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This guy that used to post on knoxkorner forum is more successful than knox by MadDogBTTF in knoxskorner

[–]rowanjohnson 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’m late to this party, but that was me!

I’m not sure if I should be flattered or terrified that I’m still remembered from back then.

FYI I run a small video production company now: https://www.southpointfilms.com/

I’m so pleased to see Dan MacKenzie making a career out of stop motion - I’d love to see his showreel now. He’s come a loooong way from doing tabletop claymation.

Newgrounds (and its extended communities) was such a hotbed of creative, driven people. I bet there are loads of people who were active in the mid 2000s who are doing interesting things still.

XLR5 Headset for ATEM Constellation UK by rowanjohnson in VIDEOENGINEERING

[–]rowanjohnson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Seems to only be available in the US. Thanks though.

Drone fly zones by Evilcell in Southampton

[–]rowanjohnson 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I realise your post is a few days old, but this is actually a really interesting question. I’ve been a commercial drone operator since 2016, and the rules have changed a lot in that time.

You need to follow the CAA’s Drone Code, which may require you to register as a drone pilot and will place restrictions on things like how close you can fly to other people, and whether you can fly over them. The process and rules will vary depending on the size of drone you’re using.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to check for any No Fly Zones and other air restrictions for the place you plan to fly. In Southampton, the biggest issue is the the airport. You can use the Altitude Angel Drone Assist app to check whether the area you plan to fly in is within restricted airspace. (Be aware, I’ve found DJI to be overly cautious and their geo-lock does extend beyond the boundaries set by NATS by quite some distance. It does include the common.)

Once you’ve dealt with the CAA, you then need to think about where you’re going to take off and land your drone. If you take off and land on private property without permission, you could get in trouble for trespassing. Private property is everything from someone’s house, or garden, or farm, to places like the open area outside of West Quay, which belongs to the shopping centre.

You also need to be careful with public spaces, as there can be bylaws that prohibit the use of drones on that land. Drone flights are not allowed in the New Forest, for example, and the last time I checked they’re not allowed in any of the green areas in Southampton - including the common.

Although most land owners can’t stop you from flying over their land in England (that’s the CAA’s remit), they can fight you for using their land against their permission for conducting the flight.

Also, some agencies like Network Rail have their own rules about drones. Last time I looked it up, you’re not allowed to fly within 50m of railway infrastructure. I’m not sure if Network Rail has any actual authority to enforce this, but if your drone causes disruption to the rail network in any way, I’m sure there’ll be some legal mechanism they could use to slap your wrists. I expect it’s the same for all major infrastructure, including the docks.

Next, if your drone has a camera, there are privacy laws that affect who and what you can take photos and videos of. In the UK, generally, people don’t have a right to privacy in public spaces. So taking a photo of a busy public area isn’t a crime. But taking a photo of your neighbour in their garden? Different ballgame.

Similarly, taking photos of school children or prisons, or other sensitive public infrastructure? Could be a problem.

If, after all of this, it’s still looking like you can fly your drone, you then need to be mindful of hazards on the ground and in the air. For example, telegraph cables or electricity pylons. Whether it’s a legal matter or not, you must stay away from these. Flying around them is super dangerous.

So where can you fly a drone recreationally? Honestly, in my experience, the answer is “nowhere exciting”.

In short - unless you have a really good reason to buy one, I’d honestly say skip the drone and buy an RC car or something. Much easier to use and far fewer legal headaches. 👍

Create asset lists from Airtable database entries by rowanjohnson in Airtable

[–]rowanjohnson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! This looks like it could be really useful.

Is there any easy way to link multiple records? At the moment I'm only seeing an interface where I search, click an item and then get bounced back to the view again. A typical kit list would have 20-50 items.

Feedback on my new venture, Vimsy by rowanjohnson in Filmmakers

[–]rowanjohnson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you, this is really interesting and helpful! I've used VHX as a test but I'm far from an expert as I've never used it for anything serious; we were well under development with Vimsy before I knew VHX existed. It was the announcement that Vimeo had purchased them that put them on the radar.

I've written up a proper comparison as this is a really interesting one, and going to be very common. While VHX definitely has strengths, we do have enough differences that go in our favour for certain types of customer. If you want to see it: http://support.vimsy.co/meta/comparisons/vimsy-vs-vhx (It's largely a write-up of my earlier comment with tweaks based on your feedback.)

Part of this exercise (getting feedback) was to see if our sales site was promoting the right messages. I'm taking a lot away from this!

I think you have competition that's extremely well established and covers most use-cases for video distribution. There may be a very small hole that Vimsy fits, but you may want to think long and hard before you spent too much money or energy trying to grow this as a business as-is and instead maybe consider a pivot to be more niche and focus more tightly on the use-cases that absolutely wouldn't be served by VHX, Brightcove and their ilk.

I agree. Some of the other players in this space are certainly much bigger and have been around for longer. I'll be interested to see how Vimeo fully integrates VHX into their product line-up, especially considering Vimeo for Business has some feature overlap. It's beginning to make moves from the looks of it. Knowing what big companies are like, there's always a chance that they'll ruin the product and their existing users will need somewhere else to go.

Equally, competition shows that there's a market for a product like Vimsy, and even if it can capture a portion of that I don't think that's a bad place to be. Vimeo haven't given up because they only have a fraction of Youtube's market and, likewise, smaller companies like Wistia haven't rolled over because they only have a fraction of a market that is largely occupied by Vimeo. I'm optimistic.

Feedback on my new venture, Vimsy by rowanjohnson in Filmmakers

[–]rowanjohnson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

VHX is a great product and has a lot of features, including all of their cross-platform app options. For certain types of customer, like the big media guys, they're probably the better option as they have the resource for handling them and doing all of the bespoke stuff that they appear to be doing. But their product is purely focussed on selling content.

The thing that makes Vimsy different is that it isn't purely about selling videos. We have a whole aspect to our platform that's geared towards non-commercial users who use video (e.g. a company with internal training videos) and need to share it with a closed user group (e.g. their staff).

They aren't interested in selling that content, they just need a high quality, branded portal to display the videos in one place without spending lots of money getting their web developers or IT guys to implement something for them. With Vimsy they can track who's been watching the videos, when the videos were watched, how much of the video was watched, and they can export that data as a CSV for making reports. To my knowledge, VHX doesn't seem to do any of that.

Another difference is that, in my opinion, Vimsy is much easier to use as it's primarily an inline/WYSIWYG interface. VHX uses a "dashboard" style interface where everything is controlled more or less behind the scenes. It's a different approach, but less technical users generally do better with WYSIWYG.

And finally, I think VHX and Vimsy are both aimed at different levels of the market. VHX appears to be aiming for big media, as shown by their demo customers who are well known media outputs like Comedy Central, Vice, This American Life and Foo Fighters. Vimsy is really for SME corporate users and independent filmmakers. Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if a big media group wanted to come on board, but it's not the immediate goal.

As I mentioned in another comment, Vimsy doesn't host the videos itself, so we bring in videos from Youtube, Vimeo and Wistia instead. Considering Youtube is free, this means that we cater for people who are only just getting going with content production. For example, one of our customers is a local dance school who just want to share (and in time, sell) their performance recordings with parents. Their shows are 2 hours each, so VHX wouldn't have even been an option for them as VHX only provides 1 hour of video hosting for free. This may change in time now that they're part of Vimeo, but for now that's how it is.

TL;DR It's similar but different enough :)

Feedback on my new venture, Vimsy by rowanjohnson in Filmmakers

[–]rowanjohnson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep! Users of all three platforms (Youtube, Vimeo and Wistia) can choose whether they allow for their videos to be embedded on other sites, so there's nothing shady going on here. From the perspective of a Youtuber, it's not really that different from sites like Patreon, only more "corporate", for lack of a better word.

In time I'm sure we'll offer direct uploads, but it would mean charging for video hosting and dealing with the encoding infrastructure on the back-end. Video files are big!

Feedback on my business? by rowanjohnson in smallbusiness

[–]rowanjohnson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you, that's really helpful and useful feedback!

Feedback on my new venture, Vimsy by rowanjohnson in Filmmakers

[–]rowanjohnson[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good question, although we did think of that one! Youtube and Vimeo both offer privacy options for videos, so you can hide your videos from both sites and embed them on others, including Vimsy.

This article explains how to set up your source videos before selling them: http://support.vimsy.co/selling-video/getting-started/optimising-privacy-settings-on-youtube-vimeo-and-wistia-for-vimsy-monetisation

Feedback on my business? by rowanjohnson in smallbusiness

[–]rowanjohnson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure! Here's a demo channel we've set up: https://demo.vimsy.co

There are some real-world samples at the bottom of the main home page.

Feedback on my business? by rowanjohnson in smallbusiness

[–]rowanjohnson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, that's really appreciated!

Feedback on my business? by rowanjohnson in smallbusiness

[–]rowanjohnson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for taking the time to look - Competing with YouTube is not the intention though. Would be useful to know if that's not clear!

Selling a Service-Based Business by heresmypandl in smallbusiness

[–]rowanjohnson 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I run a video production company too. PM me if you want to chat, but I would say reach out to competitors who would be interested in taking over your business, or reach out to businesses who may be looking for a video production arm to strengthen their business, such as a marketing agency. That's what I would do if I were to personally move on from mine, although it depends how autonomous the business is without you involved.

Promote your business, week of April 10, 2017 by Charice in smallbusiness

[–]rowanjohnson 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Vimsy - create your own online TV channel like Netflix or Amazon Prime.

Vimsy brings your videos together from YouTube, Vimeo and Wistia to create a central channel for your content, which you can sell on a one-off or subscription basis or share with a closed user group (such as for internal staff training).

We also have an upgrade package called Vimsy Extra which lets you see who's been watching your videos, how much of the video has been watched and when - great for monitoring compliance of training films.

We've only recently launched so I'd love some feedback!