[Mark Suszko]

I wouldn’t bid it on a per-finished-minute basis. I would figure the number of days times day rate and set that as the estimate, with some margin up or down depending on your confidence. That comes with a list of assumptions about what the deliverables are, how many steps of review and approval there are, the deadlines, and when you get the raw mateials from them. It would also involve a progress payment plan where the job is bid in thirds, one up front at booking, one at first full draft version, one at final approval.

If they want to divide all that out to get a per-minute figure, they’re welcome, but that’s nonsense for comparison purposes. Every job like this is too custom to pin things down that fine. There will be unexpected contingencies and changes, and some things might be tried, tbhen changed or abandoned in the process. You can’t commoditize a creative process with accurate metrics. Two guys that complete in the same number of hours, one may look awesome, one may not, what are you going to measure?

I think it was Laurie Andersaon that said to an interviewer:
“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture”

I think per-finished-minute bidding on video work is like per-pound billing for house painting.

[Mark Suszko]

Oh, you say you’ll call, but you never do… (sniff)…:-)

I keep a draft of the rec letters handy to edit and re-send, any time the person needs another one sent. The applicant sends me an email or the SASE in the post, and I turn it around the same day. I got one request to fax or email it due to a time constraint, they needed it the same day. I didn’t like it, but I did fax it because I didn’t want to cross up the applicant’s chances for a weak reason, but I did ask in the cover sheet for the person receiving the fax to keep it confidential. I googled the topic a bit last night and the standard seems to be to give your recommender at least two weeks notice to compose the thing. You can volunteer some talking points or highlights you want to remind them of, including key dates, but as suggestions, only.

Rec letters are different from reference letters. References are short and to the point objective confirmations that a person worked at said company for said amount of time, and need not be confidential. Rec letters tell someone in detail if the guy or gal, in your opinion, is worth hiring and why, and are a little more subjective.

Whom in an organization gets to do those can be highly regulated, depending on the organization. Generally, what I have experienced is, anybody who is not management usually is limited to just confirming name and dates of employment, but for fear of lawsuits, are not supposed to volunteer anything more than that.

You know the old joke: “Did so-and-so work there?”
“Well, he was here, but I’m not sure I could say he worked …”
🙂

[Mark Suszko]

annnd…..crickets………??? Really?

None of you guys ever have to do one of these letters for anybody? Or have one done for you? If I’m an HR person, I should think I’d weigh the confidential, sealed letter, addressed to me, specifically, higher than the one just handed out and xeroxed over and over to anyone and everyone, titled: “To whom it may concern”. How do I know that xeroxed one wasn’t written by the applicant themself, unless I call to follow it up? And is the writer more or less likely to be completely candid if the letter is sealed and confidential, rather than when it is handed out to the applicant? Or am I being old-fashioned? I know that I certainly DON’T approve of someone using me for a reference for anything without asking me for each instance, and if somebody put my name to their own fake letter, then God help them when the HR people contact me to follow it up.

When I write a letter of rec for someone, I put in things that relate directly to the specific position they are going for, and I address the specific person who is reading these apps. Each letter is a custom job, just as each Cover Letter you send with a resume’ should be a custom job, targeted to specific people and jobs. If the applicant doesn’t know by now if I’d write them a good rec or not, well, that says something about the person too, doesn’t it? If they don’t know me well enough to ask me, I probably don’t know them well enough to give them one in the first place.

But I seem from here to be very much alone in these views.

You guys gonna leave me hanging here, or what?

[Mark Suszko]

Classic Grinder technique, keeping you off-balance with recriminations and subtle insults about your ability. You are being manipulated psychologically by this guy. You know best how many hours something is going to take, and you are working at the best sustainable pace already. And if he doesn’t agree, tell him you’ll call around and see if you can refer him to someone else who can make him happy ( preferably your biggest rival ).

This guy sounds like he worked in News before. There, the clock is your God, and every decision is based on getting done by deadline or faster. If you wanted to make something fancier but it will make you miss deadline, you just don’t do it. You specifically sign up for those working conditions and agree to them when you cut news for broadcast. But this is not that. You’re not doing news, you’re doing something with a slightly freer time line.

“How long is this going to take?”
“As long as it takes.”

or, the more classical reference, from “The Agony and the Ecstasy”:
(Pope, glancing at ceiling) “When will it be finished?”
(Michelangelo, painting ceiling) “When it is done.”
“When will it be done, then?”
“When it is finished”.

Never charge a flat, fixed price for a job. Set an hourly and day rate, and whatever the time is, that’s the cost. For a guy like this, who wants to put you on a stopwatch and buffet menu of services, switch to the day rate (a slightly higher day rate) and say that rate is all-inclusive, any and all services you do, whatever can be done in eight hours with a 30-minute lunch and occasional nature breaks where practical. Past the eight-hour mark is overtime at double rate, with a one-hour minimum charge as soon as you pass the eight-hour mark. Be prepared to lose the business when you negotiate, and decide in advance at what point you get up, pop the tapes out of the decks, put them in an envelope, and hand them to him, or you will always be his slave.

Finally, be reasonable when estimating. In a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Scotty tells Chief Engineer LaForge to always inflate time estimates because bringing the job in early makes you look like a miracle worker. There is something to that. Not that you should lie and make ridiculously long estimates. But even if you know to the minute what a task takes in a perfect world, there is nothing in the world that guarantees that’s how long it will really take. Build in time for things like the machine suddenly crashing and needing to be rebooted, for text to be spell checked and entered and positioned, for renders and saves to tape and the like. Captains and clients will always be demanding and try to shave time off your estimate, and if you give them the honest bare bones guess at the start, assuming no interruptions, what happens instead is that you get a rep for under-estimating how big a job is, and that is as bad or worse than over-estimating the time. And shorting yourself on time limits your ability to be more creative, to experiment a little to make a big improvement. If you’re always working to the clock, you’re not always going to give your best work, just your most timely.

I have a situation where, due to staff cuts I have to often be double-booked elsewhere when the schedule says I’m supposed to be editing. Now, the schedule was made assuming my butt would be in the editor seat the full number of hours, but that often gets interrupted these days to go deal with a live client, go out on a last-minute shoot or something, because I usually edit alone and it’s easier to abandon the impersonal machine for a few hours than a live client. So I didn’t get to actually be in the editing seat the original estimated number of hours. The editing project still has a due date though.

What to do? Generally, I have two options. 1: double the time to completion estimate next time, knowing that about half of the time budgeted for the job will be stolen away to put out other fires. 2: Rack up overtime after five when nobody’s pulling me away from the edit, so I can catch up to where I wanted to be.

Both strategies work, but both have limitations. I have human and social limitations on how much overtime I can stand in a row. The wife and kids deserve a certain amount of my time, and my health requires a certain amount of rest or my skills and judgement degrade. Racking up too much overtime also draws irate fire from management. If I over-pad edit time too much, I hurt the production schedule by limiting access and then may have to explain myself when a project comes in several days early and there is slack time in the schedule that’s not serving clients (or in a cash business situation, bringing in revenue). That would make me look like a malingerer or goldbrick. So there is a fine line to balance on. If the inflated estimate is chosen, generally I find or create something else to do to kill the slack hours that’s still productive, like training on something, building something, cleaning up, whatever. Just don’t make me label and file tapes:-)

[Mark Suszko]

I find it is always best to have someone other than yourself do the final QC of your work. You tend to get too familiar with it and stop really “seeing” it.

[Mark Suszko]

Interesting. Something like this is why I suggested you play the tape on a Panasonic DVCPro machine, I read somewhere that it has a slightly wider head assembly that can capture a little more of the tape, but it looks like you found an answer.

Are you going to try recovering the wedding footage after all with this technique?

I know it is going to cost you, but look at it this way: Wedding work is mainly referral business. There is nothing more powerful than having your customers recommend you to other people, and nothing hurts your business more than an unhappy customer warning others not to use you. It is generally worth it therefore to do anything it takes, to go beyond the average limits, in making things work or making them as happy as you can when things go bad. If you manage to rescue the footage after all, you can pass it on to them and they will really change their opinion of you and your dedication, for the better. You will be the guy that raised their dead footage back to life!

Good luck and better days ahead.

[Mark Suszko]

The genlock would be a bonus, but I have frame syncs with TBC’s that I can lock them up with for the main control room switcher, or a stand-alone video toaster that will lock them in as well, and I could switch with that.

Getting something close to a live-switched finished product will cut my precious editing time and hard drive space significantly for these lectures, leaving just a slight polishing job instead of longer hours digitizing and locking slides to key frames. You can’t always get unskilled talent to do the speech over, or do it better, in a useable time frame. It’s mostly about adapting to a client demand for doing these and to make what they do as transparent an experience as possible for THEM, while making my processes more efficient and speedy and easy, and getting the best look I can out of sub-optimal situations.

I looked round for something to do this off the shelf but didn’t find anything quite with all the precise features I wanted in the price range I could afford. I think I maybe could do this thing with three grand, two of that for the cameras, the rest for the big custom first-surface beam spliiter, a recycled LCD monitor panel to bounce off it, and the wood and paint for the enclosure box.

Picking the cameras will drive the rest of the design. I’m wondering if sub-$500 handycams would be enough, in a well-lit studio.

[Mark Suszko]

AWESOME link, thanks!

[Mark Suszko]

“If it’s not on paper, it never happened.”

I thought that was magnanimous of you to offer the half-day rate for the lost days. The last-ditch offer from you might be to accept the reduced rate cancellation fee (which is what it is) in low installments without interest.

But basically they have you over a barrel. This time.

A guy I respect says “With the right people, a contract is never needed; with the wrong people, it’s never enough”. I knew a supplier/vendor like that, I’d rather have his handshake on a deal than a stack of contracts and would have slit my wrist before going back on such a deal with him. But these are different times, and in hard times people sometimes start to drop some of the more expensive parts of their character and personal code.

How this facility has conducted it’s spoken-word agreements is very telling. It’s a small circle we work in and reputation is everything.

For all future dealings with these guys, insist on everything in writing, even if it is only by email. Have your policy up front and clear. Consider billing in smaller progress payments for each step. Progress payments protect both sides; a cancelled project doesn’t have to pay for work that will never be done, but you get paid for everything you did so far.

And if you decide to drop holding out for the money they owed, you can still do what many other retail and wholesale businesses do: pass the cost of thefts and bad debts on to everyone else with a slight rate increase on all their future jobs to cover the “leakage”. Which punishes the innocent along with the guilty.

[Mark Suszko]

A correction, Youtube wants it at 640 x 480. I tried h.264 yesterday which I agree looks great, but YT rejected it as unknown format.

Their preferences according to their site are MPEG4 (DIVX or XVID) Windows AVI, Mpeg, with audio as mpeg3. Darned if I can find one of those four formats with the mp3 audio and 640 by 480 size options, all in one spot.