Have you ever spent countless hours editing a film and tweaking with coloration (and a plethora of other things) (yes, we have a plethora) to make it just right? If you’re like us, you put 100’s or 1,000’s of hours into each film. I’m not complaining. We LOVE what we do. However, there’s a 400lb gorilla we needed to address, video hosting companies.
My name is Joe Switzer and I own Switzerfilm. We began as solely a wedding video company over 20 years ago and now shoot for corporate clients such as Budweiser, P&G, Nestle, Hilton, Purina, and the PGA. On the wedding side we still shoot locally, internationally, and have a separate division that handles the videos shot for Disney Weddings.
For any filmmaker, quality and individuality are at the top of the list of important things. This is why we’ve been making the change to a new hosting company called Fyrfly. These guys have been in this business for 10 years (previously providing great music under Songfreedom.com), so they know our community and love to serve it any way they can. In this particular case, their video hosting doesn’t mess with the way our video looks. It’s incredible. They call it “Cage-Free, no-additive, Non-GMO video hosting”, which preserves our quality and individuality.
What do I mean by individuality? Just finish your film, upload it to your usual hosting platform and do a side by side with your finished film on your computer. The brightness and reds get kicked up. This has long been a known issue. Companies have actually tweaked with their edits just to try to offset the changes they knew would take place upon upload. That’s crazy! We don’t want our videos to look like everyone else’s. Everyone has his or her own style and look they want viewers to experience, that’s what Fyrfly give us. No more homogenous filters covering up what our films truly look like.
To quickly show the difference I’m talking about, here are 3 screenshots to compare. The first one is the original fresh out of post. The second one is from playback on Fyrfly. The third one is from playback on another popular platform. See what I’m saying? The first two look almost identical and the third one is just cranked on brightness, reds, and probably a few other nasty little things. We want…deserve…demand our videos look the way we intended when people watch them. Is that so hard?
Original Sunset
FyrFly Sunset
other popular platform sunset
Here’s 3 more to drive the point home again. My fresh film screen shot. The cage-free, non-GMO, Fyrfly screen shot. Then the preservative, ultra-processed, additive video hosting company screen shot. I’m pretty sure these other companies spray these things with pesticides during transcoding,
Original swim shot
Fyrfly swim shot
other popular platform swim shot
Apart from loving the way our films look, I don’t have to worry about stupid things like gigabytes or terabytes. It’s unlimited hosting so we just upload our films. No one wants to count data. That’s about as much fun as counting calories. Yuck! Nope, can’t have that cookie, you already had the soup. By the way, we use a ton of music every year and that’s unlimited on Fyrfly too…for cheap.
We want to help all the other filmmakers out there discover a better way. Sometimes it just helps to know you have an option. Got to fyrfly.com and chat them, email them, call them (yes, you can actually talk to real people) or just sign up. It’s crazy cheap and easy. Just looking out for my fellow filmmakers.
PS – Remember this link will get you 50% off your first year.
