[Nick B]

Scott thats right, you need to provide the infrastucture, the traditional post house has that but does not realy want to help the editor or producer who is not using their expensive edit rooms.

The modern business model maybe

Digitize rushes onto removable drives ‘ready to edit’ for the editor to take away, extra rushes that come in late could be sent at low quality offline over the internet and full quality sent via blue ray dvd next day.
A safety net provided of a back up system if total failure of the editors /producers system.
Final quality tech check to master tape
make dvd’s vhs etc.

Tomorrows facility may be just a giant machine room, any format in any format out with a massive server sitting in the middle which you can talk to over the internet but the facility will have few if any edit rooms or editors (just a thought)

Anyway whatever happens the kit might be cheap but the work people have todo to make a video has not gone away !

[Nick B]

‘look at the scary post from Nick B above! ‘

LOL !

I was being provocative !!

However i would imagine 99% of pro freelance editors will within the next year own an edit system Avid XPRO or FCP (x vtr)

Q How can a hire company compete with an editor with there own kit, i would hope ‘the client’ would prefer to hire the editor + own kit rather than make the editor edit on hire kit.

Should the editor charge for a ‘basic system’ ?

You could say that as a ‘tradesman’ the client would assume i come with the tools of the trade if i hire a plumber i assume he will turn up with the tools and he wont charge me extra for the use of his tools (at the rate plumbers charge i should think not !) that may happen in freelance editing.

At the London show one place had an offer of
Apple G5 Dual 2.0GHz with 2Gb RAM
Final Cut Studio
23inch Apple Cinema Display
G raid 320GB
DecklinkCard

Not bad SD system apart from maybe low storage

Price

[Nick B]

Anyone think the days of charging money for the edit kit could be coming to an end ?

As long as i get a proper edit rate for myself i could easily afford to include my system (x VTR) for free !

[Nick B]

Its a good topic, the business plan is very important it is no good buying an expensive Avid and going bust !

I to am UK based and have certainly detected a rise in interest in FCP in the UK, i looked at buying an Adrenaline but i am MAC based and Adrenaline is not 100% effective on that platform , High def is another problem with Avid they charge too much for the HD board.

I paid for my FCP uncompressed HD set up in about 5 weeks so there is no ‘business risk’ this to me was perhaps the most important thing.
With ‘expensive kit’ you could find yourself working for the bank and not your own pocket.

However as peter wiggens says the price of FCP is so low you might have difficulty renting it out, i was asked for a quote for 12 weeks system rental (although i am not realy in the rental business) and i quoted

[Nick B]

Sony make cameras like Avid make editing systems they have similar old school attitudes restricting their products while Panasonic are more like Apple in trying to give creative people the best tools they can get for the money with no restrictions.

[Nick B]

Apple have said they have fixed speed-effected clips in media manager.

[Nick B]

Just a thought
Maybe you cannot use the ‘high quality’ setting if you are doing DV graphics DV just is not good enough and its errors are playing havoc with the high quality render engine.

[Nick B]

In the old days the engineer at the post house would do the upgrade in a managed and safe way he would expect issues and would not get stressed by them.

[Nick B]

Just to put things in perspective only a few years ago i was sitting in a $1Million edit suit and i couldnt do what Motion and FCP can do for a few thousand $

So why not go out and buy a new top end G5 have After effects and Motion its cheap enough unless your working for free or low pay

[Nick B]

And are you nesting at offline then trying to online nested seq ?