Make that camcorder last until the next format change with these simple ways to prolong its life and proper operation.

“Sweet barking cheese!” I said, “this is the filthiest camcorder I’ve ever seen!” Jennifer may have been a hotshot producer with six Emmys, but she didn’t take care of her equipment.

“Hey, it’s a tool,” she replied, “it’s not a countertop.”

There were fingerprints all over the lens, dust encrusted in every nook and cranny. I turned it over.

“Is this beach sand?! Jennifer! Is this beach sand falling out of your camera?! What will I find next, a hermit crab? Seaweed?”

“Now that you mention it,” she remarked, “I think that’s where it started eating tapes.”

“Look, Jennifer,” I said sternly, “you really must clean your camera. At least a little.”

Cleanliness and your Camera’s Physical Well-being

While your camera may be digital, there are parts of it which are entirely mechanical. Your tape transport mechanism is still pretty much the same as it was in an old cassette player. The tape is pulled from its case, and exposed in the innards of your camcorder, where it passes over the heads and the little ones and zeros are written to read off it. If your camcorder has particle matter inside, specifically things like dust or sand, it can not only damage your tape, but also more importantly, the sensitive read/write heads. For this reason, it’s of the utmost importance that you keep the inside of your camera as clean as you possibly can.

Tape Head Cleaners

Though the jury is still out on “dry” head cleaning tapes, we have never seen a camera die from them. These special cassettes contain either microscopically coarse fabric, or standard tape impregnated with somewhat-abrasive materials. Played in your camcorder for about five seconds, they gently abrade the head, like a pot-scrubber, scraping away accumulated muck. Follow the directions, and never overuse them (although extra cleaning is sometimes needed for really dirty heads.)

Swab the Deck!

You can also clean your tape heads with swabs and a mixture of 50% Tetrafluorothane 50% Isopropyl alcohol. And don’t think you can use a Q-Tip, that would leave a mess of cotton fibers in your camcorder. You need to use a specially designed foam swab, available at your camera store. Follow the instructions that come with the cleaning solution.

The Lens

It’s very important to keep the lens clean. A small scratch on your lens element is actually pretty insignificant, it might account for a fraction of 1% of the lens’ surface area, but a thumb print affects a much greater area, causing flare and hazy images. Lose the temptation to “clean” your lens by wiping it with your shirttail. Most artificial fibers make terrible lens cloths and they also have oil on them from your body. If you absolutely have to use some article of clothing, make sure it’s a natural fiber, like cotton. What you really want is a microfiber lens cloth, or a lens pen. Both are specifically designed for cleaning lenses.

No Solvents!

While Windex cleans glass, solvents can damage the coating on your lens. You can use a mild solution of lukewarm soapy water. Just be sure that you wipe the soap off with clean water and make sure that moisture doesn’t get inside your camera.

You can clean the exterior of your camera as you would any plastic surface, just use a damp cloth. You can use cotton swabs to get in the small spaces; here it doesn’t really matter so much if tiny bits of cotton come off. Just wipe it down with a damp cloth when you’re done.

Cleaning the LCD Screen

The LCD screen may or may not have a glass cover. In any event, just wipe it down with a damp, not wet, cloth. Your camera’s functionality won’t really be affected by a dust-encrusted LCD screen but it can be distracting to look at and dust on the LCD screen can be dislodged into the camera while changing tapes, so it’s just as well to wipe it down while you’re cleaning the important parts. If you really need that out-of-the-box squeaky-clean-look, try special screen cleaning products like Klear Screen or iKlear.

Should I use Compressed Air?

While it’s okay to use compressed air on the exterior of your camera, it may not be the best thing to use inside your camera. There are two types of compressed air, difluoroethane, the most common variety, which can possibly leave a film, and tetraflouroethane, which doesn’t leave any dross but doesn’t have as high a pressure.

Blower brushes (rubber bulbs with brushes on the end, squeezing the bulb blows air from a small nozzle) and compressed air will certainly get some amount of the dust out of your camera’s guts, but they do it by blowing it around, which just redistributes part of it. To be safe when using compressed air to blow dust out of your cameras guts, don’t tilt or shake the can while you’re spraying, don’t shake the can before spraying (this can cause “spitting”) and don’t get the nozzle too close to your sensitive bits. You may want to try a small electronics vacuum (often called a “keyboard vacuum”) to get the cracker crumbs out.

Battery Contacts

Often overlooked, the battery contacts, the metal where your camera’s battery passes electricity to the camera, can get clogged with dust and, to use the scientific word, gunk. You can clean these with a pencil eraser or a piece of cloth wrapped around a semi-sharp object (like a pencil point).

Keep it Clean

One way to be sure your camera stays clean is to keep it in its case. The best cases are hard shell ones with custom foam cut outs, such as those made by Pelican. If you use a soft case, keep the camera alone in it’s own compartment where batteries, pens, change, and soft drink bottles don’t bounce and rub up against it. One problem with bags is that they seem to be magnets for lint. Occasionally empty out your bag, turn it upside down, shake it out, and, if you have the opportunity, run your vacuum cleaner’s hose attachment through it. When not in use, store your camera in its bag.

Lens Cap

The lens cap protects your lens from scratches, fingerprints, splashed soup, and a host of other things. If your have a threaded lens, you can put a screw mount clear filter over the front to protect the lens from fingerprints.

Conclusion

Your camera’s innards are delicate and important. Keeping dust and dirt out is your first step in keeping it clean. When it does get dirty, there are plenty of commercial products available at your camera store for cleaning every part of it, from the lens element, to the video heads. Keep your camera safe when you store it, and be mindful of its environment.

Contributing Editor Kyle Cassidy is a video artist and network engineer and co-author of Enterprise Internetworking and Security. This article originally appeared at “Basic Training: Keep it Clean” on Videomaker.com.

The worst cause of video disasters is bad planning – not just during the Pre-production phase, but right through to the end of Post-production. Professionals don’t just make plans; they implement them and then they follow through on them.

When you plan like a pro, you:

-Plan the shoot in pre-production.

-Shoot the plan in production.

-Edit the planned shoot in post-production.

This sustained planning and follow-through is essential to delivering a quality video on time and on budget.The planning aspect of video creation is so often overlooked that we’re devoting three articles to it — one for each phase of production. This month, it’s plan the shoot in pre-production. Of course, pre-production is nothing but planning, from first concept to final schedule. Here, though, we are focusing specifically on developing plans that you can, indeed, shoot and then edit. We’ll look at scripting, casting, staffing, scouting, and budgeting.We’ll also look at a new planning area: special effects. In other words, pre-production planning relates to editing as well as shooting.

First, The Script

Though writing itself isn’t planning, the resulting script is the basis for every single decision you’ll make in prepping production. Without a complete script, you can’t cast the program, design its look, determine the crew and equipment needed, list the locations or sets, budget the production, or set a schedule.

No, an outline isn’t good enough, even if it’s 50 pages long. Only a true script is specific enough for planning. How about a storyboard? Storyboard sequences with complex action and/or special effects work to visualize the layout of the video, but use a written script for production planning.

For nonfiction programs, a two-column “A/V” (Audio and Video) formatted script will include complete narration and essential audio in the left column and visuals in the right one. Fiction films use the classic screenplay format. There are samples of several script formats on the Web; and for advice on how much detail to include, see the adjacent sidebar. The bottom line is this: when you get to production, you can’t shoot the plan unless you’ve planned the shoot in detail.

Special Effects

People think that special effects are compositing and computer graphics that belong in post-production. However, the most convincing effects are fully planned in pre-production so that location, composite, and CG work can be seamlessly integrated by implementing the detailed plan. That’s why you have to develop your special effects fully even before you scout locations and budget props.

For example, take a spectacular head-on car crash. To achieve the actual impact, you’ll have the cars drive toward and past each other, maybe two feet apart for safety, shooting the master with a long telephoto to conceal the gap between them. In post, you plan to speed up the collision shot and then conceal the fact that they miss each other by filling the screen with a well-timed CG fireball over the live action.

So far so good, but the secret of any effect lies in selling it with supporting shots. To make sure you get them, you need to plan high-speed shots of the individual cars, closeups of the drivers, and maybe a shot across the hood of one car after the crash, as one victim struggles out the door. You plan to put one side of the car up on blocks to tilt it and to increase the tilt by canting the camera off-level the opposite direction. (Note to DP: choose a vague background that won’t reveal the Dutch Angle shot, and throw a flickering “fire light” on the windshield, door, and struggling victim.) In post, composite a raging fire effect in the foreground to complete the gag. Every part of this must be planned, right down to the cinder blocks and the fire effect.

The moral is, you can’t just say, “oh we’ll do the car crash in post.” Only through detailed planning both before and during the shoot can you deliver the raw materials needed to create a classy effect.

People, Places, and Feedback

Even the biggest Hollywood productions are planned and developed by successive approximation: the script describes the requirements; the planners come as close as possible to meeting them; then the script is adjusted to eliminate the resources that were unobtainable and maximize those that were.

This is always true with casting actors. Suppose, for instance, the script demands a beautiful, enticing, evil stepmother; but the closest actress you can find is a frumpy, heavyset person who would look silly vamping around on screen. Happens all the time. So you do some fast script revisions to create a frumpy, heavyset evil stepmother. By planning to fit the circumstances, you save both the actress and the show from embarrassment.

Or take locations. If you can’t find anyplace resembling the dungeon where the evil stepmother imprisons the heroine, you have three choices: remove the dungeon part, create it as a CG virtual set (if you have the resources), or just chain the lady up in a storeroom or something.

Again, if you plan these adjustments before production begins, you can still shoot the plan; but if you haven’t invested in the planning, you’re going to arrive at an unconvincing “dungeon” location and have to improvise a fix on the spot. That seldom works very well.

The All-Powerful Schedule

In reality, budgeting and scheduling are two halves of a circle. Scheduling brings the right cast members, crew, and equipment to the right location at the right time, crucial if you’re paying people by the hour or day and just as important if folks are donating their time.

With good planning, you can also save big bucks (that’s where scheduling and budgeting play tag with each other). For instance, if that antique fire engine rents for $200 a day, you’ll want to schedule all its scenes back-to-back so you can return it as soon as possible.

Oh, and how is it going to get to your location? I once rented an antique vehicle without knowing it didn’t really run. At the last minute, I had to put out expensive, unbudgeted bucks for a day’s use of a platform-bed tow truck.

This is also true for anything else that’s time-sensitive. With meticulous planning, you’ll always have the correct cast list at the proper place with the required equipment and props, all ready to shoot. Without planning, everyone ends up standing around, and that’s not good.

And if it rains or something else goes wrong? A planning pro will have a contingency plan: a way to shoot something else until you can resume the original schedule.

Money, Money, Money

Professional production accountants must keep tiny altars to the Spirit of Murphy, on which they burn symbolic dollar bills, because on a shoot, anything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong. Corollary #1: everything that goes wrong costs money.

Everything. It goes without saying that good production planners budget the show line-item by line-item, right down to cold cream for the makeup department. Then they run an eagle eye over every aspect of production. Does one character throw a vase at another? How many takes might that require, and how many replacement vases? Does one sequence call for actual snow? What will the weather be like and how many days might be lost while waiting for the fluffy stuff to start falling?

Obviously, every production is different. If you’re taping the CEO’s speech in her office, you’re probably very safe. If you’re covering whale migrations from the subjects’ POV, good luck.

Since you don’t have unlimited funds, you can’t just say, “well, whatever it takes.” You have to cast a cold planner’s eye over every script page to spot every place that could run over budget. Then you add a contingency fee for protection.

Then you double it, and pray.

That’s it for creating a production plan. Next time out, we’ll see how that plan structures the actual shoot so that you can end up editing the show you started out to make.

Sidebar: How Detailed a Script?

Whether scripting in the A/V or screenplay formats, you do not — in fact, should not — specify camera angles and individual shots. For instance, if the story calls for a character to window-shop along a street, it’s enough to write Marcie walks down Main street, looking in shop windows, pausing at some, then moving on. Half-way along, she spots something in a window. It is the statue of a black falcon. Surprised, she gets her courage up and enters the store.

Notice how the paragraphing suggests a rough breakdown of the scene content, but without trying to do the director’s job. Any director worthy of the title will know how to distribute that action among appropriate setups. On the other hand, the production manager can learn enough from the description to schedule the “Marcie” actor and plan for a small town street, an antiques or pawnshop, and a Maltese Falcon prop.

In short, the script is detailed enough for planning, without being too restrictive.

Contributing Editor Jim Stinson is the author of the book Video Communication and Production. This article originally appeared at “Plan the Shoot: Part 1 of Production Planning” on Videomaker.com.

Plan the shoot, shoot the plan, edit the planned shoot. That’s the mantra we introduced in last month’s piece on production planning. We rejoin the discussion now with the amazing new idea that when production starts you should shoot what you planned to shoot.

Talk about obvious!

Not so fast. If that deceptively simple rule were routinely followed, Hollywood epics would never overrun their schedules and amateur productions would never look embarrassing (assuming they didn’t crash and burn before completion). So let’s review reasons for staying on-plan, gremlins that attack production plans, and ways to protect yourself against disasters, both serial and parallel.

The underlying concept is that crucial decisions are made in pre-production planning that will affect everything that follows, all the way through to the end of post production. A good planner keeps that long timeline in mind, the way a good chess player thinks many moves ahead.

Stick to the Plan

Sticking to a plan no matter what seems sort of, well retentive; but there are several reasons for resisting changes or at least studying them very carefully before making them.

First, remember the law of unintended consequences. Even small productions are complicated organisms with many interdependent parts. If you decide to shoot, say, scene 22 instead of scheduled scene 14, the cast, location, and time of day might be fine — but what about the actor’s distinctive Grateful Dead shirt, which got all muddy in scene 13 but has to be clean again for scene 22? Thinking fast, you run it through a Laundromat during lunch break. Uh-huh, but when you go to scene 14 later that shirt has to be dirty again — with exactly the same stain pattern as before it was washed.

So things start to domino. Cleverly, you have the actor play scene 14 without the shirt, adding a line like, “Boy, I hope I can get that shirt clean; it’s an heirloom.” Right away, you’ve handed the editor two problems. Since the action is continuous across scenes 13 and 14, the character has no off-screen time in which to take off the shirt. Major jump cut. Also, the added line tells viewers that the shirt’s valuable, which is totally irrelevant to the story and distracting from the point of the scene.

You’re already thinking of fifty things at once, under time and money pressure to move, move, move! If you must make alterations, take the time you need to think them through. The second moral is that post production is very demanding. Once you wrap production, it’s expensive and often impossible to re-open the shoot for vital pieces that are missing or mis-matched to other pieces.

The Enemies of Planning

The first big foe of systematic shooting is good ol’ Murphy’s law in all its many forms. Things go wrong; stuff happens; you have to roll with the punches.

Outdoors, time and weather are huge factors. Obviously, you can’t shoot if it’s pouring rain, and even if it hasn’t started yet, the light in that sullen overcast before the storm doesn’t match yesterday’s sunshine. As for time, an equipment malfunction held up the shoot until yesterday’s pearly dawn turned into high noon.

Whether outdoors or in, personnel are always a problem, especially when they’re not getting paid to show up on time and keep working all day. You might limp along without a certain crew member, but if the performer isn’t there, the show doesn’t go on.

Inanimate objects are just as bad. People bring the wrong wardrobe; props are missing, equipment malfunctions. When you arrive at the gym where you got permission to shoot the “hurricane disaster relief center” you find it’s been decorated for the Senior Prom.

Above and beyond Murphy, there’s another threat to shooting as planned: your own creativity. You show up at the vacant lot to find that there’s a carnival set up there. Wow, what visuals! What production values! Thinking fast, you replace half your planned setups to exploit the unexpected dividend. Or maybe it’s just a brainstorm on the set: hey! why not do it this way instead? Either way, you risk omitting stuff the editor will need and adding stuff that doesn’t belong in your program.

Cover Your Caboose

No shoot is ever completed exactly as planned, but you can minimize the risks by following a few vital procedures.

First, always have Plan B ready. If weather might be a problem, identify indoor scenes with the same cast and have the locations, costumes, and props standing by. If performers are flaky about showing up, know where to find them and how to shoot around them in the meantime. The trick is to identify the vulnerable parts of your plan in advance and have alternatives ready to go.

Second, learn how to adjust plan A. Understand that a simple thing like a dirty shirt can ripple all the way to post production. Take the time and care to work out all the implications of proposed changes.

Next, know when to quit. Nothing is more frustrating than doing all the work of getting a day’s shoot together and launched, then sending everyone home again. Your instinct is to say, okay, let’s call Fred and Wilma and see if they can go over to the church and shoot their stuff today, and try to rent that ‘57 Chevy, oh, and phone the church sexton, and….

Uh-uh. This kind of desperate improvisation may keep your crew busy, but the results will be hasty and undercooked. You have to develop the good judgement to know when you’re licked for now so that you can live to fight another day.

Finally, review your footage, preferably before you wrap at any one location, but at least at the end of every shooting day. In even the most professional production, you’re going to find stuff that’s inadequate, wrong, or just plain missing. Before matters go any further, make the notes you need to get pickup shots, to retake bad stuff, to re-think and re-stage sequences that plain don’t work. Then plan the reshoot as meticulously as you planned the original. When post production starts, you’ll bless yourself.

Speaking of which, tune in for next month’s exciting conclusion: Edit the Shoot You Planned.

Sidebar: Your Key Collaborators

You know you’ve reached the big leagues when you can have three key people beside you throughout the shoot.

Continuity: If the script is the basis for the shooting plan, the continuity person is the guardian of that script. Did you get the closeup? Do you have the insert of the pistol in the drawer? Did you overlap the wide shot and the medium shot enough to provide good edit points? A good continuity person will catch every problem and let you know. No matter how creative you’re being or what else you’re thinking about, listen to continuity!

Production Manager: A good production manager knows who is available, which locations are open, and when the rented ‘57 Chevy is coming. If you have to change the plan in real time, the production manager can figure out a workable alternative. Never make changes in the plan without consulting the person who is directly responsible for it.

Editor: Continuity can tell you if you have full coverage and matched action; but only the editor can cut things together in his or her head and predict whether the result will be effective. When allowed the luxury, I like to have the editor on the set, making sure the shooting plan is being followed — and that it was a good plan to begin with.

Contributing Editor Jim Stinson is the author of the book Video Communication and Production. This article originally appeared at “Movie and Video Production Planning” on Videomaker.com.

Post-production is supposed to fulfill the promise of pre production (the script) and production (the shoot). Editing, they tell you, pulls everything together and delivers the program envisioned by the producer, director, and sponsor.

As usual, reality falls short of theory, because editors almost never get exactly the raw material they expected, and they don’t always shape it as well as they might. In two previous issues, we’ve talked about planning the shoot and then shooting the plan. Let’s wrap it up here by seeing how to carry planning forward into post-production.

In a nutshell, you work as hard as you can to complete the original vision, and, where that’s impossible, to make the best program you can with what you’ve got. To do this, you need to systematically evaluate and deal with your raw material and then systematically mold it throughout post-production. In both cases, “systematically” implies that you’re doing some planning of your own.

In the best production setups, the editor is in on the shoot, evaluating each day’s footage and providing feedback to the director to ensure that he can edit the show to the original plan. Too often, however, the editor joins the process after shooting wraps and is presented with a done deal: here’s the stuff, now build a program. This is the real-world situation we’ll talk about here.

Planning for Post

First off, a good editor is not an auteur (a director who is believed to be the major creative force): Your job is not to express your own vision, but to carry out the vision of the writer, director, producer, or whoever it is that presides over the production. With that in mind, you should take your very first step even before you start screening footage: you should discover (or recollect) what the original plan was — what the program was supposed to be. Typically, that means reviewing the concept with the producers or, at the very least, closely re-reading the script. Only when you have the original concept freshly in mind can you start dealing with the footage.

The obvious next step is to review all the raw material, constantly comparing it to the program concept. First and foremost, did they shoot all the material needed? (You’d be surprised how often they didn’t.) Does the footage they did shoot do its job: are the establishing shots and closeups and inserts taken of the right stuff from the right setups? Is the technical quality uniformly up to par?

And don’t forget the audio. Is the production sound good quality (or even usable)? Did they record background tracks, ambient sound, and wild sound? Have they planned the music to use and how to use it, or are they leaving that to you?

After a thorough review of the raw material (and a yellow pad bristling with notes) you’re ready to plan your post production strategy. First of all, what absolutely has to be shot (if overlooked) or re-shot (if loused up)? For example, your documentary on glass blowing covers the whole process of making a vase, from molten glass to finished…. Whoops! The beauty shot of the completed work is badly lit and out of focus. Try as you might, you can’t think of a way to drop the poor shot and edit around it because it’s the whole point of the program. So it has to be re-shot.

And as long as they have to send a crew back out, what other shots can you improve? What missing angles could be picked up? (Which is why they’re called “pickup shots.”)

Sooner or later, you’ll run up against a wall: you can’t get more coverage of the master glass blower because she promptly retired and left for Maui. Now your strategy shifts to developing Plan B. Studying the footage you discover two things:

-Several shots (some with multiple takes) in which her body blocks the furnace opening, so you can’t quite see what she’s doing.

-Inserts of her assistant’s bare hands and arms that look similar to hers.

Gotcha! Plan B is to support shots of the blocked furnace door with narration explaining what she’s doing (even though she was doing something else) and shoot the missing inserts with the assistant’s hands and arms subbing for the Master’s. In summary, then, you evaluate your raw materials, reshoot where it’s feasible, and plan workarounds where it’s not.

With plans A and B implemented, you do your best to create the finished program as originally envisioned.

Planning the Edit

With your post production strategy worked out, you’re ready to turn the raw footage into a work of genius. Here too, you need a systematic plan, though admittedly, the plan is much the same for most editing jobs.

The problem with digital post is that it encourages you to do everything at once: find the shots, assemble the sequence, trim to length, build the tracks, add CGs and graphics, repeat with the next sequence, and so-on. Completing one sequence at a time, you’re more likely to end up with a bunch of individually fine pieces that refuse to fit smoothly together. Instead, it’s generally (though not always) better to work vertically instead of horizontally: go through the entire show, doing one job — building just one layer — at a time. Here’s how it works:

First, break out and catalog all your footage at once. Why? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve plugged a hole in one sequence by remembering a shot I could steal from a different one. You need a mental inventory of all your footage before you start.

Then begin assembling your show, sequence-by-sequence, to be sure, but without worrying about fine-tuning. Once you’ve previewed the result, you’ll have a good feel for the way the program’s coming together.

Now do your tuning, trimming shot lengths, adjusting cut points, pulling whole shots that turn out to be superfluous. By working the whole program at once, you keep a feel for its rhythm and pace.

So far, you’ve had just the production track, if any. Now it’s time to pull things together with audio, layering ambient and background tracks, adding sound effects, timing narration, selecting and adding music.

Finally, you’re ready to begin adding CGs and graphics: transitions, titles, and the like. Again, seeing the show as a whole will help you keep them consistent.

And don’t forget the DVD (which will almost certainly be your release format). As you polish the show, start looking for the material to repeat as backgrounds for your disc’s main and sub menus.

So, do your strategic post production planning by evaluating your materials and deciding exactly what you want to do with them; then do your tactical planning by working through the editing process one careful layer at a time.

Sidebar: Evil Temptations

As you work, you’ll be vulnerable to three terrible temptations. If you give in to them, you risk distorting, degrading, or even ruining the original program plan.

First, never blow off problems. “I’ll stick in a dissolve.” “I’ll run it in slo-mo.” “I’ll cover it with voice-over,” or just plain, “Ah’ll think about that t’morra.” When you encounter a problem, deal with it, solve it, do it now! If you don’t, these little difficulties tend to accumulate until they overwhelm you.

Second, don’t talk yourself into inadequate fixes. “That’s good enough.” “Oh, nobody will really notice.” “Those shots cut together well enough.” No, no, and no. You’re always under deadline pressure and it would really, really help if you could get away with things; but when you screen the finished product, they’ll jump up and wave at you every one of them.

Finally, don’t make every sequence perfect in and of itself. Always recall what it’s supposed to do and how it’s supposed to fit in the program as a whole. Sure, you got such amazing footage out of that car chase that you just have to use it all; but makes the sequence way too long and too important in the story as a whole. So don’t get hung up cutting each gem, without regard to the whole necklace.

Hi everyone,

As some of you have already seen, we have made a few changes, both in Producer Rewards and in the site itself.

I wanted to clarify a bit about views. Views that count towards your total are those from the website itself or views from embedded players posted around the Net. When we initially launched Producer Rewards, views from the Metacafe application counted towards your total views. This was an oversight on our part, which we have corrected, and they are no longer included in the total number of views. This brings the program in line with the Terms & Conditions and the contract.

(more…)

By: Ken Sasaki 

This video is about a small dog named Toby. It was probably his first time ever seeing a small radio controlled car zooming across the room. When I first tried playing with the car in the living room, he was acting strangely (to me it seemed funny). I then decided to video record this on my camera.

I had one hand on the camera and one hand on the remote control, so that’s why the car was only going back and forth. I found this real funny as he tried to catch the car but was afraid of it at the same time. Obviously many thought this was kinda boring online, but I understand there are different audiences on Metacafe.

(more…)

By: John Glynn 

The video was shown on the roller coaster Sheikra at Bush Gardens Amusement Park in Tampa, Florida. It’s said to be the steepest roller coaster in Florida. The people in my video are some of my friends from school and around my neighborhood. 

I made the video for personal records. One day I was searching the internet and I found Metacafe. I then decided to submit my video here just to see how it would do. To my surprise it was pretty successful. 

I think Metacafe is an awesome website because it has a lot of funny videos and there is such a large variety. I like the fact that there aren’t many ads and if there are any, they aren’t very long. With the money I make from this video I plan to continue making videos for Metacafe and if I make enough money, I will buy a new camera.

(more…)

By: Silje Zuno Vågshaug 

I attended an art and art history college in Norway, learning about traditional art (pencil drawing and acrylic painting), but found digital art much more fun. I started with digital painting three years ago and got my first stills camera a year later (digital of course). I’ve never had any professional training, but I have a good eye for photography, and I guess knowing some of the basics of art is useful, too.
 
I joined an internet site for anything art-related named DeviantArt (www.deviantart.com) and that’s when my artistic abilities grew to new heights.

(more…)

By: Mark Exner 

I go to the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York.  It is a military academy, but it offers students the amazing opportunity of spending a year of school working and learning aboard vessels in the United States merchant fleet.  Along with a classmate, I was assigned to the USNS Lawrence H. Gianella, a 32,000 ton tanker capable of delivering 240,000 barrels (+10,000,000 gallons) of petroleum products. 

In January of 2006, the USNS Lawrence H. Gianella, loaded with gasoline and jet fuel left Australia and headed south towards Antarctica to re-supply National Science Foundation research bases.  At the end of January, the Gianella had reached the ice edge and met up with an ice breaker that had been contracted to assist breaking through the solid, year-round ice that surrounds Antarctica. 

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I would like to let you all know a bit more about the way Producer Rewards works so that the whole process and payment method will be a bit more clear.

First of all, views – and therefore payment – begin from the moment you let us know that you want your video to be part of Producer Rewards, either by clicking on the box when you submit your video through the website, or by going into the “My Videos� page and clicking on the button that says “Submit to Producer Rewards.� From this moment, once you pass 20,000 views, you will be paid for each view.

This means that if you submit a video to Producer Rewards that already had views, like an older video that was submitted to Metacafe but not part of the program, and then decide to submit it to the program, then you will not receive payment for the initial views until you click the Producer Rewards button.

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