There was a post on the CrunchGear blog that Alex found that I find particularly helpful, and I'm sure the vast majority of you will too!

There are specific How-To instructions on compressing your video to get the most out of posting on YouTube.

Check it out!

CrunchGear

First time posting here and just getting started with creating short format work to upload (some of the work I've found on this site has been inspirational/instructional). Have a few questions on the business side of things that perhaps someone can chime in on...

--These aggregation sites like Tubemogul and others; is it really worth the time to try and push your work to as many sites as possible? I understand exposure is important - but is there a such a thing as over exposing a video/your work if it's not standard faire?

--For those of us that are looking to promote our spec work, and perhaps get a job from all of this blood, sweat, and typing - how else are people finding us "guns for hire" ? Are you guys using listing sites - and which ones? I've heard of friends getting work from listing themselves on productionpoint.com and kemps, and some others...anyone have suggestions (particularly if any of these resources have international reach)?

Thanks in advance for your input,

Jay Davis

Are you an animator? Do you know a good animator? We're looking for an animator for a comedy project soon to be pitched as a TV series. If you're interested, please email [email protected]

Thanks!

I've got a short film that I shot on an HVX-200 that I'd like to edit in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. Premiere Pro 2.0 supports 720p HD editing, but it doesn't natively ingest the MXF format that the HVX-200 captures.

I'm searching for a sound mixer to help me on a short film shooting this Saturday Sept 22. I have the gear already, just need someone who can operate. It's a basic set up: 2 wireless lavs, boom, 5 channel mixer hard-lined to camera.

Kathleen
310-592-7753

So, so sorry. I let Ego Nalts on the computer. Man that post made us look stupid.

-Self Depricating Kevin

Brock here from Studio 8. We've gotten several requests to talk about how and (perhaps why) we produced the "Problem With Horsey/Here to Help" promo for The Daily Reel. So let's jump into that, shall we?

THE WHY:
A few weeks ago, TDR asked Studio 8 if we'd like to shoot a commercial for their ReeledIn web community. Within two days, we had a fresh idea and got a script green-lighted. It's a pretty weird little concept, and at first, it was more of a literal commercial. For instance, instead of me saying, "You better use an internet to fix it," I was originally supposed to say something like, "Log onto TheDailyReel.com and ask someone in the ReeledIn community about it." They didn't want it to be so straight-forward.

So the end product (we hope) feels less like a commercial and more like a quirky, short video that happens to have a logo for The Daily Reel tacked on the end of it. But because it's about making a video and people helping each other, it's still fairly related to ReeledIn's community and what-not. Right?

THE HOW:
Shooting
All the horse stuff was, of course, shot in front of a blue screen. I know that green screens are what's hot right now, but a couple of years ago, we worked on a movie and some birds poopoo-ed on this huge blue screen and one of the grips gave it to us and now that we've got a decent camera, we're able to finally make good use of it. So Rory and I got gussied up in our best cowboy duds and pretended to stiffly ride horses for about 10 minutes. We were careful not to move our legs too much, since we knew we'd have to wedge the horses in between them and the less movement, the easier the editing would be.

The computer room stuff was pretty easy. We had to fake the bedroom door as the house's front door, which was easily done by using our much smaller green screen to cover up the outer room and make it look like Vlad was standing on our front porch.

Editing
In the scenes where you look over Java's shoulder at the computer screen, our second monitor was doing the flashy scrolling thing, so we had to get real creative there. We used that angle twice, so in the first one, if you go back and watch it, you'll notice that Java's upper torso and head don't move AT ALL. That's because to get rid of the screen flicker, I just used a freeze frame of the upper left half of the shot and superimposed that over the video. So Java's hands move, but his top half doesn't. Bet you didn't notice that the first time, huh? In the second shot, Java's upper half moves too much, so I had to create a 8-Point Garbage Matte and cut out the flickering screen with keyframes and all of that mess. Yucky!

Oh yeah, we use Final Cut Pro to edit most of our stuff.

When we wanted to show the footage on the monitor, we edited those chunks and had to output them as videos with all the effects finalized so then we could just shrink it all down to fit on the monitor. Does that make sense?

For the horse scenes, we used an 8-Point Garbage Matte to cut out our back legs and feet and then stuck pictures of the horses under our front legs, so it looks like we're actually riding them. When my horse fizzles out, I just used a few Video Filters like Bad TV with keyframes and added sound effects to make it seem like it was "malfunctioning".

There are lots of editing tricks in this video, lots of implied stuff like the gunshots, horses clomping, and ducks quacking.

Overall, it was a very fun shoot that only took a couple of hours and an educational edit job that took a day and a half or so.

We'd like to thank The Daily Reel for trusting in our nutty ideas and letting us produce the video. It's honestly one of my favorite things we've done thus far and I hope it gets this site some good exposure. Thanks for reading and feel free to contact me with any further questions/comments.

Peace,

Brock LaBorde

Welcome to the crew, Everyone.

As most of you have heard by now, YouTube has launched its new ad format, InVideo, with its preferred partners. Here's the news straight from the horse's mouth, i.e. the official YouTube blog:

Today we're offering select partners the ability to incorporate YouTube
InVideo ads into their content. These are animated overlays that appear
on the bottom 20 percent of a video. If you're interested by what you
see there, clicking on the overlay launches a deeper interactive video
ad that we think is relevant and entertaining. (The video you were
watching is temporarily paused.) If you choose not to click on the
overlay, it will simply disappear, so that you're in full control of
your YouTube experience.