Laura Randall's "Top 25" Awesome Products and Services

When my kids were younger and they would tell me they had a bad day, I would ask them why. Then I would say, “Now that you’ve told me 2 bad things that happened to you today, I want you to tell me 4 good things that happened.” So in that spirit....I have had my fill of horrible BluDomain service over the past few weeks and I’ve complained enough about it to the point of feeling exhausted. Basically I think I will have to deal with the fact that they ripped me off $200. So, to counterbalance their horrible service, I thought I would create a post to share some of the GREAT services and products that I have worked with over the past year or so!


Laura's "Top 25" Awesome Products and Services

1. Epson DiscProducer PP-100 - Expensive but oh-so-worth-it if you are doing lots of DVD duplications. Easy to use software, VERY well-built product, haven't had a single ink cartridge clog up and every single disc prints beautifully. Actually come to think of it, we haven't even had one failed DVD. And I think we've printed and duplicated at least 5,000 DVDs. Changed the ink cartridges just once and that was last week.

2. Canon Pixma iP6700D printer - great little workhorse. It prints my Jewelboxing cases beautifully. Ink is not cheap and it will stop printing if one of the cartridges needs to be replaced. If someone knows of an ink caddy that actually works for this printer, let me know! In order to print DVDs you will need to buy a tray on ebay and get the hack (they can’t sell it off the shelf this way in the U.S. because of Epson). But it does print gorgeous DVDs as well once you are all set up with it.

3. Jewelboxing - I know some people have had printing issues, but I honestly LOVE my Jewelboxing cases. I did have to play with the templates a bit when I first got them, but they were more than happy to send me replacement inserts on the ones I ruined. Dawson at Coudal (the parent company) has always provided me with fast, courteous customer service. At the wedding show brides kept picking up the cases saying how nice they were. They can scratch easily so handle with care.

4. TapeResources.com - I have had nothing but excellent, prompt customer service from this company. They are fast to ship product out and have excellent prices on the Sony tapes I order.

5. Spectra Film - I started dabbling a bit into 8mm film this year. Kristin" from Bliss and Andrew Jackson from Portal Films were SUPER helpful in helping me navigate some film questions. So they also get a mention! :) Anyway, the owner of Spectra went out of his way to call when he realized I didn't get a package discount for ordering film and developing services. He wanted to make sure I knew he was crediting my card for that amount. I probably wouldn't have even caught it if he hadn't called! Again, great customer service going above and beyond.

6. Adobe - OK, granted I'm on the beta team so I have a bit of an 'in', but I'm very happy they implemented some of the things I had specifically been suggesting for Premiere CS4. Most notably being able to select a group of clips and apply speed changes, then tell it to either extend in/out points or keep them as is. Also being able to select a group of clip and change the audio gain (and have more control over WHAT is changed), and remove filters. Another feature I love is being able to customize every single panel. It's now even faster to rough cut footage. Love it. Also the Adobe Media Encoder allows you to batch encode files in all kinds of formats. The only thing is it's still slow and I still have to downconvert HD to SD via After Effects. There are things that need to be worked on though. One step forward, two steps back...but we are heading in the right direction and overall I LOVE where CS4 is going.

7. Matrox - I love my RTx2 cards. I'm so happy there are drivers for CS4 and that the beta team REALLY does listen when there is an issue. There are still some things that need to be fixed (export quality....again I'm going to AE) but at least they are listening and working on it. Lord knows I'm glad I don't have that job! :)

8. Sony GV-HD700 - Scott Shama from Ambient Studios turned me on to this portable HD deck. The price is right, it runs a long time on a large Sony battery, it has an LCD screen to see your footage, saves my camera's heads (and rewinds/fast forwards faster)....I LOVE it! This little guy has spent lots of time capturing in my office as well as in my minivan during SDEs. Thanks for bringing this to that first shoot Scott!

9. GetDataBack - a $79 program which when combined with the $99 program called RAID Reconstructor saved me a lot of heartache and about $6,000 when we had a 1TB RAID 0 crash. It took about 3 days to recover everything, but we didn't lose a single byte of data in the long run. Whew! Now if I could just get my recently crash other 1TB drive to mount I could recover that.

10. Budget Truck Rental - We rented a truck through this company this year for the crazy Seattle Wedding Show. Well, it snowed a few inches the night of move out so we wound up haivng to return it late. They totally understood and did not charge us extra.

11. Speaking of travel -
Hertz: sign up for a business account and you can get better discounts and earn free rental days. I also get free upgrades on occasion.
Starwood Hotels: Sheraton, Westin, etc. good points program that can also go towards airline miles. Great beds!
Hyatt Hotels: The Grand Hyatt Hotels have impeccable service, gorgeous hotels and amazing food.
Airlines: for me, it's a toss up between Alaska and Continental. BUT if you are flying to Hawaii, then Hawaiian Airlines is a MUST!!

12. AAA Plus - having a 20 year old male driver and unpredictable weather, this membership more than pays for itself every year. Plus they have pretty good discounts on hotels and sometimes airfare too.

13. Costco Merchant Services - If you have a Costco near you, JOIN!! Their credit card merchant services cannot be beat. 1.67% on swiped transactions or 1.99% on phone/internet orders. NO annual fees. Buy your own machine though...don’t lease one.

14. QuickBooks Pro 2009 - Not a huge upgrade, but you can now download transactions into to your bank account like you can with Quicken. Sweet! I was using 2006 and my accountant says it’s good to at least upgrade once every three years.

15. PDFCreator - I just sent this info to someone else. This is a free PDF “printer” and works flawlessly! I use it on a daily basis to email pdf files of invoices, quotes, contracts, etc to clients so I know they won’t be altered.

16. Neat Receipts - This is a little scanner and software utility that will clear out that shoe box of receipts and is IRS approved. You scan your receipts and it makes a jpg but also attaches data which it reads from your receipt with OCR software. There are a few clunky things about the software, but overall I’m SOOO happy someone suggested this to me! Not only does it help you stay organized, gets rid of boxes of receipts, give you peace of mind, but if you use it on a consistent basis you can scan those pesky receipts that fade quickly! It’s supposed to work with QuickBooks but I’ve heard it doesn’t work that well so I’ve been scared to try it. It’s still HIGHLY recommended!

17. iPhone - what else can I say? I love my iPhone. I didn’t love getting wrong information before leaving the country and having a $2000 phone bill, but an email to the CEO and a call back from their very nice Executive Escalation Team fixed that. In the end I can say I got great customer service after going higher up in the food chain. The usual people who answer your call are just not able to help with some things. Anyway, I show video on my iPhone to people often, watch rented movies on the airplane, listen to music, ALWAYS get my email (big problem I had before with my Treo), and there are a ton of fun apps.

18. Internet Hosting - by our very own Jerome Cloninger at JC/DV Productions. Maybe it’s because I know him, or maybe it’s just because he’s such a great guy, but honestly some of the BEST customer service EVER!!! He totally had to handhold me through a few things and even went above and beyond by helping me on some unrelated internet stuff. He is very responsive, smart, patient, and knows what he is doing. The hosting is FAST and very reasonably priced.

19. WordPress - I had a Blogger blog and was a bit worried about switching to WordPress, but I’m so happy I did. I was able to customize my blog and it wasn’t quite as painful as I thought it would be. I found a utility to transfer all my posts which worked perfectly. Using Jerome’s hosting and encoding to H.264 now and my videos on the blog are gorgeous and FAST!! People at a recent wedding show were commenting on how much they loved the blog....both brides and vendors.

20. My buddy Troy - an After Effects guru who helped me polish more than one turd video into gold! He is fast, REALLY knows his stuff, and can do just about anything. If you need AE person, contact me! I don’t want to give out his info here because he’s already very busy!

21. YouSendIt.com - Very easy to use and inexpensive utility for sending and receiving large files. Works well and you don’t have to mess with ftp addresses and passwords, etc.

22. MyEmma.com - awesome html email newsletter service. Great for people like me who don’t have time to mess with html and all that. It keeps track of stats for you and is so easy even a Kindergartener could use it. It is not the cheapest service available, but they have EXCELLENT customer service and is so easy to use and keep track of your stats.

23. EventDV Magazine - Where else can you get so much great info on a consistent basis in a magazine format that is dedicated to wedding and event videographers and it’s FREE? I certainly hope every single person on this forum is a subscriber!

24. Mini-dv labels - I found some mini-dv labels from TapeOnline.com http://tinyurl.com/8p7lzy and use their template in Illustrator to pre-print labels on all our tapes. Our phone number is on the tapes too just in case one gets left behind or misplaced. It keeps things organized, neat and professional looking.

25. Kata Bags - LOVE these bags, especially for traveling. They are sturdy, temperature protected, have lots of little pockets and it’s amazing how much stuff you can get in these bags! I use the bags that utilize their trolley system so we don’t have to carry anything (makes my back happy). For as much as we use the bags and they have been on many domestic and international trips, they look just as good as the day we bought them. I have one MC-61 and one CC-197 which is a newer model.

And one more for good luck! (saving the best for last!)

26. Dell T5400 system - This system is unbelievably FAST!!! It’s a dual quad core (that’s right, 8 cores baby!!) and is basically a server in a desktop footprint. It’s actually one of my smaller towers, although it’s HEAVY. It is super quiet to the point where sometimes I forget to turn it off because I don’t hear it! I have a Dell 24” super sharp monitor with it and we’ve even used it at a wedding show to display HD footage. We have a Matrox RTx2LE card in there and I honestly get so spoiled using this system that I don’t want to use any of my other computers. I haven’t needed one second of tech support. I honestly cannot tell you how much I love this system. It is well-built, extremely fast and very reliable. I wish I could afford three more!