[Mark Suszko]

Could you narrow it down a little?

[Mark Suszko]

T, I don’t want to seem like we’re piling on you about the typos and grammar, but editing video and making graphics BY DEFINITION is a precision business, and if your communications with potential clients or bosses looked like your first post, it’s no wonder you’re not getting the respect you deserve. You may be a wonderkind but they can’t see past the poor surface impression to understand that.

Let me ask you why you did 8 hours “on spec” for them; did they ask you to, or was that your own idea to get your foot in the door and keep a conversation going? If the latter, I think it was a good gamble that in this case just didn’t pay off. Perhaps you could still add it to your demo reel if you think it is a good piece of work. I once won an award entering a spec piece the client had turned down. Why yes, I DID happen to let it slip in later communications to that client, how did you guess?;-)I KNEW it was good; they’d just had a lack of vision. And other problems in their management system. But that’s another story…

If THEY asked you to do the piece, in advance, for free, with the idea they would only pay for it if they liked it, that’s a bad business deal to agree to. Likewise, the most famous lie in this business is: “Give us a break on this one, and we’ll throw you a lot more business later”.

Ad agencies often pitch spec pieces to clients or prospective clients, but usually they charge at least a token amount for the effort. There are agencies that make almost as much on billed-for failed spec submissions as they do on accepted gigs. The idea is that, like Edison, when one of his experiments failed, it still taught him something useful about what DOESN’T work. And that knowledge is worth billing *something* for, IMO.

Even if they don’t buy your spec, it may lead them in a direction they had not considered before. That client of mine I mentioned earlier did something like that once: they turned my pitch down but said they’d like to borrow some elements of it and they offered to reimburse me a token amount for that, and for the legwork and research I’d put into the pitch. It’s a judgement call deciding when to accept those kinds of deals, but in that particular case it was ok, I won’t bore you with the details why.

My ego was satisfied later though, seeing their version of my campaign fail becasue of poor execution. The guy that took my ideas and ran with them didn’t fully grasp all the thinking and strategy behind it, got some elements of it wrong during the adaptation process, and therefore it flopped. I felt good about my end of the deal, I had done my creative best and they chose another way.

It is never easy to be told they found somebody better, but the fact is there is ALWAYS somebody better than you at some aspect of this business. The consolation is there are usually many more that are worse than you, and if you stay dedicated you can take business away from them.

[Mark Suszko]

A guy who I respect says: “with the right people, you don’t need a written contract, with the wrong people, even a written one is not enough”.

So the first step to my mind is to filter out the likely bad clients before you even get to the negotiating stage.

More to your point, performance and non performance clauses are something you have to reach agreement on up-front, and should be part of any smart contract.

You want it spelled out, what gets billed to whom if for example you have a catastrophic equipment failure or accident on the set just before the shoot and can’t continue taping. If the stakes are high enough, I would in such a contract arrange (for an extra fee) to have replacement gear rented and ready or “on hold” for a quick delivery so the dud could be replaced and production could keep going.

I don’t know a lot of commercial production people who rent or buy a whole second camera just as an “in case” backup, but I know several wedding/event guys do, and some deposition shooters do, because you just can’t stop real life events and make them wait. Cheap clients will tend to not want to pay for the backup unit if it was never actually used, and it raises your rate. But they would get even madder if your ONLY camera died as the bride was entering the church and you wound up ruining “their most special day”. Perhaps if you get the right relationship and trust with a rental provider, they will not charge for the unused spare, or cut you a discount if you truly didn’t need it. A lot depends on the demand for the extra gear, and whether they passed up another rental just to back you up with the spare.

Back to the contract with the client, what are they willing to pay for to insure against such a worst case? Granted, it’s rare, but it needs to be spelled out in advance if all their recourse is just to get a refund.

Weather is out of your control entirely, the contract should specify that while you’ll give it your best shot, that’s all you promise. Re-scheduling may incur extra costs, and you need to tell them up front they will get billed a certain amount extra for that. If for example you hired a grip for the day and wound up rained out, you still needed to pay that guy for showing up, and will need to pay him again on the re-shoot. You have to pass that cost along.

As to cancellations, when I did weddings, I didn’t have any issue giving full refunds for cancellations as long as I had three days notice or hadn’t yet spent the down payment to book the camera rental (I never owned the camera, only rented it as needed for booked gigs). If the cancellation was 24 hours ahead, I’d refund everything but what I had to pay for the rental booking.

If, however, taking your gig precludes me from another, your cancellation means you have prevented me from TWO gigs, and now I’m gonna bill you something for my lost work, that’s only fair. How much has to be up to the individuals and the individual situation, I feel.

And this brings me to your editing “contract”. Did you have other biz you could have handled, other projects you could have edited, that were precluded by this harridan’s booking? Then you are justified in asking for some portion of a penalty for a last-minute cancellation. If it’s 48 hours or more, you have the chance to scare up another gig, so I would perhaps not charge a fee in that case, BUT… I WOULD put that client on a “watch list” and require a bigger advance deposit from such a client the next time they came back. Call it a “jerk tax”, call it whatever you want. Refundable later, of course, if warranted, but, you know, you gotta eat too. You can also decide to not give them the same “freebies” you used to, like free review dubs, or a break on digitizing fees.

The bottom line is to talk out all the possibilities and what you plan to do for each situation that comes up, then get that in writing at least as a memo of understanding, if not in a more formal contract.

Film producers pay lots of money for completion bonds and errors and omissions insurance. Not every project will justify such expense, but you should have a plan in advance of the gig and have everybody on the same page about it.

[Mark Suszko]

Sounds like you gave up your seat on the Titanic just in time to see it sail. My sense is to agree with the others that if you didn’t come to a complete agreement, signed off and money exchanged, it’s not considered a valid contract. Of course, I am not a lawyer, but this was on an episode of “The Paper Chase” one time, so it must be true:-)

You had a “Grinder”. Check the archives here for a great essay about them, I won’t repeat all the advice from it here. The only way this could have gone better for you is if it drove the client to your worst rival.

You stuck to your guns and held firm on your terms. With this action you lost a questionable client that was likely going to grind you until you wound up losing money on the hours put in. But you’re likely to retain your reputation and the business it brings. You have mantained your rates and terms as well as your dignity, and have not exposed your business to undue risk. You were a prudent businessman. Take yourself out to a nice meal and celebrate, you won.

I really do know how hard it is to let potential revenue go, when the bills are piling up, but trust us, this one wasn’t going to profit you in the long run, you did the right thing, and probably were overly charitable in not billing her back for stringing you along.

[Mark Suszko]

I find the clients are most surprised when I mention ways they never thought of that their footage can be leveraged and re-purposed.

This, in my context, mostly revolves around 30 and 60- second spot work. But when I mention we can put the TV spots on the web as well as make it look the same as their print materials, re-edit the audio tracks for radio airplay, or structure the spot so it can be updated with a simple voiceover change, or translated into Spanish, etc. they really perk up. Because it’s like they are getting more spots for free.

For what you’re doing, some of that leveraging could include setting up interactive promos/ demos/ tutorials for users online, and creating all manner of peripheral media in support of the marketing ans sales efforts.

[Mark Suszko]

What effect exactly DID it have?

BOOT TO THE HEAD!
🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Was the original quote accurate down to the bad grammar and composition? And that guy is in the command chain somewhere…explains a lot of what I find in my morning paper…

Those military guys work in a kind of a bubble, which makes it hard to communicate as a civilian contractor. You also get this kind of thing sometimes with law enforcement types. Don’t get mad at clients who don’t understand and try to commoditize the creative process, they are trying to use terms and concepts they are already comfortable with. As has been said, you have to try and gently educate these kinds of folks before you can communiate anything useful. You might as well have asked them: “how much exactly will it cost for a brigade of troops to take an unspecified objective?”

I work in state government, have for over 2 decades, and the procurement process is certainly a strange game, Dilbert’s happy hunting ground. So this all sounds very familiar. Any of the afore-mentioned theories could apply here.

Don’t lose sleep over it, you were never a real bidder for that job, if it even WAS a real job… it will likely wind up done by a Halliburton subsidiary anyhow:-)

What always seems to happen for projects such as this one is somebody internal to the organization will take a stab at it because they have some access to hardware, but where it always falls apart is in the script. Because there isn’t one, or somebody you can’t contradict thinks he can write one. Due to their command structure, the writing will always be very poor, and imposed from above by people who may be brilliant generals but have no business trying to write a video script. The underlings dutifully attempt to execute the awful script, then everybody gets a dressing-down when the final product stinks on ice. Or they pretend it’s perfect, but it then quickly disappears from view forever. The other likely occurance is that the project dies mid-way because the approvals process is overrun by the passing of realtime events.

If all they wanted was a video slideshow of their org chart, you could whip something up fast and cheap and even quote a fixed price. For anything more along the lines of “Why We Fight”, forget it. Tell them the gubmint and military already has it’s own internal media groups for just this sort of thing.

[Mark Suszko]

First of all, computer display LCD’s and TV monitor CRT’s cannot be compared directly, they are very different things.

Doesn’t sound like you’re luminance safe yet, nor chrominance. Do you have/use actual scopes on this, or are you getting the levels information somewhere else?

Quick test: apply a 50% gray over the entire clip, see if the playback behaves better. If so, your levels were still too high.

You may already have done this, but check if you are using zero or seven point five IRE for the black level, then re-check your brightest whites are touching 100 IRE units.

I have one monitor in my bay that’s slowly going bad, and it will easily distort when white levels are at or over 100 IRE. If that monitor is acting wonky during a playback or digitizing session, I know for sure the source is too hot, and the scopes confirm this.

[Mark Suszko]

I have not yet played with it myself, but there’s an all-software solution that’s a plug-in for NLE systems called CCaption by leapfrog.

Typically, we have a live transcriptionist listen over a phone line and type the captions live via a second phone line to a hardware encoder to amke a captioned master.

I had always thought that the captioning on line 22 gets lost when analog video gets digitized, but this article of faith turned out not to be immutable; I.E. I used a Discrete Edit with a MADRAS to capture the analog captioned betacam tape, was able to re-edit on the timeline, and output the new master to a VHS which retained the captioning. I imagine in one or two places, where I had made cuts, the caption was momentarily disrupted a little bit, but was still useable.

[Mark Suszko]

Internet streaming, the cheapest way, would create too much delay for doing something simultaneous like singing the same hymn together. The times I’ve worked on streaming live feeds, the delay builds over time to something like 4-6 minutes behind realtime. You start in synch, but inside of ten minutes the delay becomes impossible to cope with for singing a duet.

Satelite broadcast delay, same problem, but it’s a short, fixed amount of delay. You can simulate one side being in perfect synchronization with the other, but you’d be faking it, and I don’t know how it could be made duplex/bi-directonal.

Analog video over a dedicated land phoneline/cable might reduce the delay to a useable level,to where it only seems like a bothersome echo, if the overall distance is shorter than the 22,000-mile up and down path for the satellite. This may be difficult to arrange these days though.