[Mark Suszko]

What is this word you’re using, V-what? 🙂

For freelancers, the smarter ones budget and plan their full-year’s advance calendars for vacations, it is part of calculating your basic rate. You tick off the holidays you want off, plus any other v-days and weekends to get to the number of working days in your calendar, say, 327, then divide that into your expenses and projected profit margin to derive a day rate you need to hit to make your annual goals. The more days off you want, the more you have to charge for the days you actually work, to make your nut.

If you’re in a hired-on situation, its whatever the company tells you it is, typically, you accrue v-days in a ratio to days worked. Typically, like with those too-tempting TV insurance offers, “limited benefits are available during initial period”. Meaning, you don’t get to start earning vacation hours until you’ve put in a certain number of hours, weeks, even months for The Man. I don’t know what the general rule is, but I’d guess its six months to get a day, a year to get 2 weeks. Some unused vacation may be partially refunded if you quit or retire, in a lump sum. Depends on individual situations.

I have a reimbursement deal like that with my sick pay: I get 50% of the unused sick days as pay upon retirement or quitting. I think they take half the unused hours and multiply that by my final hourly wage number, so the longer I work without getting sick, the mnore the sick time is worth. I rarely get sick, and must have something like over 2 year’s worth of sick days built up by now. At some point, the hours “age out” beyond a certain cut-off, I think, I never bothered to read the detail on that, otherwise after 21 years here, I could probably convert my accrued sick leave to a retirement:-)

We also have a sick leave “bank”, where you can join by donating a minimum of one of your sick days. Across a large organization, that adds usp and can really help your firnds at work. If you get cancer, for example, and burn up your accrued sick time and personal time and leave of abscence time, you can then tap the sick leave bank to extend your days some more while you fight the illness, and still keep your job. That’s nice, and it works for union as well as non-union folks. If you don’t have this at your office, suggest it to HR. Its just accounting trickery, doesn’t really “cost” anything to do.

If you’re part-time, you generally don’t get any such deals. One big reason to charge more as a freelancer: you have to cover more on your own. Many places, particularly government organizations, have a policy that part-timers that work past a certain number or days have to be converted to full-time with benefits. This is to avoid union-busting problems, among other things.

As to when you can use days off, the boss has the final say, and has to weigh your absence against the number of people free to cover your load while you’re gone. If you’re covered by aunion agreement, there are rules in there that define things to a “t”.

I have a pretty nice arrangement in my job, in that generally my overtime is not cash, not directly anyway. It is reimbursed as “comp time”, i.e. free days off with pay. I have to “burn off” the accrued comp hours before I can use paid vaction time or personal time. It is handy to be able to burn off some spare days when a sudden family emergency or other duty comes up, or even a freelance gig, and not have to dip into vacation or personal time for that. Works out better for taxes, I’m told, as well. Whatever comp time remains unused at fiscal year’s end gets converted to a cash pay-out. Some years, that used to wind up at least as big as an IRS tax refund check, I bought the wife’s engagement ring with the leftover hours once upon a time.

The other side of the overtime/ vacation issue is, it can be hard to take much time off if nobody is taking on your workload; you come back from burning off the overtime and have to rack it right back up, and more, just to catch up on work that was left undone while you were gone, plus the normal overload. This can really wear a guy down and make you feel uneasy the whole time you’re supposed to be relaxing and recharging. What can I say, Catholic School upbringing leaves that guilt on you for a lifetime:-)

Also, you have to consider office morale, and the needs of your brothers and sisters at the shop; take too long of a break, and you’ve trapped them into covering for you and not being able to get away themselves. Instead of the traditional two weeks off a year, I much prefer to take numerous three-day weekends or five-day weekends around state holidays (add two real days of vacation or comp to a three-day government holiday weekend), spread all thru the year and seasons. This seems to work better all around for everyone’s schedules, and lets me be more flexible when things pop up that I want to go and do or see.

I dunno if that answers all your initial questions, you could maybe expand upon what your specific vacation problem is.

[Mark Suszko]

The comment by the traditional broadcaster boasting an audience of millions is basically a lie and misses the point. He’s sending out a show to a ***potential*** audience of that many, ***assuming*** each of them tuned in to that one show at a particular point in time. Neilsen aside, your CPM (cost per thousand) is high there because you’re “shotgunning” the cable Tv subscribership in a sea of other channels. I’d be surprised if that guy had one percent of the actual audience watching. Back when I was a manager of our college radio station, I could boast we were in a number three market with a potential audience of three million people. Yeah right; if every one of them tuned to the far left of their FM dial to pick up our puny 10-watt signal, even ten watts in downtown Chicago is “potentially” reaching millions of people.

The great thing about an internet show is, it’s not PUSH media like old style TV broadcast, it’s PULL: your audience is self-selecting, people who care enough about the modded cars or whatever to seek out and click on, to CHOOSE to watch the show. People who can select a subscription to the show and automatically download and SAVE it for REPEAT VIEWING via iTunes or etc. To any advertiser, this is a huge difference in the quality of the audience he gets for his ad dollar. These are pre-qualified sales prospects and more directly addressable via services like Google AdWords and analytics, and he’s not sharing them with anybody else…

Think about the fact you could add interactivity, things like viewer surveys or voting to the podcast very easily, with quick turn-around on results. Your advertisers could use that to research the potential buyers directly for new and existing products and services, to test market a new gadget, get real evaluations of rival products. Tap into the user’s brand culture directly, not just by inferrence like ad agencies do. Instead of guessing what appeals to the customers, you sit back and let them TELL YOU.

And most important, reach local opinion-makers in the car fan community. Recent experiments mentioned on the net showed it only takes maybe five outgoing and charismatic opinion leaders in a random group of 200 strangers to steer all 200 any way you want. If your show hosts and guests can get the attention and respect of your target audience, (via good production values, relevant and timely info, and entertainment value) your show gains a leverage all out of proportion to it’s size. Way better deal than the broadcast guy who is “reaching” 80-year-old shut-ins, soccer moms, people without cars, people who hate car culture, etc. along with a handful of scattered “perfect” target market types.

I think if you negotiate from that position of strength, you might do better, Grinner. Anybody with a relevant podcast focused tightly to one constituency would.

And you’re right to be playing it non-obvious with product placement and mentions. You can always put links at the end of the ‘cast to a web page with details of all the sponsored/ underwritten materials and services. That’s where your synergy with Google adwords and analytics pays off. That’s where you put the new survey questions every week and publish feedback comments from the audience.

Having the content people wear subtle logos on camera is okay, the fans wear logo wear too. It also acts as a subtle disclaimer saying “this guy is a xyz factory guy, so that colors everything he says”. Its in how you handle the banter with these reps on the screen that makes a huge difference between lame infomercial and “inside baseball” industry gossip and secrets people want. People can smell a canned sales spiel, its the part that kills many a locally produced amateur informercial. If you can walk that delicate line, where you’re more like a talk show and less like an infomercial, you really will grab ’em.

Good luck with it!

[Mark Suszko]

No personal experience but I know the Rockport workshops are one of the older and more well-established ones, along with a “school” workshop run by Sony. Could it be bad and yet be around all this time, over 20 years?

I think the Sony workshop is usually run concurrently with a shooting workshop, they often use the big Balloon race/event out West in NM as the subject; you shoot and then you edit, all hands-on, all Sony products. No doubt since I was last aware of it, they’ve expanded to more places.

Or you can take Dov Simens’ instant internet courses:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Well, this takes some of the uncertainty out of our shop’s planning. We’re an SD shop using FCP and taking our tentative first steps into HD production for news and spots. The distribution and archival issues have been huge headaches for us. Some of our multi-part strategy was to rely on BluRay disks for distribution to HD TV stations that didn’t want to use an internet or satellite-based distribution path, and we would also archive program masters and selected raw footage to bluray as appropriate.

What we really are looking for in the future is a stand-alone BluRay recorder that records HD off our cameras or switcher in real time like our SD stand-alone Panasonics do now, as well as BluRay drives we can plug into the FCP workstations for authoring as well as ingest. If they are not out yet, I expect they will be by the time we can free up the money for them. But you guys probably know more details. Most especially regarding FCP and Blu authoring. And by authoring I mean full-boat interactive disk authoring as well as simply burning one whopping great file to a bludisk as if laying to tape. I’d appreciate any knowledge or suggestions along those lines from you who are pioneering this stuff.

[Mark Suszko]

Nick, this happened to me one year in the 80’s, going to the Swiderski show in Chicago, which may be as close to something like NAB as I ever get (God, I miss those guys). It was at that show, where I went looking for early desktop video gear, that I discovered Holtz demoing Pinnacle’s Alladin at a super-tiny booth. I rushed home with brochures and data and really sold my boss on the thing, and it catapulted our operation into a whole new level of production. We soon bought a second one. We still use them every day too!:-)

[Mark Suszko]

They are aimed more towards the beginner, but there are some very well done short tutorials for editing by Chris “Ace” Gates called “Cutting Class” on the DJTV section of digitaljuice.com I found them very clear and easy to follow. Almost all the tutorials on that site are exceptional. Dig thru their archived episodes, you’ll like them

[Mark Suszko]

The mic question is an interesting one. For aesthetic reasons as well as practical ones, a wireless may not work here if there is a lot of contorting or jarring movement, for reasons you stated. A shotgun brings it’s own issues: boom shadow in your “vital” lighting comes to mind. But it will work great as long as a competent person is pointing it and you’re not just hanging it off the camera.

Maybe the best compromise is a guy with a pistol grip shotgun feeding your camera via wireless, so you can move independently. He might as well feed a second recorder of some type, hanging off his own body, as a backup to the wireless.

[Mark Suszko]

“You can google
somebody, see their posts and its a goldmine of psychological information about
an applicant.”

Oh, well I’m sure doomed now:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Not at all, it is smart business to bring in whatever extra gear and help each job requires, and bill for it. While you should not advertise to the client which parts are all yours, neither should you be ashamed to bring to the job all the talents and appropriate gear it requires, this is the job of a good producer.

You probaly don’t keep a full-time makeup artist on your payroll either, but you would not be ashamed to bring in a freelance makeup artist to make the exercise demonstrator look good, so why be ashamed of adding any other contractual staff?

[Mark Suszko]

Yes I agree there is a fundamental disconnect between the older generaton and the younger on the topic of “warez” and pirated products. Because they are in the beginnings of their careers, they have literally nothing to lose and everything to gain, from their uninformed perspective. The have not yet had occasion to be in the middle of a large paying gig when the software goes “tango uniform” and you need a helping hand from the company’s support staff: “Your serial number, please”. And warez are almost always carrying a viral payload along. You are running a lot of unknown risks with pirated software. Risks that will cost you more than you “saved”.

These kids have yet to learn that nothing in the world is truly “free” and that this business is remarkably small and circular, once you have broken your word, or done someone dirty, or acted or said something like what that kid said, your reputation is very hard to repair.

I don’t think I would hire the guy either, his judgement has not progressed at the same speed as his talent. Lectures usually do not stick with an audience not ready to recieve the knowledge. If he calls back wondering why you never book him any more, go ahead and give the reason. Maybe it will percolate over time.