I recently discovered YouTube user bbillyk's channel. He's a sword & knife enthusiast who has been uploading reviews since March 2009.
I love his most recent video if only for his pug T-shirt. Well, and maybe his Cartman-esque demeanor :)
He regularly tests his knives & swords on bottled water and I wondered how many bottles he'd slain during his YouTube career. That led to the idea of a compilation video with just the bottles being cleaved alongside a running tally.
I'd recently played with Sony Vegas Pro which is an awesome video editing package for the clueless video person (i.e. me) but I'm too lazy to watch all 115 videos to find the bottle slaying bits.
A few weeks ago I attended SydStart - a conference for startups. Matt Barrie's talk was definitely one of the better ones that day and I left with the resolution that I'd have to take a closer look at Freelancer.
This zany video concept seemed like the perfect small task to experiment with on Freelancer. I posted my project and one day later I had 5 bids, ranging from $30-$130. I didn't want to pay too much for what is essentially a novelty video so I opted to go with hempsta, a Bulgarian fellow, as he had the best ratings & experience at the $30 mark.
I imagined it would take a fair few hours to watch (or at least skip through) all of the videos and clip out the bottled water bits, and to edit them together with some music. I also presumed hempsta had other things going on in his life besides my novelty video. So I was quite impressed when he presented me with the first edit 6 days later (he informed he that he would be busy so couldn't start work immediately) and it was pretty much spot on what I pictured.
In summary my Freelancer experience was great. I think the Freelancer site itself is really spammy looking -- there's a million popups, alerts, achievements and all sorts of garbage flying in your face every step of the way which gave me the impression that I was being set up to be ripped off -- but the actual service you get out it is pretty cool.
Oh, and I can't recommend hempsta highly enough if you need some video work done.
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