Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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First of all, you really should have your own contract rather than using your client’s contract. There is just no way under the sun they will be including the language you absolutely MUST have to protect yourself against a wide array of situations that come up all the time. Does their contract make clear what they are getting for their money? Does it cover how many revisions they get before having to pay extra? Is there a specific end date so they can’t drag the project on for months without additional pay? Make sure your rights as an artist are fully covered before agreeing to use a client’s contract!!
As for the promotional use issue, just spell out, as clearly as possible, that the client agrees you can use the work for promotion. There is no specific or exact legal language required, as long as the intent would be clear and obvious to any reasonable third party (which is usually the benchmark for contractual validity). Here’s what we use in our contract:
CLIENT agrees that PROJECT may be used in part or whole by PRODUCER for the purpose of promotion and demonstration. CLIENT may request that PROJECT not be used in this manner before the contract is entered into.It’s straight forward, clear and has never been met with resistance by a client yet. I should add that at the beginning of the contract CLIENT, PRODUCER and PROJECT have all been specifically defined to make passages like this short and easy to read, yet legally sound and detailed/specific in nature.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I admit that I’m no lawyer, but I would disagree here. If someone hires me to create a video with copyrighted material, as a for-hire artist I am not violating the law by including that song. THEY are violating the law by distributing the work. It’s not against the law to mix a song into a video, it’s illegal to distribute that work in a commercial capacity, which the production company is not doing in this case since they are merely creating a video at the request of the client as a for-hire artist. Remember the four benchmarks against which these issues are weighed – commercial use, affect on market value etc. None of these issues are raised when creating a video for a single entity – what they do with it is another matter and is not your legal concern.
I would also add that a good contract should make it very clear that copyrighted material will only be used at the client’s request, and as such they assume all legal responsibility for the inclusion of such materials. While contracts do not provide legal cover for violating the law, such inclusions do show that it is the client, not you, that has chosen to use the material.
To me the bottom line is quite simple – in copyright violation cases the copyright owner will be going after whoever distributes the work, not the person who created it, simply because there isn’t sufficient cause to pursue a for-hire artist, nor sufficient damages to justify a lawsuit. In terms of your aversion to even risk it, I agree that it is better to be safe than sorry, but this is one issue I think should be weighed on a case-by-case basis, not an absolute rule.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
By the numbers, sure. But good luck working with images that large without major headaches.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
You can use After Effects’ built-in motion tracking tools to “pin” the hologram to the footage quite easily. There are many tutorials out there (even here on the Cow though a search didn’t turn up any dedicated just to motion tracking), so here’s one from Adobe:
https://www.adobe.com/designcenter/aftereffects/articles/aft6ttmotiontracker.html
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Good luck getting an image that large into AE, especially if you actually intend to render it out.
Options are limited, and the most common approach is to slice the image into many smaller tiles (2048×2048 max) as separate layers in photoshop, then import the whole photoshop file into AE as a composition. Given your source image’s size, this could result in a lot of extra work.
Shake may be a better option for you, since it better handles such large files.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I know this issue has been hammered about already, but I just wanted to weigh in briefly. Here are the four benchmarks used to evaluate Fair Use:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.In short, you could use a popular song in an internal-use corporate video because:
1. It is not commercial in nature – the work is for private use2. The song does not make up a substantial portion of the work you have created. If the work was little more than the song with a blank screen, that might be different but the song is more supportive than substantive
3. The work is not being resold to the public, so the copyright holder could not claim damage to market value or lost revenue.
If the government agency you are doing the work for is planning to sell the video, it is illegal. If they are merely showing it to people or even giving it away, that is non-commercial in nature, and the plaintiff could not prove damages since no profit was made.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
What codec/output settings were you using when you tried to render out a Quicktime? When using the right settings, you should be able to get a perfect match to what you see in the AE composition window.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Hey sorry for the lag in reply, was out of town. The screen name dates back many, many years when I was signing up for my first internet account ever. I had tried 5,000 different names, and none of them worked no matter how ridiculous. Beenyweenies eventually popped into my head (but who knows why) and it worked. I’ve been using it ever since for my SN.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Personally I don’t mind paying for a solid codec (or any other software), especially if it is a specialty application that serves my limited need. Microcosm is a similar example of a codec that probably cost Digital Anarchy a lot of money and time to develop, serves a limited audience (a scant few film vfx houses mostly) and performs very well. That’s worth big money to the people it applies to, and they can justify the cost easily in time and storage savings.
I admit, I will have a hard time cost-justifying a codec, especially the 10-20 licenses we would need, but if it saves time, storage and headache it would pay for itself quickly.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
No it works with FCP and After Effects, their page is a bit misleading.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com