[Mark Suszko]

Get a free one from NASA or USGS, then apply your DVE moves and other graphics to it.

[Mark Suszko]

Look into something called the Sport Tube. It’s a variable-length plastic container designed for things like snowboards. It travels under the same sporting goods discount as golf clubs. For that matter, look into using a golf bag container the same way. Throw a putter in there just to stay within the spirit of the thing, but otherwise fill it with the tripod, stands, etc. My friends who ship delicate and long-winged RC gliders by air swear by this method.

[Mark Suszko]

“Oh one other question instead of writing another whole new post:
How does one advertise for thier business? I was hoping to do the show and that would advertise the business and show are work at the same time. But since that looks like it is on hold. How does everyone else get new clients? Do you create your own commercials or what?”

Thanks
Chuck

Well, yes, among other things, that can be done, making spec spots is a well-worn tradition that gives you good creative practice, and a tool or calling card to introduce yourself around to prospective clients, as well as to add to a general portfolio of work examples.

My favorite strategy is to make spec psa’s for a charity or movement you support, that happens to also be one of the pet projects of the CEO at a company where you want to get some paying work. Use that to open doors. If nothing profitable comes of it, you at least contributed some pro-bono towards something for the public good. Take the entire pro-bono project and from the inception, make press releases about it before, during, and after, devote a custom web site to it, leverage your work so that it is being used in as many ways as possible to get you read, seen, talked about.

BTW, don’t confuse advertising with marketing, they are two different things that share some commonalities. Advertising is part of your marketing, but only a part. To get back to your original problem, you don’t want to caption because it eats the original planned profit margin.

You don’t have a captioning problem, as I see it, you have a financing/ budgeting/ marketing problem. If you believe in the show, you should stick with it, and concentrate on more realistic yet creative plans for the financing of it. Don’t give up just as the finish line comes into view ahead.

[Mark Suszko]

We use a live transcriptionist with a telephone hookup, we play the show over the phone and she transcribes it in realt time, sending her keyboard data back thru a phone line to our captioning unit. I think she charges a hundred an hour.

[Mark Suszko]

This question reminds me of an old Steve Martin bit: How to be a millionaire and never pay any taxes.

Step one: Get a million dollars.
Step two, when the tax bill comes, you don’t pay it. Say “I forgot”.

Nobody’s going to hire you to make trailers right off the bat, with no experience or background. You have too many folks ahead of you already doing it, and who are you to any of them anyway.

Well, I know of one exception. The guy behind the trailer and titles for “Seven” came out of a print graphic arts background, I seem to recall. He was brought in specifically because he was not a run of the mill trailers or titles guy, but because he had a rep for striking, disturbing, imaginative imagery, and that’s what they were looking for to give the movie a distinct visual identity. So, by him being out in left field like he was, that was the special ingredient that gave him an edge others didn’t have. He was brought in by networks of contacts and friends-of-friends, all of which knew him by reputation.

The other way to proceed is to not wait for every other candidate for the job to drop dead and leave a hole for you to fill, but to go work on independant projects of your own and with others, and build a reel of editing work.

Trailer cutters, while specialized, are still first of all editors. And they don’t work in a vacuum; the trailer creation proces is very tightly tied to marketing for the movie and the cutters need to answer to a plethora of bosses regarding creative and legal issues as well as advertising strategies and “formulas” or templates for these things thatare pretty copycat… to the point your own creative contribution may not be all that much… not to mention, you often have to deal with the fact the trailer is bing made before the movie is finished, and you have technical limitations as to what you can work with.

I would say the path is to work at being the best *editor* you can be, while networking with marketing types so that you can be in a position to try for a job working on trailers. But you have to realize, since the stakes for movies are so great, it is highly unlikely you’ll ever get the opportunity to work on one without many years of building a rep first. Not when there are many proven guys out there already doing the work.

Unless you find that oddball side-specialty like the example I wrote about. Be “that guy” who does the one really hard and obscure but interesting thing, and hope it comes into vogue for a while. But that’s also a very rare thing. Better plan maybe is to just keep working on anything and everything, build contacts, create opportunities. Make your OWN movies and make the trailers for them.

Make trailers for movies not yet made, as exampels for fund-raising efforts. In the latest Tarantino/Rodriguez movie; “Grindhouse”, they made fake trailers as part of the overall ambiance of the film, and the public reaction to them was so positive, at least one of the fake trailers is going to lead to a real movie now! They say “luck” is created by hard work plus opportunity. Work hard, and get to know as many people as you can while doing that, to create the opportunity. More than other busineeses, Hollywood is full of people who make multi-million-dollar decisions based on relationships. On who they know and who they trust.

[Mark Suszko]

Update: Our engineer finally got the time to open up the dual G5 tower and peek inside. The ATI graphics card has a hole burned thru it clear thru to the other side, a charred area in the circuit board about the size of a US dime, in the area of what looks like a long silver bus bar, on the side of the board opposite the cooling fan. What amazes me is, this board was still working for several days at essentially 90 percent capacity or better, something I myself would not be able to do with such a hole burned thru ME.

We’re trying to figure out if this was just a faulty board, lightning damage (system is on a UPS, but I don’t know about surge protection on it) or what. The rest of the system seems unaffected: we swapped cards with an identical FCP workstation and all is like new. Card is about 2 years old, think we’ll get warranty service on it? Anybody else have expereince seeing ATI cards imitating Drew Barrymore in a bad Steven King movie adaptation?

[Mark Suszko]

Have never used them with firewire, just composite SD video.

[Mark Suszko]

Video baluns over POTS lines, tactical optical fiber (used for golf remotes a lot), renting Canon’s optical canobeam system rooftop to rooftop, and internet streaming. You might look into renting an eng microwave truck from the local TV station as well, if it’s off-hours.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, you certainly are in a pickle. No one technology is going to solve the whole problem.
If it was me doing this, this is what I think I would try:

A rack mount (like the ones musician’s rack their portable audio stuff in) holding an audio and video Distribution Amplifier, a monitor with an outboard select switch so it can see 4 inputs, and four DVD recorders by Panasonic (I have liked using theirs, but you can also go Phillips). And a patch bay or simple routing switcher, all out of the Markertek catalog.

As you shoot each contest, you run a firewire or more practically, a composite video feed to one of the four DVD recorders in the stack. You still roll tape in-camera for later editing. If you buy the version of Panasonic that also has a hard drive, you have back-up master recording there as well, a nice feature.

As one competition finishes, you hit the stop and “finalize” buttons, then select the next recorder in the stack to accept the same live feed from the camera. A push-button router makes this far simpler than plugging cables into a patch bay.

By the time you have reached the fourth machine in the stack, the top one has finished finalizing and the disc is ready to hand off and a fresh blank ready to insert and go… For a nice professional-looking finishing touch, an assistant with a laptop and printer setup could inkjet the program title and other info onto the disk and a blank sleeve before handing it out. Delay from end of skate session to into client’s hands: not more than 40 minutes, perhaps as low as 20. If a customer comes running back and absolutely needs one more dub, you can take one of the four machines out of the rotation, and burn another copy from it’s internal hard drive to DVD-R, somewhat faster than real time.

The ironic thing about these recorders burning to DVD-R is, the longer the recording, the shorter the finalizing step. I have found if the program is fifteen minutes or less, finalizing takes 15 or so minutes. If you filled up over an hour, it’s like five minutes or less to finalize.

The racked stack of recorders can also be turned-around and used to dub as many as 4 at a time (feeding tape out of the camera to all 4 at once thru an audio/ video DA) in real time, but I don’t envision that being done too often. What you MIGHT do though is, record to two DVD recorders at once, then pop the second copy into a DVD dubbing tower with as many drives in the stack as you can afford, to be able to turn out maybe ten identical dubs or more per hour. But it sounds to me like your business model is more along the lines of one or maybe two copies of just one little segment of the show for people interested in their own famiy’s competitor, and those that want the entire shebang would be willing to wait until you get home and edit/author a more comprehensive product. This is not unlike a number of setups for events that share simillarities to yours: horse riding competitions, pageants, depositions, drag races, that sort of thing.

This would be far easier to do with an assistant, who could take the money and orders, plus oversee the units and keep them fed and the proper buttons pushed at the proper times, but I think a single person with great concentration, organization, and bladder control could handle it single-handed.

Best of luck, let me know what you wind up doing.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

Never charge using a flat fee. That way lies madness. Always establish an hourly rate.

You can use other folks in your area as a guide, but the first step is to calculate what it is costing YOU to edit, then build from there to include the profit. What some OTHER guy charges may have little to do with his OR your reality, so blindly copying another guy’s rate is a mistake.

If you are editing on your own gear, figure the cost of buying, maintaining, upgrading that gear, software, expendables, blank stock, insurance, tax witholding, all your costs of doing business. Put your weekly salary down as a cost. Also put in a percentage that goes into the bank to save up. Total all the costs. Divide the costs into the number of working days you want to be working in the year, that tells you how much per day, per week, per month, per year you must make to break even or make a profit. Your rate is that figure, plus whatever markup the local situation enables you to tack on. Aim for a figure that meets your etsablished calculated personal minimums, but sits in the middle of the range of your competitors. But always defer to the floor you calculated, even if it makes you more expensive than anybody else in your area.

The reason the other guys are charging less may be they didn’t do the same homework as you, and are low-balling the rates at a level they cannot sustain. They may be setting a rate that barely keeps the gear out of hock, but doesn’t allow for upgrades or improvements. They may be limited in what they can offer with that rate in areas like graphics, music, audio sweetening, etc. They may have a second and third job that’s underwriting the video business. They may be taking a page from Gates and just trying to starve out all competitors, then raise the rate once they are the sole survivor. They may just be really BAD, and need the lowball rate because they only ever see a customer once. Hopefully, you want to build repeat business, and you do that on reputation, not on price. The quality of your product and the integrity of your dealings is the number one advertisement for this kind of business.

No matter what, NEVER, EVER, believe the phrase: “give us a price break on this first one, and we’ll give you more business in the future, it will be good for your portfolio”. For me, these “magic words” mean these folks are crooks and liars, best referred to your worst rival. You are an editor, not a bank. Still, if they ask for this, and you would walk thru fire for the chance to work with the particular client, turn the phrase around and say: “I’ll give you a terrific break on the third one, let’s see real money at the real rate for the first one”. If they balk, walk away. Best thing you can do. They may even come back, after they’ve burned someone else, or tried a lowball player and been dissatisfied. Once you set a lowball rate, it is VERY VERY hard to raise it. Our markets are an incredibly small circle, word of mouth and reputation will make or break you.