[Mark Suszko]

Phone call audio is not very good quality no matter what you do. If they are out of town, you can record them at a studio with an ISDN line, or, you can send them a tape recorder and mike, then ask them your questions over the phone live while they record locally. You get back a clean broadcast quality recording that way, relatively cheaply.

[Mark Suszko]

Paul, maybe you just need to change what you are editing? It takes some work to get in the door, but working on forensic video for lawyers can be both interesting and profitable. Such projects include prospectus videos used by juries in deciding amount of compensatory damages. These are often called “day in the life” videos, because they depict a day in the victim’s life so a juror can see exactly what kinds of challenges and losses they face, and make up their minds on a suitable amount of compensation for that. Other kinds of forensic videos can include creating or re-creating an event using animation and other tools to demonstrate some argument in a case. And of course there are the bread-and-butter deposition videos, which are boring in terms of creativity, but very useful and sometimes interesting. I got to work on a few of these kinds of things early in my career, and one was especially gratifying, if not financially all that rewarding. Long story but I think it’s worth it:

There was this kid, maybe 4 years old, profoundly damaged with cerebral palsy by an accident in the O.R. during birth, had near-total paralysis, lots of issues, could not speak, or communicate beyond grunts. It was hard to tell exactly what his mental state was because of a lack of ability to communicate; he could be pretty high-functioning, but trapped inside his own skull and unable to reach out, nobody knew how much of him was “in there”. The trial was over and fault already ruled on, all that was left were the damages to award. The video I helped out on showed a day in this kid’s life, which clearly demonstrated the high level of care he was going to need for his entire life, which needs to be paid for. And that’s no small thing: it is quite different to see big dollar figures on a piece of paper and try to decide if they are too much or not enough, and to see the person trying to live that life.

But we also showed an experiment done by the Rehab Institute with what was then cutting-edge technology (back around 1984) .

Cobra attack helicopters have a technology their gunners use: anywhere they look, the machine guns of the helicopter track and follow the eye movements, look at a target, you can kill it. Some clever ELECTRICAL ENGINEER at the Institute developed a breadboarded system similar to the military targeting unit. It bounced a harmless invisible IR laser beam off the boy’s eyeball. The boy was fitted with large eye glasses with the laser diode and receptor built into the frames, clear lenses and tiny changeable icon decals all around the perimeter of the lenses. When he stared at an icon for several seconds at a time, and blinked, the laser would read the eyeball’s position, and an early Apple Lisa on the back of the wheelchair would interpret the icon and speak thru a voice synthesizer for the boy, kind of like the device Steven Hawking uses today. We documented the device and a test run using it to allow real 2-way communication between the boy and his parents and therapists and teachers… he could now ask for a glass of water when thirsty, or food when hungry could even say if it was too sweet or salty, he could say if he was hot or cold, sleepy or happy or sad or other things, like “mom” and “dad”… and make sentences because he could also count and spell using the “magic glasses”. So a world was opened up to this boy and his parents with the experimental device.

The jury watched this video and awarded a then-record amount of several million over the boy’s lifetime, both for his personal care and also specifically directed to further development and refinement of the machine prototype, so he and many others could all benefit from it’s development.

I only got day rate for 2 days or so for my little part in the shooting and gripping for the project, but the satisfaction of seeing a tool of war turned into an instrument of healing and communication was so very, very rewarding, I’d have done my job for free.

So why I bring this up is, don’t necessarily give up on the double-E degree: there is a universe of possibility for applications of your knowledge and imagination if you think past the obvious. but if you really have your heart set on video, you can find a lot more things to do than just weddings. Just one idea to throw out: video document LAN parties for groups of high-end gamers: combining screen captures of their realtime play with their audio comments and maybe some effects to creat a hybrid documentary with elements of machinima. or what about your dojo: slap some bright tape markers to a pair of sparring guys, extract motion data from the camera, and animate their bout so it can be examined in 3-d from all perspectives and at any speed forward or back… cool?

….and I feel the Jolt Cola starting to ebb from my system, so I’m going to stop here. The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise for the reader to fnish. That would be YOU:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Well, *I* am not brave enough to try it, but a person living in a large enough market could arrange a 2-year lease deal on the HD deck, then turn that around and rent it out to others for a day or a week at a time at a rate somewhat more than what the payments on the lease were. In essence this is what cab drivers do: buy the car and the exPENSIVE license tag, then hit the road to make it back a mile at a time.

The math is tricky, and I am not an accountant. You’d have to figure out how many times a month you need to send it out to make your nut, and if there are enough editors and shooters around to keep the demand high, or if you need to divert time and money into first marketing the thing to gin up business. If you can get some kind of tax deduction off the lease, that may tip the thing into profitability. Consult a financial professional.

Renting out gear can be kind of fun, at least it has been for my side business: guy comes to door with check, takes a box of prompter stuff, brings stuff back the next day, repeat. MUCH better than wasting every Saturday shooting other people’s weddings and not seeing your own family half the weekend… S’all good! Except…

You also have to figure in what to do if the “stuff” breaks down and your renter is waiting. Maintenance. Insurance against damage or loss because they didn’t tell you the job was going to be on the aft end of a bass boat. All of those add up to raise the minimum amount you need to achieve to make a profit on the deal. And enough profit to make your personal investment of time and energy worthwhile as well.

Sometimes the best business decision you can make is not to get into one to start with. Then again, you know the saying; ships are safest when anchored in a harbor, but that’s not what they are built for… calculate risk versus reward and make your own decisions, in the end, that’s what everyone has to do for themselves, and sometimes it works out and other times it doesn’t. You learn a lot either way. Teddy Roosevelt had a good quote I’ll mangle here, that he’d rather be a man who tried mightily and nobly failed than someone who never tried anything.

[Mark Suszko]

One of the really smart things Adobe did was give away Premiere a lot in the early days, also thet didn’t fight all that hard regarding pirated copies. Back in the day, you could get Premiere bundled free with a cheap firewire card, Pinnacle did a lot to promote this kind of thing but other companies bundled Premiere free or for a low price as well. The result was tremendous market penetration. A whole lot of people got their hands on premiere before they could afford something else. Many have stayed with it and become evangelizers for it. Even shops that declare themselves Avid shops are likely to have a copy of premiere tucked away in some corner for something. It’s powerful yet inexpensive, and there are many freelancers, particularly college students on a budget, with some basic Premiere skills that can be brought in on an as-needed basis. For lower-budget cable and TV news outlets, Premiere has long been a popular option.

The other smart thing Adobe did was make Premiere and AfterEffects such a powerful inter-active combo. AE now may exceed Premiere in total number of “seats” out there, but the gist is, where you have one, you usually also have the other. Frankly, Premiere is about as good as any of the other 3-4 popular editors, it is the power of it synergizing with AE that is the main attractor to the setup for power users. If I was going to offer a Premiere-based editing suite for rent, I would insist it also have AfterEffects, at least the basic version, indeed, might as well have the whole Adobe creative suite bundle on there, with photoshop, Illustrator, an audio program and DVD authoring too.

Here’s the business case question you have to ask yourself: who “needs” your proposed suite, are there enough of them that will pay what you need to meet your bills and make a profit?

The problem I see right off the top is, most people good enough at editing with Premiere and AE can afford to have their own copy already. You can put together a decent system and software for five grand or less, heck, two grand or less if you scrounge a bit and DIY some.

But…

If the editor is charging appropriately for their work, they can afford to buy their own tools with the profit from between one and five jobs, after which, they get ALL the profit from the system and don’t need you. And this is what the majority of editors will do. Most especially anybody who wants to cut long-form “films” or documentaries, where they will be spending a lot of time on the project, it makes more sense to own the tools than rent. Like owning a home rather than renting it over 20 years.

The computer and the software are cheap. Storage is cheap, a buck a gig or less. The breakout/interface box you mention is not all that expensive either for what it does.

What remains expensive are the fancy decks. Especially with HD formats and other broadcast formats, the decks cost as much or more than your computer and software, and unlike software, cannot be pirated and used for “free”. If I wanted to make money off of renting to editors, I’d rent them broadcast level HD decks and the breakout box. And maybe cheap drive arrays.

I am afraid that if you want to cater to new or inexperienced editors with a system they can play around and learn on, you may not be able to charge them a sufficient rate to get a good return, without scaring them off, plus, they have cheaper options available. Power users would already have their own systems. You’d be left with out-of-towners or very occasional users, not likely a big enough base to justify the investment, plus, you’d spend more money trying to market to those types.

So to me it’s not even a question of Premiere vs. Avid vs. FCP. The problem is connecting the needy to the need. You have a suite now but maybe want to add capacity? Or just variety, for people who prefer Premiere to whatever ese you already have? But you didn’t go into a lot of detail about your current business and why you were thinking about this in the first place, so I might be making some wrong assumptions based on missing or inaccurate data. Maybe if you could give some more details about the whole thing, I could think about it differently.

[Mark Suszko]

Apart from the prestige of working for a high-profile client, what your samples ostensibly show someone is that you have the skills to solve their problems, whatever those are. Chances are you are not going to get hired a lot to just keep re-making the exact same spot or look just with different client names. Some of that does go on, but that kind of slavish imitation work is a relatively small and lower-end sector of the field. It’s not lasting or even very lucrative, more like churning out weekly used car lot spots. Your samples should show your specialization but should also underscore your versatility. In 3-d animation work, for example even if all you really do well is keyframe, it doesn’t hurt to show you can model, texture, and rig and light as well. If you are a master of a particular technology, try to also show applications of that technology that are unexpected, and you stand less chance of getting pigeonholed as a one-trick pony.

So anyway if you want to show off a certain technique you applied to, say, the actor with the squinty eyes, referenced earlier, you could certainly re-create a similar example with a different person, not refer to the original at all, and apply the same solution on your own time, with some other person than that actor. When you build that example on your own time with your own tools, you own it fairly completely then, and can use that example however you want to. (Well, if there was no NDA regarding the technique. The Apple iPod FX guys are keeping very mum for likely that reason).

Look right here at the COW for a sort of example of this: the demo of making a glowing light trail using particles that *looks* like the effect used in the Apple ipod TV spots. It does not purport to *be* the same technique, but only an imitation of that particular “look”, one possible method for achieving it.

Where this example is not so good is, it contains within it a very VERY short sample clip from the actual Apple ads, just to orient the viewer as to what it is we’re trying to replicate. A stickler could raise a fuss about that, unlikely as it may be, but again that’s the crux of the issue we started talking about. You want to avoid the chance for entanglement from the beginning.

You might have hassles using Apple’s footage in your personal promo pieces, but if you completely re-create a technique on your own, that’s easier to defend. But you don’t want to imitate the original so slavishly they can sue for impersonating the product. Case law would not be on your side. Its a fine line to walk. But I think you’re definitely safer making your own product mock-ups for demos than showing client work that’s not 100 percent cleared in advance by the clients.

Sometimes, clients WANT you to use a lot of their stuff for promos; it’s all part of a larger promo strategy to have as many people talking about a product like a show or commercial as possible, from whatever angle. But not all clients are that enlightened, nor do they all have the same agendas regarding publicity. Always, the best policy is to explore this issue with the client at the outset, and get it in writing.

When the pay for the gig is not the best, permission to use examples in private demo reels becomes a big bonus negotiating point, and the client often sees it as an easy free give-away from their standpoint in negotiations. Just be sure the person who gives you the permission is actually qualified to make that commitment on behalf of the company, or they can take it back later on a whim.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve been working the same job out of Springfield for over 20 years now, part of the state government’s AV department. When the wind is wrong, you can smell Decatur from here:-)
(The ADM plant distills a lot of corn there)

[Mark Suszko]

Corollary to this is the fact that the lower down on the corporate or government ladder you go, the longer (and more tightly spaced) your title CG gets:

President
Vice-President
Assistant Vice-President for blah-blah
Executive Assistant Vice-President for blah-blah
Manager, blah-blah-based-blahbetty-blah for Blah-blah, (plus throw in some degree initials underneath that)

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t know why anybody would mess with a private service when you can get stamps or metered mail done online thru USPS. Anybody else doing the same for you would have to charge some kind of mark-up, so I don’t see how they could be pricing less than USPS. And USPS doesn’t need you to sink a large advance amount into some account. You can also now buy postage using paypal. My wife uses this when shipping out stuff she sells on ebay. I haven’t watched closely how she does it, but she makes a paypal payment and she gets back a file that prints out as a complete shipping label with the proper codes and everything. So she doesn’t have to even go to the post office, the regular carrier picks it up on the daily run, as long as it is not really bulky or heavy.

[Mark Suszko]

Tim, it’s not unheard of that companies for one reason or another will go as far as suing the artist for “infringing” by showing the work without the company’s permission. I think where you see this most is in advertising situations. But you also see this for example with Disney artists. Disney controls artistic product like South African diamond mines control their miner’s output.

The companies have many reasons, some logical, some not so much. Whether we like that or not makes no differnce, what counts is what the initial deal covered, and whatever case law would support you if you chose to argue it in court.

[Mark Suszko]

Depends if you are work for hire, to some extent. Best policy is to get something in writing from the company that says, even if they own your work product, you retain the right to show watermarked samples for portfolio purposes. Some companies are exceptionally tight-fisted about retaining all rights and will not even allow such portfolio/sample uses in case it may be seen as diltuting their brand or infringing copyrights.

Also, if you suddenly bring up sample reels and portfolios, the natural question that arises with you employer is: “Why do you need samples, are you looking for another job?” So the best policy situation is that you establish this from the beginning of your employment, that you are allowed to keep and show samples of your work product to others, provided they are watermarked or otherwise rendered impossible to use for infringement purposes.

Something else you could do in this regard that is less tension-producing is to ask permission to enter samples of their stuff in various contests.

This gets you around a couple of the barriers; even if you have to pay the entry fees yourself, it might be worth it, because it permanently weds your name to that piece of work in a public way you can use for references later, no matter what changes at the company down the road.