The crew working hard, fighting the weather, and still managing to tell great stories!

SAVE THE DATE! The Annual SAFE Party will be on MARCH 22 at the fabulous Andaz Hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter. The fun starts at 6pm and goes until 9pm. As always there will be great Silent Auction Items and the best of the best from the Advertising, Marketing, PR, Printing, Online and Media industry to mix it up. Tickets go on sale soon.  Spread the word to all your peers in the biz – this is going to be one great night for one great cause.

Fun day shooting with the talented John Weisbarth

Are we geting close to where mobile devices are serious moviemaking tools?  Not yet – but the question of how do you rethink workflows for different interfaces is exciting!  I’ve been using iMovie for iPad and iPhone to do quick edits of the family for awhile now – I’ll be interested to see what Avid brings to the table(t), and what trickles down to professional systems.

Avid Studio for iPad on the iTunes App Store.

When Apple released FCPx in June last year, the response from FCP users was universally (very) bad - well, almost universally bad.  While I wasn’t thrilled with the new release, I thought the biggest problem was not with the software, but with how Apple presented it.  This was, after all, something completely new and people have trouble with change even when the change is for the good – and whichever side of the fence you fell on FCPx, almost everyone knew that FCP7 was getting long in the tooth and needed a change.

What I said then was that if Apple had released FCPx as a free “time limited beta” – where they would gather user feedback and address problems in the final release, the response from the community would have been significantly different.  Today, Apple released FCPx 10.0.3, and from what I’ve seen, this is the release that should have followed the free beta period.  Many of the features that people have rightfully bemoaned losing in the 7 to X transition are back – most notably multi-cam editing – with mixed formats and mixed frame rates, media relink (thank whichever deity you wish to thank), broadcast monitoring (huzzah!), and perhaps most importantly (but far less sexy) XML support – which has allowed the big brains at Assisted Editing to release their FCP 7 to X conversion tool, allowing you to bring your FCP7 projects in to FCPX – I honestly think I heard a choir of angels sing when I read that.

Time will tell if Apple has also squashed the most persistant bugs, but 10.0.3 is, so far, is the first version that I think FCP users should have had to pay for.  Better late than never, and I think FCPX now is a true contender for professionals.

If you haven’t tried FCPX yet because of all the negative press, I highly recommend it.  Once you wrap your head around this new way of working (and you do have to forget almost everything you think you know), FCPX really is a powerful, professional editing tool – at least, NOW it is.

So one of the things I struggle with is the business side of the business. Like many people in the industry, I got into film and video production because I enjoyed telling stories – not because I had any particular affinity for running a business.  I have to make so many decisions that seem to have nothing to do with the art that I love:

• Do I hire staff or hire a freelancer? (usually a freelancer)
• Do I spend time on the phone selling to new customers, or on social media marketing to existing ones? (both)
• Do I cut a budget in order to land the business – even though the project won’t be as profitable? (usually no)
• How much money should I spend on marketing? (as little as possible while still reaching my goals)

That last one is particularly tricky – since we offer strictly B2B communication services, it’s hard to find a marketing outlet that gets us the right kinds of leads.  If we do marketing that has even a whiff of a consumer target, we get inundated with “I have a great idea for a tv show” and “I need a camera guy to shoot my kid’s baseball team” types of leads.  So we’re very (VERY) careful about where our marketing messages go.  One service we like because it’s very targeted is Thumbtack – it allows us to create a really nice video production for business ad at no cost.  In addition, they give us lots of neat little tools like a spotlight profile on the business, and the ability to create nice Craigslist ads with friendly reminders to renew.  All for free!

Of course, no price is a good price if you don’t get the results you want.  Thumbtack is a new(ish) service and we’ve just gotten started with it.  We’ll see if ultimately it provides good value for Groovy!

If you’re a video or film professional, how do you market your services?  Do you do any advertising?  How about social media?  Face-to-face conversations with established relationships are obviously our most effective sales tool, but how do you pave the way for those selling opportunities?

Click here to view the embedded video.

The best thing about being the boss is I get to choose which tasks I delegate and which I do myself. Today, I chose this…

Or at least a slightly larger tripod…