[Mark Suszko]

You are complaining you are getting too much well-paying work??? Here, let me help you with that, send all yuor clients over to me….:-P

Bill them more for the non-standard overtime hours. Have a higher weekend rate, and if you really don’t want to work weekends, either say you’re already booked elsewhere or charge a ridiculously high rate to discourage them. (But if you offer a super high rate and they still go for it, be ready to jump if they go along with it, or you’re going to look very bad. Frankly, a too-high rate will just get you into trouble later, after the heat’s off.)

Never be afraid to bill what the job is really worth and what you are worth. That’s just business. But always put these figures on the table before a deal is struck: afterwards, or mid-project is never a good idea.

[Mark Suszko]

I always first think of Vidipax for this, because I used to correspond with Jim Lindner, and they had been doing it for a long time. I don’t know if they are still in business or not.

A google search for broadcast format conversions will give you thousdande of hits, hundreds after you filter out people transferring VHS home movies to DVD.

But here’s a partial list:

https://www.radiocraft.co.uk/directory/formats.htm

[Mark Suszko]

I think in the transcoding/dub thing I was suggesting, what you’d do is lease or rent all your harware as needed, depending on what clients were going to bring you. Then fold those expenses into your rate and mark it up. No, I wouldn’t try to set up a broadcast museum of working decks of every type and then hope for clients to find me.

What large companies and government agencies usually don’t have are the people and time to assign to a large migration project like this. That’s where you can find an opportunity.

An outside vendor need only identify the specific formats the client has, and then lease or rent only that gear for the duration of the project. You make it a business by figuring out how to do it faster and cheaper than the large company can do in-house on their own. If you find two clients with the same format needs, you have an opportunity to double your production or halve your expenses.

Basically, you first identify the customer, run the numbers in such a way that you can do the transfers and transcodings cheaper than them, set up the deal, and conform your operation specifically to their needs, then end your equipment leases and temp labor contracts once done, until you find the next customer. Kind of like high-tech migrant workers. This shop needs all their beta SP dubbed, that one has D-2 tapes, this one here has umatics and one-inch…

Now, If I found a one-inch reel-to-reel machine in good working shape, I’d probably just buy it because it would cost peanuts to own, but I could charge a hefty price to run dubs off of it. Probably same with umatic; they are dirt cheap right now.

The hard part, I think, is to figure out number of machines and their real-time transfer capacity, versus hours of programming to be transferred, and see what kind of hours/profit/expense matrix you could configure that makes a profit, yet is cheaper than the company client doing the job themselves. The faster they want it done, the more you have to charge for decks to keep up. The less you spend in hardware, however, the more you spend in time, i.e. rent, utils, and personnel costs. Makes for an interesting mini-max problem.

It might be that you would roll some of your profit over into owning the decks you use most, as well as backup repair parts like heads and belts and transports. The more jobs you do, the cheaper the bought gear gets by comparison.

Then there is all the value-added business you can generate off the digitized materials by offering a service to organize and annotate the material for easy access and use.

[Mark Suszko]

That’s roughly $30 for each drawing. Sounds okay to me, but you can always find it cheaper in a place like Florida, particularly near Orlando, that’s heavy on under-employed artists and related craftspersons.

My question would be: are these hand-drawn, are they simple cartoon sketches, photoshopped semi-comps, or are they highly customized pre-vis, using shots of the actual sets and locations and products, keyed to specific camera directions, lines of script, illustrating specific camera moves, with the scenes framed and composed using specific lens widths and etc.? Done in Sketch-up, Poser, or one of the custom, purpose-designed storyboarding software programs? Is it accurate enough that a director could use it for a blueprint to place his dolly track and light grids? Then $33 sounds cheap indeed. For stick figures with little detail in a generic background… maybe not so much…

$33 per shot could be a little over, or way under, depending on what level of completeness and accuracy you are getting per frame. In any case, artists have expenses and add-on costs they need to build into their rates, so I don’t think it is ever going to be as cheap as you “think” it should. The issue should be how much use you’re getting out of each frame drawn or rendered. Will they save you money by accurately showing and predicting all the angles and setups? Will they save the client money by showing exactly what they will be paying for, helping them avoid costly re-dos later?

But “cheap” is relative; if it lands you a million-dollar account, it’s probably DIRT cheap, right?

[Mark Suszko]

Good luck Grinner. Here’s a spare pitch for you:

Like one of those “fix up and flip my house” shows, but with a car. Pick up a beater and totally rehab it.

The hook: into a hybrid. Then demo how it works and race it against a stock machine.

[Mark Suszko]

In your example, you could just add “in age” in parentheses in the same titles and I think you’d be okay.

[Mark Suszko]

When this was happening to me on another system, what fixed it was resetting the import settings to default.

[Mark Suszko]

While the 60-plus dollar per gallon Rosco stuff is great, yes, you can get by very well with locally custom-mixed flat latex. In both cases, what makes the paint work better is good surface prep and a REQUIRED base coat of flat white primer before you put on the blue or green.

My favorite choice for that is KILZ brand, the water based latex, not the oil-based one.

I took a sample of real chromakey material to Ace and they matched it in a flat latex very well. But your paint will be several shades darker and less vibrant and more uneven unless you prime first.

[Mark Suszko]

Did you split out the admin fee from your producers fee just to make numbers appear smaller, or is someone other than you actually doing the admin stuff? And what specific admin stuff is it? The video crew and gear: fee could be low or high, depending on the gear and level of experience, how many shoot days, also if union or not. Seems like a lot of edit days for a short piece.

I always eschew fixed fees in favor of hourly or daily rates. Even for the most well-prepared person, sometimes situations arise that add hours you didn’t budget for. Then the fixed-price line loses money.

The script for example: that fixed rate, does it cover re-writes on the set or in post? Guild or not? If the crew is at least middling competent, it looks like they may be earning far more than your actors?

That makes me wonder if the actors, at that low price, are really any good. They may be excellent actors that just cut you a break. But if they are poor actors that could only command sevety or so a day, they might actually cost you more down the road, in bad takes, blown schedules, re-shoots, extended repair sessions in post, etc. plus lower overall quality and belivability.

Good writers and actors don’t COST: they SAVE.

[Mark Suszko]

It’s all about the eye line and distance. The bigger your prompter screen is, the farther back you can throw from to reduce the eye travel.

While I like Todd, I have a point of disagreement with him regarding fonts. Studies and my field experience confirm that all-caps is an inferior way to present text for prompting. All-Caps is actually a holdover from the bad old days of prompting, where you actually typed onto rolls of paper using a custom typing ball and electric typewriter. Your “cut and paste” word processing in those days actually used scissors, white-out, and tape! The rolls unspooled on a conveyor belt past a black and white camera that generated a luminance key output to the mirror assembly, so the fonts had to be fat and readable to that camera first and an eyeball second. When early, fully-electronic prompting systems came into operation, their font selection was also limited because RAM was expensive, so you still only had one all-caps font after you did away with the conveyor belt-camera-paper roll contraptions. So many folks grew up working with all-caps by default. Not because it was a better way.

We read by decoding word shapes, seeing the word as a whole, not as individual letters. The fastest decoding of that shape relies on it being upper and lower-case letters, with ascenders and descenders, creating that word shape. Ever watch Sesame Street or Electric Company? They teach reading using mixed case for the same reason. Indeed, typically you run several lines of type on a prompter screen at any given moment, because the brain is actually speed-reading ahead of your consciousness, pre-decoding the next row of words using your peripheral vision, before you are actually at that point. It’s one of the keys to “speed reading”. It is this subconscious background processing you lose if you blow up a font too huge and reduce the number of words per line. When you lose that, you also lose speed and comprehension.

ALL CAPS destroys the learned shapes of words and sends you back to decoding each word a letter at a time. Worse than that: you are first decoding a capital letter, then deciding if it needs to be capital for a specific meaning, like the first letter of a person’s name, (Washington, or is it washing a ton of stuff) then if it is not a cap in normal usage, the brain continues to process it into the lower case letter and THEN is lining up the translated lower case letters to make the overall word shape in your brain instead of on the page. This is like when someone writes a page full of bad HTML instead of a single simple tag to get a job done: it’s just bad coding!:-)

Your brain can decode all this, of course, but it is going to have to work a little harder and take a fraction of a second longer to do it, and there is some increased chance of an error without the word shape to match against. Try reading an entire page of something in all caps some time and then again in mixed case and see which one “feels” easier to read.

Old-time newsreaders had no choice in the matter; they only had all-caps and simply re-trained themselves over time to deal with this, then stuck with it. Stingy, slow-to-update newsrooms then perpetuated this “standard” well beyond it’s heyday. (It’s like the old anecdote about why mom cuts the ends off her beef roasts when she cooks them.)

There has been some experimentation with a completely different prompting scheme, it relies even more on word shape, because instead of lines of words it sequentially projects a SINGLE word at a time, in the same space, with no travel up, down, or side-to-side. Something like the device called a tachistoscope. It takes a little getting used to, but enables a fairly fast reading speed, while being readable from a distance though using the very smallest of screens. In a sense, this is the farthest extension of what Todd was talking about and his method of presentation. One word that fills the screen, replaced with another single word that fills the screen, all centered and never in motion, only scaled based on number of letters it takes to cover the screen left to right. It has been used in some on air spots from time to time as a catchy and edgy way to put up text without loading up the screen. You might try it as an experiment some time, just for kicks.

Unless you’re epileptic; then take it slowly, please.