Nick Griffin
Forum Replies Created
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Wow, Tim! What a detailed and cogent analysis of the whole situation. You should be the COW’s Editor In Chief! Oh… wait a minute. You ARE the COW’s Editor In Chief, not to mention an incredibly prolific contributor.
The fact of the matter is the world has changed and continues to do so at an ever-increasing pace. Various business models for the delivery of content will be explored. Some will succeed and some will fail. I don’t have to like it, but it’s the truth.
For what it’s worth I’m in the very distinct minority who would happily pay more for content without the commercial, or promotional for that matter, spots. I spend something like $216 a year for HBO, probably half that for Showtime and $83.88 a year for NetFlix. I’m not paying CBS for what I can already DVR.
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Good point, Gav. But I’ve always thought of cable as the equivalent of a hyper-efficient antenna that covers every set in my house. Cable gets hundreds of channels on which I’d see the same spots whether I had cable or not. The Hulu / CBS All Access thing to me feels — to continue the cable analogy — like I’m paying for commercial-free HBO and now they’ve unilaterally decided to include spots and STILL expect me to pay their monthly fee.
Time will tell if their business model will work. In a way this seems a less Draconian version of Adobe’s new pricing plan. Stop paying Adobe and you no longer have access to your files. Avid took a much smarter approach (IMHO) because if you stop paying you don’t lose anything, you freeze where you are and just don’t get the new features.
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My fav of his is The Graduate. It continues to this day to be extremely relevant for viewing the world through the eyes of the disaffected. “One word: Plastics.”
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Unfortunately, ditto. However our calls just come weekly to bi-weekly from Verizon. Perhaps because our region may be larger than yours the people here have more businesses to pester.
We demanded fiber a couple of years ago when they finally admitted that my claims of excessive noise and hum on the line happened every time it rained were accurate and there were no more clean copper “pairs” available in our neighborhood.
And it’s not just phone companies. It’s freakin’ amazing to me that so many big companies can’t take the simple act of closing the loop on their outbound telemarketing so they’re not calling the same people over and over again. It’s costing THEM more money to be so stupid.
And don’t get me started on the so called Google calls. They’re not even Google, just some companies pitching their SEO services. These calls seem to come at least 3 times a week.
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Joe-
Your approach seems perfectly reasonable and straight forward as long as it’s clear to all parties from the start that these are your terms. It is, however, not the kind of work I pursue.And as to turning over [Joe Knapp] ” all project files”, well let’s just say that there are MANY contrary viewpoints on this. Click on over to the Business & Marketing COW and go back through the archives. After Effects and Avid files are our property and are not transferred. Period. (Unless there’s a butt-load of bucks involved, then anything is possible.)
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Or, potentially the worse case, your client wants to be a do-it-yourselfer. “Hey I have Microsoft Moviemaker. How hard could editing be?” If you’re lucky, VERY lucky he or she will quickly realize that there’s a lot more to editing an effective program than just having the software.
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Probably too late for this now, but our proposals state that we are providing finished programs and that we don’t release footage without additional compensation. In essence we are providing the services of shooting as part of a bigger package. It’s arguable that we are doing the shoot part at a discount because we are doing the post as well. That and the fact that I think a much better product is to be had when the shooter knows what will be in the edit and the editor knows what the shooter was going for.
So on that basis I am one of those who tells clients that they are more than welcome to VIEW all the footage (with timecode burned it) but if they WANT all the footage it is at a premium. I have been successful approaching this when asked by saying, “Why would you want to spend that additional 30% on the cost of the shoot?” In other words, take their side and present it as you trying to save them money.
Hope this helps. If none of it is do-able for you resign yourself to the fact that you’ve likely lost a client to someone else who will have to spend a great deal of time understanding what you have begun.
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[Bob Cole] “…but is now out of hand with file-based acquisition.”
And that’s why I’m happy to have stuck with XDCam disks. Like you, Bob, I’m an old guy who likes having what used to be tapes and now disks on a shelf. Because our digital files (Cannon & GoPro) are only a small portion of what we shoot I archive those files, as well as finished programs on data BluRay disks.
And to answer your initial question, we do not charge archive fees mostly because it seems to be an expectation on the clients’ part that they can always get something that’s been done in the past. Then when they ask for it a small “recover from archives” search fee is charged.
I’m reminded of a recording studio/video production facility (Sheffield, Bob) that back in the day would archive masters and work reels free of charge. BUT if you wanted to take them out of their archive they had a fairly lengthy release form where you agreed that you were taking responsibility for the materials and were holding the facility harmless if you should lose the tapes.
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Frankly I’ve had it go both ways. Some people have seen and thanked for the n/c extras. Conversely, on a particularly large project, we had a client complain that even though his invoice was held to the agreed upon budget he whined about “Why couldn’t your estimating be more accurate?”
As a friend of mine first said years ago,”This would be a great business if we could do it without the clients.”
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Ahhh, must have forgotten to use the option key. Now it works quite well. Thank you!