Licensed Music better that copyright lawsuits?

Now this may be just my ignorance of how the music industry works showing, but bare with me.

I just watched a video which told me that Tom Waits employs sixty (60) or more people to search YouTube for channels that had uploaded videos using the sound tracks of any of his songs. When found, they immediately file a copyright claim and or a take down notice of the offending video. And he is not alone. For the vast majority of video creators, a copy lawsuit is a waist of time as there is no money there to recover.

Is it me or does this seem counter productive to anybody (everybody) else?

If you have ever looked into licensing a song through BMI, ASCAP, Marmoset, SESAC, SOCAN or any other media licensing company, you will have found the cost can run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. There are a confusing medley of different licensees for variable circumstances. And the complex fee schedule varies as well, which obviously puts the music out of the reach of all but a few tip of the top YouTubers, who only want to share their favorite music.

With approximately 86000 new videos added per day and 60 people searching? I would say that your group are trying to stop an army of ants with a magnifying glass on a partly cloudy day. And I'm not suggesting let it all go free. After all, music has value. What I am suggesting is making it cheap and easy for video content makers to get a one time license for a video. It could go as easy as this.

Users create a social media account on, lets say, a special BMI website (this does not exist, its just an example). The account might contain the users personal information and contact info. Click on a new license form and fill it out, click pay and the site would spit out a one-use license in a PDF for print or email. The license contains the license number (an encoded version of the video description provided by the applicant) and the composer credit text that must appear in the video (end credits) and/or in any extended text description section available on the particular platform.

In order to make and keep this non-transferable social media license valid, the following information would be entered for registration: The date of application, the single upload web site (ie YouTube, Vemo, twitter, whatever), the account or channel name, the name of the video, the song you are licensing, if its the original track or a cover performance, your current follower/friend/subscriber count (more on this later), if your video will be monetized, and your expected publishing date. The License would permanently cover THAT one song on THAT video uploaded on THAT site on THAT channel. Additional uploads or songs would require their own license. IE one (1) song on one (1) video uploaded to YouTube and Twitter = 2 uploads = 2 licenses. Or five (5) songs on one (1) video on one (1) upload on YouTube = five (5) licenses.

License costs would be on a sliding scale (below based on one (1) song, one (1) video, one (1) upload);

$5.00 US - all non-monetized videos regardless of subscriber count.

$10.00 US - monetized video with less than 100,000 subscribers/followers

$25.00 US - monetized video with more than 100,000 subscribers/followers

Seems pretty cheap. But is it? YouTube alone gets about 80,000 hours of new uploads a day. According to Quora.com, the average length of a video on YouTube is less than 5 minutes. That comes out to about 86400 videos a day. If you low ball the figure and say only 10 percent of those bought a $5.00 license, that comes to $43,200 a day. That's per DAY and that only includes the $5.00, non-monetized, video license.

How much are your artists making on those uploads now? Oh, that's right your paying 60 people at 40 hours a week to police just YouTube. And I'm sure there are lawyer costs mixed up in there somewhere (there always are).

The cheap price is the key. Affordable by everyone. The license code makes checking against a database easy. The text credits make publicity for the music that is being paid for by the licensee, and its easy to check the video license validity. Now for a few bucks content creators can avoid video take downs, copyright strikes, all the bad stuff. Who wouldn't do that?

With proper announcements the site would be flooded with applicants. At the very least it would pay for its own operation, policing, and royalties. And since take downs don't make money, instead point creators to the licensing site where they could buy a license and get their video creation restored.

This is not an original idea. There are already sites on the internet that license music for uses like YouTube. But at $14-150 dollars a pop for unknown artists, their percentage of uses on videos is limited. To my thinking, the value here is volume. Getting a great rep and building that 10 percent to 40-50-60 percent licensed with a large and happy repeat user base.

So as I said at the start, I'm not a professional musician. I'm not an executive responsible for collecting royalties. I'm not paying 60 people a day to make me no money and spread animosity about my brand by doing take downs on YouTube. But even I would stop using free Creative Commons music in my videos if for five or ten bucks each a I could use popular music.

Be Well.

Taking No Hostages...

So I have been absent for over a year and a half, partly because I've been busy, but mostly because I did not feel that I had anything to say that anyone would be interested in reading.  Even if someone was reading.

Simply put, I had a series of major changes in my life, all linked, and happening in what seemed to me to be a rapid succession of cause and effect. 

I was happy about none of it.   

So what to do with my now empty days and nights?  

My kitchen more or less BEFORE

Call all my friends and cry on their shoulders until they began avoiding me? Nah. 

Write it all out here so my private life would be spooled on so many backup tapes and archived for a hundred years? Again, nah. 

Maybe curl up in a fetal position on my bed at night and cry myself through it all?  

Definitely, nah.

Instead I did something that I had been wanting to do for a very long time, but my ex and I could never agree on what was to be done....  I remodeled my house. Not that I could afford it, but thanks to some timely offers of deferred interest from some local do-it-yourself retailers, I pulled it off.

So days at work and working nights.  It took eleven months. If I could have rustled up some more credit, I'd still be at it.

More or less AFTER

Some rooms got just paint, others got more.  Ceiling fans, light fixtures, paint, furniture, drapes, floors, cabinets.. nothing was sacred.  For the first few months, my right hand held little but a three pound sledge hammer.  I had lived in this house for nearly nineteen years and had changed only the laundry room and a bathroom.  Now those were the only rooms semi safe (although the bathroom did get a change of towels and shower curtain). The kitchen would be the biggest change. Lights, cabinets, floors, ceiling, counter tops... the works.

This would be my sanctuary, my therapy, the route to a new life.  I would do it myself (which I did about 98%). I would not go down, and if I did, I was not taking anybody down with me.

No hostages.

Having a head cold is not the same as having a cool head

 I hope you will excuse my recent absence as the New Year has brought me the opportunity to explore the staggering semi-liquid production capacity of my nasal passages in the form of a whopping great head cold.  A journey which I continue this morning.  

I have also been struck by the amazing resistance, which my affliction exhibits, to all forms of remedy, store bought names, generics, and home styled.  No matter the active ingredient, nor the manufacturer, all seem to be totally ineffective.  

At one point it was suggested that it might be an allergy and not a cold at all.  But alas, Allergy meds from A to Z have also been tried only to find their way to the kitchen dustbin in miserable failure.

Felled by my cold have been boxes of various name brand facial tissues, all of which I now equate to the coarsest and most abrasive sand paper.

No sneezing, no “itchy eye,” no fever, or ache, just a continuous production of ever changing colors and consistencies as tissues by the truckload are filled and tossed away.

So excuse me for not participating in all the resolutions, hoopla, and joy exhibited by some.  I'm just not up for it right now.  

Happy Fricken New Year.

Going 3D with Blender 2.53

So at this point, I know nothing about 3D animation and graphics. I do understand using 3D environment in a 2D project, but it's hardly the same thing. I use Toon Boom Animate Pro for most of my projects now, having graduated from Studio to Digital Pro and finally to Animate Pro. For 2D, I don't think you can find a better program. It out flashes Adobe Flash© and runs circles around any other competition.

But this Blog is not about Flash or Toon Boom. It's about Blender. Specifically, Blender 2.5.

Wow.

I had downloaded Blender back in 2000 in the 2.0 or 2.1 phase. It was interesting, but I really was not into 3D graphics back then. It seemed awkward and clumsy, but so did all 3D programs.

I downloaded the new 2.53 beta is 22 megabytes (52.2 megabytes installed). I already had Microsoft C++ 2008 Redistributable Sp1 and Python 3.1 installed so installation went without a hitch.

Opening the program was a surprise. The new 2.5 menu layout was great. I had no idea what all the menus and buttons meant, nor what they actually did, but there was a big build view screen and menus to the left an right. It did take me a while to find the wiki documentation online and because this is a Beta version, the documentation is far from complete. But there are lots of great free online tutorial sites for 2.5 already (Blendercookie, Blendernoobies, and BlenderGuru ) and it's not all that hard to make the leap from the 2.49 tutorials (.Creative Cow, Lynda.com, and others). Honestly, they are everywhere and many are free.

In just a couple of evenings I was able to set my personal preferences, create my own version of the work space, and make this simple 3D text

Screen from my machine. Click to enlarge.

As I said, I have no CAD or other 3D experience, so as little as this is, it's big to me at this point. Below is a short video that outlines Blender's history


From Blender 3D 1.60 to 2.50 from Allan Brito on Vimeo.

There were some things I recognized right off the bat. Key Frame animation, by default the time line runs across the bottom of the screen, working with Bezier curves, Inverse kinematics and more.

I've been reading comparisons between the commercial softwares (Audodesk's Maya and others) and Blender, although slightly behind in some features, it seems Blender has lead the way in others and the new 2.5, when complete, should bring Blender up to the industry standards across the board

What does it take to run it? Lets do a simple compare with Maya:

Bender System Requirements
Operating Systems

• Windows 2000, XP or Vista
• Mac OS X 10.2 and later
• Linux 2.2.5 i386
• Linux 2.3.2 PPC
• FreeBSD 6.2 i386
• Irix 6.5 mips3
• Solaris 2.8 sparc

Minimal specs for Hardware

• 300 MHz CPU
• 128 MB Ram
• 20 MB free hard disk Space
• 1024 x 768 px Display with 16 bit color
• 3 Button Mouse
• Open GL Graphics Card with 16 MB Ram

Good specs for Hardware

• 2 Ghz dual CPU
• 2 GB Ram
• 1920 x 1200 px Display with 24 bit color
• 3 Button Mouse
• Open GL Graphics Card with 128 or 256 MB Ram

Production specs for Hardware

• 64 bits, Quad core CPU
• 8 GB Ram
• two times 1920 x 1200 px Display with 24 bit color
• 3 Button Mouse + tablet
• Open GL Graphics Card with 768 MB Ram, ATI FireGL or Nvidia Quadro

For 32-bit Autodesk Maya 2011

• Microsoft® Windows Vista® Business (SP2 or higher), Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional (SP3 or higher), Microsoft® Windows® 7 Professional operating system
• Windows: Intel® Pentium® 4 or higher, AMD Athlon™ 64, AMD Opteron™ processor, AMD Phenom™ processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 4 GB free hard drive space
• Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL® graphics card
• Three-button mouse with mouse driver software
• DVD-ROM drive
• Maya Composite media cache requirements for playback:
• 10 GB minimum, 200 GB recommended
• HDD: IDE, SATA, SATA 2, SAS, SCSI
• Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 7.0 or higher, Apple® Safari®, or Mozilla® Firefox® web browser

For 64-bit Autodesk Maya 2011

• Microsoft Windows Vista Business (SP2 or higher), Microsoft Windows XP x64 Edition (SP2 or higher), Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, Apple Mac OS X 10.6.2, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.4 WS, or Fedora™ 11 operating system
• Windows and Linux: Intel® EM64T, AMD Athlon 64, AMD Opteron, or AMD Phenom™ processor
• Mac® computer: Intel-based processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 4 GB free hard drive space
• Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card
• Three-button mouse with mouse driver software
• DVD-ROM drive
• Maya Composite media cache requirements for playback:
• 10 GB minimum, 200 GB recommended
• HDD: IDE, SATA, SATA 2, SAS, SCSI
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 or higher, Apple Safari, or Mozilla Firefox web browser

Now that we know what it take in hardware, what does it take in GREENWARE?
Maya - $4000.00 plus a license for every machine it runs on.
Blender - Free (Contributions encouraged) and the same price for every machine it runs on - Free.

If you are just starting out or planning to expand your operation, it's worth a look.

From A Beginner Animator

I joined YouTube in 2007 planning to use it as an outlet for all the cartoons I would be making. It would be wondrous with a fantastic following.

And it almost happened that way.

The problem was, when I opened my YouTube "Channel" I knew almost nothing about creating cartoons. I had jumped in and was not prepared at all. At my disposal was Paint Shop Pro (Which was still owned by Jasc back then and was a lovely paint and photo program for $99 US) and The Microsoft Movie Editor which came with Windows® XP. Not much in the way of tools, but I had to come up with some sort of place holder for my channel. And this is what I posted:




It's still there actually, even though it's a rough bit of animation, it was, after all, my first.

I began to search for animation programs, not knowing what the heck I was looking for. I'm married and the father of two sons, so I had a tiny budget for starting a new "hobby." What I thought I wanted was Macromedia Flash, but I was surprised to find that it had been eaten by Adobe® and was now out of my price range (See? I wasn't a complete idiot, I did do some research). Any way pirate software was out, because I don't believe in it. A craftsman is worth his wages and all that (but not necessarily the triple wages Adobe was asking). Obviously Maya, 3d studio, and all were right out of my price range and I wasn't sure that 3D was something I should jump into. I mean, don't you need to crawl before you can walk? I came across ToonBoom. I got my first copy of ToonBoom Studio on sale for $250 US (it's $299. now). After pouring through the video tutorials and making several false starts, Two months later my first real cartoon/vlog appeared:





It was up on YouTube just a few weeks later when Lisasimpson, acting as a guest editor, she chose it to be featured on YouTube's front page. A very big deal in those days. At the same time, I had upgraded my computer hardware and the Windows installation crashed. I mean at the EXACT same time. My video went from 315 views in three weeks to 100,000 views that Sunday morning and I was oblivious to it all.

So now it's nearly 3 years later and I have uploaded a few more toons. Each takes a couple of months to build, the Vlog type are faster because I can reuse my character with only a few changes, but the long periods between uploads lost the audience. Now my toons are back where they started with a few hundred view, which is fine by me. I am still learning after all.

For the record, and through a long series of upgrades, I am now using ToonBoom Animate Pro2 as my animation platform. And although I would love to have the Adobe CS5 Production Premium Suite with all the bells and whistles, I still use Premiere Elements ($119 US) to do my editing. The FREE but extraordinary Audacity works overtime to record, edit and clean all my audio tracks. I finally bought my first version of ToonBoom Storyboard ($199 US) to help me assemble my ideas. And I would not be anywhere if it were not for the free music tracks so lovingly composed and shared by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com).

And the last element is time. Lots of time. I you are reading this and just starting out, you can get into playing with animation programs on a budget. There are even rudimentary or watermarked programs out there for free even ToonBoom. But be ready to give lots of time. Watch you favorite cartoon and stay for the credits. All the names that go past are positions you must fill with your own time. It is very rewarding when you get it done, but the speed of the progress, or lack of it, especially when you have a day job, was and is my biggest frustration. But if you really want to do it, you can. I did, and I still know almost nothing.

Be Well