[Scott Hancock]

Hi Greg,

I understand where you’re coming from. We have a retainer agreement, but for wider variety of services. Would offer the following thoughts:

1. How would you set up an agreement? Would they pay in full at the beginning? Or would they pay monthly?

I would ask for 2 months advance at first and then month 3 at the beginning of month 2 , etc. So you always have a 2-month buffer. This correlates to the cancel notice.

2. What happens if they don’t use the 30 hours? Do they lose them? Or do I roll them over? IMHO rolling them over would be a headache to keep track of. How do I handle rush jobs? Do the rush fees go away?

Maybe roll over for 1 month, but not more. In any case, you should provide a running account of what hours have been used and for what projects. And what hours are left. Even better if you can get them to sign-off or confirm week by week or something so you don’t get to the end of a month with a “I didn’t know we used that many hours.” conversation.

Part of the contract should include some minimum advance notice for using hours. You can’t afford to keep on stand-by 24/7 waiting for their requests. You wouldn’t be able to take any other work. I would say the rush fees go away with this. It sounded like that was one of their goals in accepting the deal.

3. How do I add our other services to this agreement? Crew for shoots, animations, etc.? Are these a separate agreement? A change order? Are these discounted?

Suggest you make a menu of what’s included in the retainer and what services are not included and how they would be charged if requested. It’s the best starting place for corporate clients whose procurement people want to know such numbers, and also as a first defense against the direct client’s “can’t you package this up into one number?” bit.

Also beware and put a condition that “value of hours retained is NOT transferrable to other services”.

I don’t think you’d want to discount them if you are subbing them out. Don’t fall into subsidizing such discount.

Think about whether those hours are available 24/7 or only certain hours with premium for OT. Try to avoid setting yourself up to work 24/7, even though we too often end up doing. Clients will surely try to use their 30 hours in the month on the last day.

I think it’s possible to set it up as workable, but agree with the others’ warnings about becoming retained in chains.

Good luck!

[Scott Hancock]

JOE MARLER – Could not agree with you more. Have been looking for such a conceptual level explanation. It would make absorbing the X universe much easier.

BILL DAVIS – Hope you might add such to XinTwo as you seem close to it.

Scott

[Scott Hancock]

Thank you for replying, Elizabeth.
Sorry, but in the condition I experience, I cannot see the greeen button. The PPro window is displaced off my screen and I cannot ‘see’ an window title bar to drag it into position.

[Scott Hancock]

I’m having exactly the same problem. Haven’t figured out yet.
In my case, the audio only clip will play in the source monitor. It played first time in the timeline, but then the yellow box popped up and it won’t play from the timeline.

I tried moving the folder with the audio to invoke the “relink me” dialogue, but even after relinking with that, still got the yellow warning and no timeline playback.

Scott

[Scott Hancock]

My understanding – and the way I duplicate titles to make new ones is to use the button for “New Title Based on Current Title”. The button looks like a T in a film frame with the upper right corner bent over. It’s under the word “Title:” in the tab of the main title panel.

If you use this button, it will turn the current title into a copy and present you with the number of the title incremented up one.

One slight crudeness is that it increments up from the last title ever made in that project. You can’t change what it’s basing its increment on. For example, if you made 100 titles and then decided to start over and trashed them all and made a fresh one, it would name itself Title 101.

Is this what you were looking for?

[Scott Hancock]

Thank you so much for replying and suggesting, Jorn.
I did try the “reset workspace” command, but that just resets it within the window that is partially off-screen. It doesn’t affect the position of the window relative to the screen.

By “failsafe layout”, I take it you mean a small window that would be likely to always be within a screen’s area? I’m trying that a bit and it seems the size of the window is not related to the workspace within it.

Maybe I’m not getting what you mean…

Thanks a lot –
Scott

[Scott Hancock]

Hi Claire,
Sorry I didn’t answer your questions earlier. I thought I had.

What does codec mean and what does it do?

CODEC stands for COding and DECoding, which means it’s a software for changing analog information into digital and back again (coding and decoding). If you Google CODEC, I’m sure you will find better explanations. There are many codecs / ways of encoding the analog to digital.

The other word you will find related to this is “wrapper”. I hope someone else on here can describe it better, but roughly speaking, I believe it is a computer file format that “contains” the digitized (codec-ed) information. Various codec-ed video can exist in various wrappers, and vice versa. Confusing.

As I mentioned earlier, I believe WMV has an “advantage” in that it is both codec and wrapper. I hope others will correct me if I’m wrong.

I am a bit worried that the 2-3 min video I end up putting in Powerpoint will be a good quality but be a large file size and will play jerky.

That length should be no problem at all. I have put 20 minute videos in PPT. Roughly speaking that length of video shouldn’t be more than 20-30 – maybe 50Mb, if that.

Once I’ve saved out the wmv file from After Effects is a there a free program I should run it through to reduce file size but not quality?

You really shouldn’t need to do that. Any professional program that can generate WMV will allow you to adjust the file parameters to be suitable. I don’t know the specifics for doing so in AE.

Hope you have surmounted this already.
If you learn anything new or additional to what I’ve written, please share it here.

Scott

[Scott Hancock]

Clarie,

I need to correct something in the previous message. I said there are no variation in codec with WMV, but I realized that now, they can use .H264 or the original VC-1.

Nothing stays the same very long.

Scott

[Scott Hancock]

Hi Claire,

We have been using more video in PPT lately. Here are some answers from my experience. I’m sure there will be other points of view. There seem to be fewer absolute answers anymore, so try them all out.

My questions are:

1. What should the video dimensions be? (The client is yet to confirm the projector resolution – should it be the same as this?)

I have found using 1280×720 for 16:9 material is the most consistently useful.
PowerPoint seems to fit into most ‘normal’ projectors, so I don’t think that relates.

2. What render settings and video format should I output to?

Although PPT claims to be able to place many kinds of video files, I believe WMV is the safest because a) it’s MS’s own b)don’t have the variation of codec possibilities. WMV is pretty much WMV other than the size & bit rate.

3. What size should the Powerpoint slides be?

There is no changing the “size” of PPT slides. You can only change the aspect. 4:3 or 16:9

For a quick test I created a video in After Effects with PAL DV (720 x 576) but when inserting into Powerpoint (4:3) it was not big enough to fill the slide. Is it ok to stretch the video or should the video have bigger dimensions?

Inserting a bigger size file to fill the frame should give somewhat better picture, but depending on the length of the video and bit rate, the size of the file could become a factor if the playback computer has to struggle.

There is an option in the PPT video playback menu to “play full screen” which will cause any size file to fill the screen. Experimenting with your particular material and playback computer is a good idea.

One additional caveat I recently became aware of is that PPT can sometimes be fussy about the video it accepts. If you Google “inserting video freezes PowerPoint” you will see fair number of people with this problem. After experimenting, I found that using one software or another affected this behavior. If I used a conversion program “Any Video Converter 5”, the resulting file froze PPT. If I took the same source material and made the wmv in Sony Vegas Pro 10 or 11, the file was accepted. I’m now trying to figure out why some files, after being ‘accepted’ into PPT play back jerkily, while others play smoothly. In my current case, the jerky one has a much lower bit rate than the smoothly running one!

I have come to believe in video voodoo as the only way to stop being stuck looking for the “reason”.

Keep experimenting and share your findings here if you can.

Scott

[Scott Hancock]

Thank you for the suggestion, Steve.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for our case because in large corporate evironments, people cannot install anything on their company PC. It’s very restricted by their IT department. This is why we need to deliver their preview files on WMV. It’s the only video format that works for everyone in the client company.it also seems most reliable for embedding in PowoerPoint.

Thanks again,
Scott