6 Responses to “Modest Mouse wants YOU…to Edit for Free”  

1. 1 andrewmsv Apr 30th, 2007 at 12:30 pm

   If Apple will stick it to the little guy by stealing his work and giving him no credit, I see a lot of this greenscreened footage being superimposed over porn stock, clowns, goats, and old ladies, and then uploaded to iTunes for all to mock.

   Modest Mouse’s street cred will be on par with Jim Varney’s.

2. 2 bungle Apr 30th, 2007 at 1:50 pm

   This, unfortunately, seems to be a rising trend these days… a relatively successful niche band (e.g. The Decemberists - ooh, that’s SO “indie” of them) hires some lackeys to shoot them in front of a green screen for a few bucks, posts the footage on the Intertubes, and asks their fans to do the grunt work for them in the name of a “contest.” I think it was only a matter of time before bands realized that they could exploit their base for free labor.

3. 3 Eric Peacock Apr 30th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

   (Drat - my previous comment got swallowed up when submitted - so I’m rewriting this…)

   I gave this a look and actually started to work on it, but they want you do download the footage a clip at a time as streaming in a browser. No FTP, torrents or any way to queue this stuff up. And the downloads kept timing out for me and would have to be restarted.

   I spent way too much time getting a handful of the 12 or so gigs available and well, I’ve given up.

   I wanted to try it even though I was fully aware that this was no different than doing spec work - no fame or fortune is guaranteed. It’s more-or-less right up my alley and I can always use more experience, but I don’t have time to manually download the clips, especially when they’re not coming very quickly and timing out.

   The ones I did get were workable but because this is compressed video the keying isn’t a bit more involved as well. I also wasn’t nuts about the composition with the amps.

   Ah well - I hope someone has a good time with it.

4. 4 Kendal Miller Apr 30th, 2007 at 3:35 pm

   Yeah I looked at the footage well and agree that pulling keys off this type of compression would be…iffy…at best. Also had issues with supah slow downloads.

5. 5 Matthew Jeppsen Apr 30th, 2007 at 5:44 pm

   Sorry Eric, for some reason our comment spam-catcher flagged your 1st post as questionable. Weird. Looks like you covered it all in your 2nd one though. Apologies for the inconvenience, the dang machines are running our lives…

   Re: the contest…it just doesn’t seem well thought out. Distributing everything as http downloads, a non-optimal format for keying, etc. It’s almost as if someone signed on to do the video, shot it, and then backed out at the last minute. And the marketing guys were like “hey, let’s try this viral thing…”

   -MJ

6. 6 Brian Williams May 1st, 2007 at 12:16 pm

   I downloaded a couple of these clips, but they put them up at the wrong frame rate!

   I’m pretty sure it was shot 24p on varicam, but they didn’t remove the duplicate frames on capture, and I can’t pull them out because they converted the clips to AIC to save space, so FCP’s DVCPRO HD frame rate converter can’t find the cadence… I even tried converting it back to DVCPRO HD but that didn’t help.

   How do you decide where to cut when 60% of the frames are duplicates? How could they not see that it looks funky before they put it up?

   I hope this was not created by Apple’s people.

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