Chris Dolan
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks for the input Bob!
I’ve been applying steady pressure via emails and phone calls and even a friendly personal visit last week to “say hi” and check on payment status. I’m not getting nasty yet because I want to give them the benefit of the doubt (they’re all nice people) and would like to maintain a relationship with them for future work. It’s not a Chinese company so I don’t think they practice the ‘holding out on payment is a virtue’ philosophy.
So what kind of responses did you typically get when you mandated full payment in advance? Did you have contracts? I hear contracts in China aren’t worth the paper on which they’re written.
I had one (partially) paid job a couple of months ago which was a cash (half) payment at the end of the first day of shooting. The second half (yet to be paid) is supposedly coming when they get paid by their client. It’s a bit discouraging because not many people want to hire an unknown…and to make matters worse; one who requires full payment or a deposit up front.
I have begun partnering (sort of) with a couple of western producers who have been living/ working here for a while. I’m hoping to learn some typical business practices from them and find more paid work as a result.
Chris Dolan
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By the way- I’ve seen previous discussions on this topic so you might want to try a search of this forum with the keywords ‘Real Estate’ for more information.
Chris Dolan
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I started to explore this before I moved out of the country last year. I don’t have any practical experience but these are the challenges I saw while investigating it:
1) Real estate moves pretty fast unless it’s a high-end home ($4-$5 million+) so you have to shoot, edit and upload/post the final video for the agent very quickly. Sometimes when a home becomes available, offers are received and it sometimes goes under agreement before it even hits MLS or has an open house. <-This is just from my own experience in buying/selling a home. 2) I think you have to have a fairly high volume to make any profit in this area because agents aren't looking so spend big $$ for a video. I'm talking under $100. I charge that much for a couple hours of editing, so it certainly doesn't include driving to a location, shooting, editing and providing deliverables. Perhaps the high-end homes have a large enough commission to include a decent budget for video. That said- It is certainly growing in popularity and has been a trend for a few years now. I've seen plenty of real estate videos online so people must be profiting from it. If you wanted to develop a client list, you could just shoot your own house or a friend's house and set it up like a real estate video with some simple narration, then contact agents with a 'this is what I can do for you' type of pitch. You could sell it along with additional videos, if they're a big enough outfit, to do agent bios, stories about the community, real estate trends, home buying tips, etc... Good luck with it and let us know if you find it profitable/ worth the effort. Chris Dolan
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[Chuck Pullen] “I can’t just run out to a “Radio Shack” or “Wal-mart” to find what I need the way I can in America.”
Actually- you can… Run into Wal-mart that is, depending on where you’ll be shooting. Beijing has a Wal-mart, Sam’s Club, Ikea, more Starbucks than I can count and the only Apple store in China. I’m not sure about the other cities, but I imagine the larger cities here are similar.
Man, I could probably spend all night responding with tips for a foreigner in China but I’ll try to keep it brief…
So far the only thing hostile about this country seems to be the way people drive. Drivers here are among the worst I’ve seen…and I’m from Massachusetts. 😉 Prepare yourself for some pretty hair-raising cab rides. Live here for a while and you too will adopt the ‘me first’ attitude everyone seems to have. It will offend you and piss you off for the first few months but then you’ll get used to it.
Get accustomed to the notion of everyone looking at you. You’ll feel like a celebrity, especially if you’ll be lugging around a big honkin’ pro camera. Even with my ‘little’ Sony EX1, people stare and start standing around, wondering what sort of movie I’m shooting. Some people here lack a bit of the western and European civilities to which we are accustomed. It’s not considered rude to be walking along the street and stare directly at someone and continue staring as you walk past him for 20 or 30 feet. It’s surprising, actually, that more people don’t walk into sign posts or something while doing that.
Westerners are very often granted much more leeway than Chinese. If you want to enter a building, just do it as if you’re supposed to be there and walk with a purpose while saying ‘sorry- I don’t speak Chinese’…unless of course the building is guarded by guys wearing green military uniforms. 🙂 Lots of people here think because you’re a westerner they can’t tell you what to do. Even the police have stopped me for an infraction while driving and just let me go because I have a western face.
As far as shooting is concerned, you should definitely look into finding local help…at least a Production Assistant. Unless you’re conversational in Chinese, you’re going have difficulty communicating with the locals. I’ve been studying Chinese for a while and still have a hard time explaining to someone that I’m shooting a documentary. I don’t know if this forum has a private messaging feature but if you want to talk, I’ll provide my local Beijing cell number for you to call. I sent you a ‘friend’ request here…maybe that will work. I can look into local assistance for you if you’d like. There are a few production houses in Beijing which provide assistance to foreign filmmakers. They have a fee, of course.
Anyway- hope that was somewhat helpful. Let’s see if we can connect offline and I’ll try to help you more.
Chris Dolan
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Thanks for the clarifications…
Per my first post, I’m using Compressor. -A professional app like this should allow whatever bitrate you want, but I can’t figure out how to set it for 5000kbps for mp4.
Chris Dolan
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Thanks Craig.
I wanted to change the frame rate because I’ve heard about the playback differences between Vimeo US and Vimeo Europe/Asia. We’re in Beijing now, and the footage was shot in 50i but I wanted to encode it for US playback. Does that even matter now? Will 25p still play in the States? I actually ran it through Compressor at the original frame rate, deinterlaced, and it still took over an hour to encode. (It’s only an 11 minute video.)
Thanks for the tips on settings. How does one set the target bit rate to 5000kbps? The available settings in the Inspector pane for .mp4 are ‘Low VBR,’ ‘Medium VBR,’ ‘High VBR,’ and ‘Constant at,’ which only goes up to 2,048kbps.
Chris Dolan
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Which version of FCP?
A number of the Hiragino fonts in FCP7 display Chinese, from basic to more elaborate fonts. Here is a screen shot of a movie with the title “sample text” translated using Google Translate to “示例文本” and inserted as text. The font I chose was Hiragino Mincho ProN.
Hope that helps!
Chris Dolan
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Thanks for the reply Mark.
I found out over in the Sony XDCAM forum that the camera I’m buying actually shoots both PAL and NTSC.
Chris Dolan
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No kidding? Of all the features on this camera, I didn’t know it could shoot both NTSC and PAL. Wow, that makes this purchase a slam dunk.
Thanks for the help.
Chris Dolan
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BTW: I forgot to mention I’m using Premiere Pro, hence my post in this forum. To my knowlege, exporting an NTSC project to PAL in PPro isn’t advisable.
Chris Dolan