Mark Raudonis
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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This “pricing dilemna” is much like a real estate deal. Your house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
So, you’ve done a few improvements, put on fresh paint, and spruced up the front yard. You feel like you can ask for 25% over the market because you’ve got the nicest property on the block. Go ahead. Stake out your position. You might get it and you might not. You may languish on the market for months waiting for that “sucker” to bite, or you may enjoy a bidding war that drives your asking price skyward. It all comes down to market and perception. You can’t control the market (outside forces) but you can influece the perception (your skill, sales efforts, client service, etc.).The HD market changes by the day. Newer, cheaper products are constantly blurring the “differentiation” between SD and HD. My advice would be to charge as much of a premium as your clients will swallow. Where they begin to balk is where your “value added” perception comes into play. The stronger your reputation, experience, “cool factor” the greater you can charge.
There is no “magic number”. Just like no one every pays the rate card, there is no “set” differential in your situation.mark
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Uh… how about calling up MTV?
If you’re doing a show for them, the first thing they do is distribute their delivery requirements. It’s part of the contract.
Mark
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Also try http://www.pilotware.com
THis is a dedicated media logging program based on Filemaker pro. Very versatile. Probably more expensive than you’d like, but very capable.
Mark
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You can’t make such a sweeping statemement. What was your original rate? $25 bucks an hour? Your best bet would be to do a comparative market survey and see what your competition is charging for a similar service. Then, you can decide where you want to position yourself relative to the market.
Mark
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ron,
Over the past two years we’ve transitioned over a hundred Avid editors over to FCP. We used Diana Weynand’s book, “Final Cut Pro For Avid Editors” to help ease the crossover. It’s the “rosetta stone” for Avid editors showing the exact same functions on the same page, but illustrating the different names and keystrokes. I highly recommend it.
My other piece of advice is “don’t rush it”. Two weeks, in my opinion is very ambitious. Keep in mind that not only are you learning a new system, you’re also “unlearning” years of habits and keystrokes. It’s gonna take awhile.
Welcome to the party.
Mark
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Call me old fashioned, but I just like the look and design of the Apple monitors. Sure, they don’t have as many inputs as the Dell’s, but they just are so clean looking.
As for reliability… we have over two hundred in our shop. Most have been running 24-7 for almost two years. Haven’t replaced a SINGLE one yet.
Mark
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[David Roth Weiss] “we still do tape to tape color correction at facilities using DaVinci for most projects, and we’ll probably keep doing that until Hell freezes over.”
David,
Last time I checked it was pretty close to freezing out there!
We used to do the whole “it’s gotta be a Davinci” thing, but now all of our on-line (including color correction) is done with FCP. Check out the “Final Touch” color correction program for FCP. If you can afford a DaVinci session, you can afford to buy this program. Now, all you’ve got to do is either learn it yourself or pay the guy who used to work at the post house to come work at your place.
The times they are a changing.
Mark
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We have two protools suites in house tied into our X-SAN via gig ethernet. They get their OMF’s over the net and also get a quicktime movie the same way. They mix using the QT, and the only time they get a tape is when they layback to the digibeta.
I believe that there is some extra feature in the protools set up that enables them to mix to QT, so if your mixer doesnt’ have it, then yes, they would need a tape. However, I wouldn’t accept that situation since tapeless is so much more efficient.
So, to answer your question, yes, there is a faster and better way!
mark
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Reg,
We’ve dealt with alot of “huge” projects and have found that regardless of how much RAM you have installed, anything over 400 Mb is pushing it. It seems that multiclip projects have a tendency to “bloom” the project file size much more drastically than regular projects. You list your FCP version as “5”, but the latest version “5.03” has addressed this project “blooming” somewhat. So, first, make sure you’re running the absolute most current version.
I think your idea of a separate project for each song is probably the best. When you join them all together, that project should ONLY have the timeline and none of the associated media folders. This will keep the size down, but unfortunately, you’ll have to open and acess the individual projects if you need that material.
Mark
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Brent,
We have seen this behavior also.
Yes, hitting “apple “S”” should be as natural a breathing. Hit it often. (Especially after capturing!)
One thing we noticed is that if you have ALOT of projects open, the chance of NOT getting a current autosave is greater. My suspicion (someone can correct me if I’m wrong), is that the auto save function is tied to the the “active” project. If you have a project open, but not active, you may not get a save. This is just my observation.
Bottom line, save as often as possible.
Mark