[Mark Suszko]

Hey, it says “pay range negotiable”. Until we have a number who’s to say it’s unfair? This isn’t quite like the typical Craigslist ad that would list all those skills, plus demand you bring your own camera, and then say you’re working for ” minimum wage plus screen credit and good promotion for your reel”.

I meet all these qualifications, easily. Plus, I can write or fix scripts, a skill they don’t even realize they need. I wouldn’t expect I’d have to do more than two of these jobs simultaneously at any one moment, though.

I’d expect for some of the work there would be at least an assistant. They don’t say specifically that this applicant is to be the only person in the department, I think that’s an assumption you made. Perhaps they were only trying to be really complete in describing their need for a well-rounded generalist who can handle whatever comes up. Likely they wrote the requirements down from a list made by the last person to hold the job.

It is not uncommon these days for a corporate media department to be kept very lean, with specialized freelancers brought in only for peak efforts, while a small core staff of generalists handles the day to day operational grind. That’s just business.

I wouldn’t get so burned up by it, until we see what princely wage they deem apropriate for such a skill set. If you really can do the work of three guys you should at least get paid like two of them. In a typical busy day I could write a script, run a prompter while floor directing, then go shoot some news, come back and edit it, direct a 3-cam live shoot, tweak something in photoshop, fix and format some powerpoint slides, light a green screen set, compress an AVI file, and generate some music or Foley effects. Around here, we call that “Monday”. At least it’s not boring.

As far as the point about cardiologists, well, they also start out being general practice doctors before taking the advanced specialty training in heart stuff. That’s not much different really from one of us going to take concentrated courses in colorization, animation, photoshop or compositing after we’ve learned how to edit, is it?

It is my opinion that in our business, the days of people who just shoot, just cut, just composite, just do audio, are fading. Such super-specialists are now mostly only in the very high-end of the business, and now everybody else on the lower tiers is expected to bring more and more skills to the table these days, though they still may each have a personal specialty like animation or compositing or music, etc.

If you’re one of those high-flyers who can command a great salary just to do one narrowly-defined thing exceptionally well, my hat’s off to you. Really, it is, because you are at the top of the mountain, a place I’ll liekly never reach.

The rest of us have to be more of a jack of trades to prosper. I like being multidisciplinary myself.

Was it Heinlein who said: “Specialization is for insects”?

[Mark Suszko]

For several years now one hot thing has been to freeze and cut-out and glide around a portion of the shot, and manipulate obvious 2-d layers in 3-d space. I have always enjoyed the “2.5-D” look myself, going back to the old “Don’t Answer Me” music video for Alan Parsons. So, it’s not really new or anything, but I look forward to seeing some plug-ins that make it simpler to achieve that look without needing as much playing around in the compositor. There’s always going to be *some* of that required. But a streamlined method would be nice.

I think going forward, seamless integration of, and more use of, digital matte paintings and extensions will be the thing. Multicore processors will make this stuff render ever faster as time marches on. The real trick that will distinguish future star editor-compositors, IMO, will be not to be looking flashy, but to be as realistic as possible, fooling the eye so nobody thinks they are looking at a special effect at all, but real sets, real actors, real props, all looking like practicals on a real existing location, and then doing things that are impossible in real life, yet look absolutely real.

And I do think that those two jobs, editor and compositors are going to inevitably fuse into one, they already count on each other for so much. While you will always have high end specialists in just cutting and in just compositing, I think the trend is for one guy or gal to handle all of that as one thing. On the low end, this is already the case; the editor is also the compositor and the colorist as well as the audio pro. As software enables one to automate more of the work, I feel this trend will climb up to mid level and high level budget work. We’ll have hyphenated job titles, and hopefully be able to charge a little more for doing more work, the down side of it will be fewer jobs overall.

A really scary trend I can imagine in editing will happen in news cutting. When bandwidth is increased by the next revolution in codec/compression technology, I think we’ll see the death of microwave ENG trucks and satellite trucks, as shooters just plug in to the nearest copper or fiber or wimax phone access. Your location truck will shrink to a 2-door Chevy coupe.

When the video is all packets, the images don’t care if they are fed from blocks away or thousands of miles. A natural extension of that is, they also don’t care if they go to the home newsroom in Bangor, Maine, or an editing suite in Bangalore, India, where they are awake while we’re asleep, and working for a couple rupees with no benefits. The English-speaking freelance tech in Bangalore trims up a fast VOSOT package and feeds that back to an automated news server in Bangor, ready to play out, before the morning anchor team has even arrived at the studio. Instead of editors in the shop, the news director will choose and distribute editing jobs to freelancers located anywhere; local, regional, national, international, all competing on price.

Shooters will also become more and more freelance, because it will be easier and faster and cheaper to call the shooter closest to the action, than to send your own guy (on salary and benefits) TO the action.

Its just an extension of trends already happening across the country, automating more and more of live operations and controlling multiple MC’s from one central, minimally-staffed base.

[Mark Suszko]

Ebay first, then Craigslist, then freecycle, then the EPA hazardous waste cleanup day in your area. Some computer stores will accept your discards for free, responsible disposal. If you know a local user group for the hardware/software, also give them a try.

Schools don’t want your donated stuff any more. Makes IT work harder trying to patch together a motley assortment.

I’m a HUGE packrat and hate to throw away anything that still works or can be repurposed, I guess I’m overly sentimental about things… (said while looking at a D-Vision mousepad on my wall and an EECO EMME manual on the corner of my desk). My wife says I never throw anything old away. I say I’ll feel the same about her when she gets old, so she should chill:-)

Was wandering around the surplus warehouse last year and saw several SGI Indigo and Octane boxes, tossed out for metal reclamation like so much day after Christmas cardboard packaging. I remember when those cost as much as a house and were the fastest, hottest hardware on the planet. But to everything there comes a season. Strip the useful things like cables and connectors or whatever, that can be re-used around the shop, nuke the drives or hammer them, and let them go.

[Mark Suszko]

The only thing I’ll add here is, it was many painful experiences in importing image sequences that burned into my brain the lesson that you start any set of clips or bins for an editing database with a numbering system using “0000, 0001, 0002, etc.”. Because the computer will shuffle them out of order every time you don’t.

[Mark Suszko]

…And that’s why Grinner no longer works for PBS:-)

[Mark Suszko]

This is a constant drumbeat you’ll hear from many: know your rates before you start negotiating. Really know all your expenses, including insurance, retirement, health, utilities, space rental, equipment maintenance and replacement… etc. Then understand just how much time you want to spend, divide the money into the time to get the break-even point, below which, you’re losing money, then add on your profit margin, and re-compute to get your day rate and hourly rate.

With that info in your pocket, most jobs boil down to your best estimate of the time the particular task will require to accomplish, times your rate, plus any outstanding expenses like tape stock or rentals, etc. There’s a little bit more involved, but that’s the basics.

Oh, and, my personal rule is, never give a flat rate for a job, even a supposedly simple one; always bill by the hour or day. If you make a mistake or hit something unexpected with a flat fee, you stand to lose money even if it’s not your fault. By billing for time and materials, if the project takes a sudden turn, you’re not paying out of your pocket.

Bill in thirds: one third up front to begin the project and get anything you need to do the work, one third at the mid-point, where your expenses are all covered in case the plug gets pulled. This is where the client reviews the master and asks for final changes or corrections. Final third is billed upon delivery of the master, COD, and here is where your main profit comes in. Actually, you could be getting some profit from the other two payments as well, but my rule is to ALWAYS pay off my suppliers and people working for me, even before I get paid. This keeps up your good name as someone people can trust. I’d rather have that good rep than see a big profit on a job and have people hate me behind my back because they didn’t get paid on time or at all. They wind up “unavailable” the next time you need their help on a job. Conversely, should you get into some kind of jam, like the job came up too close to the weekend and there’s no time to arrange the payments in advance, they’re likely to give you a little slack on their billing because they know you’re good for it.

[Mark Suszko]

In this Real Estate market, I’d imagine the margins are pretty low for everything except mansions. I wouldn’t see much value in going to all the effort for any property under a million, because its such a buyer’s market now.

Making a beauty spread of a mansion property would be similar in my mind to any other high-end spot or informercial, so you could use the same budget models for time and materials. Analyze how many different views and setups it takes to depict the property fully, then budget for that. If you look at the production costs as a fraction of the asking price, then it becomes as much an investment decision as any other technique in house selling, like remodeling a kitchen to update it for the sale, sprucing up the landscaping, etc. Only the scale is different. When you’re selling a big number project, and the number sounds scary, you ask the customer: well, if the point is to sell a 20-million dollar item, what percentage of that 20 mil is worth it to you to invest in securing the sale? Then work from that budget.

I would suggest that it might be more successful a project in any case if you can still incorporate some storytelling besides just being a visual catalog. This is what Robin Leach used to do when touring properties on his “Lifestyles” show. He’d drop little interesting tidbits about the history of the property during the tours. So budget a little time to actually script a narrative to reinforce the beauty shots, because such purchases are not made entirely with the brain alone, but with emotions and perceptions. Any house will heep the rain off your head, but if you can say: “so-and-so used to live here”, stuff like that, that’s the intangible that people pay the extra for.

[Mark Suszko]

This may sound crazy, but maybe skip the camera light… on the camera, that is.

Frankly, after decades of shooting news and events I have really come to hate the on-camera light in all forms. Its easy to abuse, hard to use with subtlety and control, it’s best feature is that it is easy and compact. But for many jobs it would look way better if separated from the top of the camera and moved a foot or two to the side, and more diffused.

Maybe you could do this, holding the Merlin with one hand, the light with the other, powered off a coiled cord and a battery belt? Not the most elegant look, then again, you’re already walking around with a camera on a stick… but you gain independent control of the lighting. What you do to hold the mic, well, then you’re out of hands:-)

[Mark Suszko]

There wasn’t a first time. I’m sorry if you took it that way, Ron. I spent three hours last night soul-searching, writing, trashing, re-writing and editing that post specifically so as NOT to do that. In no way was it a challenge to anybody’s character, rather, one opinion that character is not what you say, but what you do. I think we’re more in agreement than not about a lot of this Flagler issue, from where I stand. But yes, we can keep it on just the issue of the technical legalities, I didn’t presume to really “preach” to anyone.

Implied and verbal contracts are worth less than the paper they are not printed on in court. What matters in a courtroom is not what was said un-witnessed, they throw that out as hearsay.

All a judge wants to see is, hard physical evidence. Words on paper, signed and notarized, and some proof the pledge on the paper was carried out in whole or in part. Saying Walmart had an expectation of privacy by an unspoken “understanding” is not law. It is very much the customary practice in our business, but it is not a law. It is an assumption that the other guy lives by the same code you do, this is very different from what is law. And its why we have to HAVE laws, for people who don’t have the same code of conduct we share.

Verbal agreements are not enforceable unless they meet several criteria. Honorable people like you and I stand by them anyway because we were raised that way and we also consider it in our best interest as professionals. Its a small circle we work in, and if you ruin your reputation, you’ll never climb out of that hole, you’d be lucky to move to another market and start from scratch, and the internet makes it impossible to escape a bad rep anymore. Flagler stands to be an object lesson to all the folks coming up in the business that you can pay a high price to “win”.

Please however, don’t tag me unfairly as being his apologist. I’m not. Nor a moral relativist, which I have to say hurts a little bit. I’m only trying to look at the problem from all sides and figure out what we can learn from it. Not to judge anyone.

We still friends or what? I’d like to think so.

[Mark Suszko]

Gav, “Fair Use” here is a defense, not a license. It is not at all a “pass go, get out of jail free”, Monopoly-card inevitability. You take your chances and do the project and they go ahead and sue you and you go to court and the court decides if you used their stuff and you admit that yes, it was their stuff you used…. and THEN you get to plead that you are excused under the cover of Fair Use. And only then does the court decide if your claim fits one of the specific examples and rules of the Fair Use exception. And even if you win, you may lose, because the way the courts drag on for ages, who but a rich corporation can afford the legal defense over all that time? More urgently, who in their right mind is going to front you the money to make a film containing these clips until you get this issue worked out and you can assure them the thing will ever get to air anywhere but your mom’s basement? So it’s a huge damper on the production of many independent documentaries.

I really envy the system you have Down Under for licensing pop music for things like wedding videos. We are in the stone age of copyright law by comparison up here, kept that way by Disney and Sony and the rest, and technically we’d be in the wrong to ever use an uncleared music clip for any public project, or even an internal company video like one might play at Walmart. See, I brought it back at the end, pretty clever huh?:-)

Gotta go to bed now, have spent the last three hours locked in an epic debate with my guardian angel over this issue, only to get inconclusive results, and I don’t pay myself overtime.