[Eric Christians]

Not to hi-jack this thread, but what do guys (& gals) charge for an ftp upload?

FTP uploading and downloading is being used more and more, especially for tv commercials, and my department is finding ourselves devoting more of our time during the work week to uploading and downloading spots. So I was curious what you all charge.

Do you charge just for uploading or both uploading and downloading?

Do you charge based on per item or per alloted megabyte?
(Like 0-100 Mbytes cost $XX.xx; 100-200Mbytes cost $XX.xx)

My sincere apologies if I hi-jacked this thread, but this post got me scratching my head this morning.

Thanks
Eric Christians
a.k.a. (KTTC-Redbeard)

[Eric Christians]

Hello Simon,

If money is not a problem, ThoughtEguity Stock Footage comes to mind as does National Geographic Digital Motion. You might have to give them a call and get a sales representive to help you with your searching.
My apologies on not listing any websites but my HD crashed last week and all my weblinks and favorites were lost…

Another alternative, and this may or may not be cheaper, is to hire some local acting talent and shoot them yourself. Contact a costume shop in your area to get right apparel for each nationality and with a little searching online you can find pronuncuations for the word “hello” in different languages. Even cheaper would be to shoot head shots of the acting talent so that you have less to rent from the costume shop. If acting talent pool in your area is underpar, you can contact community centers, churches and even lawyers that handle immigration cases and see if they can put you on the right path to find the nationalities you need.
If you can, see if you can get names and numbers of court language interpreters in your area. We have use them on commercial projects when we need two or three language versions of a commercial we are producing.
Sidenote: I was on a promotional shoot a couple of months ago to get reactions from a local lawyer who won a community service award for her pro-bono work she has done for years for immigrants in our area. It was there that I met a man she had help who had a strong, distinguished voice with a beautiful russian accent. After chatting with him for a bit I got his name and number for futher use.

Hope this helps you out.
Eric Christians
Rochester, MN

[Eric Christians]

I have an alternative approach to this problem. It’s not too client friendly but does eliminate your headaches, fustration, and the hours you will spend in researching alternative music.

If you have an ulimited usage contract with an online music library (such as grooveaddicts, killer tracks, etc); give the client the online search engine web address for your music library and have them find the exact track that they want to use. Once they find the music they like, have them send you an email with the CD title and Track Number that they picked out.

Most online music libraries will allow most anyone with internet access to search and listen to their music tracks but require an active account to have the ability to download them.

Like I said this is not a client friendly approach to the problem, but it will relieve your headaches and stress. And it will also motivate clients, who have grinders and control freaks mentality, to invest their own time in searching for music or accept your original professional recommendations.

I have only applied this approach twice in my career. Once for a client who was dragging their feet on a project for a better part of 6 months and once for a client who wanted to control every aspect of their video project.

Thought I throw my 2 cents in, hope it helps.

Eric Christians

[Eric Christians]

I would begin a steady diet of:
Baked Beans
Broccoli
Corn
and anything on the Taco Bell menu

Then place a empty bottle of Bean-O on your desktop and make reference to the Bean-O daily of how that stuff doesn’t work and how expense it was.

She will either get the hint or begin to wonder why you keep politely excusing yourself every 10 minutes.

Sorry, i couldn’t resist! ha ha ha ha

[Eric Christians]

Steve,

That was very cool and very well done.
I liked how everything flowed together, the graphical style matches the pace and feel of the project.

Thanks for sharing this with the rest of us on the Cow!

Eric Christians
KTTC-TV
Rochester, MN

BTW, If ever you need a grip for the sequel to this project, just give me a call. I am sure I can help! ha ha ha

[Eric Christians]

Thanks Ronaldo & Vincent!

Appreciate all your help with this little problem of mine.
Sorry so late to respond with the gratitude, been coping with a sick kid all last weekend and yesterday. First chance I had to hop online.

I knew there was a simple solution, I just couldn’t see it.
Thanks again Rolando and Vincent for the help!

Eric C

[Eric Christians]

Nevermind…

i figured it out! Our engineering dept gave me a faulty RCA cables and was causing the no audio issue.

Thanks to all for looking at this post!

Redbeard

[Eric Christians]

Jon,

thanks for the help. Still need to play with it, but its starting to come around. I didn’t think time remapping audio would work in AE since it doesn’t work in Premiere Pro (CS3)

Hard to believe that a relatively simple effect can’t be pulled off in Premiere or Soundbooth. please tell me that they fixed this with version CS4.

Again, Thanks for the help Jon, truly appreciate it!

KTTC-Redbeard

[Eric Christians]

I have to agree with Todd, you might be thinkin’ a bit to high of salary range. Especially if the DMA for your market is 100+. My DMA market is in the 150-160’s and the News Editors we have are roughly earning $20,000 to $30,000; depending on talent, experience, education.

Most of the news staff we have are fresh out of college and this is their first paying job in the TV. Although these newbies are green, they cut their teeth in these small markets before fine-tuning their skills and moving onto bigger, better things. (I know of several reporter and photographer friends who have climbed the Market Ladder and now are anchors, reporters, and photographers in in top 40 markets.)

But on the otherhand, small markets are a great place to learn other skills that will expand your talents. All of our editors know how to shoot news stories, write VOs and VoSOTs, run cameras and audio for multi-camera live shots, become voice talent for commercials and promotions and assist in other duties (like cheap actors in commercials). This learning other skills has promoted editors to producers and producers to reporters.

Heck, I started as a Part-time Editor/Photog at my first station. Learned how to shoot and developed an eye for great shots and then got a job as a FT News Photographer at a bigger market. Did that for a year and when I wasn’t shooting news packages, I sat with Promotions and learned graphic design and effects. Which lead to me getting a job as a Creative Service Producer making commercials for local business.
Because I worked in smaller DMA markets stations, I am well versed in lots of different categories of TV and different software/hardware. (Which comes in real handy when you are trying to get get logos that were created in photoshop to work with your news ticker software.)

Sorry, guess I got to rambling a bit. But what smaller TV stations lack in pay they make up in more opportunities to learn other skills and other departments. Just don’t be too shocked when the salary issues comes up in the interview and starting pay is $10/hr for the position.

One other note, look at where the tv station stands in competition with the other tv stations in that market. If its leading in that market, chances are they understand the value of hiring talented professionals and compensating them so that their station stays #1.

Hope this helps,
KTTC-Red

[Eric Christians]

Yeah I have to agree with Darby and Steve. Everyones’s tv different so you can only set your levels/colors to broadcast standards and leave it at that. A vectorscope will help you get colors/levels to those standards. Do a search on vectorscopes to learn more about them.

This reminds me of a client I did a tv commercial for a few years ago. She was very animate that we do not mess with her business’ logo as the colors were very important to her business. She gave me an .ai file of her logo and the the only tweaking I did to her logo was to scale it down to 720 x 480 to be used for tv. Made the spot and sent it out with the sales rep on a dvd for the client to approve. A couple of hours later I got a very angry phone call from the sales rep telling me that the logo’s colors were off and how dare I mess with the colors after the client made a point to tell us not too. I told the Sales Rep to come back to the station and watch the spot on a professional broadcast monitor to see we didn’t touch the colors. The Sales Rep came back to the station rather irrate & upseet but watched the spot on the broadcast monitor and did a 180 with her attitude. I have never seen an attitude switch that fast before or got an apology so fast either.
The Sales rep immediately called the client and invited her down to the station to view the spot, the client saw it once on the broadcast monitor and approved the spot right there. I asked the client before she left if the tv she had in her office had a viewer color tone option on its menu. She said yes, she switched it to a more red tone cause she likes to have more color on people’s faces when she is watching tv. I smiled and shook her hand as she left the building.

All you can do is setup for broadcast standards and if the client is picky about colors invite them to see it on a professional broadcast monitor.

KTTC-Redbeard