Symmetric Media Video Production

March 8th was International Women's Day. Celebrating 20 Years of grantmaking, The Global Fund for Women partnered with volunteers from across the country to organize house party events to celebrate and build awareness for women's issues. I created the DVD that was included in the event kit. They loved my idea of making a true or false quiz using DVD menus. It turned out great.

I also took care of the disc duplication and printing.

Have you ever downloaded a video and found it wouldn't play on your computer? That's because not all videos are alike. In order to play a specific video, you'll need the software that's required to play it.

Macs users can add support for most video formats by downloading two programs, Perian and VLC. Perian is a free tool that installs the necessary QuickTime components for many popular video formats. It saves you the hassle of installing each software package one-by-one. VLC should fill in any gaps left by Perian. VLC will play pretty much anything, and it's cross-platform so PC and Linux users can use it too.

Another tool to consider is the Flip4Mac plugin for viewing Windows Media files in Apple's QuickTime player. Microsoft doesn't support Windows Media for Mac anymore, and instead they have acquired Flip4Mac to replace Windows Media Player.

These tools should enable your computer to play just about any format out there. Enjoy!

Back from Prosper Days! We are happy Prosper asked us to record the conference again this year. Videos will be appearing on Google Video in a couple weeks after we finish editing and adding in the presentation slides. I'll be posting them here on this blog so check back.

View videos from last year.

That's me shooting Reggae/Pop artist Sean Kingston at a recent concert at the Oakland Arena. He opened for Gwen Stefani. The footage will air this morning on WPVI-TV Channel 6 in Philadelphia for the Boscor's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was such a fun show. I followed Sean as he ran through the audience, traversing an obstacle course of barricades, chairs, cables, and fans. Anything for a good shot!

ABC found my BizBlog through a Google search for video crews in the SF Bay Area. This site rocks. Or Poppin' as Sean would say.

This week I decided to check on the view stats for the Prosper Days 2007 videos we created back in February. I was surprised to find they topped 100,000 combined views in just seven months. That's impressive. Especially considering that each are about an hour in duration. That's a big time investment these days.

Prosper could think of this in terms of thousands more people being able to attend their conference. Numbers like that can make a significant impact on a growing company. Being on popular video sites like YouTube and Google Video, as opposed to hosting the videos themselves, seems to have been the right choice for Prosper. They not only save money, but they benefit by having their video in places that have a large audience.

I have been asked to come back next year to capture Prosper Days 2008. See you there!