[Mark Suszko]

Bill’s not wrong. You need a large, aircraft-hangar-like space and giant softlight banks to adequately light cars. Or you accept the very fine stock footage and digital models Detroit has already paid for.

You don’t really explain what your product is. Dealership promos? New only or new and used? Multiple dealerships? Why would competitors work with you unless you had a special resource unique to their region? Like the airplane hangar with the pre-set lighting, maybe? I dunno – the used car guys are famously thrifty and “thrifty” is being diplomatic. They’ll settle for a iPhone and a big curtain stapled t the side of their garage to get shots of cars for web sales. What’s the “value proposition” you’re offering? 360-degree quicktime VR of the cars? They’d better be premium-priced sports, exotocs, and luxury cars, or I don’t see how this pays off.

I’ve said this about corporate production for a while now: the only hardware you “really” need is a phone and the internet, since it’s all freelancer and rental-driven these days, with as small a human resources footprint as possible, and minimal gear to depreciate.

[Mark Suszko]

My variation on Greg’s advice is to get a separate contract on the shooting first, then one for the edits.

One reason for this is: any expenses you incur in the shooting won’t have to wait for a bunch of editing to be reimbursed, see? Shoot, get paid. Next, comes editing and getting paid for the edit. And if there is uncertainty over how many pieces to cut from what was shot, well, again, at least your shooting expenses are already paid.

This is how i would approach any project where the post is not well-thought-out or has too much potential for changes.

The other way pros do this is one fee for the whole shebang, paid in stages like thirds or fourths. First third may be larger than an actual 33.3 percent, because it has toi cover all the advance expenses and any shooting supplies, plus any crew expenses and vendors.

If you ever expect any longevity in this business, the rule to live by is; never screw your subcontractors and suppliers and crew – they must get paid, even if/when you don’t. If you don’t do that, you will have nobody willing to help you with the next project that comes up. If you always follow the rule, the best people around will always be willing to give you a little leeway. It’s about building a solid reputation for meeting commitments, in a business that is more closed-knit than people expect.

[Mark Suszko]

You could cut on a 45 or 90- degree turn, going to the bigger shot on the turn. This hits the eye with the unexpected “bigness” coming after the close-in shots. You don’t need two cameras to do it: you just need to do the line and the move twice, moving the camera from first to second position after the first good take from the starting position. I used to do this all the time in corporate/government/news stuff, to help change the mood as you go from paragraph to paragraph or idea to idea. It’s done less often now because I think people got lazy and impatient. But it looks slick and “expensive” when executed right, though it costs nothing but a little more set-up time and sometimes, a lighting tweak.

Another way to go is to rack your focus from a tight medium shot with almost no depth of field, hi angle, looking downhill a bit, to one with a tilt up to level and a long depth of field, revealing the largeness that was there all along but indistinct. This could be coupled with a simple jib-up-and rack the focus move, as the talent walks towards and then under the lens. No jib? Use a ladder and hi-hat. Or two ladders, a board, and a hi hat clamped in between. Or skip the ladders, have two grips/A.C.’s each take a hold of one end of the long board and on a signal, lift it,like a barbell, as your star walks up to it and under it. The long moment arm on the board makes it relatively stable, even hand-held.

One more idea: Communicate the Bigness by shooting in dark limbo and at the end, hit the switch and all the lights come up at once in the back. This isn’t always easy to do “live” but it can “look live” by compositing the shot in stages against a plate of “dark” and a plate of “All-On”. For that “Indiana Jones warehouse” look. Sell it with a subltle light change on the backlight of your talent in the near field, to seem like the new light is wrapping around it. And sell it with good audio of big knife switches switching and clacking on high-voltage, with lots of hum and echo. They used this gag in “The Monuments Men”. See a glimpse at a minute-thirty into this promo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czYqP1jbPTk

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[Mark Suszko]

Luke 16 is more about salesmanship:-)

[Mark Suszko]

You are getting paid under the system known as “work for hire”. That means, you get paid for the initial work you did, but nothing further; the guy that paid you has bought the use of it from you for the one-time fee. That’s kind of standard except where there is a different agreement in a written contract. Without a written contract, Work for Hire is the default a judge would decide in the USA.

Whatever it is you want out of these projects, if you want a continuing piece of his action when he sells the finished products, then you need to write up a contract for that, specifying the percentages and amounts and the payment schedule, etc. This situation of yous is very similar to my first business deal in video marketing: We made a video on how to cook deep dish pizzas from scratch, from a kit of ingredients supplied by my customer. The customer sold the video along with the kits to restaurants that wanted to get into the deep dish pizza business. We took a small amount up front, with a contract that said we’d get a percentage of each unit sold. What I didn’t find out until later was that the client was making and selling more copies of the tape without telling us about it or giving us out cut. It got ugly, we had to go to small claims where we won and cleaned out his bank accounts to make up the shortfall.

The only reason we won though was that we had it in writing, exactly how the deal was structured, and we had proof the contract was real because some money had already been exchanged and was traceable. Contracts, to be valid must pass three tests, and that money changing hands, called “consideration” is a major test of if a contract is valid or not. It doesn’t need to be a lot of money. This is why you see scenes in movies and TV of a lawyer asking the guy for a dollar to make the contract “binding”. Sometimes, a dad will sell his kid the family car, again, for a dollar, to make it a valid transaction legally.

Getting back on track with YOUR situation, you could estimate the most that this guy will make, and base your one-time fee up front off of that – it makes for a clean transaction and little work afterwards. But you may guess wrong.

I don’t know what your faith tradition is, if any, but I’m partial in these instances to point to the Gospel of Matthew, ch 20 verses 1-16. It’s the story of the vinyard owner who hires some workers to harvest the grapes in the morning for an agreed wage, (work for hire) then hires more people later in the day. The Owner, at days’ end, pays everyone the same wage, regardless of time put in, and this outrages the guys that worked all day who see the ones that worked only an hour at day’s end got a sweet deal. The owner asks the upset guys: “Did you get exactly what we agreed?” They admit yes, they did. “Then”, says the owner: “How and how much I pay the other people is my business, not yours.” There are about twenty layers to this parable that refer to all manner of issues, (specifically, that God’s redemption was for everyone, not just the Hebrews) but some days, I just like to look at that surface story and point out that getting upset that someone else got a great deal, when you were yourself treated fairly, is just jealously and not righteous.

Make the squarest deal you can with this partner, get it in writing, prove thru check writing and cashing that there was consideration of any amount you want, just to make it legal. The contract or deal memo should detail what will happen when, how much goes where and to whom, and how the deal can be broken or ended, and who owns what when that happens. Tell him it protects you both and avoids messy arguments when the rules are written in advance of the game.

[Mark Suszko]

I never have a problem like this if I follow Shane’s Law and copy the P2 cards off to folders in my AV drive before importing them. Only when I work with footage where it’s not being copied over on import, do I get into these tangles, even though I never removed the P2 from the reader. It’s like random “forgetfulness” hits the thing every once in a while – always when you’re on a deadline, too.

Maybe that’s fixed in the latest build, and if I ever get out from under my current project backlog and clear off ALL the drives, we’ll upgrade and see.

[Mark Suszko]

I re-imported source footage into the fresh library and project file, and told it to render, went to lunch, came back, the bleeding was gone and the timeline restored. Better yet, the export options are back in black, baby! So I’m trying a test export right now. Will take a while, but looks promising for now.

[Mark Suszko]

Trashed prefs as suggested…. and now the last third of the timeline is a red mess of “missing camera” picons. No biggie, just a day and a half’s worth of work went “poof” just now. Panicking? Who’s panicking? I got til lunch time to fix this. THEN I’ll be panicking.

[Mark Suszko]

Did that; no difference.

[Mark Suszko]

I have not always found that to be the case, Jeremy. As you can see in my question above.