Mike Cohen
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Or perhaps they googled Jeff (#3 result is one-click from this thread) and thought, “hmm, maybe we should give this guy some recognition”
Just kidding, I’m sure it is a coincidence.
Nice video, by the way. The girl who points at the camera sells it. Where did you get the kids that appear??
Mike Cohen
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I had wondered how they did this spot – it is amazing. It is also what separates Honda from GM. The whole approach to advertising. GM advertises objects. Honda advertises emotions.
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The answer to your question is, “What does your customer need?”
and “Who are your customers?”Everything we deliver is SD, either DVD, CD-ROM or Flash Video.
It is still a pretty low bandwidth world. We may have Cable or DSL at home and the office with great bandwidth, but corporate networks vary from low bandwidth with Flash player 9 to much better. You need to sell to the lowest common denominator in your marketplace.If you make national TV commercials, you have a much different paradigm than if you do corporate video. And quite honestly, there is a lot of corporate video work out there.
We shoot about 80% HDV. The main reason we use the HDV camera so much is because it is a much better camera, but the better image quality is a nice bonus. We don’t always edit in HDV, especially when mixing with SD sources. Our 20+ year video library is all on DVCPRO 25.
We receive about 200 videos a year produced by others, and about 199 of them this year were SD DVD or DVCAM.
SD is dead…long live SD.
Mike Cohen
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What is your business? Video Production?
What sort of tradeshow would you go to?We go to a lot of tradeshows, but we have books and DVDs we sell, so the tradeshow is a good way to distribute catalogs, make some sales and do a lot of networking. But not cheap. It has to be considered a marketing expense, not a way to make guaranteed sales.
But if you are promoting a service that is a much tougher sell.
Here is a thread we had on this forum a little while back:https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/17/863662#863662
Mike Cohen
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Starting a business – any business – takes planning, aka, A Business Plan.
There are tons of books and online resources about this topic, which is a bit broad for a forum.
Know what you have and what you can do. Know what people are willing to pay for such a service, and get your name out there. See what others in the same line of work do and do that, but set yourself apart somehow.
In my experience, each market usually has one or two DJ services that own the market – they are at all the wedding shows, they do local cable advertising, they do the high school dances (prom queens eventually get married, you know) and they often have arrangements with the catering halls.
Do some market research.
Running a business is hard work.
Mike
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Make sure you click on the sequence before going to export.
If that is not it, then maybe someone else has an idea.
Mike Cohen
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I ALWAYS export to MPEG2 / WAV from Premiere and then import those into Encore.
That wat you know what you have before Encore. It has to encode at some point, so it is not really a time savings to go from Premiere directly to Encore – that just offsets the encoding to a different place in time.Mike Cohen
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There has been a ton of talk here about all the wrong things in a contract, or the wrongness of not having a contract. Now might be a good time to talk about what a good contract should look like.
In many cases, we have a simple one-pager along these lines (simplified for illustrative purposes):
Statement of Work
We will produce video X.
Process and Costs
Video scripting – estimated 30 pages, 30 minutes
$1000Video shoot at location to be determined. 1 day, 1 camera + audio, lights, etc
$1000Editing
We will perform initial edit following script. Client to give feedback
$20002nd Edit incorporating editing revisions.
$1500Final edit – including music, 5 original illustrations and final narration
$2500Approved final edit to be delivered on DVD, h.264 and WMV files.
$500If editing revisions beyond 2nd edit but before final edit exceed 10 additional hours, client will be billed $395/hour.
Travel and lodging billed separately at cost.
Payment Terms
upon Acceptance – 50%
Upon delivery of DVD master – 50%
Client will own final edited video. Upon final payment according to the terms in this contract, we will, at client’s request, provide copies of raw footage and master video on DVCAM tape or AVI file.
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The above is the simple version. Some larger corporations have a statement of work format that you have to use, including a lot of uses of the words WHEREAS, HERETOFORE and ESTOPPEL.
But most of the non-payment situations discussed on this forum seem to be in need of a simple contract that lays out the payment terms and who owns what.
The moral of the story is, get paid something before you do work, and make sure the customer knows the terms of what they are buying and when they can get it.
Mike Cohen
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Mark – I would never make such a calculation due to all of the things you suggest. I was trying to get a better idea of what Simon was looking for, and taking a guess at what he is looking to do.
As I mentioned in my post, we had at one time tried to measure the time spent project to project, which did not take into account the nuances that differentiate projects. I say “we” but the idea was from a past IT manager who seemed to think he had it “all figured out.” He did figure out how to alienate people!
Mike
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What do you mean “assign a value?”
Are you talking dollars earned per unit of time?
A basic spreadsheet might do the trick, but I think we need more details as to what you are trying to track.
Give us an example, for example:Intern 1 – 20 hours – edited 10 30-sec spots
Intern 2 – 20 hours – edited 5 30-sec spotsif the above is true, obviously Intern 1 is twice as productive as intern 2, assuming all 30-sec spots are basically the same
If you can assign a dollar value to a 30-sec spot, such as $250 gross earned for the studio, then you can have Excel calculate (# spots * 250)/ # hours to calculate the earning potential of the interns.
If you are looking to track “bandwidth” other than earning potential, such as how much work you can manage with your crew, the same data can tell you the efficiency of each employee and how much work you can assign them.
That’s even simpler: #hours/# of spots completed.Or you could calculate both, and compare with how much you pay your employees so you know if you are actually making any money and/or how much it costs you per edited spot which tells you your profit.
If you want something that each employee can enter their own data, then you need a web-based or network-based program, either custom made or off the shelf.
As discussed a few threads down, a custom solution by a php programmer may be the fastest and lowest cost to implement.
Hope this is what you were looking for, but it is interesting to think about.
Years ago we used something called TimeTiger, a network based time tracking package. But it was so unwieldy to use, it could easily take 30 minutes a day to track all the different tasks you were working on, and pushback against using it was the net result. We wanted to figure out costs for more accurate project estimating.
Mike Cohen