Being the resident video producer here at Market7, you might think that I would be crazy about the Academy Awards but I am not. I have them on as background noise, occasionally glancing up to see who won for sound editing (I still struggle with why there is both a “sound mixing” and “sound editing” category)   There was one segment, however, that had me riveted to the screen: the reunion of the Brat Pack. In a tribute to the late John Hughes, all but one of the infamous Breakfast Club Brat Packers was in attendance. (Emilio was apparently too busy picking up trash with his half-bro & coaching little kid hockey to be bothered with such tomfoolery).

The Breakfast Club was my absolute favorite John Hughes film, why? Because it was the movie that said “it’s ok to be different. It’s ok to feel awkward. We may all be “brain, athlete, basket case, princess, criminal” and are all not that different” (as long as you were Caucasian that is…a sign of the times back then I suppose).  It followed the antics of the brats during one Saturday morning high school detention.

So what happened to our favorite brats since they famously walked in step along the library wall of their high school in Shermer, Illinois? Most of them had fairly pedestrian careers consisting primarily of made-for-tv-movies and Hallmark specials.  Emilio has had the most successful career but has switched to working behind the camera.   As an actor the geek, Anthony Michael Hall, seems to have had the next most successful career.

My personal favorite is Judd Nelson. He played John Bender, the “criminal” who famously told the principal to F-off, smoked pot, and scored the princess (albeit just a kiss as far as we know) as TBC’s bad boy.

[Look how terrified Molly Ringwald is to stand next to Crazy Judd]

Oh Judd, how far hath thee fallen…He showed up Sunday night looking like he’s skirting the bottom (which is possible since his best job recently was on “Infected” a straight to DVD release that I can’t even find a link to).  It wasn’t just his look, which in his defense looked like a barely bcleaned-up crazy person.  When he opened his mouth, it sounded like he had run the jack and coke dispenser in the green room dry prior to the show.  Really Judd?  Travolta made a comeback, so can you.  It’s not too late you self-proclaimed bad boy.  It’s crazy to think you were one time as popular as Johnny Depp when he was on 21 Jump Street. That’s like looking back when Toyota and GM used to trade at the same stock price.

Despite my Judd bashing, I felt a great sense of nostalgia well up in me when I saw the brats again.  Way back when everything was still in front of me and I had nothing but time to kill on a Saturday morning.

• Have sort of had blogger’s-block lately, but a few developments this week catalyzed a torrent of thoughts to express, so to avoid an overly indulgent post, will try to contain this to pithy bullets.
• Our stupendous PR consultant Brian Baumley (check out his three pages of results for us) has recommended recently that we could have some fun with xtraNormal, which we have done, see video below.
• Just the other day saw TechCrunch coverage of  a (frankly, kind of dull) video with Twitter exec/founder Ev Williams video from ~10 years ago including some old-timey intro footage, and a few weeks ago TechCrunch covered unearthing of a much, much better video from ~ 5 y.a. of  Tw e/f Biz Stone, also anachronistically stylized.
• inspired by bullets above, PRESENTING! A Viral Humdinger
• Hope you found that video witty, but know it also has a message: Flip cameras, iMovie softare and YouTube accounts, and cute & easy tools like xtraNormal, make many think that enterprises don’t need to pay dedicated, high-end production talent and can go the UGC route for content. — Not true.
• 15 years ago some people started to expect professional organizations might have web sites built by employees in spare time with tools like FrontPage, and probably 15 years before that people expected that all brochures would be similarly done from general employee pool with onset of desktop publishing tools. — These both also have never turned out to be true.
• Web development, print design and other media endeavors are in fact done by hybrids on behalf of corporations, of large institutions and even of major media publishers — a little bit by crafty employees with off-shelf tools, some by particularly skilled & dedicated internal professionals, and still plenty by major external agencies revving up the big guns.
• Thus it will be with video and as organizations of all sizes and types use this effective and increasingly available & usable medium throughout operations, expect some to be someone like me playing with xtraNormal, and a lot to be projects with substantial budgets & teams including serious professionals in the craft.
• xtraNormal is in fact fun and useful to play with and we look forward to availing such functionality in our pre-production software for better collaborative scripting and storyboard development.
• Back to the top few bullets above, in addition to the Ev & Biz videos, recent TechCrunch stories have also included broad criticism of the PR field including with aid of xtraNormal software. Well, we’re not sure how warranted that is, and at least can point to Brian Baumley as a shining counter-example of exceptional PR professionalism (yet another field in which solid professionalism can be just as vital as ever even in these Web 2.0+ days).
• You get the sub-title of this blog post? Reference to an old spiritual, very familiar to those of us who read Inherit The Wind in middle school with a generous teacher who screened the (highly professionally produced & staffed) film after we finished.

A little while back, ReelSEO’s Mark Robertson caught up with Market7 CEO Seth Kenvin for an update on the company, thoughts on how to make video production more efficient and more. The interview serves as a great primer for what can go wrong in any video production, why things go wrong and how Market7 can help address these extremely frequent issues. Check out the video embedded below or with a great text recap over at ReelSEO.

Missed ReelSEO’s review of Market7 back in November? You can check it out here. We’re pleased to say that we’ve already implemented some of the suggestions that reviewer Christopher Rick included in the review!

Below this paragraph you’re looking at a significant advance in our securing content and information about production that’s run discreetly through video.Market7. The first modules in the application to feature access controls were collaborative script and resource management — in both of these people can be explicitly invited or excluded from access based on permission levels granted either to them personally & directly, or more indirectly through association of privilege with their roles. Roles in this context sort of act like tags. Thing is that until recently roles could be openly changed by anyone. So, if I’m locked out of a script I want to see, but I suspect the “crew” role (or of course some other one) does have access, then I can just expand my roles to include “crew”, and I’m in. We’re about to expand content security considerations to other parts of our service, so it’s become time to close the roles loophole, now done.

The above image is a project-owner’s perspective. This is the only person in a project who may determine which people in a project may assign roles. The red padlock towards upper-right indicates that some users are restricted from role assignment, and that button is only visible to the project owner who may press it to modify. When there are no restrictions set for any team member on role-setting, which is the default condition when a new project starts, the button is green instead of red, and reveals an open padlock. Then there’s the nearby floating rectangle containing text — it’s our new (& more on-screen persistent during mouse-over) style of text/information-revealing (aka tooltip). Looks nice, right? This message tells the project-owner about their being allowed to modify roles themselves, also indicated by the little, green, open padlock above the Team module’s Roles column, right by the pointer. When someone who’s denied role modification privileges by the project-owner looks at the Team module, the lock over that column is red and closed, the person can not add or modify (but CAN see) roles, and the tooltip includes identification & contact information for project-owner along with advice to contact that person for modification request.

Every Monday, we have a Market7 ritual.  We all gather either in person or over the phone, sometimes throw down a tune or two to set the mood, talk about the upcoming week, review the current development state of our software and almost always engage in some good-natured teasing of one another.

Here’s a little taste of a typical Monday morning.

As our base diversifies, including expanding use on bigger budget production projects that tend to involve longer footage, customers increasingly request that our player functionality be immediately and comprehensively available for any portion of small or large video files. Our initial player functionality has been based on progressive download, meaning that once a video is requested, it loads in timeline order, and later portions of the video aren’t immediately available until the download catches up. As part of our assessment, and after experiments with a few commercial streaming servers, we determined the best approach for us is to engineer and implement our own approach to dynamic streaming, which we’ve spent the past month or so developing, along with a few other cool annotative player features, demonstrated here:

To assure good customer experiences, and even though we’ve already extensively tested, we haven’t yet turned on the new dynamic streaming for everyone, and we’re asking for volunteers. If you would like us to turn on dynamic streaming for (a) particular project(s) of yours, please email support@market7.com or sales@market7.com letting us know which project(s) and we’ll do so. Once we confirm that video play and annotative interactivity works robustly across projects, video files and users, we’ll turn on dynamic streaming everywhere, which should occur during February 2010.

Dynamic streaming, like its name indicates, allows users to click anywhere within timeline of a video immediately upon load, and play of video from that requested point is immediately responsive. Also, in implementing the architecture we have also allowed for Flash (.flv) and H.264 (ex: .mp4, .m4v) videos to be in-the-clear in our player so they do not get transcoded, meaning that they are immediately available for play upon upload, and that they are played at full quality of the source content with no modification. Videos of other formats do still have to be transcoded to Flash for our player, although from the File Actions button in our player, the original states of those videos can be downloaded with full fidelity for file-transfer purposes including to see un-modified in a compatible player. One more change we made to our player is allowing j-k-l keyboard shortcut navigation back-play/pause-forward, and the same for left and right directional arrows and space-bar, with additional benefit of visual fast-forward and rewind by holding down the appropriate keys.

The player enhancements are demonstrated in the screen-capture video towards the top of this blog post. Other enhancements with this release include:

• Continuing last couple of months’ theme, we’ve made still more speed improvements, especially this time for loads of project home pages
• Improved layout and presentation on printouts of pages from Script, Task and Event modules
• Easier flow for inviting new members to projects
• Activity feed reflects the first time a new member logs into a project

And again, please do email to support@market7.com or sales@market7.com letting us know projects of yours you’d like us to move to dynamic streaming immediately so that you can try it out (and please let us know how it works for you).

• Religiously oriented mixed martial arts competition
• Kids learn simple & safe cooking from talking appliances
• Documentary footage of the world’s largest house of horrors
• A world-trekking scuba diver who celebrates local alcoholic spirits
• Home makeover emphasizing reduction of toxicity
• Women in bikinis swimming through mud-swamps in Germany
• Roadtrip of 3 boys with a chef who dictates quality food (no junk) they must eat

A month or so ago Andrew Angus of our customer Switch Marketing pointed out that often his firm starts multiple simultaneous projects with a single set of clients. The way our software was working, the participating clients would have to accept individual invitations to each project. He pointed out that this can be a nuisance to his clients, and that sometimes people don’t at first go through accepting each invitation resulting in their not gaining access to every project. So, his recommendation was to change our software such that when two people have been in a project together before, when one of them invites the other to a new project, the addition should be automatic with no need to accept an invitation. We agreed, and built it, and are grateful to Andrew.

Automatic addition of prior team-mates to project means no invitation acceptances which is of course mostly a benefit for video.Market7 users, but Michael Haley of our customer Bars + Tone pointed out to us that after we made that change this also can mean no notification of some new team members’ arrival in projects’ activity feeds. He finds it useful to know when first log-ins happen, which makes sense to us too. So, using our agile development practices, we wrote a story in Pivotal Tracker that when an experienced video.Market7 user first into a project a new project of theirs, that occurance should go to the project’s activity feed.

Next week all of our customers will benefit from both Andew’s and Michael’s good ideas after we release new code that includes the latest customer-driven development ideas which our engineers just completed programming.

]]> http://www.market7.com/blog/2010/01/22/customer-driven-development/feed/ 0 http://www.market7.com/blog/2010/01/14/full-market7-review-in-streamingmedia/ http://www.market7.com/blog/2010/01/14/full-market7-review-in-streamingmedia/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:15:00 +0000 Brian Baumley http://www.market7.com/?p=2031 We think it’s worth setting some time aside to take this full one in

Back in October, Tim Siglin of StreamingMedia and Braintrust Digital came out to our engineering offices in San Francisco to learn more about video.Market7 in preparation for an upcoming review. When he left to spend some time trying out the service on his own, he did more than just kick the tires – he took us apart and put us back together again! We should have expected no less after the meticulous in-person meeting.

We are pleased that this discriminating shopper seems to have overall liked what he saw. Like many video producers who try video.Market7, Tim seemed especially taken with the annotative player, which he notes, “might be the best thing to come along [last] year.”

A huge thanks to Tim and also to Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen over at StreamingMedia for taking the time to check us out. Check out the review online and in the Dec/Jan issue.

]]> http://www.market7.com/blog/2010/01/14/full-market7-review-in-streamingmedia/feed/ 0 http://www.market7.com/blog/2010/01/06/3d-is-the-future-of-video/ http://www.market7.com/blog/2010/01/06/3d-is-the-future-of-video/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 06:10:24 +0000 Seth Kenvin http://www.market7.com/?p=1995 But is widespread 3D video as soon as Avatar & CES gadget launches indicate?

The momentum:

• Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, Panasonic, LG all make announcements about & demonstrate 3D sets they’re launching today at Consumer Electronics Show
• 3D-fueled Avatar hits $1 billion of box office receipts in 17 days
• ESPN, Discovery and iMax launch 3D cable channels

What can stop this? Nothing. We will all watch everything in 3D — live & recorded; fiction & real-life action; professional content & user-generated; and on every screen whether it’s on a wall, in a pocket or connected to a keyboard & even by a variety of ubiquitous projectors that will turn any surface into a 3D display.

Great, with the head of steam we’ve got that should be soon, right? No. I have no idea when it will happen, but I can assure  that we’ve got multiple years to go, maybe even decades, before our video being in 3D becomes more rule than exception.

Consider the following similar scenarios I recall from eight years working in the cable industry:

• Operators were working to free up the spectrum to carry HDTV in the nineties, but now two decades later less than half of U.S. homes are HD-equipped
• Broad video on-demand usage is happening about in sync with HDTV uptake, but encouraging results form famous trials in Omaha, Orlando and elsewhere stirred up  projections for VoD to boom even earlier than HD
• For all of the 15+ years that the web’s been popular some have said it will imminently cross over to TV displays, but options to surf and access web content on the tube are only available the last few years, and they’re still really more science kits than instant, user-friendly options
• Perhaps most daunting of all, in the SEVENTIES, the Qube project for interactive television in which viewers could take electronic actions on content in their programming, and pundits are still wondering whether THIS YEAR might be the one one in which iTV finally takes off

When will mass adoption of 3D finally extend to all video, consumed anywhere, at any time, on any device? Don’t know, but I expect no sooner than:

• The price ranges of 3D display devices recedes, with a low end starting in the hundreds of dollars
• The 46% of US households with HDTV sets need some time before those move from the living room to the bedroom in order to make prime in-home real estate available for 3D to arrive
• No glasses required

What else will have to happen?

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