Richard Herd
Forum Replies Created
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[Daniel Peterson] “range anywhere between $3000 – $30,000”
That’s a drastic range. For $3,000 I don’t write a contract or spend much time negotiating. I’ll send an email with a series of deliverables and their fees.
I am not a bank, so the moment I start incurring hard costs, my risk goes up. Those hard costs are always required upfront — especially payroll, worker’s comp, equip rental, and equipment insurance.
[Daniel Peterson] “Here’s some questions that I have asked myself that may get the ball rolling…
Do you include details about the number of hours/days you intend to work or just a description with the total cost?
Do you make a client sign a quote (or contract) to accept it?
Do you require payments upfront? Or a percentage upfront before beginning the job?
Do you have any other ‘terms and conditions’? (Late payment fees? Additional charges?)
How long is the quote valid for?”Details? Yeah be detailed. I include parking at the airport in the budget. I’ve found that when dealing with corporate business managers, they always try to beat the contract and nickel and dime as much as they can. I guess so in their reports to their superiors, they can show what a great job they did saving the corporation money. I really don’t know why they try to beat the contract. It’s annoying as hell.
No I don’t make a client sign a quote to accept it because what if they don’t sign it? Am I gonna get all pedantic on them? The reason to sign the quote is so you have proof that they received it. An email is pretty good for that, followed up by a phone call to discuss the terms and a follow up email noting the phone call discussion and attaching the new quote is a nice piece of documentation. (Then that will sit on the clients/corporate-contact’s desk for two weeks until their work flow cycles back to the production, after they’ve had 2 dozen meetings, the script has change, and other details.)
Upfront payment? Yes. 50% plus hard costs. This is a deal breaker. I am not a bank. If they cannot cover my hard costs, then I cannot make their shoot. You need to be paid after principal photography too. 25? 10%? I don’t know. But you can’t be expected to sit on your footage and make no profit while your contact/client puts out other fires that may pop up. It’s also really important to make sure your service agreement/contract has a clear termination clause. Here’s a dirty secret in big corporations: your contact doesn’t pay the bills. You’ll send an invoice to a completely separate department in a different city who will check the Purchase Order against the Service Agreement against the Receiving Department and will then verify with your contact’s boss (and or purchasing control manager) whether or not the stuff was actually delivered. This little piece of internal control can be a nightmare for video folks because when you deliver a download the Receiving Dept does not enter the PO number in the database to inform Purchasing of delivery. Yes, that really happened.
Late payment? Huh? That means you delivered your video before you were paid. DO NOT DO THAT! Burn timecode into every single deliverable so that the video is not really useable and also there is an easy way to discuss changes. You will have to decide in advance when the scope of work goes outside the contract and becomes a change order. Let me tell you: that conversation is not a pretty one, when you have to say “Well, that change is substantial and outside the scope, so I’ll need a change order for that.”
For me, quotes are valid until the PO arrives, or I’m too busy. Reality is, if they like your price, they’ll send you a PO (which is easier to receive than a contract, btw).
Let me talk about the art for second: I got burned really bad once because I shot some footage and assembled it for the Creative Director who then forwarded it to the client, a bean counter with no imagination. The client fired us both. That was $10k down the toilet. The lesson I learned was do not show unfinished stuff. Whatever you deliver IS your brand. So only deliver excellent material. I don’t like playback on set either. And I prefer to have the footage timed before I show folks in an edit session.
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[Mark Suszko] “A quote should always stipulate that any change orders invalidate the total amount to be billed”
This point cannot be stressed enough.
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Here’s some juicy quotes:
Dave [Cerf] really handled most of the FileMaker jiu-jitsu. It works well with XML, so we were able to go back and forth between FileMaker Pro and [Apple] Final Cut Pro 7 using XML. This time our script supervisor, Virginia McCarthy, was using ScriptE, which also does a handshake with FileMaker, so her notes could be instantly integrated into our database. Then we could use this information to drive an action in Final Cut Pro—for instance, the assembly of dailies reels. FileMaker would organize the information about yesterday’s shooting, and then an XML out of that data would trigger an assembly in Final Cut, inserting graphics and text as needed in between shots. In the other direction, we would create visibility-disabled slugs on a dedicated video track, tagged with scene information about the clips in the video tracks below. Outputting XML from Final Cut would create an instantaneous continuity list with time markers in FileMaker.”
Another trick he mentioned to me was something he referred to as a QuickTime skin. Murch continues, “I edit with the complete movie on the timeline, not in reels, so I always have the full cut in front of me. I started using this simple QuickTime skin technique with Tetro. First I export the timeline as a self-contained QuickTime file and then re-import the visual. This is placed on the uppermost video track, effectively hiding everything below. As such, it’s like a ‘skin’ that wraps the clips below it, so the computer doesn’t ‘see’ them when you scroll back and forth. The visual information is now all in one location on a hard drive, so the system isn’t bogged down with unrendered files and other clutter. When you make changes, you ‘razor-blade’ through the QuickTime and pull back the skin, revealing the ‘internal organs’ [the clips that you want to revise] below, thus making changes like a surgeon. Working this way also gives a quick visual overview of where you’ve made changes. You can instantly see where the skin has been ‘broken’ and how extensive the changes were. It’s the visual equivalent of a change list. After a couple of weeks of cutting, on average, I make a new QuickTime and start the process over.”
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The screen grabs are good.
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That’s a dubious claim. I of course did not make a dubious claim. I compared 7 to X. You compared me to you, which brings up an entirely different digression:
America’s Best Editor. or Hell’s Video Editor.
What we need is a reality show that pits editors in high stakes competition. Imagine how exciting it would be for the audience to watch video editors Right Clicking and Keyboarding nifty edits. We could have this forum as the gossip sections of the show.
On point…though, I’m a SHIFT-L kind of guy in Legend. The beauty of Js and Ls in X over Legend is how it deals with “flow” (as is named above). Also the precision editor is a marvel to behold when doing L-s and J-s. 7 v X I’m right, but I’ve used both “softwares.” I believe you haven’t actually delivered anything using X, and you are more in favor of hypotheticals. Delivering a simple test project is all you gotta do.
Kudos to the little “if you know what you’re doing comment”; it’s a beauty of a sniping zinger suited for reality tv.
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I had success recently by budgeting as a series of deliverables.
The client liked it because they could see progress. I liked it because I got paid at every point along the way. There’s traditional words that describe the creative process and also manage client expectations:
— Transcode
— Assemble Edit
— Rough Cut
— Picture Lock
— Audio Edit(Hard costs might include storage.)
It wise to invite the client to the transcode session because it’s boring and technical that surely they have better things to do, but also it gives you a chance to explain some technical details with regard to codec and such. It’s also a first hand experience for the client to see how detailed a pro editor actually is.
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[Joseph W. Bourke] “The broadcast station I worked at until 2009…”
WOW! That was a great post. I hope the finance and audit departments stayed out of your way 🙂
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[Herb Sevush] “Does this also define X as a product not made not for the betterment of the art of editing but merely to avoid the kind of patent wars that Apple is such a proponent of?”
Of course not. It could be both “a betterment of art” and “avoid the kind of patent wars.”
Silly man. It’s not an either or situation. Now, if they’d just make the damn audio editing GUI!
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[Bill Davis] “we’re truly down to content quality being remaining separator – rather than access to specialist tools.”
And that’s why everyday I go teach media production classes to at-risk high school students. (That and the fact that there’s very little production work in Reno and my wife is in a PhD program till 2016.)
Here’s one of the ads the kids made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tojT42CWFs being run in our local market on MTV.
We shot on a Panny DVC20P and lit with Lowell lights that won’t actually stand up and edited on PP 4.2 on Windows XP with 4GB RAM and a junky video card.
NOTE: With Perkins grant money I bought $10k in new equipment that will serve 125 kids this year.
Last week I started teaching “multimedia”; how to export video for the web and author html. I could not teach it fast enough. They actually put their phones down and paid attention! The running theme through the 2012 NACTE conference was “techno-literacy”; what I call video literacy: reading and writing motion picture content. The issue is a critical thinking problem; how do we tune out the bad and tune in the good?
(Feel free to donate a month of Adobe Creative Cloud. Thanks!)