Walter Biscardi
Forum Replies Created
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[Bob Zelin] “There are plenty of people that say “the business is over” – well, it’s not over, you just have to go out there and FIGHT, and believe me, at my age (almost 55) it’s getting harder and harder to fight everyday.”
Can’t agree more. Well except for the age part, but I’ll be there sooner than later…..
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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[Chris Blair] “1. At major corporations, people are being transferred from previous careers in IT, Human Resources and Customer Service…to positions as Marketing Directors, Brand Managers and VPs of Advertising. Never mind they don’t know a rating point from a pressure point. Experienced (and smart) VPs are getting kicked to the curb in droves.”
Yep, it’s all about Salary. This has been happening at Turner Broadcasting for years at all levels from on-air talent to the technical staff. Cheaper to bring in new folks or folks new to a department than to keep promoting the same people. It’s easier to take someone making $20,000 and promote them to $30,000 while at the same time letting go someone who used to make $100,000 in the same job.
[Chris Blair] “2. “Senior” Producers at Ad Agencies are younger than my son, and greener than the Chicago River on St. Patty’s day. One of them recently cast a college student to play the part of….wait for it….an elderly lady! Another cast a “how to” video with actors but had nobody on set who actually knew “how to” perform the task needed for the video.”
No surprise there quite honestly. It’s fun for me to work with green folks who have absolutely no clue what it takes to produce a project and see what they come up with. That’s why all of my contracts include a line like “based on the information available,” or “the figures quoted in this contract are an estimate and subject to change based on client requested changes.”
[Chris Blair] “3. These same green Marketing Directors ask for bids on video projects based on written specs, then once the contract is inked, present revised scripts that are impossible to shoot on the agreed upon budget. In fact, they’d be impossible to shoot on Herculean budgets! They’re upset about that fact because they’ve already told their boss it can be done without asking us first.”
As I said, my contracts always have the provision for changes. I always keep a copy of any correspondence with the end client with my contracts so if there is any question as to why I’m changing the price, they can see why. Of course if it looks like they are going to nickel and dime me to death I’ll either cut loose the contract to walk away or I’ll hold the master until we receive final payment. Nothing like holding on to a project that is scheduled to be shown tomorrow and they don’t have it in their hands because you didn’t get paid……
[Chris Blair] “4. Producers who’ve NEVER been on a shoot before argue about how we schedule the shoot, complaining “we don’t need that much time to do four setups because the shoot is in one location.” Never mind we’ve been doing this for 25 years, have scheduling down to a near science….and most importantly… the location is an industrial complex the size of a small city and it takes 30-60 minutes just to move from one location to the next…NOT including lighting, blocking and shooting the scene.”
Producers who HAVE been on shoots always argue with me when I schedule the time. Again, see my answer #2. I have had two shoots where the client insisted on scheduling the time.
On one of them I knew they under-booked the time by half so I told the entire crew to be prepared for three additional days of shooting, kind of like asking them to be on stand-by. When we got to the end of the first day it was very obvious to the client/Producer we were not going to complete the project in three days. “So what can we do?” Well, we either scale the project way back to shoot what we can in three days or you will have to add three more days of field production to your budget.
They miraculously found just enough money to cover those extra three days of shooting.
If a client wants to back themselves into a corner I will let them. Then I let them make the decision of how to proceed. It was their decision to forge ahead ill prepared so they can make the decision on how to fix it.
But my contracts have the provision to cover overages and I will (and have) held Masters until final payment if necessary.
The trends you mention really aren’t all that new quite honestly. Well except for the part of the folks getting younger in much more prominent positions.
I’ve had my own company since 1998 and right from the get go, our first client “knew television” and insisted on how the first project was going to go. He was wrong and we ate the added cost.
Since 1998 I’ve had to deal with the “sticker shock” when we tell folks how much a project is going to cost. And especially the time involved. “It doesn’t take 30 minutes to edit a 30 minute video?”
The big trend of the past few years has simply been the availability of the tools to a much wider audience. Anybody with a Mac laptop is a video editor with a very powerful suite of tools for $999. So as a result, the rates people can charge have plummeted and the sheer amount of people providing production services has skyrocketed. Go to any dinner party and you will hear about someone’s child who is at college / high school / tech school editing, animating, doing graphics and website in their spare time on their laptops. Those same kids then move into our field and since they’re only out a couple grand for the laptop and software, will charge $25/hour for what a typical shop would charge $175/hour and higher.
We have not been hit quite as hard in that regard because our prices have always been much lower than the going rate in this area. I’ve always gone after the strategy of long term clients paying less per job but making up for that with the volume of work. That has worked for us so far.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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And as a PS, I’m well aware that there are two potential outcomes for our expansion.
We will continue to be successful.
We will have a downturn in the company and declare bankruptcy.
I know this going in and accept that we will work hard to make sure the first option is where we go. But I will never have to wonder what could have happened had we not expanded.
At this point we have no choice but to expand. 1000 square feet with 6 people tripping over each other is not going to work. So sink or swim, we’re going to have fun trying.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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Make it easy on yourself and contact CaptionMax. Great folks, great prices. Send everything to them and mark it up a little bit so you get something out of it.
You will spend all of about 20 minutes on this and you’re free to go off and do another job while those folks take care of you.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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[David Roth Weiss] “Walter and Bob telling them that everything in the world was just peachy.”
I’ve been saying the world is peachy? No. I’ve been saying that we are in the fortunate position to be expanding while much of the country is contracting.
In Georgia our film and television business went from around $200 million three years ago to about $1.7 billion last year.
I’m also in a position where I have very good long term clients that have nothing to do with corporations.
I also steered my company away from corporate clients 4 or 5 years ago when the only thing that mattered to them was the bottom line and I could simply not compete at the price level they were asking. The young college kids are better suited for their price points.
And last but not least, we keep our overhead to an absolute minimum and the new building is part of that strategy. Because the economy is so bad, we are building from scratch on almost 2 acres of land for about 60% less per month than if we leased 40% less space than we are building.
Yep, the economy is bad, high school kids with iMovie can do the exact same work we’re doing for pennies on the dollar and I’m now getting resumes from people who used to work in the $85 million production facility in town. But we’re still expanding because we’re in a position to take advantage of everything that’s going on in this state.
Nowhere does this say everything is peachy, nor would I ever say that in this economy. All I’ve said all along is that we’ve built for 10 years to put ourselves in a perfect position to take advantage of this down market.
Call it what you like. I just call it being in the right place at the right time.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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MPEG Streamclip
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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Our problems were related to the Mac Pro Octo Core 2.93 machine and Apple changing the Ethernet controller on that machine. We installed a Small Tree PEG 1 card in there to solve the problem.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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128GB is actually a very small project quite honestly. 1TB drives are $89 at Fry’s Electronics and 2TB are $129 these days so my first suggestion would be to get a larger hard drive. We run the WiebeTech RTX series of hard drive enclosures here that allow us to simply purchase bare hard drives and slap them into the box for archiving and remote editing.
Short of that, pull selects from your original media, don’t convert everything. ProRes is a very small file size compared to uncompressed HD media which would require you to get many more hard drives.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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[Craig Johnson] ” My question is do all the frame sizes have to be exactly the same, and do all the codecs?”
No, frame sizes do not all have to be exactly the same. You set up FCP to edit in whatever frame size you want the final product to be and then start editing in that type of timeline.
The codecs should match if you want optimum picture quality but they do not necessary have to match. FCP will render the frame sizes and codecs that do not match. However, know that FCP is limited in the codecs that it will edit with cleanly.
Know that if you’re mixing interlaced material with progressive material, you’ll have mixed results in the final product. FCP is not that great in mixing those two.
If you’re mixing frame rates, you can have mixed results as well.
[Craig Johnson] “Also is my project fixable somehow to alter the existing clips so they match and it plays back with a fairly consistent image in widescreen?”
Yep. Set up a new timeline the way you want it to be. Frame Size, Frame Rate, etc… Just use an Easy Setup, that’s the easiest way to get everything correct.
Create the new timeline.
In the original timeline, copy all.
In the new timeline, Paste
All of your clips will drop into the new timeline, if FCP asks you whether to change anything in the timeline, say “No.”
Select all of your clips in the new timeline.
Right click on any clip and select “Remove Attributes.”
Select Basic Motion and Distort and click Ok.
This will remove any re-sizing and re-formmatting that FCP did to your clips when you dropped them into the timeline. Now you can go through the clips and resize them to properly fit into your timeline.
In either the User Prefs or the System Settings (I’m not in front of an FCP system right now) there is an “Editing” tab and in there is a setting to have FCP automatically scale any incoming clips in a timeline. It’s in the lower right of the tab. Un check that to prevent FCP from automatically resizing clips as you move them into a timeline so you have total manual control of each clip as they come in.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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[David Roth Weiss] “On the other hand, broadcast quality today is anything that simply doesn’t get rejected, which means video ripped from a DVD isn’t out of the question if properly color corrected.”
Sad but true.
On the DVD part, just set it to the absolute best quality and make a ProRes file. That’s what we do here. It doesn’t get any better than the original file.
When needed we apply noise reduction and blurs to clean up the image as much as possible.
But in this day of camera phone video and flip video quality, I guess the quality of the image doesn’t matter so long as it’s compelling. Well, does that even matter anymore these days……
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.