[Mark Suszko]

It’s too little to sue for, even in small claims, they’re counting on that. HAve a lawyer write thema notaraized letter demanding the “bad” tape be returned.

If you are an olt testament sort of person, you can report them to credit bureaus, the triple-b in their region, and the attorney general in their state. Won;t help you directly, but will make life a little harder for them and maybe they will even agree to a deal just to clear the blot, on their public records.

Or you can have your accountant deduct it and call it tuition in the school of life. Sounds like you got off light this time.

[Mark Suszko]

Where I live there ar at least three distinct stores that sell nothing but religious articles, books, and videos. Someone is buying these things and buying a lot of them. No reason he couldn’t eventually produce something marketable on his own and market it. I would say it’s the long hasrd way to modest riches, but you know, they were skeptical about “veggie tales” at first, too, and look whata breakout that became, I love those, and my kids do too.

Such an undertaking is a very ambitous project. It will take some time to find the right idea and create the show and market it. It would make thigns easier to team up with others who share the vision, or to apprentice under someone who’s further along in the process. People of faith are exceptionally driven when they make one of these projects their “mission”. That’s good, you need the
persevereance. Just don’t let your zeal overtake your business sense, make good, practical decisions as you go.

[Mark Suszko]

Agree with 99 percent of the above.

Stay with full-size CD’s or DVD’s, some slot-loading machines have problems loading or ejecting the smaller ones, you don;t want to break a client’s amchine as your introduction… I would make it only a DVD, by the way: that can be played by almost any modern computer as well as every home DvD player, but a CD-Rom assumes technical acumen your viewer may not have. Not trying to be sexist, but maybe more “ageist”, Bride’s mom’s are not in my experience very technically savvy, and they are major decision makers regarding wedding stuff, so don’t give them a technical puzzle to work out, loading drivers or players or whatnot, they’ll just say ‘skip this hassles” and move on to the next applicant. That’s my own opinion, and it’s not a universal statement about all bride’s moms I’m making, but IMO it’s the way to bet.

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t have the best answer, but I do know whatever you put in a Quicktime viewer can be step-framed and you can print whatever frame you are paused on with the normal print drop-down menu or keyboard shortcut. Seems like you can also print to file that way, and just designate jpeg and where to save it.

[Mark Suszko]

You promoting the game in general, a team, a sponsor, what?

You could go Abstract, you could go obvious, you could go surreal. You could make it using game footage, or none at all. You could go dramatic or comical. You could pick a particular viewpoint; fan, uber-fan, non-fan, sports widow, sports widow-ER, tailgater stalwart, a folk-tail-spinning old geezer’s rememberances, a stat-obsessed-nerd, player, coach, the ball as if it could talk, the guy that paints the lines on the grass, a play-by-play announcer and how he treats everything around him all the time the same as calling the game, etc. or take one of these viewpoints and transplant it on another viewpoint.
You could make it all really fancy 3-d motion graphics, you could make it all toon-shaded 2-d flash-looking. It could be all animated type done entirely in the CG. You could make it out of animated cutouts on a flat screen or on a 3-dimensional prop set. You could just roto mattes around stock game footage and comp it over sports jump-backs.

What do you want to accomplish, what’s the message, who’s the audience? When you know these things, you are on the way to picking a style.

[Mark Suszko]

I think what I would do instead is put them all on a DVD, go to the local Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, etc. meetings and introduce yourself and leave the DVD’s as a free hand-out.

Rreturn to the organization meetings the next time they are scheduled, some of the businessmen will approach you in person with questions.

The DVD in this case can cover a lot more information and show your skills off more cot-effectively than a shotgun approach of running spots your target market may never see. A sub-section of it can steer them to your web page for updates, and other section can be a short documentary about how you put spots together for a client, how to budget the production, etc.

The business owners thus self-direct and pre-qualify themselves for spot work *for you*.

[Mark Suszko]

Hm, sounds like they want to pay you to teach them so they can do it themselves and never pay you again;-)

How many sessions? How basic/detailed? Are you expected to generate a syllabus, or is this more 1-on-1 walking them thru a hands-on session of the editing application? I am skeptical that you can do this all in one half-day session, unless the standards are pretty low.

What is it you can teach them more efficiently than just going thru the manual and the accompanying tutorials? Wait, they’re men, we don’t READ manuals;-) Seriously though, I’m guessing they want a very scaled-down introduction to how to edit or whatever. The problem with that as you can imagine is you can teach a few keystrokes in 20 minutes, but the thinking *behind* them takes much longer. Frankly, I think you’re asking for way more trouble than the money’s worth. You might offer one of these strategies:

“sit-in”: You still edit everything, but they ride “shotgun” with you, watching and shadowing your moves as you make them. You explain what you’re doing as you do it, and why. I like this kind of learning where I have to physically do something as I’m listening to the reasons for why I’m doing it this way. You start the project doing everything yourself, but every little while, you turn over yet another function to the student, until by the end, they are doing everything and you are just commenting where they make an error. Requires motivated student, the ones that just sit passively at lectures won’t like this.

“custom tutorial”: Generate an actual project like what they will typically be doing, run thru all the pre thru post production steps. Their notes become the manual. Only as good as the questions they ask you.

My experience has been that folks who do something else for a living and who suddenly want to do this video kind of thing as part of work are not fully aware of the scope of what they are getting into. They uniformly hate the results they get from trying to short-cut another discipline from the one they’ve mastered. In this context, you can look forward to many, many sessions until they are up to speed, and extra charges to “fix” the stuff they did on their own, so I would bill by the hour instead of a flat rate, or you will be earning less than minimum wage.

Your mom is right as usual, a base flat rate just to charge them for disrupting your life is necessary. Because of the disparity in age and staus, you NEED to generate some mental *space* to define the teacher-student relationship and give you the respect you need and deserve. People give respect when they sense what they are getting has a cost, that’s not always right, but it’s true… You don’t want them to take advantage of you, and a base fee defines the business relationship like nothing else does. It also gives you an escape if they start to press for too much: “I can do that too, but it’s going to be an additional charge”. Your finances and proficiency level , what else you could be doing instead, and how bad you want this dictate the rates you set.

Since you’re young, start with minimum wage. If you were earning this amount flipping burgers to make extra side money, would you be ok with that pay level? No? Now teaching editing: is this more “fun” for you? Less drudgery anyway? Maybe you charge less if it feels like recreation to you?

How much time will these proffs save with you giving them a flying start? Compute it that way: assuming their hourly salary, if learning this this saves them x hours, why not charge them a large portion of that savings? Could you wangle a discount on tuition off of this? Pro editors in a very broad sense could be charging from $50 an hour to five figures an hour. You are delivering “value”: saving their expensive time and money. Set the value appropriate to the level of service you can provide and their expectations.

Expectations: this is usually a big problem area, you gotta define them up front or somebody will end up unhappy. List what they will be able to DO or UNDERSTAND once you have run them thru your course. Ask them to tell you if they can, what they want to get out of this. Don’t accept vague generalizations, you need concrete feature sets. Objective goals. Like:

“After the course, user can:
create a new master project file
Input standard settings and presets for typical project
Correctly calibrate footage for input(reading bars on scopes and audio on VU meters)
Successfully digitize and log footage
Manage a resource bin of footage (naming, arranging, etc.)
Sequence clips on a timeline to tell their story or message
Use audio tools to improve sound
Use graphics tools to create simple title overlays
Properly save a project, archive it and output it to tape or DVD or etc.”

This makes no promises as to the aesthetics of their output, merely that it is technically meeting a minimum standard, with No Proff Left Behind;-) Aesthetic and design “counseling” or “Consulting” is something you should charge separately for, it’s the meat of what we do, and you charge whatever the market will bear.

[Mark Suszko]

Well for 100 bucks or more you can attach a scan converter between the coputer’s VGA output and the computer monitor, or skip the computer monitor all together and the scan converter will output a Video signal via composite RCA and sometimes also S-video out.

Scan converter liek the averkey imicro is 99 bucks, but you can pay way more, in general, you get better quality the more you pay, but it’s not a strictly linear relationship. When you start paying around $300 and more for the scan converter, then it’s a coin toss in quality between that and the Canopus ADVC 100 for example, but the Canopus has the additional advantage of being a2-way device good for bringing analog stuff *into* the computer as well as making a analog-out spigot for your VHS dubs, TV monitor, or whatever.

[Mark Suszko]

Premeire where, local cable? Network? Syndication? His mom’s basement? If it’s local, then it smells like a scam to self-fund a pilot show on spec. If you go for this, don’t pay until there’s a complete show in the can at least. There’s also the video equivalent of a “vanity press”. Pat Summerall has a famous bit where he does a semi-canned “profile” on a corporation including it’s CEO. The bits get flogged on some cable news channel. It’s basically paid advertorial, IMO.

But let’s say it’s legit. If you advertise in the show, are you going to ever use uncleared copyrighted music? Because the exposure is practically going to guarantee you some lawyer is going to see your work. If you’re using uncleared pop songs in your videos, you will be practically asking the music companies to look up your (censored) with a microscope, as everybody will assume you are rolling in the dough if you can advertise on a show like this.
Just saying, before you bring on the scrutiny, be sure you can stand up to it.

[Mark Suszko]

“client supplied college game footage”…
(spider senses tingling)

Does any of that footage require clearance? NCAA?
Not a sports nut, so I don’t know off the top of my head. Could be something legally dangerous though.

At 100 an hour for the edit, you’re at $800, plus the dubbing, plus an hourly rate for “thinking/planning time”. You should be charging a little something for using the jump backs so you can keep buying more. Likewise for the music. Plus tape stock, any applicable taxes, a gear depreciation/software update fee, then a mark-up for profit. Is the station handling the time buy?