start and complete a project at SD res and then get told that it needs to be HD, you could take your rendered footage and just scale it up but even with the best upscaler you’d still be better off had you completed the entire project at the correct resolution.

At the start of each project I make sure I know what the final video is going to be shown on and if it’s going to be used on multiple devices, then complete the project at the highest needed resolution as after all, it’s a lot easier to scale down and maintain quality.

4. Not understanding pixel aspect ratios

This is a very basic part of dealing with digital video and yet I still come across people who will make basic errors, such as rendering a 4:3 video using 16:9 aspect ratio. As mentioned in number 3, you should find out exactly what the final video is going to be used on (or what it needs to be delivered in) and create your project/footage accordingly.

I highly recommend ‘The Art & Science of Digital Compositing‘ by Ron Brinkmann which has a very good chapter about aspect ratios for all forms of video and film, although any standard Video/Film/After Effects book will explain the basics.

5. Accidently saving over things

Now this can apply to nearly all software, but I’ve made this mistake a few times before. Say you’re working on a project and you go through it with the client and they ask you to change the pacing of a section. What you’ll probably do is make the changes while they are there and then save later on. This is all well and good until you get a message saying that they’ve changed their mind, or more likely, their boss has overruled them, and they want it back as you had it before. Now because you saved over the top of the project, you’ll have to go back through and make all the changes manually.

What I’d recommend is either Save As another version of the project before you make any changes, or what I do which is duplicated the composition before you make any changes. That way you’ve always got an old copy of the composition in-case they want to revert back.

This was just a quick post (mainly due to myself making mistake number 1 yesterday) but let me know if any of this was useful by leaving a comment below.

-Bearpig-

When the Twitter craze started it was described to me in a similar fashion to this:-

You on twitter?

Nope, I don’t really see the point.

Think of it like Facebook status updates…

Ok….?

Well. That’s kinda it. But you can update from anywhere. With pictures.

I still don’t see the point.

And so that’s what my view of twitter remained until I started seeing how other freelancers were using it to network and exchange information, mainly due to various articles on other sites about how to use it to increase awareness of a product/website/company. So I’ve joined (link for those that are interested) and here are a few links to things you might find useful if like me, you’ve just made the leap.

Twitter for WordPress

Bearpig.co.uk is powered by WordPress and I wanted to see if there was an easy way to integrate my latest ‘tweets’ into the site and came across plugin. Now there are lots of plugins for Twitter in WordPress but most seem to either be bulky, ugly or not too flexible (including the standard plugin from Twitter). This works well due to it’s widget based so it’s easily configured. The only thing missing would be turning the titles’ hyperlink on & off (default is on) and the option to add a ‘follow me’ button.

Twitter Basics for Businesses

This article at Business Insurance explains about how to market and promote websites using social media and covers most questions that beginners would have about Twitter. It also would be useful article to read if you worked in a company that has no social networking campaign and were interested in putting forward some points to your bosses. FYI I really don’t have a clue why all their articles have anime girls for pictures – slightly weird but don’t let that put you off, the articles are very informative.

Twitter Campaign Case Studies

Engagingsocialmedia.com has a number of small case studies on how large PR campaigns were conducted over twitter. The secret seems to be (as with all good campaigns) engage the audience first and they’ll remember the brand/product, not because of the campaign, but because of the experience that it caused.

Good Twitter Tips

A list of really good, common sense Twitter tips. Unlike all other lists of ‘Twitter Tips’, this one actually points out that even though you’re just posting 140 characters at a time, you’re still creating content and therefore it should be relevant and useful to at least someone else! (Tips 4 & 5 are refreshingly apt).

Hope this is of some use to you guys/girls – please comment below if it is!

www.uncrate.com (with festive decorations on the logo)

Building on such a simple idea done well has allowed them to expand on the site – Answers (Where they get readers to answer questions about products posed by other readers and vote which are the best. This draws new products to the sites attention and has on several occasions led to a product being featured on the main site) and Uncrate Widget (a desktop widget which reads the RSS feed and allows readers to follow the updates while keeping the site branding in the forefront) – although all parts still remain true to idea of the site which is bringing the product to people’s attention (there’s no real reviews or testing, just awareness about the product).

As with many people I suppose, I discovered the site by searching for something in Google Images and a great pic that was of decent size caught my attention and then I was hooked by other products on the site. This got me thinking on how users find a site and usually it’s down to one mention/picture/product not mentioned on other sites – so on an internet that’s rapidly beginning to be consisted of pages that are rehashes of ‘cool website’ lists, try something more original – it might lead to more readers.

Home

Everyone seems to choose working from home at the start and you can see why – no extra rent costs, you don’t have to commute and generally you can start/stop working whenever you like although after the first few weeks/months you can tend to become slack when it comes to putting the hours in. But the most important issue is often overlooked and this is that your not interacting with anyone else, especially in your industry.

This was definitely something I’d overlooked as I thought that my contacts online would do but that way, you’re competing with a worldwide amount of other freelancers that they can approach. So unless your field is something that is going to supply a regular amount of constant work (i.e. writing for several popular sites) then you’ll hit a point where your business isn’t growing and your work will become stale.

Coffeeshop / net cafe

working from a coffee shop can cause high levels of caffeinated goodness...

So you might think heading to the local web-enabled coffee shop would be a good idea, with visions of lots of like-minded young active creatives tapping away at laptops. And you might be lucky. But unlike 5/10 years ago, most people in coffee shops with laptops are either killing time or trying to pose. There’s no real rent bar buying a coffee every couple of hours and it gets you around other people which may cause inspiration but if you’re trying to finalize a 3D render or perform some cross-browser testing on a site, this isn’t going to be correct atmosphere for you to work in.

Rent an office

If you like privacy and being in control of your surroundings then renting your own office space would probably work out well although when you have to sign leases, pay bills, setup utilities and generally outlay money for things, it can get pricey and unless you’ve got a space in a particularly creative part of town then you could have the same problems as working from home.

Co-working space

The Observatory - the co-working environment I currently share (we're still moving things around hence nothing on the walls as yet)

So the path I’d definitely recommend is to co-rent (as this is what I’ve ended up doing). If you can get a group of like-minded freelancers and get a place together, then you’ll find that your client-base and skills will grow due to the proximity of other freelancers. If you’ve just started out in your industry or you have recently moved location, try looking for a nearby co-working space here. The benefits of being able to bounce ideas off people would alone be worth it, but the fact is that if you’re there and one of the other workers needs someone of your talent, they’re most likely going to ask you to join the project which of course leads to a lot more work.

Well that’s my experience/thoughts on working in different environments as a freelancer, but what do you think?

The first article is already up (Freelancers: How to Invoice) so please go have a look. If you can suggest any topics you’d like me to discuss or cover, get in touch and let me know!

Check it out here to track our progress and donate!

Here is the wallpaper in a variety of sizes (1024×768, 1440×900, 1920×1200).

Enjoy

When I used to use a XP PC, I would to note down time spent in my mobile phone during or after the job, and then type each seperate invoice in MS Word. I’d then print 2 copies; file one in my ‘awaiting payment’ pile and send the other to client. This worked for a while but I’d have no way of working out how long the invoice has been outstanding unless I noted the date when I printed it. Another issue was of course I’d have a pile of paper and wouldn’t be able to quickly workout how much the outstanding total was. I’d organise the digital and hard copies into folders due to the client, but lots of seperate files = hard to catalogue and check history of client.

I then switched to Quickbooks on the advise from a friend of mine who gave me a quick lesson on using it. He uses it for all his accounting (he sells a lot of stock) and convinced me to do the same. Turns out the pros for have all my clients/jobs in a searchable form and being able to quickly generate invoices were rendered null seeing as I’m just as hopeless at remembering to enter my accounting info as I am remembering to invoice. But from the time tracking and ease of use, it was a bit too complicated for me.

And then I finally made the move to running just a Mac.

This meant I had to work out a way of running Quickbooks on OSX, which as anyone who’s done this can tell you, is a minefield plagued by extra mines. First of all, switching between Quickbooks for PC and Quickbooks for OSX doesn’t really work – both versions aren’t fully supported by each other. So my next option was to run Parallels and install the copy of Quickbooks I ran on my PC and just migrate the files over. I ended up going for this option which worked, but I quickly would find that the extra step in creating an invoice (booting Parallels) would put me off even more.

So I started looking into OSX invoicing software options.

My basic requirements were as follows:

• Easy to use daily

• Easily customizable templates for invoices

• Track client history

• Reminders when overdue

• Reliable and backup-able

Not outrageous demands but surprisingly there was only a few pieces of software that turned up. I’d download a demo and test each one, so he’s a rough summary:

Billings ($39.99)

Pros

• Fairly cheap

• Lots of users and forum for problem solving

• Smart layout and very ‘osx-esque’

• Time Tracker included

• iPhone app on the way

Cons

• Invoice template customizing isn’t very easy if you want complete control

Now in it’s 3rd revision, Billings seemed to be the most highly recommended of the lot and it certainly ticked most of the boxes. Easy to use and setup, there would be only a few issues that made me stop looking and get this one.

ProfitTrain ($69.95)- formally Billable

Pros:

• Looks well designed

• Customizing templates once worked out is very flexible

Cons:

• More expensive than Billings

• Still in development

• No iPhone app

I’d looked at Billable before but the interface wasn’t as well designed as Billings and again, the customizing of invoices, although more flexible than Billings, it required a far amount of arsing around with HTML – not great for my ‘if it takes a while to do, i won’t do it’ attitude! ProfitTrain is it’s new name and to be fair, it does looks a lot better designed, but it’s still in development and although it’d probably stable, I don’t want to risk records being lost or corrupted due to a bug.

Grand Total (49 euros)

Pros:

• Good user interface

• Can use Address Book for client database

• Reminders in the dock when invoices are overdue

• iPhone app

• Seperate Time Tracker availabe for a price

Cons:

• Fairly new therefore it did crash/hang sometimes when I first got it, although the developers responded quickly to my questions and have released 2 updates since I purchased it (2 months ago)

This software is the main reason why I’m writing this article. I’d almost given up hope finding something that was intuitive, not too pricey and did everything I wanted it to, when I came across Grand Total. I’m a firm believer in if I come across something good that deserves more recognition , I’ll let people know about it (hence this article!). Grand Total definitely was exactly what I was looking for as it looks good, integrates with OSX Address Book, allows cataloging of services/parts, setting up custom invoices is easy and it’s fairly cheap (I paid £38 for it as I got multiple licenses which came with a discount).

There are ‘howto’ videos explaining the basic operation, as well as a well written FAQ and help PDF. All things are done via the program itself, so you have to download the demo version (which puts a watermark on invoices printed) and then order a full license through the program (you can also pay via PayPal which is always useful). It comes with 30 or so templates for invoices/quotes and these are easily modified or you can start from scratch by dragging text boxes and shapes around. A very useful function is that you can create a background template PDF and drag it into the invoice layout to be used as your static areas. Dynamic text areas are add by a drop-down menu that’s organised into Recipient/Sender/Document/Currency which makes it very easy to lay up your template. The main area of your template is organised under a ‘Table’ page which uses the same dynamic text.

Once you’ve setup a client you can create new invoices with one click, check previous history as well as working out their paying patterns/methods. You can create recurring invoices (for hosting/retainer jobs) with one click. At any point you can preview the invoice/quote so you don’t have to print to file just to see how it looks – very useful option that I’m surprised no one has thought of. Multiple payments for an invoice can be recorded, and change the status of the invoice from ‘outstanding’ to ‘partially paid’ which can be easily monitored. Generating reports and printing stock lists are also one click operations, and emailing invoices/quotes directly from Grand Total can carry pre-written messages which can contain the same dynamic text as the invoice creation page.

There is a companion iPhone app but it requires a me.com account so I’ve not tested it, but from I understand it allows you track invoices but not create new ones (please correct me if this isn’t the case). One point that I was happy about is that when it comes to taxes, you can apply different clients to different tax charges which are done by country, and yes, Jersey was included with it’s random 3% GST!

I’m rambling a bit, but the summary is that GrandTotal is by far the best OSX invoicing software I’ve come across for freelancers. Pretty much everything I wanted it to do, it did and easily. I can’t recommend it enough which my fellow workers at The Observatory can backup, as I’ve convinced them all to switch from manually typing invoices up in InDesign or Quark to GrandTotal!

Any comments or questions, please post below.

-Bearpig-