Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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As far as I’m concerned residuals have no place at all in local/national commercial or corporate production. My understanding is that residuals are typically paid when a film is released outside of the originally intended market – the US theater market – to other profit centers such as DVD, foreign markets etc. Since a commercial will most likely never be sent out on DVDs or any other secondary market (and definitely not as the product consumers are actually paying for) there is no point in paying a residual.
I guess what my sleep-deprived brain is trying to say is that commercials are not profit-earning entities unto themselves, and never enter secondary markets, so there would be no “residual” profit owed to the talent.
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For starters, Vegas is an editing app and AE is a motion graphics, special effects and compositing application. Vegas may allow you to do basic graphics, but I assure you it can’t do 99% of what AE can as you stated. The benefits of using After Effects over an editing app for graphics and special effects are far too numerous to list.
Really it all comes down to your personal needs. If you are struggling to see the benefit of AE, then clearly you don’t need it in your pipeline. At my shop advanced motion graphic design is a huge part of what we do, and I would sooner shutter our doors than have an editor do this type of work in an editing app.
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Personally I agree with both points of view presented here down the line.
I respect the hell out of Walter’s commitment to pleasing customers. After all, anyone can land some business, but not everyone gets repeat business. That said, I also agree with Dan that, allowed to go too far, this has contributed to trends in this industry that are not so good. For example, the “no budget and needed it yesterday” mentality dominating the client mindset today is a direct result of too many shops saying “yes!” when they should have been saying “yeah right.” So many people I know are just happy to be in this industry, feeling lucky to be doing what they love for a living, and as a result take a Laissez-fair attitude toward “holding the line” on customer expectations. This has caused prices to drop across the board, which affects us all.
I also agree with Walter that clients are not very well educated on the subject and generally lack the ability to visualize complex ideas until after roughly 4/5 of the budget has been spent. This IS a problem, and one that can be solved with simple tools like storyboards, creative briefs and client meetings. The only problem is that, thanks to the point above about having no money and no time, these tools that were once mandatory staples of good film making are practically luxuries now.
Ultimately, I think it is on all of us, not clients, to shape this industry. If shops start holding firm on reasonable prices and deadlines, clients will come to respect that again. Maybe then customer service will be less about swallowing costs and pride, and more about forging relationships.
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My honest first recommendation would be to run out and buy Stu Maschwitz’ book The DV Rebel’s Guide. It is packed with useful info from the shoot to After Effects, specifically dealing with special effects, greenscreen etc. You will get a lot from that book, including all the needed camera measurements MoldyBoot mentioned.
My second suggestion would be to do a complete test run using a DV camera just so that you can test your workflow and weed out any issues before shooting expensive film. This is almost mandatory unless you just really like living on the edge. Tracking dots (or even gaffer’s tape Xs) are pretty important, I would use yellow so that they can be keyed/roto’d a little easier but different folks prefer other colors. You should also really, really try to nail down the environment you will composite into the background BEFORE you shoot so you have some idea what type of lighting, and from what direction etc. you will light the live shoot.
My third reco would be to consider very carefully your post process in terms of Codecs you will use, the pipeline, editing system etc. You will definitely want to stay in 10-bit to preserve the film’s latitude and retain high color sampling. Personally I would never do a project like this using AVI files, because it mostly limits you to Windows machines and certain codecs. There is no DVCPRO HD option, and the Video for Windows 10-bit implementation is sketchy (can truncate to 8-bit even though you THINK it’s a 10 bit file).
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I agree with all of these points on the quality issue and down-converting to SD, but I think people tend to assume it will look better just because it’s HD (i.e. bigger). That isn’t necessarily true.
For example, footage shot on digiBeta with a 2/3″ chip and a quality set of primes will not only look better, but it will hold up better to color correction, greenscreen extraction etc. than footage shot in HD with the 1/3″ chip, fixed lens HVX200 or any other prosumer-grade HD camera.
HD is a format, not a quality indicator. I’m sure we’ve all seen horrid footage from pro level HD cameras and simply amazing SD footage, so the solution is not to just shoot bigger frames. It starts with better lenses, bigger CCDs, higher sampling, better lighting, better art direction etc.
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Kayak,
Are you saying your project file is 100MB or the RENDERS are 100MB? If your project file is 100mb something is horribly wrong…
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I agree completely with MindYourVideoBusiness.
Many artists get angry when they see how much the producer/production company is making, but that is only half the story. The producer may have a profit margin of 5% due to all the costs of managing the job, other artists, the cost of landing the job to begin with etc.
Reacting based on one slice of information (and information provided by a client looking to pay less for the job) is foolish, and going behind the friend to take the job is just as back-stabbing and ethically bankrupt as the producer is being accused of engaging in.
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Before you even start thinking about how to produce the show, you need to consider two major points if you haven’t already – Opportunity Cost and the reward for your risk. A six hour show will require a LOT of work to complete, at least several months. If you are working for 6 months at a reduced salary, you are missing out on a lot of potentially high paying gigs and that is your opportunity cost. You MUST factor that in when considering whether the project is worth it.
You should also ask your “partner” how much revenue he anticipates making from this project, and ask to see a business plan or other documentation backing up his claim. If he has no idea, run away NOW. If he anticipates making $10,000 profit (important distinction between profit and gross!) and you are getting a 10% share, that means you make a mere $1,000 from the profit sharing plan. If the project takes 6 months to complete, this profit share only adds $1.00 per hour to your “reduced” salary. As was mentioned, this project has a lot of competition and could take years to see any real profit so any money you make from the profit share could be spread so thin over the years that you barely benefit from it at all (do you REALLY want to get a check for $3.85 every month?). Get some hard numbers from your “partner” and do the math to determine if it’s really worth it to you before wasting another moment planning the production.
Consider one other point. Since you are doing all of the production work, what happens if the “partner” feels like your production is less-than-stellar? If the project fails to make a dime he can turn around and blame the whole thing on you, claiming that you delivered an inferior product. There is so much room for trouble in these types of arrangements that you have to consider this angle.
I tend to agree with the general sentiment here. I have had many offers from businesspeople to “partner” on ambitious projects, and have never once accepted the offer. These people are usually what my studio lovingly refers to as “Dreamers” – a big idea and a small bank account or, at the very least, an unwillingness to invest properly in the project (which should tell you how confident they are that it will make money). They rarely analyze the market properly, because when you get down to it they are just running around convincing others to do all the work so they aren’t risking much at all. May not be the case here with your “partner” but that’s how it usually goes.
As was mentioned in another post, the word partnership implies equally shared risk and reward, but it sounds like you are being asked to shoulder the majority of the financial risk AND the effort to make this show a reality and a success. If it were me, I would never accept a deal like this unless firm numbers were presented showing real profit potential, or a guarantee from this “partner” that even if his idea fails, he will pay you a certain amount to compensate for your risk.
Whatever you do, make absolutely certain that every detail of your arrangement with this person is spelled out in a contract, or you are truly asking for trouble.
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If it were me I would apply the Exposure and Levels controls and adjust each to taste. The Exposure effect will allow you to affect the overall mood (blown out vs. inky black) and Levels will allow you to fine tune.
As for tutorials or instruction on how to get certain looks, good luck. Black and white video/film work is rarely employed any more, and I’ve never seen any instruction on how to effectively employ it.
Just use the tools mentioned above and use your artistic intuition.
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Dave,
Just out of curiosity, how DID you make a file that big? Since AE is primarily referencing files rather than storing them in the project file, I can’t even imagine what you had going on that resulted in a file that large.