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We don’t update our company blog as often as we should. Let’s just say it’s been a really busy year since we last posted an update. These photos just tell part of the story, as we’ve done client work for BlueGreen Vacations (corporate head shots, photos, live stream, video, Google Tours), AutoNation (photo, video, Google Panorama Tours), AMMY NYC (video), The House of Muscle (video, audio), Subaru of America (photo, video), Windermere (photo) and many others. 

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This is Autoblog Details, produced by Ryan Douthit at MediaSpigot LLC in association with Larry Kosilla (AMMO NYC) and Make Rain Productions. 

We filmed the entire 35-episode series at SpeedSport Tuning in Danbury Connecticut over six very long days in the fall of 2015. Finals were delivered to AOL Networks a few weeks later. 

Cameras: Sony FS700R with Convergent Designs Odyssey 7Q+. Some B-shots with the Nikon D810.

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This is a short we produced for Formula Photographic covering the 2015 Mt Hood Rally and, in particular, competitors that were taking part in the Cascadia International Rally Championship. Shot on Sony FS700R with Odyssey 7Q+ recorder (to 4K Prores at 120 and 30fps or HD at 240fps) and Nikon lenses, Nikon D810 (for the ultra-wide shots) and Sony A7S for walk-around at start/finish. We also used a Kessler Second Shooter system for some automated slider action. The day started out dry with heavy dust. Thankfully, the rains came and gave us the wet conditions we prefer.

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We can now do 4k video at a whopping 120 frames per second. Here is a short clip recorded from a Sony FS700R in SLog2 to an Odyssey 7Q+. Be sure to set your YouTube viewer settings to 4k. 

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We shot and edited the "Freedom One" episode of /DRIVE Clean for the YouTube /DRIVE Network. It took four days to film, with the final cut delivered within 10 days. Watch the full 27-minute feature here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOrskBTuNLA

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MediaSpigot LLC provided photography and video walk-throughs for the new flagship Porsche store in Bellevue, Washington.

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We took delivery of the new Sony A7S today yesterday. This is a very small, but very capable, 4k-upgradable, mirrorless camera with a video-opitimized full-frame sensor. It features groundbreaking low-light capabilities as well as several "pro" video features previously found in much more expensive cameras. 

One unique feature is the ability to shoot in very low light, another feature is a relatively decent 120fps mode. This quick video tests a number of new features in the camera, such as slow-motion, how well the new XAVC-S codec deals with complicated scenes (since water splashes can be challenging to render efficiently), the auto-white balance (it was mostly good, but missed in a few areas) and the in-lens optical stabilization (mostly decent, but it behaved oddly when trying to pan sometimes.) The video was filmed at ISO2000 and was completely hand-held. Brightness was adjusted a bit and saturation was bumped up, but no color was otherwise adjusted for this sample. 

Overall, I'm very pleased with this initial test. The first major event we plan to shoot with the A7S is the upcoming Formula Drift event at Evergreen Speedway on the July 18, 2014. Look for that video in the weeks ahead. 

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Earlier this week our review of the new 2015 Subaru WRX hit the internet, racking up 20,000 YouTube views in a day. It was also featured on BiteSizeTV and other various partner network sites.

We used the premiere of this video to test the new live platform we have in development for next year. This consists of an industrial-grade CDN pumping live studio and video playout to Android, iOS and Roku devices (with XBox and Playstation systems coming later in the year.) Ryan hosted the pre- and post-video discussion live from the studio in Kirkland, Washington. We'll have a lot more information about this platform in the near future. 

The WRX video was filmed run-and-gun style in Napa California with the Sony FS100 and a GoPro 3+ Black. Editing was done in Adobe Premiere CC. The complete piece was filmed in three hours, and edited in one day. 

2015 Subaru WRX First Drive and Review

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Today we premiered Season 2 of our in-house produced motoring show, Driving Sports, on the Vimeo On Demand service. Filmed across Spain, Isle of Man, Ireland, Colorado, Oregon and California this is our most ambitious series to date.

Filmed "single-camera style" with a Sony FS100, Sony A77 DSLR and a pair of GoPro cameras, the series shows what is possible with minimal resources and a lot of experience. 

The new Season will make its broadcast debut on South Africa's Ignition Channel in September and will also appear on Apple iTunes, Amazon On Demand and X Box live in the weeks that follow. 

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Filming on top of a mountain can pose some interesting challenges. Weather can change on a dime: snow, rain, wind, sun and fog can hit at any moment. Additionally, filming at 14,115-feet for extended periods of time can cause nausea, headaches and exhaustion. It was under these conditions that we produced a pair of social media videos for Mitsubishi Motors of America, featuring their MiEV Pikes Peak racecars. 

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The weather was unusually hot for Spring in the Pacific Northwest, which meant a massive amount of dust for this year's Oregon Trail Rally. The subject of our video, the Fastron World Rally Team, did very well in their first North American event. Watch the full 12-minute production to see just how well.

This was shot using a Sony FS100 and a collection of classic (Canon FD) and modern (Sony, Tamron) lenses. Our chase rig was a 2014 Honda Crosstour with AWD and a V6 -- a surprisingly good choice. 

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Our team is producing a series of videos for the Fastron World Rally Team this year. Their first race was the Oregon Trail Rally. This car-crunching event claimed nearly half the field to crashes or damage. FWRT drove fast and smart for a 3rd place Overall finish. Here is our first post-event video featuring on-car footage from Stage 13 near Dufur, Oregon. This was shot with a pair of GoPros and a Zoom H4N audio recorder. 

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MediaSpigot filming for the Northwest Automotive Press Association at its annual SUV and Crossover vehicle challenge.

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This is a short production we put together for MC2, the MINI Enthusiast Magazine. It was filmed at the DirtFish Rally School in Snoqualmie, Washington, during the annual Northwest Automotive Press Association's Outdoor Activity Vehicle of the Year Competition (which will be in an upcoming episode of Driving Sports TV)

Filmed with a Canon XF300, GoPros and edited on Premiere Pro CS6 with a quickie 3D title built in After Effects.

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On Monday, April 22, Subaru announced the availability of its new web-series that gives rally fans an exclusive look behind the scenes of the Subaru Rally Team USA and the Subaru Puma Rallycross team. Titled "Launch Control" a new episode will be available every-other-week for a total of 14 episodes. MediaSpigot's automotive video network, Driving Sports, was chosen as a key distribution partner due to it's wide reach and multi-device support.  

Official Press Release:

Cherry Hill, N.J., -  Subaru of America Inc. has released the first episode of “Launch Control”, a bi-weekly web video series that chronicles Subaru Rally Team USA and the Subaru PUMA RallyCross Team as they prepare for and compete in a fast-paced 2013 race season spanning the globe. With a mix of in-car video, car prep and driver interviews, “Launch Control” is the story of two teams, everything it takes to win and everything that gets in the way.  In the debut episode of “Launch Control,” Subaru Rally Team USA driver and defending Rally America Champion David Higgins is training for the upcoming season at his home in Wales, UK, while the crew at Vermont Sports Car, the Subaru technical partner managing both teams, is hard at work in the shop preparing the 2013 Subaru WRX STI team cars for a the season ahead. If there is a team that knows what goes into winning a championship, SRT USA would be it. Subaru’s 2012 Rally America championship victory marked their second in a row and their sixth in seven years.  RallyCross, on the other hand, is relatively new for the team. Competing in the emerging Global RallyCross Championship the team must tackle new venues, new race formats, new rules and new cars. Challenging the established RallyCross teams from Europe, the learning curve for team drivers Bucky Lasek, Dave Mirra and team leader and three-time European RallyCross Champion Sverre Isachsen, has been steep.  “Launch Control” will follow the trials and triumphs of these two teams throughout their 2013 seasons and give viewers a behind the scenes look at the efforts of the drivers, engineers and mechanics as they fight for victories. “Launch Control” can be viewed at Subaru of America’s YouTube channel youtube.com/Subaru with new episodes launching every other Wednesday. The series can also be viewed on the Driving Sports Network which can be found on iTunes, Blip.tv, Roku, Mevio, and DivX TV among others. 

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Spent a day filming the new 2014 Mazda6 in the Planer Building at the Dirtfish Rally School. Mazda has done a great job bringing the aging 6 up-to-speed with this all-new release.

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Vimeo on Demand and the state of VOD

Earlier this week Vimeo launched their brand-new Video Vimeo on Demand offering. It has the potential to be a revolutionary service, but first it has to overcome some major hurdles. 

Currently, iTunes is far and away the #1 Internet-based VOD system. According to market research group NPD, in 2012 Apple walked away with a 45% share of all VOD sales. The next closest competitor was Amazon at a (relatively) meager 18%. iTunes dominance is even more surprising when you consider the limited devices it can run on: No XBox, no Playstation, no Android.

The funny thing is, even Apple’s dominance is paltry compared to TV operator’s dominance in the VOD marketplace. If you add up all Internet-based VOD, including Apple, Amazon, Vudu, Xbox, etc., together they only count for 28% of the total VOD market. Yes, your friendly cable company commands a whopping 72% of your on-demand dollars. 

Netflix is certainly affecting all of this, but as a subscription service it’s a different beast. 

Now, back to VOD. As a producer there are several ways to enter this market today. You can get an agent and hope they can successfully, eventually, sell your series into the Comcast or Time/Warner VOD systems. This can take about a year if it happens at all. Or, you can take  destiny in your own hands by walking up to one of the handful of Apple-certified encoding houses and pay them about $1500 per title to convert your ProPres files and list them on iTunes. Sit back. Profit. 

Okay, so you don’t have $1500 sitting around to list your project on a system like iTunes. $1500 could buy another Zeiss lens, after all. Let’s look at the self-service option for the second-place system, Amazon. For their VOD Amazon relies on a subsidiary named CreateSpace, a company that apparently designed their system in 1990. 

Step 1 in getting on Amazon: Burn a DVD. (Seriously.) Send that standard-definition DVD to CreateSpace, who – after several weeks – will rip a standard-definition file and insert it into the VOD system. It is a fairly cheap process, but if you have 15 episodes (like we do) the idea of creating 15 discs just so they can be converted back into digital files is appalling in 2013. 

There has to be a better solution. 

This is where we have to acknowledge comedian Louis C.K. who self-produced a comedy concert video and sold it directly to his fans. Overnight, it was a smash hit, selling millions. As producers we all knew this was possible, but it needed a big success to prove it to the masses. Louis C.K. provided that. Self-publishing finally found a better model.

In the months following the Louis C.K. success the VOD landscape started to change. Chill.com, a social video aggregator, pivoted their entire business to replicate the Louis C.K. model (and, in fact, a majority of their sales are comedy concert films. You can see one of our documentaries listed here.) Chill also mixes in a little Kickstarter in the way they offer bonus premiums on top of the downloads, which is interesting.

By the end of 2012, you couldn’t toss a stone without hitting someone else looking to bring self publishing PPV to independent producers everywhere (and take their own slice of the pie in the process.) A noble idea with a potentially solid business model: a stark contrast to the previous wave of internet video startups. Has YouTube really been that great for producers? That’s debatable. 

Enter Vimeo. This site has been a head-scratcher for many years. It has a great video player, but shuns commercialization of its content. Not only has the site refused to run pre-roll ads, it explicitly forbids creators from posting commercial content onto its servers. Because of this, the site has become a haven for producers that, apparently, don’t need to make any money off their work. That means it has a lot of skating and skiing videos. 

A few years ago Vimeo decided it wanted to start making money. Sticking to their guns regarding video ads, it offered a Plus member package for $60/year. This gave users increased storage, removed banner ads, and some extra user perks. As a follow-up Vimeo added a Pro tier, which is primarly a white-label video service. We actually use it to power a number of our own sites (including subiesport.tv and drivingsports.com.)

Meanwhile, Vimeo was also rolling out players for every major viewing platform, including Apple TV (Vimeo’s slow-motion theater on the big-screen is awesome, btw), iOS, XBox, Samsung, Vizio, Roku, etc. Their mantra was convenience, quality and no-commercials. 

People like skating videos and they like watching without ads on their mobile and home theater devices. Because of this, Vimeo has grown to become one of the top video destinations, just behind YouTube and DailyMotion, with 15 million members. If YouTube is the DVD clearance rack, Vimeo could be considered the Criterion Collection. 

So it was particularly interesting when, last year, Vimeo started beta-testing its own PPV/VOD offering with a handful of full-length films. Films that I had no interest in, but I definitely was interested in the technology. To be successful, however, Vimeo would need to go all-in on VOD. Not just stick it in a corner (like YouTube does.) 

It was at the 2013 SXSW music and tech festival when the announcement finally came. Vimeo was going to get serious about VOD. The first wave would open their VOD platform to anyone with a Pro account (that $200/year white-box soution we already use), with many more features promised as the platform develops. 

Because we already host our broadcast screeners on Vimeo Pro implementing the new VOD pages was quick and easy. It was just a matter of adding some metadata, uploading a poster image, tweaking pricing and colors, then clicking the Launch button. Seriously. It couldn’t be easier. Vimeo takes a 10% cut on top of credit card and PayPal processing fees, leaving nearly 90% to the creator.

From the buyer’s side it’s just as easy. They have to create a free Vimeo account (if they don’t already have one), enter their payment info and then their purchases are added to the Watch Tab on every device they have a Vimeo app installed on. Or, if the producer has enabled downloads they can even download a DRM-free copy to their desktop. 

So it’s all cupcakes and sunshine, right? Not exactly. As it is today, Vimeo on Demand isn’t going to change anything because it’s missing one critical component: A way to discover great VOD content. The VOD offerings don’t even show up in Vimeo’s search engine yet (update: a Vimeo rep confirmed their engineers are "working on it.") They are, effectively, hidden from the world and reliant on each producer’s own personal network to bring in the buyers. This is fine, to a degree, but if there’s no way to tap those 15-million Vimeo members, what’s the point of launching on Vimeo versus, say, Chill or Distrify? (Other than slight variations in features.) There isn’t.

Pay your $1500 to get on iTunes and you have instant access to millions of members. Vimeo, pay $200 and get some great white-label features plus POV, but as for accessing their members? Not yet. That will change, however, as Vimeo is preparing a VOD directory which will launch at some point in the unspecified future. If they can offer a nice lineup of shows, make it easy to discover new titles, make show offerings browsable across all devices and (this is a biggie) if they proactively market the heck out of them, 2013 could be the year that everything changes for the do-it-yourself independent producer.

--Ryan Douthit