Novacut – open source video editor built for collaboration. http://novacut.com/
Novacut is still a work in progress and looking for people to become involved. It’s clearly a worthy effort to support, but I remain somewhat skeptical that Open Source projects can achieve the finish and polish of commercial software, but it does usually produce tools that are competent and free. And that’s no bad thing.
Selling Special Interest Videos: Sell The Sizzle, Not The Steak http://tinyurl.com/26gsbgq
It’s a good general principle in marketing: people are not interested in your product or service (The Steak), merely what it can do for them (The Sizzle). In this article, that principle is applied to selling special interest videos.
Marketing to a potential customer is not that different from marketing to a video service client. You can use all avenues, such as advertising, networking, PR, etc., but to make it the most effective you have to keep this key marketing concept in mind – you need to step into the customer’s shoes and ask, “why would I buy it?†You need to sell the benefit of watching the DVD and answer the question, “What’s in it for me?†That’s what gets people excited about buying your video.
Then goes on to give some great advice on writing copy that sells!
Top 5 Ways to Fail at Crowdfunding http://tinyurl.com/234p3co
Of curse, do the opposite if you want to succeed. Â From a documentarian’s perspective, slightly rewritten by Documentary Tech.
The film version:
Sync-N-Link 1.6 Faster syncing – 245 clips processed in 2.7 seconds compared to 43.2 seconds in version 1.5 http://tinyurl.com/3y3d984
No new features! – just significantly faster syncing thanks to a complete rewrite of the code.
Free update to all – Check for Updates in Sync-N-Link’s application menu.
Apple to preview next version of OS X on October 20th. http://tinyurl.com/2f9j2k6 That’ll help FCP make 2012 timeline if the expected changes to the underpinnings of QuickTime are ported from iOS 4.1.
Let’s guess: announced October 2010, finished 10.7 at WWDC 2011, Final Cut Studio <next> sometime thereafter? I think this makes the 2012 timeline seem reasonable: announcing OS X 10.7 in July would have made it difficult.
Dubbed “Back to the Mac,†the invite’s image shows a slightly rotated Apple logo with a lion peeking through it. In the invite, Apple says “come see what’s new for the Mac…†and adds that it will present a preview of the next major version of Mac OS X—which I think we can now safely presume is Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. The company will also be providing a café breakfast and a coffee bar—isn’t that nice of them?
Indie Success through Branded Entertainment, Syndication http://tinyurl.com/2ehkerb
Report from a panel at the New York Television Festival Digital Day panel.
Almost all of the panels emphasized that branded entertainment is the best way to go to monetize independent online video. Nonetheless, many producers and executives seemed to view brand integration as a necessary evil, yearning for when it is no longer needed. Even Ben Silverman, whose company Electus exclusively does branded entertainment, mentioned that brand integrations helped keep television afloat in its early days before the platform matured.
P2P Backed Film Platform to Reward Influencers http://tinyurl.com/23mxzry
Instead of being the “freetards” they are painted with, the P2P community seems to be setting some precedents in alternative business models for distributing, growing an audience and monetizing them.
VODO, short for voluntary donation, has been a great success thus far. With support from several torrent sites including EZTV, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, all of VODO’s major releases have been downloaded several hundred thousand times. In addition, downloaders have donated tens of thousands of dollars to the filmmakers.
‘Ride the Divide’ a case in DIY http://tinyurl.com/2d3edl7
I love an article about a filmmaker that starts with:
Hunter Weeks went into his work on the feature documentary “Ride The Divide†with a solid sense of how to get the film out once it was done.
This is so important and yet so overlooked by most filmmakers. It’s a business and you have to think about the Return on Investment right from the start, because you’ll have to be creative about it.
They took on a corporate sponsor and encouraged participants to wear the corporate beanie (but not compulsory). They targeted a limited number of film festivals and when they missed the larger, more public ones, they went straight to distribution.
The film has screened at about 100 times in theaters, in about 70 cities in all, in shows we’ve produced ourselves – sometimes one night, or sometimes three nights in a row in the same place. We also had a licensing fee to screen the film for $295, and we tapped into these hotbed cycling communities – mountain-bike extreme groups all over the country, especially in the mountain region. We had these tremendously successful shows. And that helped sell the DVDs in a pre-release version over the last six months.
One other approach has been to offer 500 “Living Room Screening Packages†for $99, for which 50 percent of the proceeds go to cyclist Lance Armstrong’s Live Strong Foundation. The kit includes a DVD or Bluray in wood laser-engraved box by karvt.com, a limited edition t-shirt byMighty Karma, a SmartWool Beanie, Tony Hsieh’s Best Selling book – Deli
TV is Dead. Long Live Web Video. http://tinyurl.com/2cb9xuu But Web video isn’t television. It’s something else. Web Video abandoned TV.
So much has changed – Cameras, Bandwidth, YouTube – provide a trifecta of change plus the cognitive surplus we have as a result of being less “couch potato” and more “active creator” leads to a whole new thing: not TV, not web video as it’s been.
But Web video isn’t television. It’s something else entirely. And in the past 5 years, from 2005 to 2010, as Web video has moved to become the fastest growing and most prevalent form of traffic emerging on the Web, something else happened.
Web video abandoned TV. It moved on.
There are plenty of examples of this — but the perhaps most dramatic one is the growth of TED Talks. TED Curator, Chris Anderson, calls this emergence Crowd Accelerated Innovation. His thesis is that Web video accelerates the cycle of humans creating, sharing, and iterating.
If you can type, you can make movies…http://tinyurl.com/57y7b2
Simple avatars and typed text-to-sound does not make a “movie”. It makes something that’s mildly interesting but it’s not a “Movie”.