[Steve Kownacki]

You probably should have said $2500 and then the $1000 would have been a bargain… its all a game. Never lower your price, just reduce the number of hours to what they’re willing to pay for and still produce some sort of presentation. Sometimes you will never be able to produce anything for what the client wants to pay.

The problem is its powerpoint. Sometimes easy, most times a bugger. Can you tell us how many slides (and are they building bullet points) and if there’s lots of animated transitions that they want to keep in the finished movie. Are you working on MAC or PC? I can respond better with that info. Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

In keeping with Todd’s ‘half-full’ philosophy, I’m still following my every-January resolution of focusing on my top 20% clients and less on the bottom 80%. Maybe I’m not ‘firing’ the bottom guys as quickly as I’ve done in the past, but I still don’t waste too much time nursing them along hoping for the ‘big one’. Keep your best customers happy, its far cheaper than obtaining new ones. Plus with the spectacular service you offer (you do offer spectacular service right?) your customers should be happy to refer their peers to you – this costs nothing and they’re pre-qualified as to your pricing, business practice, morals and ethics. There’s no selling, just the keepin’ ’em happy and keeping to the scope of work for a given price which has absolutely NOTHING to do with offering more for less. Is your favorite restaurant giving you 20% more food for the same price in fear you’ll go somewhere else? I don’t think so. We (the industry) can offer more because the tools allow us to, but the price doesn’t come down. And we’re thankful that our first quarter has a pretty full schedule.

I’m reminded of that guy in the airplane magazines who say’s something like “you get what you negotiate”. You have to have faith in your skills and market them appropriately. We do good work, not the super-high end stuff, but its what our customers want, we’re comfortable producing it, we make a profit, we grow. Do we offer the BEST product out there for our price point, probably not – alot of you are much more talented – BUT we take care of our customer, service is king NOT the widget. I got a job yesterday to put together a series of infomercials – we got it because I called the guy back! OK, well he liked our demos too, but I communicated every step of the way. You’re never too busy to be courteous.

Call you customers – don’t send an email. Take them to lunch – yep, ya gotta spend a few bucks. Why did they hire you in the first place? Ask for that referral. Don’t you get testimonial letters from you customers? Focus on what they liked about you. Send your top 20 customers a $5 gift card just to say Hey. Little things go a long way. Thank people along the way. Thank your customer ALOT.

Running the show is a huge job for small companies especially if you are working IN the business, ya gotta work ON it too. E-myth, Tom Gerber. Look at any big businesses, they have full departments for sales, marketing, production – they have the advantage of volume. I can’t live on the typical grocery store chain profit of 4%. Some just get tired of doing it all, its a 20 hour day to wear all the hats if you’re a one-man, full-service shop as opposed to just an editing guy.

Maybe you can partner with a competitor/friend? I make a horrible employee that’s why I’m a small business (I was knighted by a client the other day that if I’m in biz for 16+ years, have employees, an office… he said I graduated past being self-employed). That’s the kind of relationships I have with clients. He never questions price. Make sure your customers know your full service list. You’ll be surprised how many of your dupe clients don’t know you could produce their training video. Or put the video on the web or CD for them. Cross-sell what you already offer.

So I’m a bit off, but it all relates I guess. When things are good, its easy to be optimistic, we have rough patches too. And like Todd, watch the bottom line. I’d love an HD cam, but so many people have them now, they’re cheap to rent.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

I didn’t see anything mentioned about editor’s cuts or versions versus what the director wanted. I’m self employed for 16+ years now, but in the early 90s, all my personal reels had the typical montage thing to start, but also the full spots or clips as the director wanted them and then MY version of the same if I felt strongly about something and they just wouldn’t go for it. Wanted to show I could think on my own.

I get reels now from people and a majority take advantage of DVD and have chapters for montages and then full clips. With kids out of school its usually all their own work, but I’ve never gotten an editor’s/aspiring editor’s reel that didn’t represent what somebody else wanted or made the judgment on.
Peace,
Steve

Daily affirmation: computers are our friends.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

OK, so it’s been a while, but I finally have some time to finish the story…
As you recall I needed to hide car lights and other retailers from the exterior shot. So what we ended up doing was stretch a 250′, 3/32″ aricraft cable between the client’s sign and a Genie lift 20′ feet off the ground. The plastic was 100′ long covering only the critical parts from the angles we shot. The lift, miscellaneous hardware, landscape plastic, and cable came to just around $450(US) for materials. Add that with 1/2 day shoot (setup 6:30pm, wrapped by 10pm), extra crew and shopping time. We usually don’t do 1/2 days, but they’re a good regular client and ya do what ya do.

The plastic weighs about 40 pounds, that’s alot of weight to hang up there. Plus its like a huge sail! Cutting the slits allowed airflow and we puts lots of bricks on the bottom to keep it in place. with 4 of us, it was all in place in a little over an hour. Overall this worked amazingly well!

I posted bunch of pix on my flickr site here
https://www.flickr.com/gp/9432631@N07/928hYW

Steve

Daily affirmation: computers are our friends.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

OK, so it’s been a while, but I finally have some time to finish the story…
As you recall I needed to hide car lights and other retailers from the exterior shot. So what we ended up doing was stretch a 250′, 3/32″ aricraft cable between the client’s sign and a Genie lift 20′ feet off the ground. The plastic was 100′ long covering only the critical parts from the angles we shot. The lift, miscellaneous hardware, landscape plastic, and cable came to just around $450(US) for materials. Add that with 1/2 day shoot (setup 6:30pm, wrapped by 10pm), extra crew and shopping time. We usually don’t do 1/2 days, but they’re a good regular client and ya do what ya do.

The plastic weighs about 40 pounds, that’s alot of weight to hang up there. Plus its like a huge sail! Cutting the slits allowed airflow and we puts lots of bricks on the bottom to keep it in place. with 4 of us, it was all in place in a little over an hour. Overall this worked amazingly well!

I posted bunch of pix on my flickr site here
https://www.flickr.com/gp/9432631@N07/928hYW

Steve

Daily affirmation: computers are our friends.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

OK, so it’s been a while, but I finally have some time to finish the story…
As you recall I needed to hide car lights and other retailers from the exterior shot. So what we ended up doing was stretch a 250′, 3/32″ aricraft cable between the client’s sign and a Genie lift 20′ feet off the ground. The plastic was 100′ long covering only the critical parts from the angles we shot. The lift, miscellaneous hardware, landscape plastic, and cable came to just around $450(US) for materials. Add that with 1/2 day shoot (setup 6:30pm, wrapped by 10pm), extra crew and shopping time. We usually don’t do 1/2 days, but they’re a good regular client and ya do what ya do.

The plastic weighs about 40 pounds, that’s alot of weight to hang up there. Plus its like a huge sail! Cutting the slits allowed airflow and we puts lots of bricks on the bottom to keep it in place. with 4 of us, it was all in place in a little over an hour. Overall this worked amazingly well!

I posted bunch of pix on my flickr site here
https://www.flickr.com/gp/9432631@N07/928hYW

Steve

Daily affirmation: computers are our friends.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

somebody said it some years ago:
To meet somebody’s budget, you never cut price, you cut services.

It may be that you can’t cut enough services to get the job done at the requested budget; then its black and white and no hard feelings.
Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

I have an Audio Technica AT100 wireless with a plug-on transmitter. I come out of a mixer, thru a line to mic level adapter to the transmitter. Usually hang the transmitter on a light stand to get it up high. This gives great audio without cables. I’m not a fan of wireless for wireless sake – better to run cables if you can and forget the headaches. wireless is line of sight, the band (or other outside sources) may have interfering frequencies (you can do all the testing at rehearsals you want, but when the show begins that’s when you know if you have a problem… so have a backup plan.) Also be aware of the competency of the sound guy, you probably don’t want the same mix he’s sending to the house PA system. Can you maybe pull from an aux mix bus that YOU setup before hand?
Steve

Daily affirmation: computers are our friends.

Steve

[Steve Kownacki]

I have no experience with Xpress and not sure what signals you are using.

1) On your current setup ensure that your Xpress is using the external ref input and not an internal ref.

2) This will work – feed component or s-video to Beta and composite out of Xpress to the Ref in on the deck (ditch the BB gen). This will fix the roll issue. Send monitor out to the other nle.

We cannot do this with our FCP/AJA io setup because it doesn’t provide simultaneous signals because it shares the cables and output is software selected. Works great on our old media100.

3) If you are feeding composite to the beta, feed it to the ref in first then loop it out to the video in – that will lock your picture. Monitor out to the other nle. If you don’t have a loop jack, use a video DA to give you 2 composite signals.

4) You can firewire out of Xpress to a DV deck then take those composite & component signals to the beta deck. You would need BB fed to the DV and Beta for it to lock.

steve

[Steve Kownacki]

I can’t recall all the talks with my legal guys, but I never use the word ‘contract’ – it’s always ‘an agreement’. I have a production agreement. You spell out a scope of work, timeframe, responsibilities from each party and get signatures. It also helps to build in enough profit and reasonable assumption that changes ARE going to happen outside of this scope. With the right amount of money, you can happily say “we’ll take care of that”. But definately say ‘here’s when it’s done.’
Steve