[John Morgera]

Thanks for the information and advice, definitely gave me a lot to think about.

My schedule is a little unorthodox, so while I have a full time job, I have a couple days off during the week and a decent amount of time off, plus I’m usually off Saturdays for wedding work. My plan has been when I can’t do all the freelance work and take a little vacation with my time off, that would be my time to do freelance full time, but the key is getting there.

What I was told in school by a professor who had worked as a freelance videographer/editor that the way to really have a bit of a safety net is to have three clients who consistently need work, because if one slows down, another may pick up. Obviously, there’s no guarantees, but right now I have one client who has been using me consistently and could potentially be one of those three, but I’m kind of at a loss at how to find more. So I think the strategies here are good places for me to start.

Would cold-calling/e-mailing be a good idea with both potential clients and ad agencies be a good idea (after doing the required research)? I’ve always been hesitant because I didn’t want to come off as either desperate or as a pest. Do you think there would be any value to that, or should I focus more on the networking so people get a first-hand of experience of me first?

[John Morgera]

Thanks for the response.

Yes, I’ve definitely heard that being a corporate shooter and a wedding shooter kind of conflicts a client. I’m definitely more interested in the corporate side of things, but I’ve probably made more money off of the wedding side of things, just because there’s been a little more accessibility to brides than corporate/business clients.

Where my mindset is now is I kind of have to do the wedding shoots until I have so much corporate work that I don’t need it, but my reality right now is if I just stopped shooting weddings I’d really kill my earnings. Kind of a Catch-22.

Do you have any advice on how to grow the corporate work? The clients I have had liked the work, but some only were interested in the one video and aren’t interested in more.

[John Morgera]

Thank you again for your response; I’ll definitely give that a try. My response may be a be out of left field being a little over my head on the tech side of things, but the files I’m having issues with are .mov files mostly, and some .mp4. Would that make a difference?

I also have a question when it comes to transcoding. With the GH4 footage, I’m probably not going to have a lot of projects where I master to 4K, but wouldn’t I lose a lot of information on the front end of the project, or would I be creating proxies?

Thanks for your help, I greatly appreciate it.

[John Morgera]

Thanks for the feedback. I do have all of my footage and scratch folders on external drives. I generally import my footage from the Film menu (I had a camera that did not import correctly dragging and dropping), and I tried making a sequence from the 4K footage directly, so I’m not sure that’s my issue. So, that’s what’s making me think it’s either a CS5.5 issue, or more likely, a hardware issue with an aging iMac.