For those of you following some of our tweets and blog posts, I have been working as a producer on the Dreamforce Keynote video for Salesforce. The video has been a ton of fun so far. Here is the evolution of one of our shots (420) as it goes from physical production to composite. Thanks to Salesforce and Pixel Corps for allowing us to use this footage.
This first video shows behind the scenes on set. You can see the shot is set up to sweep around the talent who is standing on a pedestal on the Greenscreen soundstage at the old ILM facility, (now Kerner Optical). We are shooting on a Red camera which is mounted on a circular dolly track.
The second video shows the result of that shot in its raw format. You can see we have burned in the frame numbers for the director so he can easily pick the frame range we want to use (which keeps us from wasting time keying, roto’ing, and tracking frames we will never use). The triangular markers on the back wall are to track our shot in 3D space so we can put a CG background behind our talent later.
The final video in this series shows the rough composite after we pulled the green key to make an alpha channel, tracked the shot, and added our CG background and our Salesforce logo (which transforms into a flying hoverboard of sorts). This is an early stage composite which still needs some contact shadows for our talent and the Salesforce hoverboard to make them appear as if they are in the environment. We also need to clean up the key on the talent so the hard lines of his shirt are less pronounced and other tricks that will help him blend into his artificial environment.
While initially building video.Market7 we presumed that a typical production would involve sharing of a few cuts of footage towards the final product plus occasional collection of some integrated assets like graphics that appear within video. So we built our Files module to be a single, simple repository for everything assembled within a project, thinking that just sorting the list according to certain criteria would be sufficient to organize and find. In fact our customers are using projects in our service to collect much more content including storyboard elements, headshots of actors & scouting shots of locations, b-roll & other footage to be integrated into production, and various planning & organizational documents. Several have asked for better capabilities to work with larger amounts of documents and media typically assembled in a project so we are in the midst of enhancing our files capabilities, the latest aspect of which is folder-based organization:
Another point that’s come up more than once from our users is that awaiting review, feedback and approval about content is a frequent source of anxiety. So we’ve included viewing of video, files and published scripts as activity feed generating items, whether or not the viewer makes comments. And instead of having to constantly log into a project to check its activity feed, we now allow users to subscribe to projects’ feeds by email, including control over which modules they want to follow and how frequently emails should go out:
There are a couple other new features in this release, also responsive to customer requests. Uploading content now includes availability of an “alternative uploader”, based on HTML instead of Flash, that may prove more robust for large files (like 1-2 GB). We are working towards bringing such robustness to our Flash uploader too but there are a few current challenges for that in industry practice, acknowledged and under consideration by the relevant technical community. Also, video.Makret7 project-owners now have the ability to edit other team members’ comments in our Annotative Player which could be used to clean up clutter of comments after decisions have been made or to resynchronize comments if a file’s been replaced with a newer version that has timeline alterations.
It’s Saturday night & I’m making the weekly effort to achieve inbox equilibrium by Monday morning. One message indicates that www.twitter.com/marketseven is now being followed by @web2review. Not familiar, I check out the site, www.web2review.com, and we fill the recent activity feed items there!
Our profile on the site is http://www.web2review.com/site/4178-Market7/, and video.Market7 gets strong reviews from both Jeff & Josh of web2review, based on their using us to produce a video. Reviews include insights about how it’s tough to master the time variable when communicating about video, with appreciation of our approach to that. They also like some of our recent power-user functionality, attaching files to comments about video. Praise is nice, but it’s also always good to be kept humble, and both reviewers mention that we should keep striving for ever greater ease of use (we do! but, thanks!).
Web2review lookslike a nice site & service itself. I’ll shortly get to uploading some screenshots & otherwise populating the entry about us. (& if that site’s ease-of-use is an issue, I’ll be sure to report)
We are submitting a couple of panels again this year for South by Southwest (SxSW). In the development of our software, we have collected a ton of best practices for video producers and their clients. It seems fitting to try and leverage some of that in the form of an informative and fun panel. Our two proposals are on content ownership rights and creating compelling content.
Please help us get our panels selected by voting us up in the polls. We chose topics that our customers and friends have a great interest in. Please take a moment to vote for us by clicking here.
Except for a couple of posts celebrating our business with Google as a customer, there’s been a certain theme on the Market7 blog throughout August: emphasizing impact on our customers’ bottom lines. We provide our video.Market7 service to enhance the communication and organization of production, with results including making better video (to drive higher associated revenue) and doing so on-time and on-budget (to contain costs). The prior sentence’s parentheticals are of course the components of the most basic profitability formula.
Last week, Shannon posted four pieces ofartwork& high-leveltext on which he toiled valiantly for vivid and entertaining illustration of how what we provide enhances profitability of efforts at each stage of video production. Those four pieces are now compiled together into a single one-sheet of collateral, avalable as a pdf at the bottom of this post. Week before last, we introduced our newest module, Resource Management, which is is the most directly reflective piece of our service about profitablity, keeping track of each participant’s contributions to a project and how that compares to forecasts and how it drives costs. And at the start of August, we put up an inside look at some work we’ve been doing with our excellent summer coleague Driss Benamour to model how video.Market7 can impact profitability. Here’s how that model’s shaped up [hit play + you probably want to use that full-screen toggle guy towards lower-right of player to be able to read what's on-screen]:
Please contact us, as we’ll be thrilled to spend some time going over this model with you, get your practices reflected in the figures, and assess how much profitability you may be leaking that could be recaptured with better organization and communication through a solution like video.Market7.
Our 4th (and final) in the series analyzing how Market7 provides a return on investment. We examine how collecting timely and accurate feedback through the Annotative Player module provides for a streamline process that cuts overhead out of post-production. [Click image to enlarge]
Our third in a series analyzing how Market7 returns on investment. This time, we focus on how money and time can be saved through the project management features of the Event, Task, and Resource modules.
We continue our series this week on exactly how Market7 saves time & money, this time by looking at our scripting tool, the Collaborative Script Editor. [click on the image to enlarge & be able to actually read]
Its clear how using the Market7 Creative Brief in the planning stage of your video production saves headache and time but what about money? We have been giving this some thought and decided to put together a little explanation on exactly how. (Pretty pictures drawn by yours truly)
2GB! We have doubled our maximum upload size, coincidentally around when YouTube makes the same move (next time it’ll be us out in front). Please note that we recommend using Flash 10 when uploading files above 1GB.
Logo!Our accounts from Line Producer level up have long allowed customers to displace our brand with your own, well now if you’re Producer Pro or higher (so upgrade already!) you can specify this branding at per-project granularity.
On-off switch!The account management page (“My Account” link in upper-right visible only to account holders (versus their admins or invited team members)) — anyhow, that page now includes de-/re-activate buttons and whenever a project’s deactivated its storage does not count towards the account.
Another on-off switch!Free Production Assistant accounts (upgrade already!) are still limited to five team members, but now members are not stuck there permanently but can be removed from projects (& also can be subsequently reinstated).
More acurate than ever!Our script running time estimation had been anchored on speech at 100 words-per-minute which is fine for drama and such when there are non-verbal passages mixed with dialog, but most videos are filled with speakers at a natural language pace so we’ve scaled up and now anchor on 125.
Coolest of all — four out of the six items listed above are based on ideas originally articulated by our users.
