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Waiver for technology shortcomings?
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You can buy insurance, so you can pay the client back their money plus whatever they sue you for. Or you can buy redundant gear.
One of the main reasons I got out of shooting weddings on weekends was that at the prices I was shooting with one camera, there wasn’t enough margin for a second safety camera and I knew some day that would bite me eventually if I kept rolling the dice. I found the weddings much more stressful than the Brides did, knowing I only had the one chance to get it right with no net.
Put my vote down as well for Go Big or Go Home. Invest in more and proper gear so you have backup, or be prepared to take a huge hit when Murphy taps your shoulder and says: “Hi fella, been a while. You’re gonna love this next part.”
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I agree with the previous posts about taking the responsibility.
The problem of drop-out is a tape thing. One little defect in the tape, piece of dust….
If you want to greatly reduce the possibility of the video going south, go with a solid-state camera or use an external HDD to capture the video.
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[Bob Zelin] “Sebastian, is this a joke, or WHAT ?”
No, I just like to be prepared for when bad things happen, so when I saw that I had lost about half a second of footage on a decent quality tape, one from Panasonic and labeled “For Professional” that I had just opened, I started to wonder what would happen if that drop had occurred while taping the kiss between a just married couple, or a similar crucial moment, and how that works in the real world.
[Bob Zelin] “Let me assure you, one day soon – YOU will have a disk drive fail with all of your valuable media on it. YOU WILL LOSE YOUR WEDDING FOOTAGE, and when this happens, its YOUR FAULT. You must have backup.”
Ok, but we’re talking about different things here. If I have a wedding that I’m charging, let’s say, $1200 for, I will make sure that I burn the source footage to a couple of blu-ray discs as well as copy it to an external drive that I will keep disconnected from the computer. That means an initial investment in a Blu-ray burner, discs, and an external drive, which are paid off with the first wedding. So there’s a difference between losing all the footage from an event because you were not careful enough to make a backup and then a virus formatted your hard drive and you lost it all, as opposed to having a drop out in a just opened tape of good quality that happened in a crucial moment of the event. Let’s say you are cheap and keep using the same tape over and over for different events. If then you have drops in the footage then it’s your fault for being careless.
Still, I see your point and everybody else’s, the customer will not give a damn if it’s really your fault or the technology’s, even if you did your best. I know I would be really pissed off if I hire a guy to video tape my daughter’s school play and there’s a second missing right when she is doing her part. Knowing about how technology works I probably would understand it, if I know that he used a brand new tape of good quality, but I know most people don’t care about hearing about the technological shortcomings of HDV, or the tape manufacturing process.
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[Timothy J. Allen] “If the camera malfunctions for a moment, you use a clip from your spare. If that won’t work, you refund your fee.”
Good, but let’s suppose you’re taping a school play. Your customer’s son has a small part in it. You put in a new tape in the camera, but you were unlucky enough that you had a drop just as he was saying his glorious lines. The customer will understandably be pissed off, but what do you do? Just give him the video for free? I would think that I would give him a big discount, but I couldn’t just refund my whole fee and still give him the edited video, because even if there was a blunder, there’s still a lot of value in what he’s getting, despite the one second missing from it.
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[walter biscardi] “Just like in Post here at our shop. We have three full edit systems because we’re delivering to very hard deadlines. Technology breaks all the time, but with three edit systems we have redundancy. We also run all our storage in RAID 5 so if a hard drive fails, we can keep working.”
OK, but we’re talking about different things here, different sizes of companies. You are talking about a production center that probably has tens of thousands of dollars in equipment. I’m talking about a small events videographer, who would probably have to charge a wedding thousands of dollars because he has to recover the huge investment he made. I’m talking about a beginner events videographer with about $3500 in equipment between two HD cameras and a fast computer. And besides, it’s like I said in another post, I’m not talking about things that are preventable such as making backups, but those things that are impossible to prevent, such as a manufacturing defect in a professional tape that you just opened and was never used before. And I know I’m just being negative for the sake of discussion, I taped a high school play with a Canon HV20 a while ago with two of these Panasonic tapes and I didn’t get one drop in two full tapes. However, yesterday I opened another one of them and I got one drop while just filming in a lake to try my new camera. So that got me thinking, if this happened now, it may happen at a crucial moment, and what happens then?
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[Mark Suszko] “You can buy insurance, so you can pay the client back their money plus whatever they sue you for.”
That’s a good idea, but I wonder if any insurance company sells that type of insurance. If they do I could buy it, since most likely it would be cheap like renter’s insurance.
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[John Baumchen] “If you want to greatly reduce the possibility of the video going south, go with a solid-state camera or use an external HDD to capture the video.”
Not a bad idea, but an expensive one. The hard drive Sony makes for my camera, HVR-DR60, is selling for $1400 now, and even if I could buy it, attaching it to the camera would probably make it even more uncomfortable than it already is. Given that I recently had a pinched nerve that affected my right upper body, I’d rather not put more weight on that camera since it’s rather heavy as it is.
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[Sebastian Alvarez] “I taped a high school play with a Canon HV20 a while ago with two of these Panasonic tapes and I didn’t get one drop in two full tapes. However, yesterday I opened another one of them and I got one drop while just filming in a lake to try my new camera. So that got me thinking, if this happened now, it may happen at a crucial moment, and what happens then?”
As many here have already said: If you want to run with the bulls in Pamplona, you have to put on your running shoes.
Translation?
If you want to take people’s money, you need to be a “real” business; otherwise, do it as a hobby and don’t charge people. Once you accept their money, you are on the hook in a circumstance wherein excuses do NOT cut it. Telling them that it wasn’t under your control will not work. As Bob Zelin said, it was under your control — you just did not take the steps necessary to stay on top of it.
Everything else is merely the droppings left by the bulls in the streets of Pamplona.
Hate to be so direct but there really are no excuses that work in situations like these.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
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[Ron Lindeboom] “you just did not take the steps necessary to stay on top of it.”
I don’t agree with that. As I said, there’s a difference between not taking steps to prevent a failure, such as not making a backup of the footage, and things that are out of your control, such as a brand new professional tape that caused a drop out. I know it doesn’t matter to the customer one way or the other, but I don’t agree in that it’s always YOUR fault. You might take all the necessary steps, and still technology might fail, and there’s nothing you could’ve done better to prevent it.
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[Sebastian Alvarez] “You are talking about a production center that probably has tens of thousands of dollars in equipment.”
I’m pretty sure that Walt’s facility has just a tad more than “tens of thousands of dollars in equipment.”
Sebastian – as Bob Zelin said, “Welcome to business.” It only works when you have the correct match between what you can invest and what you can charge.
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