Mike Cohen
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and don’t forget that with a salaried non-union job with benefits, the employer pays usually 50% of the premium for health insurance ( a significant number if you have a family), disability insurance, dental etc as well as 50% of your social security and sometimes a 401K contribution(matching or otherwise) – amounts that are above and beyond the actual salary you earn. So for a salaried employee with full benefits, the salary may be $50,000 but the company is actually paying closer to $60,000 or more.
This thread has provided a nice cross section of examples, since we have staff editors, freelancers, small business owners and people who do a little of everything.
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Great points all around. A national salary average is kind of BS. As Tim has pointed out 100K in New Britain, CT is probably equivalent to 200K in Boston or 300K in NY or LA based upon what you get for your money.
Gross vs Net is also another great point. Depending upon your expenses, 100K is either a lot of money (you live in your parents’ attic and drive a used Geo) or just getting by (wife, 2 kids, mortgage, minivan, annual trip to WallyWorld, property taxes, insurance, payments on your EX3, etc.).
And if you are freelance you are responsible for your own taxes and possibly no group insurance, or no insurance at all which has a cost of risk – so to the younger folks reading this thread, as well as to folks trying to advance their careers, you need to look at the big picture.
As for me, I won’t post my salary (5 figures), but I do a lot more than shoot and edit video, I live in a city with very high property taxes, and next month when I pay off my Saturn I will jump for joy at the extra $300/month, which no doubt will be used to pay my property taxes.
Mike Cohen
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I don’t know, if you are a freelance editor in NY making $200/hour that could be $416,000/year if you are booked 5 days a week. Not the norm but it would skew things. And it would be awesome! You could buy a lot of Blu-Ray movies for that salary.
Mike
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Another great and accurate post from Franklin.
Clients should pay a vendor for their expertise, and then trust the vendor to give them that expertise, and trust the expert advice. Sometimes, clients push back against the expertise they are in fact paying for, until they realize that the expertise is in fact what they want.
Sometimes they do not realize that they are getting what they are paying for until they actually see the end result. Then they pat themselves on the back for giving you all the right input to make you, the button pusher, give them the exact end result they have paid for.
Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and let the client believe that they had the best ideas, even if you the vendor did most of the work.
Such a compromise is only allowed if you are being compensated adequately. You lose a little bit of self when you let the client get his way, despite your best advice, and you charge at level 2.
You lose less of your self when you do the same at level 3, and hopefully the end result of level 3 work is what you believe is right for the client, even if the client either, A does not realize this is the right approach until the end product is delivered, or B the client gets what he wants because of his own expert input which may in fact be a regurgitation of your own expert input. Sometimes C happens, and the end result is something you would not have recommended, but it is exactly what the client wants, or thinks he wants.
Again, although the client comes to you for your expertise, perhaps your opinion of what constitutes your expertise(expert at enhancing marketing campaigns) is different that the client’s view of what constitutes your expertise (expert at photoshop and shooting video). Your client’s view of your expertise may in fact be accurate, because this is something they themselves cannot do, but perhaps they do not see the bigger picture that you see.
In the end, you as the vendor know that you have done your absolute best, using all of your expertise, even if the client only acknowledges certain aspects of your expertise. But we are not looking for validation or recognition, we are in business to earn a living.
Hmm, this would make a good blog post…
Regarding the music issue, I agree that using timely music seems to date a project. I recall back in 1992 or so the Van Halen tune Right Now was used in a Superbowl Ad and was quite popular. A local technology company in Hartford licensed the music to use in a corporate event intro video, which our studio edited. The editing took days on the flaky Abner editor, but the client was happy. Since the event was so close to the Superbowl, presumably a few people in the audience recognized the music.
But this is an example of a client who knew exactly what they wanted, not what this thread is about.
You as the vendor need to be an expert in client management. A client does not come to you because you are an expert at managing your clients, but that is precisely what you need to do, and what they NEED you to do, though they don’t know that that’s what they need.
Good Luck.
Mike Cohen
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Apparently tens of thousands of wedding videographers have the same problem. This is why I do not do weddings
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We had a fractional T1 for many years as we hosted dozens of website from in-house servers. Once we stopped hosting sites from our office, we switched to a Cable modem which works amazingly well considering all the uploading/downloading we do. Not sure of the speed or the cost, but it has been reliable.
For large files however you may be best with T1 speeds.Mike Cohen
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Todd, I e-mailed you offline with a contact you may be able to use.
Mike Cohen
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We use a medical transcription service. We just upload MP3 files to their FTP site and within a few days or the next day if we ask for a rush, we have a 99% accurate transcript.
I too tried the speech to text feature in Premiere, and it is pretty bad compared to the marketing.
I am a pretty fast typist so for short clips I sometimes transcribe myself, but in most cases it is easier and more cost effective to let a trained professional do it.Remember that doing something yourself may seem like it is saving money, but let’s say you make $30/hour editing video. If you are spending 3 hours transcribing something, you are not billing $90 of editing work you are doing work that someone earning $15/hour could do in half the time.
Mike Cohen
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It is important as an interviewer and a shooter to listen to the interview, so if you need to do a pickup with different framing, you can tell the subject where to go back to.
Usually I am the interviewer and the shooter, so it makes for a lot to do at once.Mike Cohen
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Apparently the deal from the start was that Disney would do a feature version of Planet Earth.
Mike Cohen