As before, I’ve collected some awesome articles I think are worth the read below. Give them a look and be sure to share your thoughts in the comments!

• Synechdoche, Russia. What happens when a crazy Russian director gets to build a fully functional Soviet-style town and leave it running continuously 24/7 while he films a movie that might never be finished? GQ (yes, GQ) has the story.
• Hopefully you’ve seen this beautiful eulogy for Steve Jobs written by his sister author Mona Simpson, but if not prepare to tear up.
• FreelanceFolder asks if you’re guilt of T.M.I., something that’s all too easy in the age of oversharing.
• Canon have launched a new camera to take on RED, the C300. DVInfo has the details.
• I started a subreddit! If you’re of the Reddit persuasion and are feeling a little unmotivated or unfocused lately, /r/focus is the place for you. Share tips, tricks, and ideas for getting your brain on track.

Have your own links? As always, share them in the comments. Until next time… thanks for stopping by!

I thought I’d open up the floodgates with our first official open thread. This time, we’ll be focusing on our current projects.

Plug your stuff in the comments, and be sure to check out everyone’s stuff.

I’m excited to see what the community is working on!

Chris

The Round Up, by Flickr user Benimoto

Hey there YMMers! I read a lot of blogs, and I thought it might be fun to share with you my favorite posts. I’ll try to keep this on a regular schedule, but as always this blog is sort of “that thing I do in my spare time” so I make no promises!

In the meantime, enjoy these excellent articles from around the web. I’ll be posting material that spans a whole range of categories: freelancing, productivity, writing, arts and culture, and media tips and tricks. I’ll also add in some random “grab bag”/”potpourri” links that don’t directly relate to YouMakeMedia, but are worth looking at anyway.

Share your thoughts on my selections in the comments, or offer your own links! I love discovering cool new websites!

Link Roundup: Dawn of Time through October 21, 2011

• DSLR Video Shooter: I (finally) got my first DSLR. While I’m mainly noodling around with photography at the moment, the end goal is video. Caleb Pike, proprietor of DSLR Video Shooter, has provided an awesome resource for folks new to the DSLR video scene. His video blog series alone will keep you occupied for hours!
• This post on SEOmoz, Should I Change My URLs for SEO?, offers a great look at links and their effect on your search rankings. If you take nothing else away from this post, remember that when building websites, you need to give everything careful consideration if you want top results. Slapping together a WordPress site is easy: optimizing it and getting results is another story entirely!
• We’ve all made mistakes. Now stop beating yourself up about them.
• This post is written with freelancers in mind, but there are takeaways for anyone: 5 Easy Ways to Stay Healthy as a Freelancer.
• Leo Babauta’s ZenHabits is possibly my favorite blog right now, and this post illustrates exactly why. Leo offers excellent advice for staying energized when you’re Tired of Being Tired.
• Grab Bag: I’ve blogged my love for Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians on other sites before, and loved this post by Disney animator Floyd Norman on the subject (Norman worked on Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, and other classic Disney animated films in the 50s and 60s).
• Grab Bag: My good friend Kevin Daly (the self-proclaimed “Theatre Aficionado”) had been pestering me for about a month to listen to the recording of the new “Matilda” musical, an adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl story, opening next week in the West End. When I finally did, I fell in love: Tim Minchin’s music and lyrics are absolutely brilliant, and perfectly capture the spirit of the book. Kevin has blogged about the musical, and his analysis is worth a read.

Well that covers it for this edition of Link Roundup. Remember to share your thoughts, suggestions, and links in the comments! Thanks!

Of course, you’re welcome to donate, but this isn’t about us.

This post is about ubiquity though, and whether or not Kickstarter’s ubiquity is hurting the projects it supports. The Kickstarter premise (for those few not in the know) is that it offers a crowd-sourced funding platform where random folks can donate to your project in exchange for rewards (that you set). And there’s a layer of safety: you only get their donations (pledges) if the project reaches its threshold: a set goal that you specify.

As anyone in creative fields can tell you, Kickstarter has exploded, and the number of projects with it. It seems like every day you see a new Kickstarter project appear in your Facebook or Twitter stream. How do you stand out against the crowd with your project? How do you set yourself apart? How do you make sure that you’re the one getting pledges when you’re up against a sea of (often equally spirited) competitors?

It’s a problem that has been nagging me since even before I posted our project. I chose to tackle it initially with rewards for all donors, and not just “thank yous” on our blog or Twitter stream. The other reward levels stack (a common theme in Kickstarter projects, though not a prerequisite) and I think are equitable to the money put in. The temptation to keep rewards simple can be dangerous, and requires you to put more stock in your donor’s belief in your effort.

But that alone isn’t enough: I’m looking for more ideas so I (and others after me) can successfully set their projects apart and get funded. This recent post on 2amtheatre made some suggestions:

Identifying your audience requires thinking beyond your immediate circle and understanding what will motivate the target group of donors. The answer to what makes a YouTube or other Internet video go viral is identical: finding a point of resonance with something the audience already values, and providing something that taps into those values. This doesnâ€t mean “spinning” your pitch or changing anything you do artistically, but it does require some awareness and thoughtfulness at the outset.

It ultimately concedes:

Audience awareness is the single biggest answer to any successful effort that an artist undertakes and converting those efforts into the bottom line that makes it possible to dedicate oneself to the project. The more we know ourselves, the art at hand, and the target audience, the more effectively we can communicate and produce results.

So how do we build awareness and build conversions? How do we set our project apart from the dozens of others we may be competing with, just within our own social circles? I’d love to hear from those of you out there who have tried Kickstarter, or pledged to someone else’s Kickstarter campaign before. What worked for you? Why did you donate to one campaign over another? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed […] We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible. [via NewTeeVee]

vintage television by phrenzee

At YMM’s sister site FOSSwire, we offer a lot of video-based tutorial content. Up until this point, it’s been offered in Flash with OGG downloads available as a backup. With the <video> tag in HTML becoming a hot new standard, it seemed like a perfect time to jump aboard. But our old videos were encoded in FLV (pre-MP4 support in Flash) so we had to do some conversion. This tutorial will teach you how to turn your old FLVs into HTML5-friendly MP4 video files.

It’s important to mention that these MP4 files won’t work in every browser. Opera and (most) Gecko-based browsers won’t support MP4, preferring OGG Theora or Google’s WebM instead. Still, MP4 gets you Chrome, Safari (including the iPad), and the soon-to-be-released-if-we’re-lucky IE9 – a sizable chunk of browsers. You’ll certainly want a Theora backup though, and we’ll go over how to do that next week. FOSSwire has covered a bit of the codec madness, head there for more details.

Follow me past the jump to begin your journey toward HTML5 fun…

What you need

All you need is the free and popular HandBrake. Don’t be fooled by tutorials insisting you need a shareware product with a sleazy name like “Web Online Video Converter Pro X” – HandBrake is completely free, open source, and the real deal. It’s available for Mac OS X, Windows, Ubuntu, and Fedora, and other versions of Linux can use command line versions. This tutorial covers only the GUI releases.

How you convert

Easy: add your file as the source, pick your settings, and go!

Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that if you want your quality to be great. For FOSSwire, our source clips were screen captures, so when converted to MP4 the results with default settings were less than stellar. MP4, like all codecs in its family, is optimized for picture based content, rather than simple animation or broad swaths of color. It’s like JPG vs. GIF or PNG. Play with the settings on clip before you commit to anything.

Optimize MP4s for animation or screen capture

If you are like me and are trying to convert animation or screen capture-based content with higher quality results, take a peek in Handbrake’s advanced settings. For my screen capture content, I…

• encoded in two-pass mode. You have to be setting an average bit-rate or target file size for this to be an available option, but it gives you a drastic increase in results.
• increased Deblocking (anywhere from +1/+1 to +3/+3 can help)
• set the number of B-frames to anywhere between 5 and 9
• set Subpixel motion estimation to 9

Once you’ve got your settings to your liking, encode away.

If you’re still having trouble, look at your source FLV. The artifacts you’re seeing in the MP4 might just be carry-overs from the FLV (as I experienced more than once – oops!).

Optimize MP4s for traditional video

By default, the MP4 format is great at encoding traditional video. You can probably get away with default settings. If you’re having problems, look at the frames in question – do they have large areas of a single color? You might need to try some of the techniques listed above to see if you can increase your quality.

And as I mentioned above, if you’re still experiencing trouble, check your source vid. The artifacts might just be forgotten remnants of a bad first-gen encode.

Working in bulk

Although Handbrake doesn’t have a true bulk mode like other apps (such as the long missed and mourned VisualHub) it does have the ability to set a queue. Simply click the “Add to Queue” button located in the Handbrake toolbar. When all your files are ready, hit the “Show Queue” button and hit “Play” to get your encode on.

Convert away

I hope this tutorial helps you prep your content for the “next big thing” in web video. HTML5 will help lower the barriers to entry again in providing web video to a massive audience, and you’ll certainly want to be on the cusp of it.

Money...What Money by flickr user stuartpilbrow

In a perfect world, artists and content creators could work without the constant worry of funding and money looming over our heads. Unfortunately it’s not a perfect world, and in an age where content creators are a dime-a-dozen and sponsors are a dying species, you’ve got to have business savvy to succeed in your pursuits.

The City of New York recognized that, and an article in Sunday’s New York Times explains how city government is aiming to teach artists about turning their work into business.

“Does everyone have Excel?,” Peter Cobb, a lawyer and administrator at the New York Foundation for the Arts, which runs the program, asked the class last Saturday. “For next week, your assignment is to make a list of all your expenses for 2009.”

The sighs and complaints that followed were proof of the challenging task Mr. Cobb and his colleagues have taken on: trying to teach people who like to color outside the lines about drawing up business plans, budgeting and making a sales pitch.

YouMakeMedia has talked in the past about various web services and how they help (or hinder) your money-making, but it’s exciting to see a program that delves even deeper, helping artists think more consciously about the business end of what they do. It’s easy to think that it’s as simple as throwing ads next to your content, or selling copies of your output, but having a deeper understanding of business will give you a more rewarding experience (and a more rewarding return) when it comes to doing the selling.

Do you have any tips on learning the business side of arts and content creation? Share them in the comments!