[Mark Suszko]

Working on retainer generally means the client is expecting to throw you a lot more business than they are letting on, in exchange for a discount, hoping in that way to get a better deal… and for priority access to your services. It also can mean they just want all the billing and admin totally streamlined, one price, anything you need, done. So if I’m them, the retainer rate is one price for “anything and everything”, so that means you have to pre-figure your other services and subs into that number, and not bill them out separately. And yes, this entails risk for you, since you will eat whatever expenses the retainer didn’t cover. So you don’t dare low-ball the retainer. And that makes the retainer less attractive to the customer. Maybe, the retainer has to be highly restricted in scope, not” one price for anything and everything, any time”, but, “one price for as many powerpoint slide montage videos as you need”. And any services above that minimum package are separately billed out.

What if they put you on retainer and then not give you any work for weeks or months? At first blush, it seems like you should rebate or prorate, since you did nothing. However, the whole point of a retainer is, you are on full-time alert to answer their emergent needs; like Batman, you come-a-running if the signal goes up. That represents opportunity cost; maybe you can’t take on certain other jobs that could interfere with the retainer client, you can’t do vacation trips out of town, you cannot tear down the edit bays for a planned rebuild/upgrade… or, you may have to cancel such jobs at the last minute, damaging the cash flow and potentially your reputation and other client relationships. So, for those reasons, maybe you don’t rebate or offset anything, because at the heart of it, you’re being paid to be available, whether or not you are actually used. In union labor law, there’s the idea of “waiting to be engaged” vs. “engaged to be waiting”. Firemen on duty at the firehouse are engaged to be waiting, and get paid for being on their shifts, if there’s a fire or not. You are the fireman here.

If you get the retainer, you probably need to put your subs on one with you, for any work coming out of that client. It won’t do to get the call for urgent service and then turn to find your contractors can’t do it. It may chafe you to pay the staff camera op or editor for work not done, but, again, opportunity cost, and “engaged to be waiting” applies all the way down the line. And you’re now a bank, extending credit for services not yet performed by your staff and subs. Do you really want to get into all that? I don’t think I would. The potential profit would have to be substantial…

After reading what I wrote, I don’t think I’d personally go for a retainer arrangement. Too much risk. Instead, I might offer a repeat client a simple discount or a “coupon” good for “x” off for a limited, expiration period of a month. The idea there is to keep them ordering services, even minimal ones, every month. Idling the engine, so to speak. But without any up-front availability commitments from you.

[Mark Suszko]

You can send it to Compressor, and there you can adjust the quality some. But you know, a DVD isn’t HD quality. A Blu Ray is.

[Mark Suszko]

I can never figure out where sync problems like this originate. When I make stuff for youtube and facebook, I’m making mp4 files and they play with proper synch locally. Watching them stream on my facebook feed, they almost always look like the lip synch is off to me.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks everyone!

[Mark Suszko]

Big SmartSound fan here.

[Mark Suszko]

Too much hassle getting permissions. Too busy to re-create the shot privately.

[Mark Suszko]

Take a look at a few such projects on sounddogs, see what those artists charge. You’re probably not going to like what you find out, regarding price. There’s a whole lot of competition, driving the pricing down in this field. And many people (me included) tend to just buy loop-based program like SonicFire pro and let it custom-build my tracks automatically, one price, one time, no rights issues, built to fit any length, ready in seconds, clients usually love them. There is still a place for more elegant and creative, bespoke, hands-on music creation, but it tends to be for bigger-budget work than I get to work on.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, my formula would be to charge a rate where I can afford the time to do the client’s job right. Your description makes it sound like you really don’t care about the client’s content. That does not bode well for success.

Have you tried skimming the videos at double speed, or better, to listen for some of the best bits? JKL keys are your friend.

Whoever did the original content, probably shot them to a style or formula. If you watch one or two you can probably figure out what that is. For example, when I shoot these, I always use the same pattern of wide and tight shots for every “paragraph” or sub-topic of a lecture; Wide shot at the beginning, tighter, after the initial premise, where the speaker fills out more detail… then it pops between wide and tight and cut-aways and 2-shots for the bulk of the segment, with a tight shot on the overall summary statement. The next segment begins with a wide shot again.

If you skim my work with the sound off, you can tell by this pattern, regardless of the content, where each main idea stops and starts, and where the next one begins. Your preview would then take the form of making a montage of the summary statement sections, with perhaps one cut to the other, example sections. Or, if the presenter used an agenda slide, you’d probably feature that, plus a shot or two of the actual content.

Sometimes, the only way out, is through, and the only way to get thru a big job is to just bull your way through it, get into a zen flow with it. You might also divide the work between more than one person.

But I think your biggest problem may have been, you under-bid the job to begin with.

[Mark Suszko]

Your reply is, understandably, focused on the audio and the squeakiness of the gooseneck first. My lament as a shooter is that they are often too long, too floppy, don’t hold the mic clip right, are plain ugly, are never set for the right height, and inconsistently adjusted by unskilled hands or left mispointed for the next person, as each new person comes up to the lectern, so invariably, one or more speakers has a camera shot of the mic windscreen dead center on their face, creating a Bozo nose effect, or, between short and tall speakers, the mic ends up pointed into their pericardium or lower.

They are Of the Devil.

[Mark Suszko]

That’s a terrible thing to have happen, I can’t even joke about it. Did you not do test playbacks first? Typically, you would connect their medical hardware to a scan converter/scaler first, and then to your recording device, monitoring both the scan conversion output and then testing a playback out of the recording device as well. If it was me, I’d also have put an actual 2k or 4k camera on the monitor the whole time, just as a backup.

Sometimes these machines also have their own internal recorders, have you checked for that?