Yes this is me ranting but with the cost of my season ticket going up this year (again), ginormous sums of money being tossed around by Arabian oil magnates and American insurance salesmen in an attempt to buy the title / Champions League and Sky’s nauseating coverage, it seemed to me that the guys behind this site have got a decent idea.

It’s a campaign to see a salary cap introduced in European football and to be honest, I think it makes some very good points.

The argument is put forward very well, it’s got support from some pretty high-profile corners and it seems to be a campaign that has the game as a whole at heart.

Put simply, there are too many clubs running up ridiculous amounts of debts to pay unsustainably large salaries to players whilst at the same time, the top names are able to cream the best of the talent to the detriment of the competition.

The site is Footballers Wages and personally, I agree with the idea of having a salary cap. It works in other sports and not only will it save some clubs from themselves, but it might at least bring footy back to being a contest decided on the pitch, rather than in the boardroom.

Thx

Lately I use DVD quality MPEGs for most of my videos, unless they’re short enough, when I’ll upload a “raw” dv25 formatted (the same format you get out of your camcorder-only slightly compressed) footage in .avi format. (Mac users can do this in .mov format)

But I know people who claim to have uploaded weird formats like .fla an even .wmv and had them work, though I am a skeptic. Bottom line, YouTube is more or less compatible, as long as you stick to fairly normal format sizes.

But I am an excellent speller.

Wait. Does ‘native form’ at Tubemogul mean I can upload .dv there, too?

Minor problem: In the early 2000’s, hard disk space was still pricey, and a DV tape took just as much space back then as it does today. I had erased all the files as well as the Premiere file with the editing, and only kept the final product – with the music bed in it!

Fortunately, I never reuse clients’ tapes, and I keep a 7 year DV tape archive (no really – I have a filing cabinet with tapes going back to 2001 right now) so with some work I was able to recreate the commercial, but to avoid that headache today I take some different steps:

-Keep the premiere (or whatever editing software) file! It’s relatively small, and if you just reload your tapes to the same spot, the program will assume the new files are the same as the old ones, and boom, no re-editing.
-Save two copies of a file – one with any soundtrack, and one without. I save in DVD-compatible MPEG format. It will get mangled up if you try to edit it at all, but if you just need to add a new music bed, you’ll be fine.
-Backups! Like I said, I save all my “business” tapes for 7 years. This does take up a lot of space, but it’s saved my butt more than once. With YouTube stuff, I’m far more liberal, but I still have a 10 tape rotation going, so it takes about 15 hours of taping before I record over the footage I shot. (I always use LP mode on my cameras). I also put the files I mentioned earlier onto DVD’s, just in case a hard drive crashes.

Anyway, I’m rambling. I could have summed all of this up with “Yup, I agree with Nalts!”