[Mark Suszko]

Walter shows you how its done.

You really ruined any chances you may have had by not simply and openly and honestly asking up front. Also, you likely won’t get much if any more business from that client by going behind their back like that. Why should they trust you?

Had you had the conversation about this from the beginning, very likely you would have gotten permission for that demo footage and more, perhaps to enter some of it in prize competitions. Clients love getting an award trophy for something you did for them.

Our job is more than technical, it also involves managing human relationships just as much as techical processes. You can be a brilliant shooter, editor, whatever, but if you can’t deal with people, you’re never going to achieve all that you might.

[Mark Suszko]

Find DP’s in the Cinematography forum.

[Mark Suszko]

I only barely passed high school Spanish, but even so, I am very glad I did, since I am getting more and more projects where the additional Spanish tracks are becoming a consideration. Turns out I am the only Spanish-speaker, poor as I am, in the shop, and I get ALL the language-related jobs to handle because of it. Even though I don’t consider myself qualified. WHat I do for bigger jobs is I bring in volunteers from other parts of the organization with some fluency to help me over the rough patches, but for simple spots I can read and understand pretty well on my own, particularly if I also have the English version nearby.

If you look at census data and trends, everything points to the fact that you should go out and learn some Spanish in order to expand your marketability. If you don’t, you’re handing over business to rivals who are no better than you, maybe less good, but can speak the lingo. Es Verdad. Maybe your boss would spring for a Berlitz course or something for you? Consider it job security because I think it is easier for a boss to go find a Spanish-speaker and train them on FCP than it is to find an editor and make them take language lessons.

In the meanwhile, the suggestion to run off a DVD window burn of all the Spanish for the interpreter to pre-select is the best way to make the most of your time.

[Mark Suszko]

I heard of a plug-in for this somewhere on the COW in the past year, but can’t recall details. You can use your real or virtual vectorscope/wave form monitor and count the scan lines, I suppose.

[Mark Suszko]

One thing to know: any time somebody says “cut me a beak on your rate for this one, and you’ll get all my subsequent business”, they are lying. I have NEVER seen this come true in over 20 years.

Setting a rate for editing is tough because it depends on a lot of factors, like your experience level, how creative the work is supposed to be, what the overall budget is, if any, and how much time you can spend. Lets just pick a number out of the air: $50 an hour. What do you get for that? Do you get a simple cuts-only tape-to-tape transfer that just cuts out the worst of the dead parts? Or a real nonlinear edit with titles, effects, wipes and dissolves for transitions, color and filter effects and rendering, music? Is it just the ceremony, or ceremony and reception highlights? Or is is wall to wall coverage of the entire day plus a music montage piece? Is it single cam or multicam footage? Do you have a high reputation already or are you an untested unknown who may screw up the whole deal?

You can quickly see that the fifty bucks an hour is somewhat overpaid on the low end and ridiculously underbid on the other, particularly if you are working to a deadline. And it is for this reason, the variability of each job, that you should stay away from charging a lump sum flat fee. You will be either way over or under.

To save a lot of constant figuring it may be easiest to pick one hourly rate and then bill for however many hours it takes. From that you have to deduce what your rate really needs to be. So how do you do that?

This has been covered a lot of times so an archive check is in order, but a reader’s digest version:
Decide how many days a year you want to work, if this is your main job.
Total your costs of living and the costs of all your tools and software
That includes utilities, rent or mortgage, insurance, taxes, loans, travel, expendables like tapes and discs, the cost of maintaining and upgrading your gear, everything.
Divide the money into the days and that’s just your break-even point for how much per day you need to make, it doesn’t include any profit or any amount put away towards savings or investments. Recalculate with a profit margin (you decide how much)

Now you know the number, the number below which you are LOSING money, the least amount you can afford to charge, working that x number of days a year. Convert the day rate into an hourly rate. Now ask around in your area to see what others are charging. It is good to be somewhere in the middle to upper third of what the competitors are charging, but never drop your rates below your minimum just to chase another guy’s lowball figure. You never win that way.

That’s for full time self-employed. If this is a second job or hobby that’s trying to pay for itself, you CAN afford to charge something less than the minimum you calculated. But I would approach the decision process the same way. In this case, decide what your ultimate goal is: owning a good system with all the bells and whistles you want? Total all that up, maybe use the B&H catalog as a source for the numbers. Add in some for upgrades and maintenance. What about some training DVD’s or books? Figure how many hours a week you want to be working and run the numbers as before, with the idea of paying off the system inside of a year. From there, kind of swish it around and see how it tastes.

[Mark Suszko]

When you figure it out, tell ME:-)

Seriously though, the number one problem of any small business, and the usual reason for it failing, is that they start out under-capitalized. They talk themselves into betting they can be in the black in a year, and this almost never happens, regardless of the business. The rule of thumb I heard was you should have two to three years’ worth of working capital to draw on until the business finds it’s level and starts paying for itself. Who has that much in liquid assets hanging around to bankroll the startup? Not many. And if you had that much, why risk it? Include credit in with the capital, and the legal protectiions of limited liability and incorporation, now you see how it’s done.

What the whole finance works really revolves on is a kind of ponzi scheme of credit lines and deferred payments. Everybody gets paid and profits except the last guy in the chain. if you can keep the thing going around and around without stopping, it never quite gets to the last guy. Well, it did this week.:-(

You are a juggler, and you must keep x number of balls in the air between billed and collected, while you walk the 30-day tightrope at the same time, living off the cash FLOW the whole time. Businessmen from Trump on down to the corner hot dog vendor all work this same way, using OPM to create a cash flow and drawing off from the flow. As long as enough of the juggling balls (debts) are floating, you can catch the billables and stash a few away now and again towards paying everything off, and a real profit later.

But some successful and large businesses NEVER actually make a profit, if you factor in the debt. All the huge financials that went belly-up this past week? they were all doing it, the SEC permitted them to all run a way larger ratio of debts to actual assets held than was prudent, or maybe even legal. When they failed to keep enough of the debt balls floating, it cascaded down all over them.

[Mark Suszko]

The Toaster and Tricaster are the only ones I can think of with *all* the features. There are laptop editors, there are laptop switcher programs, but few that combine all that with the graphics and etc. in quite the unique way the Newtek products do. or if they do, it’s not exactly all in one box. You could look at Sony’s Laptop all in one system, but it’s pretty pricy.

You don’t sound like you have a switcher problem, more like you have a Premiere problem to me.(ducks) The Tri comes with it’s own speed edit NLE built in, have you ever messed with that?

I once got a week to play with and review a prototype of the Pinnacle StreamGenie. That was an awesome and very capable product that was ahead of its market, but it would have been a great success in today’s podcasting environments. Just ahead of it’s time back then, and the economy going “tango-uniform” right at that time didn’t exactly help.

[Mark Suszko]

I think what I would try is to create multiple instances of the clip and in each one, push the blacks and whites alternately with contrast and brightness controls and use those as the basis of some selections. Stacking all the instances of the selections and flattening *that* could create the moving mask you want, without roto. Before you can do that, I imagine you need to motion track and stabilize the footage, but perhaps you can wait until compositing it into the new background comp. I think I would do it first, though.I will say this about roto: load up an ipod, set up a wacom tablet, have a Big Gulp and a box of cookies in arm’s reach, and you’d be done before you know it. The secret is to not allow yourself a cookie until you get x number of frames done:-)

Using vector masking, you don’t *need* to roto every frame, just certain keyframes, and a keyframed vector mask takes away more than half of the job right off the top. Roto is not everyone’s favorite thing, but the results, what you can do with the cut-outs once the roto is done… are fun for everyone; “I hate writing, but love having written”.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m with Biscardi on this one. Unless you plan to have someone with the van at all times, you’re just asking for all kinds of trouble. But a good compromise might be to go with removeable magnetic signs instead of vinyl. Best of both worlds; flash for the relatively few times when you need that, stealth when you don’t want trouble.

I would rather spend a little on custom shirts or uniforms than graphics for the van, if I was going in that general direction. When you see a staffer in a logo shirt, you may strike up a conversation and they can act as a sales contact. (“Oh, I see you work for so-and-so?” “Yes, do you have a question about our service?….” ) The van can’t speak or answer immediate questions and hold conversations like a person can, its just a billboard.

[Mark Suszko]

This is probably covererd in the Guerilla marketing book somewhere, but one common strategy is to have other people do the work for you as much as possible, and by that I mean to leverage the reactions and chatter of third parties to your message or product. Which is some of what viral marketing is all about anyway, using others to flog your product or idea and using their influence and credentials with the target market instead of your own.

Without spending a dime, literally? Tough to do, but on a low budget? Yes, doable. I think classically, you would try to get favorable press coverage thru cleverly-positioned releases and promotional events. I would define that as free or nearly free marketing. Of course, the more you rely on that kind of thing, the more control you give away as to where the focus goes and what the specific call to action will be, or evolve into. If you start a stampede, you can’t expect to drive it with much if any precision, so once started, get the most you can out of it immediately before it swerves off course or decides to dissipate on its own. And be careful you don’t make things worse for yourself instead of better…

A marketing story I got out of a Mel Bay guitar playing how-to book:

A violin maker was upset that a small fad for the novel new instrument called the guitar was hurting his market for violins. He decided to flood the market with cheap guitars with the premise that people would then burn out on their look and sound, get over the novelty, and come back to the classic violin in short order. Instead, the guitar’s popularity exploded and went from a local fad to a regional phenomenon, and expanded from there.