[Mark Suszko]

Where I work, before I joined up, one of the engineers had a hook hand and would occasionally create shorts and damage when working on circuit boards and decks and the like. We said we made a motley crew; cameramen wearing glasses, audio op with a hearing aid, repair man with a hook, we were like some kind of Earl Buttz joke waiting for a punchline.

[Mark Suszko]

Oprah and the BBC use Schedu-all. Most small operators probably use a separate contact management program, an accounting program, and a calendar program.

[Mark Suszko]

Great catalog and site: fullcompass.

[Mark Suszko]

There are a number of these solutions out there, some let you update remotely overnight thru an internet connection. Sony makes one system, Doremi is another, like Adtec Digital, and there are more, in various price points. Some are hardware and software integrated together, some are just software, like SCALA and others. But yes, they sort of work like a TIVO in reverse: from a drive storing all the programming and stills, they will play back from a preset schedule, and can loop in various combinations with different combinations each day if you wish. You can access their playlist and make updates for things like emergency weather schedule annuncements and the like, from anywhere with an internet connection.

[Mark Suszko]

You’re very kind to say so, but it’s just opinions, not really article-worthy unless you collected a much larger sampling of opinions from all kinds of editors and could derive some sort of consensus out of it.

I’m sure there are editors that love a bright, open, heavily-decorated workspace. My office where I write and do my email and whatever is crammed with chatchkies and wee-wahs, from my toy robots and sci-fi toys to my tiki-bar mug and memento collection, (complete with autographed head shot of Don Ho), and about a hundred pictures of my wife and kids. But in the editing room, I really don’t want all that around. Depending on if I’m doing something like a long roto or paint session, I’ll have music or dialog from AMC chanel on the cable TV playing to listen to, but that’s about it. When I’m really into my editing, I’m basically in church.

[Mark Suszko]

This is in my opinion really something best left to an engineer/architect to handle for you: the savings you get from not having to rip out and re-do something twice or having to live with bad compromises and wrong specs more than makes up for the higher upfront cost.

But here are a few things I would like to see in a facility, from my personal preferences.

1. I strongly believe in the windowless, timeless “editing cave”. I used to see all these fancy photo spreads in useless mags like POST, showing highly decorated and fanciful editing rooms with windows, nay, even sun porches, and made to look like everything from submarine conning towers to the bridge of a UFO to a gas station grease pit. No offense meant, Grinner, your rock and roll room was not as far-out as some I’ve seen, and there’s nothing wrong with a litttle kitchsy flavoring here and there, but overly-themed rooms are stupid:-) NO, I believe in creating a dead-quiet, neutral, uncolored, womb-like space, well-ventilated and indirectly lit to individual taste, ergonomic, and all concentrated on the screen and speakers. I want to be able to sit down in the AM and forget time passing until my bladder is about to explode, then look at the clock and see it’s past dinner time. What decor there is needs to be out of the peripheral vision of the editor while they are concentrating on the screens. The telephones, if at all present, should be one-way, out-only, or moderated by an intermediary/recptionist, minimizing outside distractions.

2. There has to be room for clients, much as I find them generally distasteful and distracting to the creative process:-) Let me talk about architecture for a minute. I have seen many an edit room that was built along old design principles, emulating the “trench” style live switching rooms of major production offices or maybe the firing room at Canaveral. In such a layout, the editor sits far up front, in the “Sulu/Checkhov” position. Client/Producer and retinue sit in the equivalent of a “Kirk chair”, above and behind. The result? Most of the time you can’t see the client’s facial and body reactions to your work, so you don’t pick up subtle cues about what’s working and what’s not. Heck, you may waste half your preview playbacks playing timelines while the guy(s) behind you on the couch are not even looking.
If you try to keep some eye contact while working, you get a crick in your neck.

This physical arrangement makes the editor seem like the cab driver, and client the passenger telling him where to go; the unspoken subtext is very hierarchical and top-down, where they tell you what to do. In such a physical setup, if you or the client want to create more of a sense of co-creation or creative partnership, he has only one choice; to come up front and cram himself up next to you, bumping knees under the console, getting in the way whenever you want to slide over and work a second or third keyboard or tablet or deck conrols, etc. with his B.O., coffee or smoker breath, and all his papers and work tapes and EDL sheets and other creative detrius. This is not optimal. This description is also not of any “particular” client of mine, more of a composite over many years. They’re not all bad!:-)

I have my own answer to this from an architectural and ergonomic perspective. I call it the L-shaped peninsula. Basically, you keep your same console arrangement. To your left, say, runs a peninsula type extension or return type desk, and your client sits at a right angle to you on the far side of this, the narrow, bar-like desk between you, with a second “God Monitor” right there in the crook of the “el” shape, at their left elbow, where he can see it plainly but it does not obscure your vision of each other. Now you have some psychological and actual “breathing room”, while still both comfortably close, and you can each make or break eye contact as and when you want while collaborating. He’s also got room for his laptop, stuff, and papers without having to balance his latte cup next to your keyboards, switchers, decks, and consoles. To me this is a great layout.

As to suggestions about multiple suites, if you have the room, create a spare one or two, even if it will likely remain empty for the near future. You can use it in the meantime as a backup audio record booth, secure client library room, a place to run the DVD dubber for quick one-offs, a quiet office where the client can have his manhood ripped from him in little fleshy bits courtesy of his home office and supervisor, in privacy, instead of awkwardly in front of you. Stuff like that. If you are teaming up, one of the spare rooms could be a photoshop or animator or audio sweetening or colorist or web comprssionist room or a space for scanning flat art or digitizing into the SAN without tying up an active suite. It will never be cheaper or easier to build out the rooms than right up front and all at once, so build-in some future-proofing at the start. Lay in as much infrastructure and spare capacity as you can afford. Extra, currently dark fiber runs, extra network cabling, extra copper runs, etc.

For soundproofing walls, you have to stop vibration via conduction as well as transmission. Air gaps, rubber insulator strips and huge inertially dead masses accomplish this. I’m a fan of concrete tile/backer board rather than drywall for making the basis of acoustically dead rooms. If it’s not practical or affordable for every wall, at least for shared walls or the wall immediatly in front of the noisiest source. If you build the rooms right you won;t have to fix them with expensive sonex treatments later. And you won’t have the effect of sitting in a multiplex listening to your quiet drama while a war movie is bleeding in from the cinema next door.

The elevated computer flooring is a good idea, but it tends to sway unless well-anchored and it can transmit noise unless baffled properly. I would suggest that removeable carpet squares are okay over the top of that except you don’t want the square carpet tiles right in the area where you run your chair back and forth a lot: in one of our suites, the rolling action is always prying the tiles up and creating a bumpy, ugly mess on the floor there. One-piece carpet in the runner area please:-) Ours is a multipurpose edit and control room originally designed for a 3-5 man crew. Nowadays it’s a one or two-man room, but the old ergonomics forces a lot of chair-rolling to reach various controls all day.

And be careful on the carpet selected; we had no choice in our building, and the micro-fibers released daily by normal traffic lead to monthly air filter checks on the gear that look like your home dryer lint trap. Maybe running electrostatic air cleaners overnight would help keep the gear from clogging up so soon…

I agree that a central tech core or alley is the way to go, perhaps if you want four rooms, you run them either side of a narrow enclosed alleyway, which adds some sound isolation to at least one wall of each suite, but keeps common cable runs short and accessible, and it becomes a place to hide your racks of noisy or hot-running stuff too.

Create a “team space” where a handful of people can lounge around in close proximity and talk over projects and concepts and plans and whatnot. This is the area where you can “theme it up” to the hilt with wacky decor if you want:-) A break room with dinner-height conference tables is not right for this: you want low couches and benches and maybe low cocktail or end tables, one large flat space with track for holding up storyboards or whatnot. The difference is subtle but vital.

That’s the kind of space I’d not mind working at.

[Mark Suszko]

One thing that helps is to explain up front that to keep the bills paid, the company (you) has a set monthly limit on pro-bono hours, past which requires cash money or a wait until “fresh hours” open up and become available next month. You let them know some others folks already have some of those hours booked ahead, and that paid gigs always supercede virtual payed gigs…

Then as these guys have all said, you create a “virtual bill”, an invoice as if it was being billed at standard rate, showing the hours and the fact that it’s discounted or comped.

I find that in video and in life in general people don’t respect “free” resources as much as ones that cost dearly or even a little, so they tend to get sloppy in their prep or pre-production work, then hand you a mess that leads to overtime.

Putting a hard limit on Pro-bono hours takes you off the hook and puts them on notice that avoiding a cash bill is up to them and their advance prep work. If the project is not all that important to them, the extra wait for new free hours gives them time to get their act together and you time to do paying gigs. Should they get desperate and the deadline looms, they retain the option of paying “real” money to get it finished, and that is almost certainly going to still be a fabulous deal for them versus paying full-rate elsewhere. What it does is gets them to invest more effort into their end of the work because they suddenly perceive a value.

[Mark Suszko]

Not exactly the evocation we were looking for in the search for inspiration, but whatever let’s you find your, um, bliss.

[Mark Suszko]

Q: How do you make a million dollars in this business?

A: start with two million.

[Mark Suszko]

Zvi, then I think I agree with you that you are not ready…YET. One thing I would suggest you do is, apprentice yourself to someone already established, that uses a more advanced camera and work as an assistant to them for a while. That’s common for beginners in the biz here that want to turn pro: LEARN from a pro. For example, volunteer to run second b-roll camera for an established wedding videographer for a paltry sum, just to get the practice. If you click with the guy, he may even refer you some business and supply you with one of his cameras, if he’s for example double-booked some weekend.

Again, my experience of this is only in the States, but over here, you can go to a pro broadcast video equipment rental place and get some hands-on experience with the cameras right there in the sales room when they are not being rented. The typical pro rental shop here indeed *encourages* people to do this, since the better you know their rental gear, the better care you will take with it, the more often you’ll rent it, and the more positive and profitable of an experience everyone derives from this. It’s a mitzvah:-)

So I would budget myself the time to pay one or more of these places a visit, let them get to know you, perhaps establish an account with them for when you are ready to rent, explain you are going to start doing some productions and eventually rent a camera from them, but you need to get some hands-on tutoring first. Indeed, I think it would be a great chance for you to try out all the brands they have and compare and contrast their features to see what you thik will work best for you.

Another route we have for gaining experience here is local cable access channels and comunity college instructional classes. Both let you get training and experience with hands-on use of all the hardware. The larger cities have such classes going on monthly or quarterly. There are also 3-day and 7-day seminar training camps run by companies like Sony, that have company pros walk you thru every step of an actual production from pre-production thru aquisition and final editing. You could make it sort of a business vacation to take such a course, and you probably should. Over here, you might even be able to get a business tax deduction for it (ask an accountant).

Invest in your skills in these ways first, then work on the company idea, so you can back up every promise you make to a client with solid pro performance. And don’t give up!