Subcontractor loses media

[Nick Griffin]

WOW, do I feel your pain, Steve! Certainly makes “Errors & Omissions” insurance seem like a tiny expense, but if you had it I’m doubting that it would cover your sub-contractor’s mistake.

Is it at all possible for the client to let you do a re-shoot or was this an event that can’t be repeated? If it’s a piece with actors you could bring them in for ADR.

Huge sympathies on this one. Keep us posted.

[Steve Kownacki]

Thanks for your condolences Nick.

Once in a lifetime event & a foray into 4 future sessions. This was more critical for audio than video to capture groups of people’s discussions. All I have of the first 90 min is a mix of 8 mics with 30 people talking all at once. The part that was recorded came out exactly as anticipated. The client is more curious about the group discussions that are now lost. (I am weak in the knees to say the least.)

Steve

[Richard Herd]

How did the mic signal flow?

I was thinking maybe you can create a series of EQ’d sends to isolate some conversations between some people on some of the mics. But this is a Hail Mary pass for sure.

[Nick Griffin]

And just for future reference, not that it will do a thing to fix the current situation, Ty Ford (who you already know) does excellent sound recording for a wide variety of production environments.

[Tom Sefton]

Steve,

I’ve had this happen before and can totally commiserate, and imagine the horrible feeling in your guts when you realised what had happened. The only thing I could do was go the client cap in hand and own up as it being my mistake. I waived their invoice and offered to reshoot for free and only charge for the post. I didn’t pay the guy who made the mistake but luckily for me, the client respected the fact that I had made the offer and actually tried to work with me to deliver something useable from the rushes which I was able to invoice enough to cover my costs for the other freelancers on the original job. If there is a silver lining, we still work for them. The only possible thing to try would be if you can salvage anything from the camera feeds with something like izotope rx3. Best of British.

[Mark Suszko]

Some kind of insurance would certainly help the cash flow situation. I’m curious why someone said E&O would not cover such an event; if not E&O, what would you call a policy that DOES cover losses due to subcontractor incompetence or “acts of God”?

[Richard Herd]

[Mark Suszko] “what would you call a policy that DOES cover losses due to subcontractor incompetence or “acts of God””

And also, how would a completion bond affect the situation?

[Rich Rubasch]

Funny, we just had two shoots come back with no audio on one key interview (like none) and super overmodulated audio on 14 minutes of another key interview.

Can’t stress enough how important audio is in this business while we all are focused on shallow depth of field, aerial shots and gimbal shots.

Get the audio right! Hire a skilled audio tech!

This one sounds like it’s gonna sting a bit.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Todd Terry]

[Rich Rubasch] “Can’t stress enough how important audio is in this business while we all are focused on shallow depth of field, aerial shots and gimbal shots.”

Indeed.

Especially for small companies like ours where we usually go on location shoots with a tiny crew where there’s no single person dedicated to monitoring and recording sound (maybe just a boom op)… that makes it doubly important to get the sound right. In those kinds of setups audio can really become a neglected stepchild, so we try to work extra hard to make sure the sound we capture is good. Fortunately a great deal of our work is MOS so we don’t always have to worry about it.

As people have pointed out before… for some reason viewers will forgive bad images to a degree, but they will not suffer through bad sound at all.

The sad thing is though that Steve did what he could and did have a professional sound crew that was supposed to be taking care of that one-and-only thing… and they let him down.

Sadly he is a bit up the proverbial creek on this one….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Bill Davis]

Everyone here is cringing.

If we haven’t been there – we’ve been close and imagined it. So I’ll add my condolences.

It’s one of those “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” deals. Which suck to live through.

One instant place my brain went is to check out the dim possibility that the field recordist might be ignorant of some of the more esoteric file recovery arts – so I’d just double and triple check that whatever media he or she was recording to was in truth irrecoverable – to the point of pulling a drive and sending it to a clean room recovery service.

This might be totally useless, and you might have taken that exploration ALL the way. If so, ignore this. But it’s the first place my brain went.

Hang in there. This too will pass.

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