[Mark Suszko]

That courier better be bringing a certified bank check or money order (no personal checks) for your full amount, or you can give the courier a note to bring back that says you will be filing a mechanic’s lein. (google how to do that in your area).

Do NOT part with any more materials until you get the amount you invoiced. He is the one under calendar deadline pressure for a compete program, not you. Wait him out and if he needs it bad enough, he’ll have to cave. You are calling the shots now.

[Mark Suszko]

…Says a guy who has been here all of two days. Don’t pretend to know me or my mind, Mr. Pants.

What I suggest is you go back over the very first posts in this thread and read word for word what the military customer said in his quest for the (bogus) quote. Read how he spoke, see how he completely failed to understand what he was asking for, how he refused to even be reasoned with. I have met such people, in the military and outside of it.

I don’t assert all military people are like that. I know the opposite to be true. I was saying that in an organizational culture that is so very top-down and insular, full of bureaucratic circumlocution, one often needs to translate things into English first. That guy did not know what he was asking for, could not communicate it and could not be communicated WITH to determine what the specs for the program were.

Communicating to establish the simple specs of the job, much less the needs analysis for the program, the creative treatment, the essentials in making a productive script before a single word is typed… all these things are hard to get across, because it’s an alien language to them. As it is to people in many industries, but there in particular. Have you ever read real military memos, manuals, and documents? “The maintainer will then maintenance the aircraft” is a direct quote from one such I witnessed. You can’t make up stuff like that.

You are reading your own insecurities into my remarks and taking them out of original context. Have some tapioca and switch to decaf. Pet the dog. Go to church. Walk the beach with Mrs. Pants. Whatever you need to get the rancor out of your system.

The one thing I agree with you about is that personal attacks are inappropriate here, so I’m going to stop; feel free to have the last word but I will not respond further on this matter. I know what I said and how I said it, I tried to clarify it for you and we are not having a meeting of the minds here, so further argument would be unproductive. Maybe over time, you’ll come to realize I am not the guy you’re complaining I am.

[Mark Suszko]

“Forget it , Jake, It’s Chinatown…”

Even if this was a work for hire, there’s no way they can claim legal rights to your original paid-for Jump-Backs.

Ditto the other comments on not giving them the stock footage or music,or plug-ins, they can buy that themselves. YOU did.

Personally I wouldn’t even give them the project files, but only their original footage and a window dub of your version of the master,which is enough of a guide for your replacement to see where things were going, but not something they could rip off and use without paying you for it. If you take the view that the master is what they paid for and not just your time, then I guess you give them a master… but I would fight that, myself.

I had one of these happen once where the sessions all seemed to go fine, then the client turned around immediately and took the finished product to another place to re-edit it, saying something disparaging about it. I met that re-editor socially some time later, he seemed really apologetic and embarrased about it, kept telling me all he did was shave a frame off here and there, but he had kept about 98 percent of my edits the same, he thought my work was fine going in. The worst part was he felt bad he was ordered to take my name off the credits entirely. I said it didn’t make any difference to me, as I’d been paid.

Sometimes, clients don’t feel they’ve put enough of their own decisions into something, haven’t “put their own stink on it”, as we sometimes say around the office. It’s an ego thing. If you get one of these, sometimes they feel satisfied if you deliberately botch some simple thing like the end point of a dissolve and they can “catch” the mistake and correct you. Suddenly they feel more in control and more part of the process. The things we do to make clients happy!

I’ll tell you I think that you did one thing perfectly right: asking for extra money on the first one where you had to establish all the looks and the graphic templates, etc. That was very smart, and reasonable, if they were going to be re-used a lot in subsequent shows. That extra work on the first one makes the subsequent ones go much faster, saving them money.

[Mark Suszko]

Bellypants, you read too much into my remarks, but if you don’t believe my thesis, just drop by any local bar near a base, and you will get enough stories about such things to curl your buzzcut.:-)
Just the stories I got from buddies in the Guard were enough for me, and I have done a few things for them over the years, so I know whereof I speak.

I never said I didn’t respect them as a blanket statement, only that, as in many professional organizations, they have people working outside their area of expertise or competence that think they know how to write scripts and plan videos but don’t. And because the military frowns on you telling your boss when he’s being an idjit, it’s harder to solve this problem in videos made for the military. And if you don’t think military procurement has any problems, well, we differ on our views of reality.

Best of luck to you.

[Mark Suszko]

See the thread a little lower down in this same space…

[Mark Suszko]

Well it never stops amazing me what person to person talking can accomplish in the right situation. I’m also a big believer in doing your P.R. right to generate impressions and create a base from which to talk to clients in a non-sales mode that leads to sales later. Things like networking chamber of commerce meetings, social organizations, etc. But also, generating stories about you and your work in the paper. Doing some charity/ pro-bono work as a way to build recognition.

Back in my wedding videographer and forensic video days, I never had to advertise, it was ALL referrals and word of mouth; my happy repeat customers were my sales force. I’ve been out of weddings now for maybe five years or more, and I’m STILL getting occasional calls based on my earlier rep. Now I turn those into referrals to other guys I like and respect that will keep up the same level of work and value. We all try and help each other out that way.

[Mark Suszko]

Alan, I don’t think that it’s necessarily the case you fear. While business school grads have been getting more ruthless since the eighties, I don’t think it’s a given yet that ALL businesspeople are now “Enron types”.

It could perhaps be a statistical bump caused by the ever-dropping cost of the tools bringing in more and more people who are not necessarily streetwise as the more seasoned video pros. So they fall for more of the old cons and are less wary to start with. The real professionals have not changed their way of doing business honorably. But that doesn’t make the news, only the crooks and crimes do. So maybe your impression that it’s overall getting worse is is subjective, not objective.

Also, the ever-downward pressure on prices versus performance means client expectations (especially uneducated first-time clients) keep becoming more and more demanding; expecting Lucasfilm quality on a handycam budget. In such an atmosphere it becomes hard not to over-promise and under-deliver. When the new clients are used to commoditizing everything, they have a hard time grasping that this is not identical, mindless assembly line work we do, it’s hand wrought a piece at a time by a craftsma

Whether you are right or I am, the solution is the same: spend more time vetting the client and coming to a meeting of minds BEFORE the project starts. And don’t be afraid to pass on the iffy ones. Then get everything in writing and get the down payment first. Never work 100 percent on credit. Ever.

[Mark Suszko]

Hi Robert;

No, as you suggest, it would be impractical to limit it to “three particular changes”, but you *could* limit it totwo or three complete “approval screenings”, as in: “Whatever changes you suggest, we will implement, then you will either approve the whole version when we screen it or not”.

At that point they have paid for the time up to the revised screening; if they do not accept it yet, we must re-negotiate further work. I try to be flexible about this and if the additional outstanding item is relatively trivial and they hae been good people, I might go ahead and do it, maybe not even bill if it’s trivial, but only because I want to, not because I HAVE to. I have been burned too many times before to let things get out of hand like that, ever again.

My own rule is the client always get one free revision after seeing my first draft cut. Theoretically, the first version should be 90-100 percent what they expected, because I like to talk things out quite a bit before we start and to keep in touch as the first version comes together. Sometimes they sit in with me for all or part of the first draft, but most of the time, I’m given my head to work alone, and I kind of prefer that. But I have never had a situation where what I did was so horribly different from their vision as to be a complete wash. Sometimes it’s even better than they expected:-) Other times, we just have a creative difference of opinion. The client gets their way, that’s what they pay for, but I don’t feel it’s wrong to bill for a moderate amount of time spent exploring better options in the edit. That’s all part of the collaborative process.

I will screen the whole thing for them when done, they will give me a list of any and all changes, and if there are no particular problems, I execute the changes and we screen it again; at this point,it should be 100 percent right – if I satisfied everything specifcally on the list, they need to accept it. The only exception would be a technical flaw like a bad level, a missed flash frame, or video out of broadcast spec or something like that; you know, “pilot error”.

If they now want to do something else, something more, not a correction to an error but a new addition, that is going to be billed as a new, separate edit. There may be a discount involved, depends on the situation.

I never charge clients for my mistakes: if for example some titles are spelled wrong, and the printed sheet they gave me has it right, I eat the cost of fixing that. If I screwed up levels while digitizing, I eat the time. I think such policy is pretty much standard with editors everywhere. If they GAVE it to me wrong, and the piece of paper in my hand they gave me proves that, Sorry, THEY are paying for the extra time to fix it. If they pause the edit to clear something with remote bosses over the phone or we have to wait for a new element to get delivered, they are eating that time. I make this very clear up front, I charge extra for mind reading:-)

What if you are in a situation where you’re not billing for cash? Like a revolvng or charge-back system in a school, government, or corporate setting? Well, you can still create an invoice that describes the time, tools, and effort put in, and you can assign a reasonable average local market value to those hours and tools, to show what they would be paying if they took the project elsewhere. Combine this with a stated policy that each “free” client is charged against a monthly quota of “virtual hours” or “virtual dollars”, then it becomes easy to say this:

“We have to stop, I’d like to continue, but we’ve run out of the alloted hours for your account this month, and we now have to give prioty to the paying clients. If you want to take this project onto a cash basis from this point, we can continue now. Or, I can pick this up again for you at so-and-so date, when we’ll gladly re-set your free-hours clock for the new payment cycle. We do this for everyone so we can be fair to everyone with our time and tools”.

Such “virtual billing” not only helps you keep control of the calendar, and the grinder clients, it may give your clients data they can use for tax or other accounting purposes. You’d have to ask an accountant about that, but I know people who are writing off something as a charity usually need something more formal than just a figure scribbled on a note pad for the bill.

[Mark Suszko]

Robert, Robert, Robert!

This is a question that is never resolved, everybody hs their own opinion about it, and it is argued incessantly. It’s a religious discussion. Here is my take.

They are all tools, it is not the specific tool that makes the art, it is the artist.

You can make an identical program on Avid, FCP, Premiere, etc. Nothing intrinsic to the machines or software makes the work somehow “better”. It depends almost entirely on the skills and artistry of the user. Don’t base the decision on intangible snob appeal, but on the actual work product and what it costs to get that work product. Does the finished program work or not? Without specifically mentioning it on the tape, nobody can tell WHAT machine it was edited on.

Now, each of the tools has a little different “feel” to it’s operation, and a good artist (when he can) picks the tool they are most comfortable with, which lets them then master that tool most efficiently. You can try free demo downloads of every major and minor NLE system. Play with each and see which one you like most. Then master the heck out of it.

Anybody can be cross-trained from one of these systems to another: you can even re-assign the hot keys and shortcuts to be identical from the system you used before, so on an FCP system you can set up all the buttons to work the same as Avid and you can work pretty much the same. So the platform is not (at least, should not be) the main reason you get hired; it’s what you are able to DO with the platform, the skills and artistic sense you bring, that makes people want to hire you.

As to the argument that you get more and better work if you are trained on Avids, I feel that is partially marketing hype. You are just as likely these days to see an FCP suite or another type of editing suite as an Avid. More and more TV shows and even movies are edited on FCP as well as Avid. And there are probably more “seats” of Premiere in some flavor or another out there than FCP and Avid combined. While Avid cornered the high end pro market early, that lead has been steadily eroding as all NLE systems continually converge to having identical features. Don’t believe that you can’t edit for someone just because you don’t have Avid experience. This would be like a construction company saying they can’t hire you to drive their Caterpillar bulldozer because you have only driven a Komatsu bulldozer.

Some places might be narrow-minded like that, and refuse to even consider anything but a specifically certified Avid editor for their Avid suite. Well, if you want to work at that kind of place, you certainly can take a course and become certified. But certification is no substitute for talent: all certification does is prove you have memorized what buttons to push, and how the particular hardware likes to be configured, not what kind of creative decisions to make. The certification diploma is not going to be as important as your demo reel.

If your corporate office is starting up from scratch and you are asking about what system to put in, Avid is no longer the only safe or economically sound “default” answer to that question. You really need to analyze what kind of work you are going to be doing, then evaluate all the systems available, see what’s the best fit.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, you can “force” it, but the result is not what you’d call broadcast quality. If you compare the shells of a beta SP and a regular betacam casssette, you should find an extra hole in the SP casing that tells a sensing switch in the deck what flavor of tape it is. Occasionally the switch goes bad, and lets you record using the wrong tape if you put that in, but the recording is not clean.

I remember a long time ago now, there was this guy on another forum, wrote a LONG post about how clever and proud he was in coming up with a way to “beat the system” at his university AV department. They were running S-VHS decks, and his rant was that they couldn’t afford the more expensive S-VHS tapes. He insisted the tapes had no real quality difference, that this was all marketing hype, and that he was going to “beat the system”.

He deterimined it was the same kind of indexing hole issue that allowed the machine to detect s-vhs or regular tape. So, he goes into this long spiel about buying a little drill press and making a special indexing jig for it, then drilling his own holes int he bottom of case after case of tape, one tape at a time, all the time using a shop vac to keep grains of the drilled plastic out of the cassettes, etc etc. And he was bragging about all the money he saved (but not all the time he wasted). Triumphantly, he said the tapes now ercord s-vhs, and he’s apyin a whole dollar less per cassette(minus the labor).

So one guy responds to this long post: “Why didn’t you just take the lid off the VCR, reach in and unplug or short the little sensing switch to disable that, instead of adapting every tape that goes in?”

The guy with the drill and all NEVER posted again. Too mortified, I guess:-)