[Kira Hammond]

This video is a brilliant description of what you mention in your post:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2a8TRSgzZY

To answer the market question. True CA has been hit very hard, tons of freelancers out of work, lots of cut backs and downsizing, a number of big players closing their doors. Folks offering to work at half to a third their normal rate. However, it’s not all doom and gloom.

To be honest the “what can you give me for less” and “this other group said they can do it for less” has always and will always be something you need to contend with in terms of new clients, or as roles change within a company- your new client contact. From the client side it makes a heck of a lot of sense. Think about when you walk into a store don’t you think “Hmm I wonder how much this is at xxy shop? If I go online can I find it cheaper?” It’s the same thing, clients want to make sure they get the value for the money.

What you can do to change that mindset is to show that not all value is a $ figure. The key is to focus on building a relationship, by providing value outside of deliverables- know your client’s products, do proactive pitches to them based on their product line and life cycle, watch your client in the market are there sales up down? What’s on the horizon for them? Spend the time to really walk in their shoes, know their concerns, address them proactively.

This way a client stops shopping around, and just goes to you first because you’ve shown that you know them and their products, you meet their needs and can prove it with stats and facts, and that they feel important because you respond proactively to how the market changes are effecting their business.

Clients are still spending but differently. They want to leverage the same media in more ways (it’s a video, it’s a web campaign, it’s a print ad), and instead of bigger events the interest is in small events with key players, virtual events online, and viral marketing instead of big displays and broadcast commercials.

Budgets are generally smaller, so it’s helpful to walk through a budget with a client and show them where they can make cut-backs and where they can’t spare the $. Make your proposals modular so clients feel like they can pick and choose to save costs rather than having to nix the whole idea due to sticker shock.

For example instead of saying “Oh yeah we can do that 3D spot for you for $500k.” (insert client passing out on floor from sticker shock) Say “Well, we can’t do a minute long spot for that price, but we could do a 15 second spot. We also can’t do 3D for that price, but we can do a 2D motion graphics look with some 3D elements.”

Being flexible is key in this market, what do your existing clients want that you can offer? If you can’t do it in-shop network with folks you know in the community to offer that service to your clients. Example you don’t do graphic design but you know a local agency who specializes, bring them into the fold and team up with them to provide what your client needs.

Staying ahead of the curve in terms of the technology is also key. Broadcast commercials are taking a nose dive due to cost to produce and cost of air time. So think flexible- how else can your client reach their market and what can you do to get them there? You have to think “how can I help my clients sell more?” not “how can I get more business myself.”

If you can work closely with your clients’ sales teams track ROI and sales goals. Did that media campaign actually increase sales? If so how much? Give your client a reason to come back and spend more with your company by giving them hard facts. If the launch wasn’t successful why? What new idea can you pitch proactively to the client to try and hit that goal they have?

It’s not a pie in the sky mentality it’s how the company I work for operates. We’ve survived both the dot com crash and this recession in good shape because we concentrate on building and maintaining client relationships. Rather than focusing on selling a ‘product’ or a ‘video.’

I agree with the other points here not to low-ball just to land a job, if you do there’s no way the quality can stay as high, and you’re more apt to loose that client from an inferior product. Also, then the expectation to do more for less starts and soon you’re burning out your staff for tiny to non-existant profits.

Old and new clients who have gone back to shopping around have actually come right back to us because while the project was cheaper with another company the result was sub-standard. Or the experience was just bad for them. By sticking to our guns of- Let’s look at what we can do while staying within your budget- we’ve made out OK in the market.

One last thing to mention, it is always important for any company to cut their own costs proactively in a down-market: What gear can you donate or sell to make way and $ for more gear? What services are under performing and can you cut them out or redefine them to make them profitable? Cut the slack or overhead whenever possible. Can you recycle or reuse elements? Can you downsize any departments without impacting overall quality?

Hope this helps!

Kira

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[Kira Hammond]

No worries. I’m going to go with whatz in my brain but I know there is lots of info on the web about the differences between RAID formatting.

In my experience RAID 5 has the right mix of performance and failure protection for video applications. It takes a wee bit more on the setup but I think it’s worth it, and it is still straight forward, you can do it in software which is nice.

There are lots of factors that come into play when determining which volume stripping to use but for video I think 2 stand out: the speed at which you can read and write data, what happens if a drive fails.

read/write speed….
RAID 5 is a good compromise for keeping the throughput of data high because it allows reads to happen at the same time on multiple drives in the array. Reads are faster than writes. I’ve done real time records onto RAID 5 arrays and haven’t had a problem, haven’t done uncompressed real time writes, and I haven’t tried HD streams other than DVC PRO HD CODEC which is efficient as all heck. oooo I forgot to mention you do need 3 drives at least for a RAID 5.

failure…
It’s true if a drive fails in a RAID 5 it will impact your array and slow you down but…it will keep going (system failures are tricker but hardware failures are more common and the RAID 5 will endure through a hardware failure. If you can setup your RAID 5 to create log files, just in case you have a system failure these log files will help you). Yes you can recover that data too, which is awesome. Most RAID formatting options allow for mirroring the data (or parity), it’s just how many identical copies, are they spread across multiple drives or to the same drive, if a drive fails can the other discs operate without it? A RAID 5 writes the same data on multiple drives, so if one fails you have a backup. It’s also nice because it doesn’t do the parity to just one drive, it’s spread across several so it’s just a nice little safety net as you can’t choose which drive is OK to fail and which one will cause you major hair loss.

You can go totally hogwild with redudancy failure options in RAID land…you can write triple redundancy with some of the format options. If you were running a spaceship off your RAID I’d go with RAID 10 hehe.

Let me see….it’s hard to visualize what the heck RAID formatting is doing sometimes…ah ha! Here’s a site with some great graphics to help illustrate how it all works…cool! the text might be too dense with computer nerd-speak to grok but the pix are good.

https://www.bytepile.com/raid_class.php

[Kira Hammond]

FirmTek makes a PCMCIA to eSATA card so you can connect an eSATA RAID to your Mac laptop. We use it all the time in on-site video editing situations, works well. You can actually edit 720p HD on a Mac Book Pro with the eSATA RAID.
Only thing to think about…the older model card doesn’t support port duplication so you’ll only be able to use 2 drives RAID’d together. The new card coming out does support port duplication, much better you’ll be able to double the number of drives. I might suggest formatting your drives full on RAID 5 for extra security, can’t hurt to mirror the data especially with all I’ve heard about the flakey nature of the P2 cards and losing/or corrupting data.