Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX.

[Noah Kadner]

Providing the footage to the client on a portable hard drive is pretty much the best way to go if you want to work as a freelancer at this point. Giving them the “raw” P2 cards is not realistic financially. You could always run out a tape using a 1200A deck but that doesn’t make much sense either as they would then need to recapture that back to hard drive anyway in order to edit. It’s a new workflow sure but I think most clients see the huge benefits of great looking footage and material that’s ready to edit right away.

Noah

[Chris Baldwin]

granted there are only certain clients that will bite on this, but I have had luck convincing a few clients who do their own post production, to purchase the P2 and/or external P2 Hard Drive. Just like them bringing their own tape stock and not paying for a marked up tape. Now again granted this agreement was also reached as a forward looking investment on their part and based on using the HPC2000 not the HVX200. If they are going to spend between $2000 to $7500 on P2 then they probably have the budget to just but the HVX200 themselves. Nevertheless I think for local clients with their own post production facilities, I think its not unreasonable to have the conversation with them to investigate their willingness to purchase their own aquizition media. For out of towners, I’m back to the drawing board of creating Hard Drive Dups but more than likely this means giving them the media after an overnight transfer. It’d be wonderful for my clients across the country if there was a super fast way of transferring them the 100 or so gigs for a full day’s shoot. I think this might be a bit off topic though as it is to my knowledge not fiscally reasonable and probably not fast enough to be logistically reasonable.

Chris Baldwin
Shoulder High Productions
Media of the World; For the World!
https://www.shoulderhigh.com
newsletters@shoulderhigh.com

[Leonard Levy]

So far at this point I find it a very hard sell. But time will tell.
People need to fget used to the workflow.
I haven’t shot a single job in HD yet – all miniDV.

[Mike Schrengohst]

Are you just shooting and handing over the tapes??
All of my shoots have been HD. Of course I am finishing
and delivering DVD’s as the final product. Plus I have
clients who want to run HD files from a Buffalo player.
The difference in quality from DV to HD is night & day.

[Steve Freebairn]

in response to sending the 100gb to a client across the country, I remembered seeing a device a while back that they are marketing toward Digital theatres, that uses a device on one end of the connection (either the sending or the receiving end, but I think it is mainly for the sending end) and it uses a high speed connection to transfer terrabytes of information overnight to clients around the world. It verifies data after it is transferred and used some special techonologies to use as much bandwidth on the net as it could find. It was very impressive, but I haven’t been able to find out where I saw it. You might look into file transfers on google and then look for hardware options. The box also let your client log on from anywhere in the world and start downloading. Although, it seems like if they only had DSL, that they’d be downloading for days.

[Phil Yunker]

So it sounds like the best options are to:
1: discuss and try to sell the P2 technology and workflow to clients and try to get them to purchase a card reader or store drive to keep at their facility
2: I would purchase a couple of hard drives that I could transfer media to and rent / loan to the client
3: purchase more than one store drive for clients to rent

Another question, how many people (agencies and such) are aware of this “new” technology. Most of us who are shooters/editors/producers and general techies are aware of this technology and are welcoming it with open arms. How hard of a sell has it been for those of you who are using it?

Thanks,

PHIL

[Mike Schrengohst]

Yesterday I shot a greenscreen insert for a clients website.
They know After Effects and Flash.
The fact that I could immediately render them
a QuickTime file they could use was like magic.
No tape to digitize and I did it right after the
shoot will I was striking. Right before I left
they were keying it in and then said “Mike do you
have some cool video backgrounds??” It never ends……

[Todd Mcmullen]

I am currently shooting a lifetime television movie in Shreveport, LA. We are using the HVX as a 4th camera along side sony cinealta’s from panavision.
The post house is in Burbank. Here is our workflow.

Shoot 1080i 24p onto 2-8gig and 1 4gig card.
Transfer footage to lacie fw 800 hd.
Copy days footage to g-tech 100 gig mini HD, or, a 20 gig firewire ipod, or dvd’s. ( it all depends on amount of days footage)
Send days footage with hd cam tapes and sound to editorial in Burbank.(overnight)
Editorial sends back HD for another days footage.

Works just like sending film to the lab.

Todd McMullen
Flip Flop Films
Austin
Cinematography Forum Leader

[Phil Yunker]

Todd,
This workflow makes sense to me and the extra drives or DVD’s would not be that expensive of a investment. Did the producers ask for the HVX or did you have to sell it to them.

[Drew Harty]

Anybody working with Iomega Rev for archiving or getting footage to clients? The Rev has 35 gig removable media that Iomega says is archival, and, if my math was right, takes about 25 minutes to write a full disc.

Drew Harty