[Mark Suszko]

Can you elaborate a little more on what you want it to look like?
Do you mean you want the video on the TV to be shown for example inside a color-coded frame? Or do you want to create a literal timeline on the TV screen with frames of video marking key points?
Or perhaps have the video on half the screen, and a map with moving dots on the other, showing where people are going in synch with the video? The more detailed your explanation of what you want to see in the end product, the better suggestions we can offer on how to do it.

[Mark Suszko]

This is why i bill projects in thirds and get a down payment before work that covers any rentals or crew I need to hire. If the cancellation is under 24 hours and I am not getting stuck with any out of pocket costs, they skate. If I have already committed rental funds and myself and the crew have given up another moneymaking opportunity to do the now-cancelled gig, if we can’t get something else to fill in for that day I would bill it. Rain-outs and policy for that should be built into the schedule in advance. Again, my guiding principle here is that I am not the client’s bank.

[Mark Suszko]

Totally unrealistic proposal. Best thing would be to send them to your worst enemy.

[Mark Suszko]

This sounds like a local access type program, so the stress should be less. FCP and Apple Motion together can create a lot of beautiful graphics for your show, including titles, opens, lower-thirds, bumpers, and end credits. Yes, you can hire all this done for you, or check out the many tips at Digital Juice, which caters to a lot of entry-level people as well as more experienced folks.

[Mark Suszko]

Ad agencies thrive on dealing with bizzarre company names that imply youth and hipness.I can’t imagine a typical corporate client that would entertain the hiring of a company called BO Funk or anything more outrageous. Some folks with multiple personalities to the company pick one overall name, then subsidiary names for made-up “divisions”.

This strategy lets you keep the main name, but add a second identity below it that makes a certain comfortable distance or defines a more narrow function or focus. Where this works pretty well is an overall name that’s kind of button-down like Amalgamated Consolidated Industrial video inc. And from there you add a more cutesy name for a sub-division that just handles, say, wedding business, Like ACIV HeartStories, a division of ACIV Inc.

Nobody on the other end needs to know all the mail to these “divisions” and all the phone calls lead back to one in box and one phone at your desk. But it is up to you to keep your identities straight, and it would work smoother to have a reception person filter and route all the calls and etc. to pull off the illusion.

[Mark Suszko]

Painting out graphics supers can be very lucrative if you charge by the hour:-)

Seriously, the only answer to the guy’s need is to ADR or “loop” the actor’s audio with someone else re-doing the voice to specification. This kind of work has always been more popular in Europe, because first of all good location sound gear was hard to come by or pay for over there in the early days, but post production looping was dirt cheap. Secondly, the multitude of languages and dialects over there meant ADR was often a necessity for distribution. Orson loved ADR because of his background in radio. On “Magnificent Ambersons” he tried to pre-record and edit the entire movie in ADR sessions, THEN have actors lip synch it on the set. His technology was unable to make this work well enough and it was abandoned. Today, the tech is certainly there.

[Mark Suszko]

Yep, I got caught with that one just once, as a very young kid. they handed me a camera I’d never used before, a Hitachi, I think, and sent me out to shoot some 3/4. The in-viewfinder talley for record had a red and a green light. The intuitive thing was green meant “go, you’re recording” to me. Turned out in that camera green meant “paused in record mode” Red meant “rolling record”.
It taught me to always triple-check for things like seeing the reels turning. This is now another problem, as tape is disappearing, we get fewer and fewer moving mechanical visual cues regarding system operation. I always freak out now if using someone’s solid-state audio recorder for that reason: no reels to see moving!

Some guys I know worked freelance shooting a high school basketball tourney for the local station. They had a remote truck with switcher, and betaSP decks. During the half-time break, somebody stopped the deck, but left the REC button pressed and lit for E-E, and with free-run time code set, from a distance the deck looked like it was really recording. Nobody did a close check before the second half began. They didn’t record the second half of the show.

Since it wasn’t broadcast live, there was not even a home viewer’s VHS copy to borrow. The hosts had to verbally describe the second half of the game, from memory, after airing the first half of the show and a apology. imagine being the sales guy selling commercial time for the seconf half of THAT program!

That’s the real killer about basketball anyway: nothing matters score wise until the last 2 minutes. 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Story I heard. Client comes in with picture of gramps working on his tractor. The camera shot from the near side of the tractor, gramps is on the opposite side, the tractor obscuring 90 percent of his body.

Client wants the tractor painted out so he can see the rest of grampa.

photoshop can do that, right?:-)

[Mark Suszko]

The main programming and national commercials look good because they come down from the satellite, from a large, well-funded and staffed master control someplace that has real engineers and knows what its doing.

Your local spots are inserted at the local level, at the head-end of the local cable system. You have no way to know, unless you visit each such facility, how they ingest your masters. If they have a server-based spot system, it could be what is happening to your analog tapes is, they are being played out of a beat-up old deck in analog composite, with levels not carefully set, thru a composite video feed and indeterminate chain of beat-up proc amps and TBC’s, into some kind of converter before it hits the server. That server probably has numerous capture settings for compression that are a balance between storage capacity and quality. Guess which side of that trade-off the local cable place is going to select. Yep, they’ll re-master it into their server at the lowest possible quality level because they are hurting for drive space. Any wonder then, that your baby comes out the other end looking beat up?

Probably the thing I would do is to go to each site and see what their ingest process is. If it is digital, bring the master to them in a digital format that doesn’t need re-compression or translation steps before it can be directly used in their system. That’s probably the biggest improvement you can make, is my guess.

[Mark Suszko]

Can I get mildly religious with you, just for a minute? This is a story I have to repeat to myself any time I feel jealous about someone else’s good fortune.

Bible parable about a man who owns a vinyard:
His grapes are bursting-ripe and ready for picking, and in the first light of day he hires some men to come pick the crop.
Little later in the day, he realizes he’s going to need more men, hires them around noon.
Later in the afternoon, he sees bad weather is coming and anything left overnight unpicked will be lost, so he rounds up some more guys and puts them to work too, only for the last couple hours.
The harvest is a success, and he pays off all the workers.
Workers who got hired in the early dawn hours complain to him that he has paid the same full day’s wages to the guys that worked only an hour, and that’s hardly fair.

His response:

“Is it my money to do with as I please or not?”
yep.
“Did I or did I not give you every penny I contracted with you for?”
absolutely, the full amount.
“Then what do you care how much I paid the OTHER guy?”
…

So, the point is not to beat yourself up over someone else’s success; in your case, the guy that preceded you, but to concentrate on the simpler issue of: are you getting paid exactly what you contracted for. Also, maybe it’s best to always sleep in and be late to the gig, you get paid more:-)

While the average rate around you that others get is a handy guide, it is not some kind of law they have to pay you the top of the range.

Now, like the bible story says, the worker is worth his wage, and no one begrudges you getting your due.
But it is you that must take the initiative to define the range of what is reasonable compensation for your level of performance. It very well could be they can’t afford more, just as easily as it could be the case they are shafting you. The only way to find out, is to have it out.

Understand, you have to be willing to quit and walk away from the negotiations at any time, and *they* have to know that, if you are to have a hope of winning the negotiation. Have your demo reel updated, take most of your office decor home leaving bare essentials that will fit in one box. Start coming to work dressed a little bit differently, wear slacks, a nicer shirt and tie, if you normally wear open-collars and jeans. If asked what’s up with the threads, say nothing, really, but when you go to lunch, always leave the building and go somewhere they won’t see you… Later they’ll assume you’ve been interviewing on your lunch hour and may have another place lined up. In fact, actually DO interviews if you can manage it, but faking will work as well psychologically. Prepare yourself to find or have another place to go, or you have no leverage. I don’t know if at my age I have the guts to do that, with mouths to feed, but that’s what it takes, to be willing to walk away from a sure thing if it isn’t the right thing anymore.

Be sure they really understand the level of commitment and effort you have out into this job, remind them of the past successes you had together. Documentation, hard evidence, don’t rely on memory. You can explain what that same job would have cost them last year using th eold guy’s rates, and how much you’ve saved them. Then let them know that while you are very happy here and would love to stay, you have to get more to do more, and that means reduce your workload or pay you for the extra work.

Fridays are for firings and sneaking out the admission of bad news and embarrassing revelations. Hit them up early in the week, Monday or Tuesday, so they have to look at you in the eyes the rest of the week: “Bob, I gotta talk to you and Jim about something important, can we schedule some time this afternoon?”

Play it with innocence and team spirit: “…you know, Bob, I think we’ve all just let this situation sneak up on us, we’re all so involved day to day with getting the best job done and on time, that we sort of lost sight of the larger picture of just how much is being done, and I know you’ve said how happy you’ve been with this work, so I think out of fairness, it’s really time we update the compensation to more accurately reflect the level of commitment I’ve given this working relationship. What do you say to setting a schedule for a salary bump somewhere down the road? When can I expect a merit increase?”

If they say no outright, put the remaining personal stuff from your desk in the cardboard box and say you’re very sorry this couldn’t work out, and no hard feelings, (smile with a sympathetic expression of pity for them the whole time) but business is business and you’re going to have to tender your notice. You’ll clean up the last of the active paperwork before you leave today, so everybody knows where all the in-progress work is. They might want to stall you, avoiding scheduled meetings to talk about this while they scramble to find a replacement.

(cheerfully, sympathetically: ) “That’s okay, I understand if something came up and we can’t meet today, but listen, Bob, I hope we can re-schedule with the both of you soon, certainly within the next two weeks, because (two weeks from today) is my last day.”

It will cost them more to replace you than keep you. In money as well as lost productivity and goodwill with clients. But they may still let you go, figuring you are too wised-up now to be strung-along anymore with tales of poverty. Time for fresh meat, and all that. From what you have said, you’re basically the shop now. You have them by their synch generators, as it were, particularly if this is a heavy time for production with many deadlines. If you don’t ask for more money, you’re likely to earn their contempt, if they are the “grinder” type.

If you put it as sweetly as I did up above, and they are regular guys, what should follow is a nuts and bolts negotiation of when and how much you’ll get raises. Put it to them that you are all for pegging increases to performance, and that you can help set up quarterly reviews towards that. With the expectation that good reviews mean a bump up. In this way, you’ve diplomatically set a 3-month deadline for them to pay more or you walk, and set the timer ticking. That also buys you some more time for your job search while still working.

First work on getting them to admit a raise is in order. Take your time getting to an actual figure for the amount, because in that negotiation, the first man to say a number loses. Keep nodding and looking them in the eyes as they suggest a figure, prompt them with reminders of the multiple functions you serve. This is a good time to offer them the olive branch of dealing out some of those “intangibles” in lieu of cash, that I mentioned earlier. You are dealing with them as fairly as you can on this, offering every possible assitance to reach a fair and honorable deal for both sides, believe it!

I wish you all the luck in the world on this, it is a very tough position to be in. Your proper attitude is vital. You want to remember that no matter how much they might imply how replaceable you are, your destiny is ultimately not in their hands, but in yours. YOU are the one with the power to decide when to stay and when to walk out and find something else. The worst they can do is fire you, and that’s just freeing you to go somewhere better. If you’re working the kind of hours you imply, for the rate they pay, that salary’s not much above a senior burger-flipper/night manager’s wage, and you probably don’t even get the cool uniform and plastic name tag. You are not doing this work as a charity, but a livelyhood.

Raise or call.