New Products for Producers: Part III

My Aching Feet

Like an army, a video crew travels on its stomach, but it walks on its feet and after a day of location work our feet can really hurt. After twenty years of location work in just about every type of terrain, there is one brand of shoe I must recommend; the Mephisto. In addition to being the most comfortable shoe we've ever tried, Mephistos have the uncanny capability of completely dampening the shock of your heel hitting the ground. Consequently, if you are trying to make a steady camera shot while walking (whether or not you are equipped with a Steadicam), these shoes will reduce the tendency of "bobbing" the lens.

Mephistos, available in several styles from sandals to walking shoes, even waterproof GoreTex models, feature numerous technical advances. Our test model, the Match, featured an air pump system that jetted tiny blasts of cool air between the toes while running! Smartly designed, it suited the jeans-attired road as well as the suited formality of the client's front office.

Not cheap, Mephistos are hand made in France and cost about $250. They last a long time, however, and at the end of their tiresome journey, may be completely rebuilt at the factory for about $85, and returned to you almost new. Mephistos may be found only in select shoe stores and special Mephisto outlets. Call 800-____for a list of locations near you. We acquired a pair prior to our recent European production trip (see January '99 Videography, "The Global Producer") and almost never took them off!

The Ultimate Nerd Pen

A few years ago, NewTek, of VideoToaster and Lightwave fame invented a kean pocket tool, Calibar, that I found indespensible and a swell conversation piece to boot. Now that many project studios are tooling up to digital formats, the need for a Calibar with a serial digital interface (SDI) warrants a new version. Calibar Digital is a pen-sized test signal generator that can go anywhere. Powered by a single 6v. rechargable battery (not included) or a 110v. power supply (included) the business end is a BNC connector that can be adapted to male or female. A small button on the side cycles the output signal through color bars, convergence, multiburst, 5 and 10 step luminance staircases, luminance ramp, modulated ramp, 7.5 IRE black burst, 5 primary color fields, multi bars, 100 IRE flat field, 5 MHz line sweep, 50 IRE pedestal, EIA bars and more. Clip it in your shirt pocket before a shoot. You'll find you'r pulling Calibar Digital out to set up your field monitor, test doubtful BNC cables, or just impress your client.

In the studio, I attatch a Trompeter patch plug adapter and shove Calibar into my patch bay as a quick continuity tester or for more sophisticated signal source tests. Since my nonlinear editing computer serves as my digital source generator, Calibar serves as my studio's SDI reference whenever I'm too much in a rush to booth the computer. At $TECH, Kalibar beats a lot of that rack gear to the price-punch and as a portable tool, it cannot be matched.

Please, Not Another Business Card

Okay, as a reviewer, I go to a fair amount of conferences, seminars and trade shows. But even one trade show, like NAB, can load my pockets with 50 or more business cards. Add to that the cards one collects in the normal course of marketing a media production company and you're pocketing a hefty wad of would-be contacts.

In the old days, I would have triaged them into "now," "later," and "Who the heck was this guy I met last year?" A few years ago, somebody invented a card scanner that would suck all the information off a business card and put it into a proprietary computer database. It didn't work so good and then you had to either live with the clunky database or laboriously convert it to a good contact management program.

Now there's the Cardscan300+ from Corex Technologies, a totally reworked card scanner that outputs to all popular databases like Act! and Goldmine as well as interfacing with mobile PCs and PDAs like the 3Com Palm Pilot. This little box is also accurate to a "T." We accidentally fed it a card on which someone had written an email address. Cardscan put all the information on the card into appropriate categories, even the email address!

Cardscan ($TECH) consists of a mini scanner that sits on your desk and software that loads into a PC or a MAC. The software drives the scanner as you insert card after card. In seconds, a scanned photo of the card appears in an on screen "Rolodex" while the proprietary optical character recognition (OCR) program converts the text on the card into ASCII characters and sorts them into a default arrangement of fields. Software routines are included for all popular databases and mobile computing equipment, but we discovered an interesting bonus.

Take a larger scanner, capture a page from a client-laden directory (such as your local Better Business Bureau or ITVA membership list) and then run it through the Cardscan software. In minutes every name and address are neatly databased and ready for telemarketing. Just set it and forget it.
ACT! or Goldmine

Okay, you're either using contact management software or you're going bankrupt. If you read the first instalment of this series (New Products for Producers, TECH issue), back in TECH, you got a head start employing this powerful category of software that manages a database of people, their companies, vital statistics and your interaction with them.

So you already know that there are two leading brands of contact management software, ACT! and Goldmine. But do you know which is best for your company? We've tested both, and while they are both excellent and offer many unique and overlapping features, we discovered that there is a very logical way of deciding which is best for you.

It depends on the size of your company. How many people in your company interact with clients? Count the salespeople, the producers, the freelancers with client contact responsibilities, even the receptionist, if he makes appointments. We found ACT! to be best suited for the small production company with 1-3 client contact people. For larger companies, with dozens of staff members, especially staff on the road or in satellite offices, we found Gold Mine to be an excellent choice.

Each product allows you to create a record for each person in your contact list. Default fields allow for a vast range of vital data, from email addresses to the names and birthdates of children. Don't laugh, a sincere inquiry about that college-bound senior can generate a solid relationship, but you have to remember her name and that's what contact management software does - it works like a super secretary! When a potential client says, "Nothing now, call me back in six weeks." You can pop up the calendar, drop the guy's name in the date six weeks hence and on the appropriate date, an alarm can remind you to call.

ACT! and Goldmine offer tons of facilities to make your contacts (and your wallet) richer. You can store boilerplate letters, transfer data to a PIM, send mass email, fax, whatever. The key difference in the two programs is based on networking - the computer kind. We found that Goldmine is designed to be used across a wide platform of interconnected computers. Tasks may be assigned to a group and then broken down, by color coded markers, into individual group members. Therefore, if you have a five man production team, consisting of a salesperson, producer, designer, the company principal and a secretary, each can be assigned specific tasks with regard to a client and those tasks can be tracked - confidentially, if necessary - by a manager.

ACT! on the other hand, is much more useful if you run a small company where most of the coordination between team members is made face to face. ACT! is simpler to set up and operate. Although it works fine on a small network of four or five computers, it can be installed in minutes, loaded quickly and put to use within an hour of opening the box.

My guess is that most companies start with ACT! and, if large, quickly migrate to Goldmine. Now you can save the money and buy the right program for your outfit.