David Baxter

A little free advice for those of you looking for film/video jobs (coming from someone who’s seen dozens of résumés in the last month):

• Don’t act surprised if you get asked for sample work (in fact, submit it with your resume) — I’m hiring you for your video skills, not your resume-writing skills.
  
  
• Always make it super-easy for an employer to figure out what your role on a project was — I’m hiring you, not your entire crew. I want to know your role on a project before I watch it. Don’t make me hunt through 3 minutes of credits to figure out what you did…I lose interest too quickly.
  
  
• Pay attention to the job qualifications: If the position is for someone who can shoot & edit, you should submit example work for shooting & example work for editing. If you submit only editing examples, I’m going to infer from that that you can’t shoot. And don’t get offended that I made that inference.
  
  
• Your sample work should really be available online. DVDs bore me and usually look worse than Vimeo.

Biola’s Spring 2011 Commencement by the Numbers:

Months of planning.

1 full week of setup (thousands of manhours).

5 hours of event.

6 hours to tear it all down.

995 graduates.

10,000 visitors on campus.

6 HD viewing stations around Metzger Quad.

2 HD overflow venues.

Over 2/3 of a mile of video cable alone.

5 cameras generating a total of 700 GB of raw HD footage.

20 talented video/audio production staff.

Over 1000 people watching the live stream, many on an iPhone or iPad.

350 GB of streaming video transferred, pushing over 250 Mbps at our peak.

1 exhausted @dbax.

Why Thunderbolt should be awesome

Apple & Intel announced their new Thunderbolt technology today. It looks like it could be a huge win for video pros. Here’s a few quick reasons why:

• It’s fast. 10Gbps each direction. For reference, Firewire 800 tops out at 0.8Gbps, and an uncompressed HD-SDI stream is 1.485Gbps.
• It allows multiple devices. Apple’s specs say you can chain up to 6 devices (including a display). Should be a lot better than Firewire, which starts to choke after more than one device.
  In theory, a single Thunderbolt port on a laptop should be able to support a couple RAID drives, an external I/O card (like perhaps an updated version of Blackmagic’s UltraStudio Pro), a fast CF/SSD/SxS reader, and even a monitor on top of that. Very cool.
• It has industry buy-in. Intel’s press page for Thunderbolt has quotes from Apple, AJA, Blackmagic, Promise, and Western Digital. G-Tech tweeted me to insinuate that they’re working on some Thunderbolt compatible stuff. I think it’s pretty clear that this is not just an Apple standard. I’m guessing we’ll see a ton of Thunderbolt gear at this year’s NAB.

With today’s Thunderbolt announcements plus the recent Final Cut rumors from Larry Jordan, I’m starting to once again get excited about Apple’s commitment to video pros. It should be an interesting year.

Lighting is a powerful thing. Spend the time to do it right and you can create welcoming environments, amazing emotions and memorable experiences.

Case in point: 

There’s a temple on Hacienda Blvd (on my backup route to/from LA) that was having some sort of a festival tonight. Their entire grounds were beautifully lit with hundreds of soft, warm china balls and lanterns. In contrast with the stormy dusk sky, the soft lighting was inviting you in, begging you to bask in its glow. I don’t think a film crew could’ve lit it any nicer.

I was tempted to stop in and take a closer look, but then I remembered I was wearing my church’s “serve” shirt, and I didn’t really want to start an accidental religious war. :)