[Bob Cole]

[Todd Terry] “every estimate and subsequent invoice includes a line item, “Archival.” It’s not much, less than a hundred bucks, but enough”

It would concern me to make any sort of promise to a client to save his/her project elements in perpetuity. It is very difficult to guarantee the future.

If I did this, I’d add a disclaimer that makes clear there is a possibility of failure to retrieve an archived file.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

There are thorough discussions of Fair Use online. But from your description, this does not sound “transformative.” That would require the usage to show a different meaning, from their particular usage of the footage. Your footage was employed as if it were stock footage – there was no “commentary” on your original footage.

There’s a documentary about background actors which made “Fair Use” of notable feature films, because the clips were only long enough to show the background actors in the same shot as the big stars. That was transformative because it used feature film footage to “document” the proximity of these very poor background actors to the very wealthy movie stars.

Your birds are just being given another viewing — nothing new or notable.

Not a lawyer,

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[walter biscardi] “I don’t see any reason to charge a client to show them the work I did to come up with the budget.”

Unless the client simply shared that budget with another producer, and had no intention of hiring you.

All that said, how would you all react if a potential client sent you, unasked for, another production company’s budget, in the context of a bidding situation?

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Bob Zelin] “even if you can get GREAT SUPPORT from someone, the damn part is no longer manufactured anymore”

Wow – coming from you, that scares me. That isn’t even what I was concerned about, but I am now. What about that first level of support, e.g.: “I have a problem, and I can call someone about it, and they’re going to be empathetic and helpful.” In my experience, AJA and CalDigit have been great at that (CalDigit, as recently as this past week, when they guessed correctly that I had a bad PCI card, sent me a card and a cable just in case that was it, and offered to take back whichever piece was NOT the one that needed replacement).

I take your point about obsolescence. So, what to do? Buy two of everything to have a spare? Or, rigorously renew every part of your studio, on a set schedule (what, every 3 years)? That gets expensive and disruptive, and besides, many of the problems I’ve had with electronics have actually been within the first couple months of operation.

Re my current issue: to go with a new non-PCI-card Mac, I’m looking for new Thunderbolt storage.

I had been assuming that I would need a RAID-5 or RAID-6, but you’re making me wonder about that. If, as you said, the market has gone low-end, with cheap, planned obsolescence, maybe I should go that way too. I’m not working in multiple streams of 4K video anyway — all I want is to be able to deliver HD videos on time to my clients, even if a hard drive fails now and then. Instead of expensive RAID-5 or RAID-6 devices, what about daisy-chaining some Thunderbolt drives and either mirroring or making frequent, scheduled backups?

I realize, Bob, that you don’t need phone support the way I do; hence, your focus on the hardware EOL issue. But I’d be very curious as to whom you would recommend for that first level of phone support. I have never dealt with Promise or Maxx Digital so don’t know how they’ll be with support. Any other candidates?

Thanks for your insights.

Bob C

P.S. I just want to give a shout-out for some great repairs: Specialized Communications (for Panasonic), Sony (for a price), and winning the Grand Prize, Midwest Technical Sales and Service. After HP assured me that my LTO-3 drive was not repairable, Midwest Technical Sales and Service fixed it for a very reasonable price. They did not pay me for that endorsement.

[Bob Cole]

Very ingenious; I’m assuming you didn’t hit any potholes!

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Updating projects has been a major PITA for me this year.

Sadly, the flexibility and speed of the modern NLE has created expectations which are unrealistic. It’s so easy to make revisions to a current project that clients inevitably think it will be easy three years hence.

Yet once a project is completed, for the average client it is OVER, and clients have little reason to pay you to archive the footage and project files.

I try to archive everything. But it requires a lot of unbilled time, and then, no matter how carefully I do this, I often run into problems reloading old projects. These problems are difficult to predict, too; we don’t know how future changes to hardware, software, and OS’s will affect the reloading and media-relinking of old projects.

[Nick Griffin] “You should have this covered in your original proposal/contract/letter of agreement. “

I keep reading, in this forum, about contracts. I wonder whether someone could recommend a good source of contracts specifically geared to video production. This situation (updating old projects) is a great example of something which would only appear in the contract of someone with a great deal of experience in video production.

I would be hard put to give a specific cost for keeping a project active and available for three years.

Thanks.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Too bad. I was curious.

Way back when I had a PA who stole a concept of mine for a mockumentary. He won a national prize with his film, never credited me, left a trail of bad debts to a number of suppliers — but he was so brazen about it that I sort of found the whole thing charming.

There is definitely an “ethos” (as opposed to “ethic”) that some filmmakers evince: I’m doing Art and therefore whatever it takes is fine.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Steve, I read this yesterday and thought “That has NEVER happened to me.”

Then I remembered that something similar had. I was using a Betacam BVW300, which routes the audio signal to the headphone jack, and then to the tape deck, by a very delicate ribbon cable. VERY delicate, it turns out. (Yes, the camera offers monitoring off-tape as well, but I was interacting with the subjects (it was a tennis instructional tape) and didn’t want to get thrown off by the audio delay, so I didn’t use it.)

The wireless worked perfectly, the audio sounded great through the headphones, and of course, no audio was recorded on tape. Zero zippo zilch. Worse, it was an extremely hot day, lots of people were involved… And I didn’t make a lot of tennis videos after that.

I’m glad your relationship to the client is strong enough to weather this storm, and I appreciate your sharing – and reminding me of such a delightful memory.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Sad situation. If we can take Kang’s description of the situation at face value, I agree with Mads.

[Mads Nybo Jørgensen] “DO NOT offer discounts”

I agree 100% with this, but Kang already did offer a discount, which the clients may have interpreted as a signal that he thought he was in the wrong. So often this is the case: we try to “make nice,” which is interpreted as weakness and tends to normalize bad behavior. In this case, the best response would have been incredulity. “You want me to give you the Deluxe Package for the Economy price????”

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

So, what happened?

Bob C