[Mark Suszko]

We switched from Vintens to Sachtler Video-15-Plus, with carbon fiber legs. We are very happy with these. Apparently a majority of Chicago news shooters are as well, because they all have the same model. I LOVE the elevator column, it gets me way over the fences,heads, crowds, and other obstructions at many shoots and can look like a low-altitude crane shot.

The legs have held up for two years now, where the Vinten legs, a combination of aluminum with carbon spreaders, started to break down after maybe six months. The mid-level Vinten spreaders were always popping their glue joints. On Vinten advice, after a couple repairs that kept failing, we went to their soft rubber floor-level spreaders, as we saw other stations doing. This works okay but picks up dirt and mud like crazy, and is poor on very irregular terrain or stairs (which is why we started with mid-level spreaders). The individual leg locks on the Vinten were time consuming to deploy or tear down, and their “click-over” knob system always left me feeling unsure if the leg was really secure or not. Not a problem unless you do a lot of ENG grab-and-go, where speed is life.

The Sachtler leg locks work much faster and easier too, it’s nearly a one-handed operation to deploy or break down the tripod. The carbon makes it light too. Keep the center column clean with an occasional wipe of a damp rag and the fold/central lock mechanism will not bind.

Head wise, I was happy with the Vinton heads, the Sachtler is just as good there.

I think the only thing besides price difference between carbon or aluminum left to think about is, do you have the kind of operation where you might need to field-repair the tripod legs? You can field-repair aluminum legs almost anywhere, with even crude tools, but high-performance, high-stress carbon fiber epoxy composite of this nature is not practical to repair, you have to replace the component. As the Air Force found out. We had a car back-up over an aluminum tripod, (I swear I was not even ON that shoot!) and while one leg bent a wee bit, it didn’t effect useability. Carbon will crack under the same abuse. Oh, and carbon/epoxy may soften in high desert heat over 150 degrees, where aluminum won’t. But I think I’d be malfunctioning before my sticks do:-)

Other brands I like include Miller and O’Connor.

[Mark Suszko]

I would suggest in most cases, to simplify billings, ask the client up front if you can use their account number for things like Fedex or personal couriers. Say that this is your standard practice, and they may not blink, unless they have not set up such an account.

This has the advantage of making them think twice about how many things they need shipped right away, and saves you trying to guess how many trips or ships to plan for in the budget. You can say it speeds the process (it does) to do this as standard practice, and that they have the benefit of an immediate audit trail of this expense line, so it keeps their costs under control in that you’re not over billing approximate amounts just to cover shipping expenses: they only pay for what they actually use. See, make it seem like a benefit to them. The fact it makes your life less complicated is just a coincidence:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Avid cert classes only teach you what the buttons all do and how to set up the computer and peripherals and maybe a little bit about managing the bins and database tools. You can teach a monkey (sorry, pixelmonkey) what buttons to push to get a result.

But to be great, or even just good, you need to know what’s *behind* pushing the buttons. You need to recognize and develop an aesthetic sense. You need to understand something about timing, pace, rythym, color, sound, music, the psychology of how shots are made and how meaning is changed, sharpened, controlled by the way shots are sequenced. How to tell the story is one thing, and we spend our lives learning just that. How to “make” the story, or create an entirely new and different one from raw elements, is the next level, one I can only perceive dimly myself, from where I am right now.

So I guess I’m saying cert classes are for technicians, what you want is to go to school or read up on things like semiotics, art history, composition, drama, creative writing, graphic design principles, music appreciation, photographic composition, that sort of thing. Get as rounded and as eclectic as you can, because it all comes into play at some point.

Believe it or not, when I try to write and direct the simplest PSA or commercial, (and on my low-low budgets, they are ALL simple!:-)) I often endeavor to emulate the complete “Hero’s Journey” as John Campell wrote about, in 28.5 seconds. Not easy! But I’m trying for a lot of things, both overt and subliminal, in such a spot.

One I’m working on now combines visuals, vocal narratives, and simple but very deliberate sound and music cues to all reinforce an otherwise prosaic message. I am trying to take the audience on a little journey for 30 seconds, to create characters with personalities and even back-stories, so your attention is being rewarded with a fun little complete story, complete with visual and auditory humor, as I’m pounding you with the copy points. I feel this makes all the difference between a hard-sell comemrcial with some guy lecturing you and a spot you will watch over and over because you get something new out of each repeat viewing. You feel like I know you’re smart and I put that gag in just for you, to entertain you while I’m asking for your attention.

Does an Avid cert class teach this? I’m not sure a lifetime of study and practice can. But that’s what I’m going for.

As far as technical training for working between actual film footage and video editing systems, yeah, you can take a one-day or one-week course somewhere and learn how to match up EDLs, keycodes, color settings, etc. from a purely mechanical perspective. This will make you ready to help out as an assistant editor to someone who knows how to cut film, logging and digitizing footage, setting up drives, tweaking proc amp settings or whatever. But while all those things are necessary, and require skill and professionalism, that’s not the biggest part of the job, or the most creative or lucrative. That’s just getting a foot in the door.

[Mark Suszko]

There are consumer DV camcorders from Sony I believe that let you load in or precompose a title and super it in-camera. Heck, they had this feature on some VHS camcordes in the ’80s, with multiple pages and everything. The one font in two sizes was horrible, about like the fonts in pong, but you could get it in several colors (same ones as the color bars). Back then it was pop-on pop-off or scroll, no fades on the titles. Did I mention we all wore onions on our belts back then? Damn, I feel old.

Channel storm Livechannel is a $1k program you run on a mac laptop, lets you switch and run effects plus do supers with a CG or with precomposed CGs built in photoshop if you want to get fancy. B&H sells a DV switcher with firewire from Edirol for just under a grand, you could feed that with graphics off of a Tape, DVD, or laptop and key them live.

[Mark Suszko]

Wow, talk about good news/bad news stories! My initial impression is that maybe your interests are best served by having your competition have to deal with these types of clients.

Everything you complain about in the last deal, you claim is how business is done there; if so, how indeed could you change this?

I like that you got half up front, even if it turned out over time to actually be somewhat less than half. My personal rule is that the up-front money has to be at least enough to cover all my expenses and any rentals or subcontracting I had to do… so that, even if the project dies in the middle of production, I’m not left holding the bag on the preproduction costs. I always plan and budget to pay off all my debts before I even consider my own profit. I made this rule for myself because no matter how big a city or market you live in, the actual circle of people you work with and have to depend on for services is relatively small, and your reputation as a guy that pays his bills in full and on time is one of your most important assets. Once you get a rep for welshing on deals, you might as well sell the house and move out of state. If I ever have to ask someone to float me for something, I want their instant answer to be: “no problem, your word is good, I know you’re good for the money.”

As far as your deal, and what to ask for next time… You need a more specific contract, for sure. I would think about offering the package of the edit plus one screening of an approval version, and one “free” re-edit for revisions after watching that initial cut. (It’s not free really, it’s built into your costs using day rate and a guesstimate of the time you’d have to use).

Any revisions after that first free revision are a separate contract, with an up-front fee of 50% and based on an estimate of number of days and day rate to make the changes… This keeps the endless revisions on a “pay as you go” basis. Remember, you are not a bank, and you’re not in the interest-free loan business.

How I would market this idea to the client is, I am charging you less up front because you are going to have your “act” together and have all the key decisions made in advance, so there should be near total agreement on the “vision” of the program ahead of time, and no big surprises. This in turn means the free revision may not even be necesary, or it will be quite minor. The additional revision charges only apply to unprepared or disorganized clients.

Another way to approach the issue is to charge a storage fee to keep the project on your active drives past a “date certain”. This puts another kind of money clock on the client. You explain that their delays are costing you business with other waiting clients so they have to pay to stay, just like apartment dwellers staying past the expiration day of the lease. If they don’t want to pay, the project comes off the drives. Whether that means you nuke their files, or just lay them off to deep storage on DLT or off to videotape is up to you and how acrimonious the relationship is.

[Mark Suszko]

I fired my wife too once, she was relieved. I was shooting a wedding that turned into needing to be a 2-camera thing just the night before, at the rehearsal, and I had nobody available to run second camera for the day of the service, which was only needed for b-roll and cutaway of the aisle procession and the vows. On the day of the shoot she double-pressed the go button on the camcorder in her nervousness and took the camcorder OUT of record for the essential shot. While the video was not ruined, it was not up to my standards without that cutaway, so I comped the client half, aplogized profusely, (they were puzzled by this as they thought it was all fine and didn’t notice the lack of the cutaway) and told my wife “Honey, I love you very much, and always will, I was grateful you volunteered to help me out in a jam but it didn’t work out and you are fired, let’s go home, I’ll cook tonight.”

[Mark Suszko]

Well, a certified bank draft type check is okay, as it’s on the bank’s credit, not theirs.

[Mark Suszko]

I sometimes say “an artist is not his tools”.

[Mark Suszko]

I would take Debe’s suggestion, return the blank, reformatted drive, but with a note saying you will keep the files until you get paid, and you are filing a Mechanic’s Lein on the footage. They can pay you now or they can see you in small claims court.

The last minute flurry of file copying from other people’s drives sounds like a tip they knew they were going to declare banckruptcy in advance and were using you to unknowingly rip off other unpaid suppliers. My guess is you will never get paid for this gig. But keep the files as insurance. If they use a court to pressure you, you can still give them up. Or you can play a waiting game with them.

Guys who operate like these folks are like jugglers: they have a number of balls in the air, timed so one incoming revenue source covers the previous bad debt, and so on and so on, the current project revenue is paying off an old debt or financing the next project, and they make everybody working on the current project “float”, unpaid. Essentially they make you their bank, they are borrowing money without paying interest on it… your money.

This pyramid-like scheme is always fragile and depends on the timetable not being disrupted too long, or the juggling balls all arrive at the same time; old bills catch up to the new revenue stream. If your footage gets tied up in court with a suit and counter-suit, and they need it to complete another piece of the pyramid, their whole plan falls apart. This gives you more negotiation power then you thought you had, if they know that you know what their deadlines are.

Once the footage is past the expiration date for the deal it was part of, it is worthless to them and you will never hear from them again. Until then, expect a lot of whining, wheedling, cajoling and threats, whatever they think will work to get you to give up the prize. Make them work for it. You will be amazed when the money suddenly, miraculously appears. Warning: do not accept a counter-offer of a bigger payback than you are due, if you would just let them float. Insist all current debts must be paid in cash first.

[Mark Suszko]

Tape is the cheapest thing we buy, really. Unless it comes back from the shoot blank, then it’s the most expensive thing.

No client ever pays you big bucks for a tape with nothing on it. Unless perhaps your job was erasing evidence or something.

I say economizing on tape stock is the singlest most silly thing to do. Find a good, reliable brand that works for you and stick with it, and hang the cost, you pass it on to the client anyway.