[Bill Davis]

I’m going to gently disagree with the advice here at least to some extent.

One of the factors that’s changed a lot since I started in the video business is the SPEED with which projects go from concept to completion. Nowadays, it’s not unusual to be contacted on the first, have a script due on the 7th, shoot on the 9th, do a rough cut by the 15th and deliver the work on the 19th. Sometimes that’s an almost RELAXED schedule in these rush rush days.

But as my clients have grown and the projects and invoices have also grown, it’s not uncommon in my practice to have to front everything but labor for a five or even occasionally a six figure production budget.

My clients are typically very stable national companies. And I know I’ll get paid. But even if I invoice for a third or a half up front, it’s not at all unusual for the job to be done and delivered before the deposit invoice is processed. That’s not unusual in an environment where the size of an invoice will require two or even three approvals up the corporate line. If one of the folks on that approval ladder is traveling or on vacation, it’s not a surprise to find that it takes a full 30 days to process invoices. And let’s face facts, sometimes even with honest people of good will, a PDF invoice can get lost in the electronic ether, simply mis-routed or fall victim of a server issue. I won’t know that until my A/R system flags the invoice in 30 days. When this happens and I call the client, they put a RUSH on it, but that can take a week or two to cycle into the check cutting routine of a company that might be sending out hundreds or even thousands of A/P payments a week.

I’m not arguing that contract workers should be anyone’s bank. Just that there are good reasons that sometimes net 30 or even net 45 circumstances are reasonable.

Back when I was doing a lot of advertising work, a lot of the agency business was built on net-60 being typical since the work that they did in month one was billed at the end of that month, then they had 30 days to collect, then pay.

All my regular vendors know that if they don’t see a check at 30 days I’m already on it. And of course, if any of them need the cash, I’ll always accommodate them. But in a small business, cash is KING. And regularly paying in front of collections – while noble, nice, and something that your vendors will truly appreciate, might put you in a position where you might hope that you don’t get a SECOND big project that requires a lot of up-front capital outlay prior to your collecting on a First one and you have to turn the work down.

Lines of credit are nice and all. But if you’re borrowing money – there’s ALWAYS a cost. I learned that the hard way over the years, and I’d rather self-finance than partner with my bank and pay them to front me money on every job I do.

I will note that as you get bigger clients, one of the smartest things you can do is arrange with their A/P departments to put you on direct payments into your business account. I haven’t seen a paper check in the past few years from my two largest clients, just the email notification that the payment has processed and that it will be in my bank account the next day.

That’s the day I call my vendors and ask them if they want to pick up a check or have me mail it.

That system has been working fine for me for a couple of decades.

FWIW.

[Bill Davis]

Cutting is about a lot of things. Simultaneously. Sometimes it’s about seeing the person speaking. Sometimes it’s about seeing the reaction of another person to the person speaking. Sometimes, you get a Great line delivery, but there’s a glitch. “No, she didn’t sleep with Tim, ev… ever! And you realize that if you leave the glitch, the audience will get distracted. So you use a J cut or an L cut as necessary to cover the damn glitch and smooth out the scene.

Sometimes, it’s simply about either the visual or the auditory rhythm of the scene.

I remember cutting a scene once where the actor kept looking at a secondary character in order to involve her in the scene, not realizing that we had tight crossing two shots. The eye movement made him look shifty. So I covered the eye glances with a series of J and L cuts as needed.

Any form of edit is simply a tool. You’re trying to focus the flow of images and auditory information so that the audience can easily extract the needed ideas and keep your story flowing.

IMO, editing should never be a “when this happens, use this kind of edit.” But rather an exercise where you understand the nature and effect of all the types of edits at your disposal and deploy them when they best serve the needs of the scene you’re cutting.

FWIW.

[Bill Davis]

Unless I misunderstand you, you’re making this WAY too complicated.

Say you want to do a 10 second “invisible man” walkon shot of him entering and sitting down at the desk.

Just lock down the shot and shoot 15 seconds or so of a static shot of the set. Then have the man walk on and sit down at the desk.

Put those TWO shots on different tracks and set the opacity of the second shot (the one with the guy) at between 40 and 60% depending on how “invisible you want him to be.

If you want him to interact with the visible objects, eg answer the phone. THEN you need to deal with separate keying issues and generating moving mattes to isolate objects in one layer to interace with objects in other layers.

But the basic invisible man stuff is about as simple as my first two paragraphs indicate.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Like everyone else here I think going through an RFP is a little like getting dental work done.

However, if it’s properly done it can serve a useful purpose for you and for the client.

That’s when the RFP is specific enough to define the actual terms of the sample job you’re bidding on.

If that’s the case, you’d expect a vendor or two to come in high. A vendor or two to come in dirt cheap. And a statistical cluster in the middle somewhere that actually defines what the market expects to pay for the scope of work outlined.

This is fair because it tells both the client and the vendors what market rates currently are. If an existing vendor is way out of line on the high side, or if the company doing the RFP has a vendor doing work too cheaply, both those extremes will be uncovered.

However, once that process is done – it’s done. The client has surveyed the market and determined fair market rates. Anything beyond that is silly and I’ve written to clients doing RFPs and told them exactly that.

Of course, I’m different from a lot of people here. I HATE hourly pricing. That’s based on my belief that if you’re good and fast you shouldn’t make LESS than someone who’s crappy and slow. And when you bid on time that’s the first trap for both sides. The second is that selling hours is stupid because it’s an ever diminishing inventory that’s leaking away no matter whether you’re working or not.

I personally prefer bidding projects based on what I think my time, effort, and mostly my EXPERTISE is worth. That bulk rate should be reasonably “screw up proof” which is to say my skilled rates are such that if I have to work some extra hours on something, I still end up properly compensated for my abilities and experience.

That way it’s up to me to do things efficiently – and to the extent I do – I should be able to financially benefit from the efficiencies I bring to the project, not make less because I can do in 8 hours what it might take someone else 14 hours to accomplish.

My view anyway.

[Bill Davis]

Just a support comment about Filemaker Pro.

I started using it almost 15 years ago and it’s great for customizing just what you need to track and eliminate what a DB designer designing for the masses THOUGHT you would need.

If you don’t want to develop your solutions yourself, there’s a robust community of Filemaker consultants who can help for projects like this.

If you wanted to develop a solution for yourself in conjunction with a database consultant, I might suggest first buying a copy of a simple flow-chart/diagramming program (I use Omni-Graffle on a Mac) and use it to visually design out what you want your database to do. Then hand that over to the DB designer. It’s a great bridge between us visual types and the linear types that tend to make good DB coders.

Just a suggestion.

[Bill Davis]

Sean,

Having just set this up for a non-profit whose board I chair, I’ve got to say it’s a bit complicated.

The hardware side is actually relatively simple. Any laptop can take a USB card reader and scan any mag stripe card into the system. (Actually it’s fun, scan your own credit card or drivers license and look at all the data every scan sends out – It’s kinda creepy)

Then something needs to parse that text stream. There are a lot of software options to do this. Shopping cart software, simple mac and pc storefront software, etc. But those have to connect to a merchant account and this is where some of the complexity comes in. You need to make arrangements for that merchant account to hook up with one of the electronic payment gateways in order to insure that the data goes to the right system, gets verified properly, then gets credited to YOUR account properly. this requires a separate service like Authorize.net These payment gateways typically require monthly contracts and extract their small percentage. Small volume users tend to get disadvantaged by the terms.

The alternative to these commercial systems is to rely on PayPal or iBill or similar services for small transactions. They hide the behind the scenes credit card complexity from the end user.

Hope this helps.

[Bill Davis]

Sure Jeff,

First and foremost, the most important element in any video image are the people’s faces.

If you make the people look good, then suddenly everyone’s delighted with the overall video. BTW, this is equally true of shooting a corporate CEO or an Alice Cooper tribute band. (The Alice lead singer probably took hours to get the makeup right – rendering their face as a glowing smeared deep blue-lit blob in the entire video just won’t do!)

This means that you LOOK at the performers individually and use the lighting and staging in order to make them stand out and look as good as possible.

Start by determining your camera position. Then focus on your shots of each performer. Look at the camera frame for each band member. Each one should be illuminated to show them at their best. That would typically mean a variation of 3 point interview lighting for EACH. Now don’t get freaked. For a 5 man band, this doesn’t mean you need 15 lights to do a good job (tho that IS one approach!). It DOES mean you have to figure out how to get a reasonably angled key light on each face. And at least some fill light. You can set backlights to pop each player out of the background, or you can do something as simple as putting a temporary piece of light foamcore behind the horn player so that the shape of their dark hair doesn’t get lost in the dark back wall.

Or maybe one broad back (rim) light on a really tall stand can act as a shape modeling light for ALL the band members.

Maybe a couple of strategically placed 650 fresnels at the back of the room – ruthlessly barned door’d off to avoid spill and scrimmed on one so that it’s more fill than key might just raise the level enough so the faces aren’t totally screwed by the emerald gel the house light guy thought looked so hip on the stage PARS.

The stage background, stage depth, ceiling height, and what instruments you have available are all variables – but when push comes to shove, lighting is all about providing shaping and modeling of the faces and bodies of the players to provide the appearance of three dimensional human forms on a flat TV surface.

Another thing to remember (AND to remind the band about) is that the crowd will see them once tonight. On video, they may be seeing them for YEARS to come. Video lighting should never kill the whole vibe and suck the life out of the performance space – but it IS very important if the band wants to learn to harness the awesome power of video as a tool for exposure and a path to continued success.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

I think it’s instructive to remember that humans have been on a quest to make type beautiful since before Guttenberg impressed that pesky bible.

By all means study and learn. Just realize that nine tenths of a lifetime from now you’ll still be at it.

If all goes well.

[Bill Davis]

You know how you can go to Costco and buy a really nice electronic keyboard?

So if a client came up and said they were having a series of PARTIES and instead of hiring live musicians they wanted to buy the Costco really nice keyboard and get music that way.

So they do that. Then they get the keyboard to the party and they hit the key labled AUTO play songs… And yes, there’s music at the party – but it’s pretty weak.

Eventually, they’re SICK AND TIRED of listening to the damn electronic keyboard. So someone figures out that maybe it’s not the keyboard, but the fact that they need someone with talent to play it. SO they hire someone who knows how to PLAY piano, and suddenly the keyboard sounds a LOT better – but it’s still just a Costco keyboard so it’s kinda limited.

Then when they grow up – they realize that what they REALLY want is the results that a real band provides and the keyboard sits in a closet from that point on.

Equipment doesn’t make videos. People make videos.

And sorry, but giving video equipment or lighting equipment to people who aren’t experienced in how to use it is as silly as buying a keyboard and thinking that the ownership of it is what’s required to produce music for a party.

Set up the all the pro gear you want in that client’s set. But if nobody knows how to adjust it for the woman with wispy blond hair or the guy with the Carribean vacation tan, then the BEST you can hope for is mediocre results.

My 2 cents anyway.

[Bill Davis]

Kalid,

Compressing anything is a balancing act.

The more compression you add, the smaller the file gets.

Smaller files download faster and stream better than larger files.

BUT

The more compression you add, the worse the picture looks.

Also compression isn’t ONE thing – it’s MANY things.

Compression involves deciding how many frames you’ll feed in a unit of time – 30 frames a second? 15 frames a second? 10 frames? It also involves the SIZE of those frames. Will they be full digital video standard frames of 720×480 pixels? Or can they be half that size which saves you FOUR TIMES the data since you’re losing pixels in both horizontal and vertical dimensions? Or will another frame size be better?

Then there’s the whole discussion of the actual CODEC scheme you use. Some compression/decompressors are really efficient – some less so. But some of the less efficient ones are are more COMPATIBLE with older computers.

So you’ve also got to understand the type of USER that will likely be viewing your work and what kind of hardware, operating system, and software they’ll be running.

As you can see, it’s VERY complex.

The computer companies are pushing for standards. Apple with Quicktime. Windows with Windows Media 9. But even inside these purported “standards” there are variations that can trip you up.

Like I said, it’s very complex right now.

Sorry there isn’t an easier answer – but that’s the state of the game right now.