[Mark Suszko]

The project files are proprietary secret sauce – you NEVER just give them away. Either that is negotiated up front and you bill accordingly, or it is left out specifically in the original deal, always spell that out up front.

You don’t say if the original product was a work for hire, but even then try to resist giving up project files because that’s leverage for getting repeat business. If they are asking for project files they plan to cut you out and take the work elsewhere.

If it’s just a dub, as Jeremy says, comp it. If it’s a re-edit that is more than say 30 percent different or more, it should be negotiated as a fresh project though depending on the client relationship you might consider giving a discount. But free edits are a slippery slope.

[Mark Suszko]

Not really any favorites, and I bristle at paying for a downloader. Right now I use various free ones that pop up thru a google search. Many of those are trying to get you to buy their downloader product but they look sketchy and might be hawking malware to me. I used to be able to download YouTubes by typing “ss” into the URL just ahead of the first letter in the name. Didn’t YT themselves offer a downloading link at one time?

[Mark Suszko]

If you mean general principles of editing and theory, not just what button to press to get x effect, there are hundreds of free and low cost resources. This Guy Edits on Youtube is good, explaining the why behind the what. Larry Jordan offers training, some of his is free online. Adobe has classes, I think. You can read Walter Murch. You could even go to Amazon and buy a used college TV Production or Film Production textbook or two, in my day, the books by Zettl or Wurtzel were the standard, who knows what edition he’s at now or if that’s even still published, but the thing about editing technique is, it doesn’t go out of style, not the basic principles, anyway, so don’t be afraid to crack open an older textbook on it.

If you want to really know what you’re doing and why, a course on the history of editing technique is necessary. Editing has developed a “grammar” over the last 100 years, and you can’t be effective if you don’t understand that grammar and how to apply it.

Meanwhile, here’s a neat little video that touches on it.https://youtu.be/z-uJOyT_7i4

[Mark Suszko]

Had a thought regarding your problem of having silence or music up front… make a sub-dub of the track and add throw-away dialog just to fill that hole. When you get the timed SRT from YouTube, just delete the filler part.

[Mark Suszko]

A quick scan shows a used TASCAM DR05 like I own could be had for around 50 bucks; the rest of the allotted money would go towards the best wired lav you can buy for that remaining money, used or new. Those two discrete components could end up doing numerous different jobs, too. I appreciate your budget constraints as I live in that same neighborhood, so to speak. When you don’t have money you need to apply imagination.

[Mark Suszko]

Doesn’t have to be a phone, you could get a used TASCAM DR series pocket sized audio recorder, or something similar, and do the same trick.

[Mark Suszko]

Pavlo, I just had to congratulate you on this; it is very comprehensive yet simple and covers all the important things to consider in calculating not the just the day rate and hourly rate, but also how to budget for a specific project and make a bid that is really solid. Well done, sir!

[Mark Suszko]

My 4 cents is, you can often get better gear on the same budget, if you buy used versus new. And you get even more value for the price if you can rent. $170 is not a lot for a rock-solid wireless system. That’s like the price level for a mediocre office meeting room PA system lav (IMO).

$170 is however more than enough to rent a real quality wireless lav system for a day or two. If this is a paid gig, I’d try to budget for the rental and bill the client, plus a little markup. Of course this assumes you have a pro AV rental outfit located in your city or willing to ship to you from nearby. A place like that is good to get to know.

As far as buying used, if you stick to the well-trusted brands and reputable sellers it can work out well. I’ve bought several mixers that way and was pleased at the value for money.

Last cent: if realtime reception isn’t a deal-breaker, you can often do better than a wireless lav at any price level, by using a wired lav going into a small digital audio recorder hidden on the body, even if its just an iPhone. No RF or signal drop-out problems. Synching it up is pretty easy now in modern NLE’s that will do it for you automatically. I find iPhones do surprisingly good audio recording. This is what we used to call shooting “dual-system”, and in my wedding video days it was how you guaranteed at least one audio source was going to be solid. Wired lavs that can plug into a phone start in the 20-dollar range and go up quite a bit but you could find something around $100 that would suit your needs. The phone BTW could be a used one from the pawn shop and need not be activated with a phone service for it to still work fine as a camera or recorder.

[Mark Suszko]

Not me, but one of the previous guys here… video shoot in an underground coal mine. His Anton-Baur battery pack started getting low, so he swapped batteries, laid the dead one down, and forgot to bring it back out with him… he was sent back down the tunnel to ask the miners if they’d seen a fist-size black object around…

“All day”, they said:-)

This guy I think was also the one that dropped another battery pack from a chopper somewhere over some corn fields. That happens if you fly with the doors off and you haven’t thought about locking down every piece of gear.

[Mark Suszko]

One from (very) early in my own career: the 30-second spot is a “one-er”, one continuous shot. The scene is a straight road heading dead away from the lens up into some hills. In 20 seconds, a car has to crest the hill, barrels down to the camera at 45-55 MPH, and comes to a stop in such a way that the license plate fills the frame, dead-center. Camera on a hi-hat on the road surface.

Camera operator on hands and knees, same road surface.

The driver would not be able to see me or the rig in the last few critical yards of approach. We made a sort of gate out of light stands and plastic pipe, for the driver to aim for in the last 3-4 feet: if he hit the center of that gate, with the pipe just above his hood, he’d hit this mark. If he passed that spot, …he’d be OVER Mark. I mean, me.

The deceleration was practiced and timed, and we decided he couldn’t hit his brakes until the last 50-70 feet. Took about 20 takes, my guardian angel must have been working overtime, but I got the shot, had to fudge the framing with a delicate zoom and slight pan to get it the last 5 percent right, …but I got it. The safety equipment? My chief engineer had a grip on the back of my belt; his job was to yank me out of the way if the car over-shot it’s mark. Now, the driver was a semi-pro race car driver outside of work, but thinking back, I just shake my head at the casual attitude we took with risks in our youth.

Spot looked damn good, though:-)

Today, you’d perhaps use a remote PTZ motion control rig for this, or, shoot into a mirror placed in the spot my body and camera was occupying, from a couple of yards off to the side of the road, like they used to do for railroad engine track POV shots. Gear is replaceable.