Anyway after taking public transport for a few hours to Thomastown, I met the guys and organised myself for the shoot. I was surprised to see such as professional set up with all cars in a showroom! All the Mercedes were well maintained and I even got to meet the cleaner.

After setting up my gear it wasn’t long before I started shooting with my new tripod.  However what I wasn’t prepared for was a lack of sunlight. Which means that I will need to invest in some light stands as well as reflectors to block out the sun in certain shots.

The footage did come out much better than previous videos and I can say that I’m learning my JVC Everio Video Camera much better, but it will take some more practice.  I’ve moved away from using auto mode and shooting everything in Manual mode adjusting lights, zoom, levels according to my environments.

After experimenting, I did record more footage that I should have and that led to my 4hr battery being drained. Embarrassingly I had to finish up early, but the guys were great and allowed me to come back for another shoot.

So I came back with an extra battery and continued shooting, making sure all the Indoor lights were turned on. I even had the car interior lights on for a little extra.

Then it was time to edit, luckily my brothers friend who’s a doctor is still interstate and I’m able to use his high powered pc. Which has made video editing a much easier as well as saving time. My current machine is a bit old now and really for this kind of work you really do need the processing and memory power.

Other good news is the new logo, its finished. Honestly i’m not totally happy with the logo, but for my current budget this will have to do, until I can afford something better.

New Logo

Currently the brochure is being worked on, so I’m awaiting for this to start more promotions.

Until next time…

Jon Nikolakakis
automax.tv owner

A larger advertising campaign is scheduled, in one week, after putting some money into the ad campaign.
Thursday AD, which is a Melbourne Based newspaper has agreed to help us out and have added a link to their links webpage. Thanks very much for supporting me, thursdayAD is good Melbourne newspaper and gets over 300,000 visitors each month.

The owner of e30 Racing has offered to place a link onto their e30 for sale.
Please visit their site its very good.

Some other news is the Drop Down Category system is finished and am very happy with how it functions.

A new logo has also been created in preparation for a brochure. So am awaiting finalized designs.
My goal this month will be to get more cars on automax.tv, to give the site a huge push.

If anyone has any news on how to help my advertise please send me an email.

Regards

Jon | owner

Only the search results require tweaking based on the new category system.

Additionally when uploading new cars, the Model and Family will be auto created for each new car.
The system has been tested and is working well using ajax, as the programming front.
You may notice other older formats refresh the page every time a category drop down menu is selected.

I’ve reached a stage where I’m happy of the functionality of the website and now the advertising campaign must come info effect. I’ve created ads in my local paper and during the week and will monitor what effect this has had on phone calls and website visits.

Other good news is that I’ve bought myself a new Manfrotto 190xdpo
With a 128RC Head,

The Tripod and 128RC head from manfrotto are excellent and provide a smooth fluid motion that will enable automax.tv to provide smoother Video pictures.

Additionally more work is underway to operate the Video Camera.
A new plate for the tripod has been ordered and this will be sufficient until a future upgrade is needed. Definitely an improvement over my old $40 inca.

What happened was a driver slammed the brakes very hard in the wet and I went straight into his 4wd tow bar.  So the damage to my car is around $4k.  I also have the other party ringing me up asking me to pay for his car.

This means that Budget Direct had me driving my car for more than 5 months without insurance. They also tried to find every trick in the book to not insure me. They asked for:

- 5 years driving history from Vic Roads
- Copy of my license
- Service History of car
- They even contacted the original owner.

So they objected to my first claim, I appealed and then they refused that claim. I went to Financial Obdusman and now they have formally refused the appeal.

They have refused my claim, because they have said there were undeclared modifications, which were done by the previous owner. Even though they had my car fully inspected.

The claim process has taken 2 months, because of the time they take to process your claims, but just one hour on the telephone to accept your MONEY.  Many times, I had unreturned calls, and after 5pm, I got transferred to their outsourced call centre. (From India, which is what a Budget Direct employer comfirmed, however one of their staff, said to me, he was from Indonesia.)

Really I should have researched this company before I signed up with my first insurance company, please do yourself a favour and visit these links below.

http://au.messages.yahoo.com/news/general-discussion/646213/
http://www.productreview.com.au/showitem.php?item_id=11769&section=REVIEWS&order_by=item_rate_score&is_asc=1
http://forums.overlander.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=52529&highlight=&sid=05d2b0cbace5ca8a92ba9c6fe41fa371

So if anyone out there is with Budget Direct, I recommend reading these links and deciding for yourself,  if saving $100 -$200 is really worth the headaches.

Let me know if anyone has had any previous nightmares with Budget Direct, via the contact form.
I will continue to fight this with Financial Obdusman and after will go to court, because its not right for a company to treat us like this, what if I had crashed into a $500,000 Porsche?

I’m sure once the buyer has settled on a car, that they’ll want to watch the video. So users will be getting the best of both worlds, however the concept that the car must have a video still applies.

Streaming has been fixed and videos dont stutter when being viewed, the playback is more smoother and this is definetely a massive boost, as the site was really getting affected by this.

Additionally the core code has just been changed and this has added to 20% increase in performance, which will allow in the long term more users to this site.

More development is still underway and i’m very busy with work, however via an agressive marketing campaign this site will be boosted with more traffic.

3.06 Dual Xeon with HT and 4gig of memory. The location is alot closer to Melbourne, so access times will be increased greatly. Currently the bandwidth delivery appears to have improved also.

All in all a success and statistics should definetely rise because of this factor.

The DNS has been reconfigured for reverse dns, as well as dns caching, which will greatly enhance the delivery of webpages.

I’m with Budget Direct (http://budgetdirect.com.au) (A&G Insurance) but they havent treated me well so far.