[Mike Smith]

If your work is going to be a business rather than a hobby, my suggestion is that you need to think business-like about it.

Identify the service(s?) you want to offer. Identify possible paying customers for those services in your area. Identify other people offering the service you want to offer, and try to find out the rates they charge.

If you are able to, look at some of the work your competitors have done ; can you compete? If you are a little slower, less experienced, less talented, what can you offer to customers to compensate, to get them to choose you anyway?

If your work is good enough to face the competition, how will you demonstrate that to your customers? Most likely you need a showreel – as good and varied as you can manage. This is your trade sample – make sure you are proud of it.

Then you need to develop a pitch you can make to prospective customers – to let them know you exist, what you offer, why what you have to offer is compelling (quality? service? price? “we try harder”?).

Remember, though, price is only part of why people choose – if you agree to work for nothing, that’s what you’ll likely be offered on any second or subsequent job. Work out fair rates you can live with early on, and establish and stick with those. Learning to negotiate firmly, but with a smile, is going to be a key business skill for you.

If you major as an editor, then probably your customers will be – who? Many local video companies will shoot and edit “in house” – what can you offer to get them to use you instead / as well? Are there shooters locally who don’t like to edit? Are there pr, advertising, marketing or new media agencies who might shoot off some stuff on a camcorder, but get bogged down with an edit – could you help them? At a higher end, are there local TV stations or spot producers who might need extra freelance help from time to time? Unless your contacts are fabulous, you may want to look more widely at people or businesses who might benefit from what you have to offer.

Once you’ve identified your target market (customers), what you have to offer them (your well defined services), created a compelling pitch – a reason to choose, use and pay you – then you’re ready to roll.

You “just” have to find a way to get your pitch in front of the prospects, and watch how they react to it. If you find people all choke on what part of the pitch / offer, you’ll need to work on that to make it stronger !

Good luck.

[Mike Smith]

Or try a different font ..?

[Mike Smith]

NTSC to PAL conversions (and vice versa) are expensive to do well and are not as good as shooting and editing native in the format (at similar camera / edit quality) you desire.

Having said that, for standard definition output, a really good broadcast quality camera / lens package shooting either (onto digibeta) edited at full quality and professionally transcoded will outperform pretty well anything you do on DV (or HDV and downconvert to PAL / NTSC). The lenses and image processing are better.

There are also good DVCAM options (Sony’s DSR 570 / 450, and no doubt options from e.g. ikegami) and no doubt an excellent DVCPro choices but I don’t think any of these offer switchable NTSC / PAL recording, but the results will be good.

While the HDV cameras offer terrific value for money and HD on a budget, the limitations of the packaged lenses are there to see. These include not just in low light performance, image control and lens definition but also poor mechanical handling controls – e.g. very hard to get a decent smooth zoom start / stop. There are also the problems associate with heavy mpeg compression with complex pictures – waving trees in the wind in low sunlight on HDV ..?

So I guess it’s a choice for you.

[Mike Smith]

Thanks guys.

[Mike Smith]

Often times, folks on the forums here can focus hard on one half of the pricing equation – what we as suppliers would like to be able to get to maintain a decent life.

There is also, though, the demand side to consider – what will the market bear, or what will the customer be willing to pay? It’s where these two “curves” intersect that economists think we find a market price – and usually what the customer will happily pay is a lot less than “every hour I can think of, billed at my most optimistic rate” will add up to.

There’s also, sometimes, a tinge of not-illegitimate fear that newcomers, part-timers and hobbyists doing it for cheap will hold down market prices – which they will. That’s not really your problem, though.

As producers, people deliver long, complex, unpredictable and sometimes hazardous projects every day to fixed budgets – managing the customers’ expectations and managing the processes so as to deliver impact on the screen at controllable costs are key skills.

At a freelance / facilities level, people and businesses quite realistically want to charge for just what they do, rather than take on a fixed fee deal and find a customer wanting to rack up all the hours God sends and then some, because, hey, it’s all in the price, right? Wrong …

So why not charge what you and your aunt think is a fair price, and enjoy it. If you’ve done a great logo, you’ve given her good value – whether that took you weeks of agony and trying or whether you pulled it together in an hour’s inspiration and half a day of sweating the details … which of those should cost her more, if the result’s the same …? These are not always easy questions, and there will never be consensus, so don’t distress over dissent – just do it your way

[Mike Smith]

Hi John

These DRM issues do look likely to cause serious disruption for Windows developers wanting to issue fast driver fixers (e.g my black magic board has major new drivers every couple of months) for Vista – as you suggest. I’m thinking keep everything on XP for now.

I can only hope that MS will look at this and find another solution to their issue – maybe “source licences” for driver verification for known production equipment developers, so they can patch quickly without awaiting MS certification and without triggering hardware downgrade?

And third parties might help – was there a rumor that Creative Labs were going to look at restoring a hardware abstraction layer for audio on Vista, exactly to help with these issues?

Not to forget, it’s not that long since Apple’s approach to color space in HD was causing concerns – and those auto gamma changes in and out of Quicktime still bug me!

Hardware wise, perhaps we should be encouraging developers to port their software to open source operating systems running on high-performance commodity architectures …. Linux on Intel architecture anyone?

Perhaps we’ll come full circle to the SGI / Smoke approach after all. Don’t know if you’ve seen https://www.jahshaka.org/ – but I guess it would be well within scope for Adobe to port their software into a Linux distribution … !

[Mike Smith]

Except, of course, PAL standard def DV and family is lower field first – apart from a quirky PAL DV codec from Matrox for some of its hardware, which is upper field first ..hmm

[Mike Smith]

For control D to work of course, you must exactly be at the cut, and the cut must be in the target track, and both clips on the same track …

[Mike Smith]

Nope. You’re just loopy. If you think the old man is in the wrong and should have fired this guy, tell the old man – don’t waste our time!

The guy has been to a funeral. Who knows the background – you? Do you even know him?

My guess is he’d be well out of a hick family-run outfit …

[Mike Smith]

Personally, I found the rtx100 deeply disappointing for quality and with some compatibility problems with PAL DV, so would avoid. A fast current PC is virtually realtime in titling with PPro.

And isn’t Velocity, sadly, now end-of-lined …?