[Mark Suszko]

Your idea will work.

Your problem with the sound recorded earlier may be that you had mis-matched sample rates. If you convert the sample rate from the external recorder to match what your editing system uses, your sounds should stay in synch much better. Seems like a cheaper solution is to see if that fix works before you spend more money.

[Mark Suszko]

I think you gotta bill for the lights, if not all, at least half. You had to make certain commitments in order to be available to execute the work. That included certain gear like lights. I avoid problems like this by paying for that stuff with a down payment from the client before the project started. Then it ceases to become an issue. Another way to go is to bill by the project, keeping a running tab, but you say some of your clients won’t go for this. I think you have to play hardball at such times and say “No, I want to do that, but I can’t do it because you wouldn’t pay for it”. We all hate saying that, but sometimes it is the only way.

It is important you get a good relationship established with the rental place, in your case, a quick call to the rental place may have resulted in them comping or postponing your rental for weather. This is something you need to work out at the time of the rental, and policies are different everywhere you go. In some cases, it may be that if you can return the lights by a certain time, so someone else can use them, the rental shop will tear up the bill or just defer it to the rescheduled day.

The key is to work this out in advance.

[Mark Suszko]

Todd explained it pretty well. May I add that recording a narration track and only then dropping in bits of video to fit the narration is not usually going to create a superior video product. You are making a radio show with pictures when you edit this way. That’s giving up half the power of video.

What gives superior results is a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of both the audio and the video in a complementary fashion. It requires writing to the images rather than just hoping somebody comes up with images that will fit what’s been written.

[Mark Suszko]

Speaking of urban legends, one I had always heard about NAB’s convention leaving it’s early home in Chicago concerned what happened to Sony one year at McCormick Place. The story goes that the Sony engineers set up their own gear in the hall without using or consulting with the union guys. Or paying them, apparently. Overnight, some kind of suspicious electrical fire consumed the entire Sony booth and gear. Sony refused to come back and others followed them out West. I’m a pro-union guy, but even I have to say it makes little sense to wait two hours for an electrician to come over and plug your stinger into a wall socket a foot away for fifty bucks or more. Somewhere a realistic balance needs to be forged if we’re all to keep making a living.

Story may be apocryphal, and there were certainly other practical reasons the show moved west to Vegas: bigger halls, a limit of available hotel rooms in Chicago, crummy April weather, fewer union problems in Vegas, the allure of gambling and evening entertainment options to what was then pretty uniformly an all-male clientele. I’m curious if anyone else had similar stories from the Chicago days?

[Mark Suszko]

Have been resisting mightily to comment further:-) But the anecdotes reminded me of what used to be the Chicago version of NAB once NAB left Chicago, the annual shindig at the now-defunct (removes hat) Swiderski Brothers…

One of my best memories of this was back when the Pinnacle Alladin was brand new and nobody had heard of it yet. Suites were linear A/B roll umatic or beta to one-inch, and your high-end graphics were limited to ADO or Abekas DVE, and while these could do a lot of cool things, they cost a LOT at the time, too rich for a place like our shop. We were hurting for good graphics, with only a VP-2 Chyron and it’s 2 fonts in three sizes, fancy titling was made for us by staff artists painting and using ink, paint, letraset and zipatone on card stock shot under a suspended Ikegami 79e. We tried hard but were sorely limited in the “looks” we could give. The rich guys across town ha da Quantel Paintbox I lusted for, they charged improbable rates for very simple work on it. I went to the Swids show that year and met Paul Holtz, who was sitting at a card-table-sized booth doing a one-man demo to anybody who’d care to walk by. Not many were.

What this reminded me of strongly was an old Volkswagen commercial that itself was a fake retro look at fifties car shows, each booth more bombastic than the next, touting concept cars with things like huge tailfin size or a guy in a lab coat with a pointer expounding on the number of decorative portholes in the sides of the engine compartment… and off in the corner is a nebbishy little guy in a gray suit with a VW bug, quietly talking about what made the car special…

This is what Paul was doing with the Alladin. I watched from a distance for a while, then came closer as I realized what I was seeing was a DVE that, while only single-channel, was stupendously easy to use in realtime without complex programming… and that it ran off a regular PC… that it came with still stores, it’s own virtual switcher, chromakeyer, a paintbox system, a really nice (at the time) CG with hundreds of fonts and even a bundled 3-d animation program. For less than half what an Abekas was going for at the time. I kept asking “Can it do so-and-so?” “Yes, here, I’ll show you”. That refrain went on for maybe 40 minutes. The next closest thing to the capabilities of this box at the time was a Video Toaster, but at that time the toaster’s output was still a little on the rough side, and again, the price was higher.

Next day I told my boss I had seen a single little box and software that would immediately make our edit suite look and work like the big boys downtown, for chump change. We got one and people walking by our edit suite would do a “Kramer” at the door as they saw us do some amazing things. We still use two of those Alladins today, long after Pinnacle dropped them, the first of many mistakes that company made, IMO.

But we’d hardly have noticed or heard of them if it wasn’t for Paul Holtz’s demo skills and ablity to explain the unit.
Paul’s a great guy in my book. He’s still a pretty good VAR as far as I know, though he probably does more training video production now than anything.

[Mark Suszko]

Crystal 3d Impact Pro will run on a very old PC, not a problem. The kernel of the program is probably as old as you are:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Ron, to follow up on your car analogies, if Chevy suddenly decided to not have a presence in the Detroit Auto Show, but said: “We’re not interested in the auto show, but we’ll have a presence in town”, what would you rate their stock at afterwards?

Even if Avid’s strategy is brilliant and I just don’t see it, the immediate affect of this move is not massive new sales, but that a ton of Avid users are going to flood whatever off-site location Avid will use, to get reassurance they are not going to wind up like Discreet Edit* users. Non-Avid people who might have been interested in a purchase are now going to sit on their hands and see what happens instead of pulling the trigger on a purchase, and Avid better hope those folks don’t see another product they like in the mean time. There are plenty.

Avid has lost control of their own story and these kinds of “death watch” memes become self-fulfilling if people lose faith the company is going to be around to support their purchases. It doesn’t help when the last smart move of the company was to couple Avid’s indifferent customer service with Pinnacle’s fanciful notions of tech support. The fact that Avid is not forthcoming with more detail about their new directions at this stage just allows the negative rumor mill to run wild.

I think the smarter move would have been to keep a scaled-down booth at NAB, just like during WW2 when Ford had no civilian cars to sell, but it made ads that said “when new and better cars are built, Ford will build them”, or words to that effect. Keep a smaller booth and make the booth all about the changes, is what I’d have suggested. What Avid has now is a panic, like a run on the bank. How is that good?

Does anyone have a good theory on what Avid is up to next? Avid’s biggest strength was and is file management. Some people even joke Avid is a file management system with an NLE dongle attached. Where could such a tech advantage be useful? Where you have massive, massive projects and assets. My own guess or idea of what might happen is, purchase by Google and converting or building an Avid product into a free online YouTube editing and posting and management/access interface. For a small upcharge, you get a plus version that adds more effects or whatever. There you get complete vertical integration, and a huge, worldwide 24/7/365 market. Granted, it’s mostly of college guys in their dorms or mom’s basement now, but still…:-) YouTube is so amazingly huge, monetizing a proprietary interface to it at even a fraction of a penny per use would generate oceans of cash. More perhaps than Avid got out of being the defacto Hollywood standard all these years. If Hollywood made 400 films this year, that’s about ten miuntes worth of one day’s worth of uploads to YouTube. I didn’t say anything about quality, just numbers.

[Mark Suszko]

Nice to see you again Steve! We miss you ’round the old place.

[Mark Suszko]

This was code for “we can’t pay you what you’re obviously worth”.

Or, “We WON’T pay you what we know you’re you’re worth. Are you desperate enough to take a huge pay cut?”

You might counter with: “I was impressed by your operation and the kinds of clients you serve here…I sure would like a chance to work with you on some of these type of projects all the same; so how do you feel about taking me on sometime on a freelance basis, something to get you over the hump when you’re backed up or need to add some extra manpower or a different approach on a short-timeline project?”

If you offer to go work-for-hire instead of regular salary, know that they will have to pay you a higher hourly rate, but less often, because they’re only going to call you in for the “Hail Mary” plays, maybe to do some slick compositing or whatever your strength is, some low paid fulltime shlub will then plug that into his timeline and take the credit. And you have to carry your own health and benefits and taxes, etc. so that’s why a higher rate for fewer hours. However, this arrangement can sometimes come out looking cheaper on the final billing sheet to the clients, so they may go for a package of a number of agreed upon hours at a defined rate per year. It would be nice if they paid some kind of monthly retainer, but it sounds like they’re too cheap for that.

If you go over that amount, say 50% of what a salaried guy would have made in a year, they have to put you on salary with bennies or stop using you altogether. Below that point, you’re a hired gun they call in as and when needed, but you’re otherwise free to work elsewhere.

For ethical reasons some kind of limited non-compete memo would be apropriate, but nothing that would keep you from doing most work you want to do when not on their clock. This protects them from you swooping in to romance away the clients you’re helping them retain.

You would still be free to do other projects the rest of each month.

Another way to look at your situation might be that you’re finding a market niche that’s underserved, with too many shops of old fuddy duddies that can’t/won’t do the new tricks. If all those guys are in the same market area, there might be enough business there that you could steal away some with a hot new boutique. You would have to do a lot of homework first, not just on the market and competition, but your real costs and if you can meet a rate that’s sustainable yet competitive.

Anyway, don’t get mad, analyze what they are telling you and not telling you, and see what you can make of it.

[Mark Suszko]

RoseBrand in NYC or Denny Mfg. I can never spell that second one right firt try, is it Denny or Denney? Google both along with photo backdrops, you’ll find it.