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…yeah, but it’s fun when the car whinnies…

right before the transmission falls out!

(just a joke, not commentary!)

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Yeah, Michael, I hear ya on the bills…they never get smaller, ever, do they?

Thank-you for the kind words. You’re situation has been in the back of my head all day. I thank you for reminding me to test my own perspective! As I sit here on a Sunday in my office capturing B-Roll…

But my husband is out of town, and the kids are with their mother….so it’s just me, THREE cats, and the mortgage today!

Good luck, and keep us posted!

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Ron-

I’ve got another set of eyes for you! If you’re looking for more volunteers for your proofreading list, please count me in!

I come highly recommended by several editors who can’t spell their way out of a wet paper bag. & I do more better with the grammar-ish stuff…

(Seriously, I do have grammar skills, too!)

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Nicks advice is, actually, heartwarming. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, and nothing I am about to say is meant to contradict him…I don’t know that I am going to, but if it seems like I am, I don’t mean it!

The best advice I can give you, Thom, is really know your market before you do anything rash like cash in your retirement account to build a facility.

You may already know that. There wasn’t a lot of history in your post. We don’t know if the clients you have are a good, steady client base that can sustain rent and leases and overhead. Obviously, contracts can’t be signed yet, but how much work do you do with them already? If you increase your overhead, and have to charge them more than what you currently charge, will they come along with you, or find someone else in your old price range? That’s not always bad. Trading up for clients can certainly have it’s advantages, but it does hurt to lose a client, regardless. Also, we don’t know what level you work at, how long you’re been an editor, how much experience your producer/sales person has at either producing or sales. There’s a lot of unknowns, so forgive me if I either shoot too high or too low for your circumstances.

I know a guy who put his entire future on the line about six years ago to build his post facility. He’d been in the business for about 15 years working at the best facilities in our area. He had a stellar client base, a great reel, and a TON of promise. The first four years were pretty rough. The bottom fell out of our market in 2002-2003. I had a stretch of seven months where I worked a total of seven days. ( I’m a freelancer. I work with my friend occasionally, but I’m not an employee) You have to be able to survive things like that. Hopefully, you’ll never experience a work drought quite that bad, but timing is everything. If he had to do it over again, he may have chosen a completely different time to open his shop. Perhaps several years earlier, or a couple years later. When he did was the worst possible time in our market to try to get a new facility off the ground. Of course, you can’t know that. You just have to take the plunge.

The past two years have been a bit better for my friend. Eventually, I think he’ll come out ahead, but it’s been a rocky road for him. You have to be able to handle the ups and downs and financial foibles that come with a fledgling business. He took a LOT of risk, and it’s just now starting to pay off. His risk was greatly magnified by our local recession. There were several times in those middle few years where he talked about liquidating it and moving to Florida or Vancouver or Toronto and taking a staff job. He stuck it out, and to his credit, the business is currently booming! If they can sustain it for another 24 months or so, he likely will be able to pay off most of the debt he accumulated in those first several years.

Through it all, he’s only had a handful of steady, repeat clients. He took on several seasons of locally produced national cable program(s) to pay the bills. Those types of programs hardly ever pay full rate. He kept up with his lease, and that was about it. He’s had many clients come and go and come back again, but as for steady…even with his pedigree, it’s tough to keep clients over the long haul. It’s tough to find steady clients.

Now, my story is a bit different. My risk was actually minimal. I ended up with a very nice niche of clients this guy turned over to me when he built his facility. (Backstory: I used to be his assistant back in the early ’90’s. Were still great friends. He & his wife and my husband & I do all sorts of social things together.) These were all his clients with in-house Avids & FCP systems. Still, I felt the sting. Those seven months of virtually no work were followed shortly by another five month dry spell. I survived it because I had money in the bank from selling my first house. Eventually, I DID end up with three steady, predictable clients. I only have one of them now. One fell victim to a merger, and all production moved to the other company’s HQ in another state, and the other moved his business to Colorado. That’s too big of a commute for me! These were things I couldn’t have planned for. I mean, really, who expects an insurance company that’s been around for 100 years to all of a sudden stop production? Their employees stay for decades, so unless I royally screwed up and they “fired” me, I never thought that client would dry up. Yet they did. The one who moved to Colorado, his biggest client by far has corporate offices here. I never expected him to pack up and move three states away, either.

Replacing those two clients is one independent producer who used to work at the insurance company. With the merger, her job moved to the other HQ. Her husband’s job did not. He also works for that company. She quit and started her own communications consulting firm. The other main client I have now is a production company that gets so busy at times that their staff guy can’t keep up and they come to me with all the overflow work. There’s a lot of it, when it happens.

I’ve spent at least the equivalent of my wages my last year on staff, and likely at least 20% more, acquiring gear in the last 2 1/2 years. I have my own little edit suite now in my office. My risk has been smaller, but my profits have been bigger because my overhead is so low. Eventually, the guy with the facility will blow me out of the water on profit, and one day, he may be my boss, who knows, but in the meantime, I slept a lot better than he did during our recession. I agonized over every purchase over $500…no, really, over $200. And virtually every time, that piece of gear paid for itself so fast I couldn’t believe that I ever doubted the expense.

I worked my tushie off when I had work, and I pounded the pavement when I didn’t. I keep my clients’ welfare always in the front of my consciousness. Parents need to be with their kids, husbands with their wives, and anything I can do to make their lives easier keeps them coming back. It’s so much more than the editing. There are other editors out there that cost more and have higher-end gear, and frankly, probably are better editors than I am, but my clients like me, love my work, and the price is right for their clients. I have stumbled upon a great balance that someone with a ton overhead can’t strike.

Find the balance. If it’s a big room with a high-end machine room core and you have the client base to support it, then by all means, do it. If it’s looking ahead and buying what you need only when you need it, there might be more white-knuckle days, but the payments might be easier. And you might sleep better.

How are you with risk?

More than a couple of cents’ worth.

I hope something in there helps you!

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Wow! This thread reads like a GOOD soap opera! (there have been a couple…)

I’m certainly not in your shoes, Michael, so what I’m about to say shouldn’t be construed as advice by any means. It’s a perspective story that may (or may not) help you a teensy-weensy little bit, that’s all.

Seven years ago I was in a somewhat similar situation, but looking at it from a different direction. Not career-wise, not life-wise, but perhaps priority-wise.

I was a staff editor at a large-ish post facility. At our height, we had 8 editors, four digital linear online suites, three Avids and a facility at a local sporting venue that supported a team that did something or other with balls. (I wasn’t that editor…can you tell?!?!)

I was pushing 30 (this is where I’m not in your shoes…), and I didn’t know how miserable I was. I had no life outside of work. I had two cats and a mortgage. But I love editing, I love what I do. The circumstances and conditions under which I had been editing at that company didn’t work for me anymore. It took me a really long time to figure that out. It was a great company, the owner was the best guy you could hope for in a boss. I was editing at a pretty high level for my age. Working there gave me experiences I likely wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else nearly that fast. Unfortunately, the company had grown, had changed, and we were going in different directions.

Many of the other editors were in your position where they felt they were missing out on their kids’ childhoods. I felt like, “hey, give me a chance to FIND a life.”. Working 10-12 hour days 6-7 days a week nonstop for months isn’t the way to do it. Even if you love it.

So I did a survey of some freelancers in the area. Many had been on staff at that same facility. And then I quit.

Six months later, I met my husband on a freelance job. Three years into this freelancing thing, I bought a G5 and now I have a pretty nice studio in my office. I have three really great, steady clients, and a handful of others that come in a couple times a year.

I went from not knowing how miserable I was to not understanding how happy I could be in six months. My parents still talk about the change in me.

We just celebrated out fourth anniversary at NAB. I’m doing things with my work I never thought possible seven years ago. Granted, much of that is due to the technology, but it’s also due to taking that HUGE step back and really looking at what I find important in my life and re-focusing on that. Completely moving out of what I knew made room for new, and I’m finding, more efficient things. I’m doing better work in less time, and I’m having more fun!

It sounds like this is what you’re trying to do. It seems there’s something inside you that needs this priority change.

It works. That’s all I really have to say. There might be a slow start, or it might take off like a rocket. You can almost never go wrong by taking a long hard look at your priorities and changing your life/business/career to fit what is most important to you.

Just my 2

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Yep, thanks for the reminder, Scott. She’s going to use the “Statistics” bin view. That seems to make Sebsky’s happy!

Thanks everyone! As always, great info here on the COW!

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Sebsky’s is exactly what we need! I can’t believe I didn’t think about this a LOT sooner!

She’s been faxing me hand-written logs for years. The Excel spreadsheet is usually a disaster, because she omits too much info, and it’s usually faster for me to key it back in than it is to wrestle with making the Excel document work.

This way, she can send me an ALE, and all will be well…if she remembers to change the tape name, that is!

Thanks, guys!

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[Wendell Davis] “tried that it didn’t work… still sets the in and length to 10 seconds.

Thanks.”

Tried what, exactly?

I’ve been changing the import duration of stills all day. It certainly does work.

In the User Preferences, click on the Editing tab. The first box is “Still/Freeze Duration”. Change that to 5:00, and you should be good to go.

Is this what you’ve tried?

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Thanks, Matt!!

I’ve copied this into my “How does that work again?” file for future reference!

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I never found a solution to this. I just had a similar experience. I had a client who was too lazy to hunt up the master tapes that the DVD was created from. (I KNOW they exist, I edited several of the pieces a couple years ago).

Anyway, a 30 GB file created from the ripped DVD wouldn’t trim under any circumstances.

Please post back if you do find a better solution. Mine was for a one-off event, so archiving would have been nice, but not completely expected. I made a master for my library, and if they need something else in the future, I’ll capture my master and do it the old-fashioned way.

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