[Mark Suszko]

I like a gray cave too. No windows unless maybe on the door to the room, with a shade option. My suggestion would be to put in a large hollow crown molding all along the walls a foot or two from the ceiling and run rope lighting or daylight color temp flouro tubes in the trough of it to wash across the ceiling so the lighting is all indirect. Then use pin spots just to shine on specific task areas like a patchbay or deck rack, like that. Track lighting never seems to be placed exactly where I want it, always too far or too close or not quite the right angle.

Myself, I don’t like backlighting the screens much, but others do, so make that an adjustable dimmer to suit each user’s individual tastes.

I like a lot of toys and art around my desk but not in my eyeline where I edit. In the client area, sure, go nuts.

A spot for the iPod and cupholders, can’t live without those. And a sideboard for the snacks and lunches.

[Mark Suszko]

Just another way to look at this:

Perhaps the simpler way is to bill separately for the shoot and the edit, and you each keep the money from your end.
This way at least, you only get money for what you did, not what someone else did. Even though your work complements each other and is incomplete without the partner’s contribution. 4 hours of driving to the shoot plus maybe 5 or 6 hours to shoot the event plus 4 hours back is roughly 14 hours total. Assuming (not everyone does) that the driving is billed as the same rate as shooting. Some bill portal to portal, some bill from start of work to end of shoot and not any travel. Makes a difference.

Figure the editor takes three hours just to ingest and log your raw tapes before she edits. Then working at a pretty fast pace she might take 4 times the real time duration of the finished product to cut something together, say eight hours to get to “done” but nothing fancy. Eleven hours for the edit, two more to make a tape dub or burn a DVD, you’ve just about put the same hours in on both sides of the production, you had to wear a tie is the main difference…

If she goes on to do more for the end product, make some cool montages or extra segments like a music video, she’s going to add up extra hours over you, and make more money for it. She should: she did more work. Are you wanting a cut of that? Why?

I once was sent by my wedding video boss to talk to an unhappy client. She didn’t want to pay full price. She had been quoted a rate of about fifty an hour for a shoot and edit, and said she should only pay a hundred because the finished master’s length was 2 hours. We had 2 guys spend six hours shooting four hours of raw tape and eight hours of editing to get her the finished 2-hour master.

[Mark Suszko]

If you have a seasoned pro who could do the job fast and accurate, and a beginner, who kind of stumbles thru it but gets it done, either the beginner has to cut their rate to next to nothing, or the pro has to charge out the wazoo by comparison. They can’t both work for the same rate, not without a markup for the pro or a discount for the beginner. Yet the beginner has a floor rate below which he dare not go as well.

The pro has spent a lot of time to get mastery which leads to efficiency and productivity. The pro can maybe do the job in one hour, the beginner, in eight. The pro can thus do eight jobs at the lower rate, (which though mathematically possible is practically unlikely), or the one job at the higher rate. Even at the higher rate he may still cost less than a cheaper guy that has to try, then abandon several approaches over an 8-hour day before he gets the one that’s going to satisfy a client. So comparing rates is never just an objective exercise. The level of artistry and quality you get for the rate has to figure into it as well.

I see this when I use pro actors versus volunteers. The pro actors can memorize lines and deliver with consistency take after take, with few mistakes. That lets me shoot with just one camera over multiple takes for different angles and yet I know everything will cut together well. For nonpro talent, that single camera work becomes expensive because I have to do many more takes to get the same footage right. They’ll also often wind up needing extra help like a teleprompter, and they likely won’t be as believeable or smooth in any case. Because they can’t do the same take the same way twice, I often find I have to backstop my continuity and cover shots by using two cameras, a closeup and a cover shot, instead of one, or I won’t get enough good matches to edit with. And that extra shooting from a second cam and sorting thru lots more bad takes adds time in the editing suite. So you can see that one simple decision on pro versus nonpro talent could have ripple effects that lead to double or triple costs in gear, staff, quality and time. While the actor’s were “free” they cost more in the long run than hiring “expensive” pro talent. And such it might be for editing and graphics comp services.

So back to the original question.

Know your hourly rate. Predict at least to yourself the hours it should take. If this will take more than a day, you might give the client a minimum and maximum HOURS estimate, with a cutoff if you go over that needs his approval. Figure how long this project will take and if it’s more than a half day, but less than a full day, just quote a day rate, which is giving you some margin for trying a few different things that may work out or not. I think you should usually never tell clients the hourly rate if possible, only the day rate, where you can adjust any markups you need to make for the differences in each project’s difficulty and time.

Billing half days usually is a money loser because of the blown opportunity costs of missing another gig. What happens if you run over a bit? Are you going to eat the overage and thus functionally cut your rate and profit, or try to add on to a bill that was already agreed, (bad for customer relations) or negotiate a new deal to finish? None of these are great situations to have to face, so don’t.

I would agree that if you were learning an app the first time on a client’s dime, you should not charge full rate for any “dead time” there, so if you are a scrupulously ethical person it might be good practice to keep a stopwatch nearby that you can start and stop to track productive versus nonproductive time. Don’t tell the client that’s what you’re doing, this is for your own use. Then search your heart at the day’s end when you’re tallying the hours and efforts, and rebate accordingly. Don’t cut rates or hours just to ingratiate yourself or encourage future work, that way lies madness and grinders.

Cut rates where you honestly messed-up and wasted time, where gear broke down, etc. Trying and failing may sometimes be billable, if what you’re doing is pushing the limits of the creative process. Often I’ll spend many hours off the clock thinking about upcoming projects, I don’t get to bill for that, but it has an effect on how well and fast the product turns out.

[Mark Suszko]

Indeed, everything said so far is right on. I still belong to the school of thought that says you keep two sets of speakers around: high end audiophile reference monitors, and a pair of crummy AM radio quality tin boxes hooked to a compressor to hear what the finished product sounds like to perhaps 80 percent of your audience.

How far you bias the mix to allow for the extra down-stream compression and crummy speakers has to be a subjective call. Some will just refuse to ever compromise original quality for people who don’t own decent TV’s and stereos and don’t recognize quality audio anyway. Others will try to strike a balance that accomodates the widest audience possible.

Neither person is wrong. They just make a choice. That choice is easier to make, the better you know what the final audience and market are and how the show will be presented “on average”. If it’s a DVD for a PBS audience, you’d treat it differently than an infomercial for “Head-on”.

[Mark Suszko]

This is just me talking, my own opinion for what it’s worth.

Did you notice, anybody with about four grand can build one hell of an NLE suite today, except for the DECKS. Digibeta decks and HD decks in various formats are the most expensive part of the suite now. Digibeta is getting pretty long in the tooth although it is still a broadcast staple. The prognosis is the decks and media will get more and more rare over time, and costs associated with using it are going to go up.

The XDCAM format gives you “affordable” (compared to P2 cards) storage in a disk-like format which sort of emulates tape cassettes, in that you can afford to put the disk casette on a shelf as it’s own archive. P2 users can’t affordably or practically do that wth the cards yet, and will be shooting with external firestore units on the cameras and archiving on hard drive packs which will then sit on a shelf as the “archive” and/or be dumped into a larger storage array.

Will XDCam turn out to be another version of Panasonic M2? If it does, you’ll have expensive and ever-harder-to-get legacy format-specific players and recorders to buy and maintain until you transfer everything over to holographic cubes or quantum foam or whatever the heck the next thing is.

This is where the dirt-simple, plentiful, and cheap hard drives the P2 guys use may be a better deal, because you’ll have lots more resources available for the obtaining, playing and upkeep of those drives, they are cheap and getting ever cheaper, so you can afford to mirror the data for a more secure backup in case one whole drive fails. Where the XDCAM relies on a specific, proprietary type of media and hardware, P2 uses the cards but is actually agnostic as to what you record it on, anything with the data rate and capacity suits it just fine. Ergo, Firestore, Citidisk, etc. Also, we keep hearing promises of cheaper, more modern cards and from multiple sources other than Panasonic, which is good news for keeping prices competitive and having alternate access to mroe media. Sony likes keeping things proprietary (memory stick, anyone?).

You would use P2 cameras backed up by portable hard drives so the P2 could be used for fast-turnaround work and the drives as backups and archives after being used for a first edit on long-form jobs.

Your biggest issue becomes keeping software and computer hardware around to be able to recognize the p2 data, but there again you have an advantage we didn’t in the tape days until digibeta: bit for bit lossless clones anytime you need them.

I think we have to wean ourselves from thinking in terms of any one particular physical recording media and concentrate on thinking of everything in terms of creating, handling and storing just a data stream, and the wrapper for that data can be quite mutable as long as the data can still be read. In a sense, you don’t pick any one future format: you pick ALL of them.

How you parse that into a 10-year purchase plan, I’m not sure, but I think it would have to start with lots of removeable drive modules and a central SAN that can grow exponentially. The larger amount of money will eventualy be spent on just converting the remaining legacy media over and over until a “standard” emerges. I would hate to lock into a particualr physical format right now, if it was my own money I’m spending.

[Mark Suszko]

I think everyone there was hesitant to give you the hard number you were asking for because it is such a subjective thing, as I addressed before. You said in another forum for this same question you charged $600 for the rest home spot. While I won’t say what I think you should have charged, I will opine that you likely lowballed that one quite a bit.

Pricing is subjective to a great degree. Look at two different cars. They both get you across town at the same speed limit in the same time. Price is not the same. Why is the Honda FIT cheaper than the Ferrari? For the details that go into them. Same with any two houses, and any two spots.

You know the old joke about the engineer? The factory’s complex machine stops working. They call in the engineer to fix it. He looks it over in a few places, does some figuring in his head for a moment, marks a precise spot on the machine and whacks it with a hammer. Machine springs back to life. He gives the manager a bill for a thousand dollars. Manager says “that’s ridiculous, you only took ten seconds to fix that and anybody can hit a machine with a hammer”.

Engineer revises bill to break out details.
“One hammer, ten seconds of use = $1.00”
“Five years of school and five more of practical experience to know WHERE to hit it with the hammer = $999”.

That’s kinda where we are in any pricing discussion over production. Does your set price of $600 reflect the costs in hours, truly?

Beyond a reasonable amount for standard expenses and the hours put in, you pay someone for the added value of that person’s expertise and creativity. That’s a subjective item. To get them to agree to the same value, you have to market, to sell them. The other fellas were trying to suggest you could do, need to do this part better, so you can ask for the rate you really want and need. Whatever that rate turns out to be.

You’re doing well so far, but you can certainly take it to a higher level. Everyone here is here because we’re trying to help make ourselves and each other better. Keeping an open mind and an open attitude is the only cost of admission here. Disagree all you want, but don’t be disagreeable. You have friends here, even now. Keep reaching out, with a smile. You’ll get one back, or a full refund.

[Mark Suszko]

Hopefully, if it is hanging from stands, you are using a stiff, ridgid pipe or other crossbar at the top and the cloth is fastened to that with clamps or staples or maybe it is glued and screwed between two thick boards in a sandwich. Be sure that it is supported in the middle as well as the ends or the center will sag.

If you have enough that it runs on to the floor for a foot or two, you can take a length of pipe or conduit or heavy chain or smooth edged 2×4 board and lay that right at the intersection where it first hits the floor. Then pull on the very forward end of the cloth to put it under some tension and tape or weight that down evenly on the studio floor. The pipe will want to roll away from the little curve in the cloth at the wall/floor joint. roll it back “uphill” a bit and tape or block it into that position (don’t tape it to the cloth) so it maintains a tension there. Let it sit over the weekend with a humidifier nearby on “low” and by Monday it should be pretty well straightened-out. Remove the pipe.

Something you can do for later is use fabric glue to add loops or a long cloth tube to the back of the green muslin all the way across and just a few centimeters above the floor level. When the glue dries, you can slip the pipe or a length of heavy chain into the sleeve behind the camera side any time you need to stretch that baby out. Adjust height so the pipe is just a hair off the floor.

Muslin’s nature is to be wrinkled. Most times, photgs work with that, accentuating it with edge lighting, but not for greenscreen, obviously. You’ll want to light it from the front as mucha s you can.

[Mark Suszko]

Wow, Christopher Walken sells cars!:-)

Aaron, I’m just going to talk in terms of the last 2 spots that were all-your-own. I don’t think just quoting you a number out of thin air for the pricing is the right thing to do, because every market is different, every client is different, every spot is different. To make a seamless background from scratch or throw down a JumpBack you get the same end product but one takes more skill and time than the other, one ballpark figure can’t express that.

So I’ll repeat the old song. Know your true costs. Set a rate that reflects those costs plus a margin and a markup for profit. Multiply the hours you put in on these last two spots by that rate and you get the ballpark figure. But don’t necessarily reveal that rate to the client immediately, if ever. Compare this rate to what others in the area charge, see if you are somewhere in the middle or upper third. That’s kind of a sweet spot on rates: the lowest-cost guy in town starts out strong with business but is never taken seriously in the long haul for being able to handle higher-end, better-paying stuff. The guy with the highest prices can only keep charging them if his quality levels and results are inarguably high as well.

Do not sell production to clients based on a flat fixed amount, ever. Ever. If you do that, you will always be overbidding or lowballing the costs, and neither one is good for you.

You use your experience to estimate the hours, tell them a minimum and a maximum number of hours you think it takes to bring this baby in, then tell them the hourly rate, with the understanding that if you’re going to go over the estimated maximum, they have to okay it first. At the same time you show the guy three levels of effort you can put into such a spot, then the amount of hours he wants you to put in drives the overall cost.

This is helpful, because some other guy will promise what sounds like a Ridley Scott spot on a hundred dollar budget and look like an idiot. Another may eventually DELIVER something of extraordinary quality, but lose money based on the time and expenses he spent on it. By showing a low, medium and high option for the spot, you can settle a lot of issues right up front and better match the clients’ expectations as well as his budget. And here you also help distinguish your spot over Cableco’s. Their “low option” will be a no-shoot spot with house announcer voiceover and canned music that’s all flying type, and maybe a couple digital stills flown over a jumpBack that may not even fit the theme well. I bet you could throw one of those together in an hour. But is it worth anything, will it bring in business? Is the client wanting something MORE? This is your opportunity to upsell the things you can spend more time on than cableco can. Cableco is about volume production to meet a set price. You can be about custom craftsmanship.

You can sweeten the deal if you like by offering that if you spend less than x percent of the estimated time, you’ll rebate them x dollars. Then you ask (always) for a down payment to start work, that is at least a third of your anticipated total costs. Or if they kick about the rate, offer some added value like compressing the spot for YouTube posting or their web site for free, Cutting a radio spot version for free, extra DVD dubs, that sort of thing.

But you have to know for yourself the minimum amount you can accept, below which, it makes no sense to power up the gear – beyond which, your time is better spent on self-funded projects like your documentaries, or pounding the pavement drumming up sales, or just practicing and running tutorials to perfect your skillsets.

I can’t tell you that hard number amount. Anybody says they can, without knowing what you know, should be suspect.

I can tell you that for spots like the last two I saw on your demo, you are fighting the lowball or even free spots the local cable company will charge when you buy airtime. You can’t compete with 100 dollars per spot or even free, so you are going to have to make your higher quality and effective design and writing more obvious.

The bar spot for example has little to distinguish it from any average cableco-produced spot. I can tell that you spent more time on it than the cableco guy typically would, setting up all the action shots, however they look like they were all shot the same night. But worse, it’s not significantly more distinct or effective than a cableco spot. The voiceover is weakly delivered. The logo is not prominent or persistent, and if you want to show a URL, keep it up way longer. The copy is a little too passive and monotonous, lacks a memorable focus. Suffers from kitchen-sink syndrome, too much info all given equal weight, when topics could be more effective, spread over more than one spot, or left off to other things like a web site. The tag line that’s supposed to riff on the place name is a good idea but is garbled and not made more prominent. This spot becomes obsolete the minute one of the laundry list of day themes is changed, and bars change these things often. That’s a hassle for you and the client to have to recut the spot for every change under your current format. Think about restructuring it as a donut format with an easily replaceable core or one that can be updated with only a new audio track.

The lower thirds are meant to seem funky with all the font changes but just look ununified, and they fight the background video for attention. Either exaggerate them more or lose most of them. You could do a better job of dividing the info load between the voiceover and the graphics to eliminate dissonance and increase synergy. The camerawork is competent but the lighting is weak and flat, everything has the same cast to it and no colors “pop”, making it look like you used a cheaper consumer or prosumer camera. I thought it could use more change-ups between tight and wide shots. The music was not memorable.

Not meaning to beat up on you at all, they are not awful spots, just calling it like you asked me to. And showing you the kind of factors that you could improve on so that when you show the next client your rate, the number feels “reasonable” for the look they are going to get.

The nursing home spot looks more polished of the two. The copy was just okay, the “for a lifetime” line was perhaps not the best choice in this application.

I don’t want to rub salt in a fresh wound, but yes, as a key tool to marketing your services, your web site design needs a reimagining. You might consider creating separate sub-sites to let each one concentrate on one specialty with more elegance and simplicity. Don’t offer commercial production on the same page as weddings or sports, this is bad juju if you want to gain serious business clients. Lose the hard black BG, all-caps, and too much red, this whole page is very hard to read and it looks too much like a myspace page and not a business page. Not saying you need to make it boring, far from it, but you need to make it classy yet accessible and distinctive. I am not a web designer, we can’t all be equally good at everything, so when I decide I need an effective web page, I’m not doing it myself, I’m going to spend money on an experienced graphic artist and web guru to put it together.

I hope some part of this was valuable to you, and I wish you success.

[Mark Suszko]

On a lighter note, it could have been worse. He could have had to work on a 2-for-one combo offer with the travel pillow and THIS product:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJUBFkVrk9s

(note: while safe for work, the link goes to a spot with audio that might be misconstrued by someone not watching the screen, be advised)

I dunno if this is legit or not, they have the Ronco look and feel down very well. But somehow I just don’t think the product was named right.

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[Mark Suszko]

The way I heard it in video camp, you’re supposed to chant “Thelma Schoonemaker” three times with the lights out, and she’ll appear in the mirror. 🙂