Sid Levin presented a humorous look at working with clients throughout the past 20-25 years. It was fun to reminisce about the products and prices of the past and see how client's expectations have evolved. Sid gave some insight into how to be successful. It takes focus, discipline, ability to work under stressful situations and timelines. The important thing is to make everything work faster, smoother and better. And then bring something special to the table – a value add that the client was not expecting. A text transcript of Sid's presentation follows the video.
Clients...I would say for the last...20...25 of those 30 years I worked with clients in the edit suite. I don’t even think I can count on one finger, how many times they’ve asked…”so what is it that you work on?” They really didn’t care what equipment I used. I thought that was a great thing. They really cared what I was doing. The process, collaboration, making them happy, making them feel good. One other thing. Always give the client something they can do. Always leave a bad cut in the show. Let them be the one to say, “you know what, I think that’s a bad cut.” And you go, “Oh my god, you’re right.” They feel so good about themselves that they were actually part of that creative process, that they found a bad edit.
We teach our clients along the way, don’t we. We teach them the process, we teach them the technology, in the hopes that we’ll learn a few things along the way as well. I feel like I’m constantly teaching my clients. This is why we do it this way. Not all of them understand it all, some of them do. Some of their kids just cut their field trip to the Museum of Science with HD on iMovie and now they’re coming in here and saying, “you know, my kid does this.” And I’m like, yeah I know. Bring them in. Let them cut it on iMovie.
But a lot of them know now. You can’t pull the wool over their eyes any more, they are savvy. They know just about as much as I do about what’s going on out there. They’re not shy about telling you.
In the early days my clients were more concerned about the tape formats. They wanted to know, how are we going to deliver this, what are we going to shoot on. They were never really concerned about the equipment or the process. I don’t know how many of you are still working with Betacam, Betacam SP. That was probably the last format that had any real longevity in the marketplace. I don’t know if we’ll ever see another format that will have lasted almost twenty years. Which meant I could actually recoup my investment before it became outdated. Maybe DV, DVCAM might have a long run but I’m not sure if that will happen.
You know what’s nice about acquiring on “no tape?” No drop-outs. Clients hate drop-outs. They don’t understand how they get there. They don’t understand that they can’t be removed. We have to go in an fix them, and that’s more time. So I’m loving, I’m just trying to adopt this whole solid-state field recording technology for a client. And what I’m doing now and what I think I will continue to do is…I’m offering a client a harddrive at the end of a session. Here’s a harddrive with your name on it. I will take everything you’ve worked on and put it on this harddrive for you. It is your’s it stays here. Guess what? For the cost of the harddrive, it will save you all the re-digitizing if we ever have to go back and do it again. And how much is a harddrive now…200, 300 dollars…for enough to get a consolidated sequence. Even if you have just a limited amount of raw material that you want to save for the client. By them two drives. Or don’t even charge them for it. But maybe if they want to take it out of house, maybe you make them pay for it then. Make it easy for that transition. I’m thinking that’s probably the only way I can get them to sort of migrate over to this tapeless workflow. I love the tapeless workflow. I love the fact that I can take something and not digitize it. I hate digitizing. Does anybody love digitizing? I used to love it when I could charge money for it. Now clients go, “you’re not going to charge me for digitizing?” I have too, I’m in the room.
So how did I offset the trauma to my clients that I have to digitize my material, I have to render my material to show you dissolves, I have to ingest every bit of material I’m going to work with and then when we’re done, and we’re offlining, because we didn’t have terabytes. We had six gigabytes, nine gigabytes drives, and then they came up with eighteen gigabyte drives. So we couldn’t bring in eight hours of material in high res, no one was doing that. And then we have to batch digitize. “So you’re going to charge me for digitizing, we’re going to render, and then we’re going to batch digitize in an online res, and that’s better than what we used to do?” Because in the old days, we worked in high res, right? The dissolves were in real-time the CG was real-time, the DVE was real-time, everything was real-time. Now I have to go to the client and say, it’s not real-time anymore. It’s changing.
I always build into my budgets a half a day for my client. It’s a two-day edit with a half day of fixes. Do we really need it? Yes. Always. That half-day is yours, you do with it as you wish. So if I feel it’s a two day edit, it’s a half-day and that’s their time to make big changes. If it’s more than a half-day…four, five hours…then it goes beyond the budget of the project.
Sit down with them, get a true understanding. Say, look if you really want me to budget this out, let me do it right. I don’t want to quote you something now, that’s going to scare you away. When in reality, it’s a half-day edit. So I’m going to quote you two days, three days a week? Is there a review process involved? Is there a producer involved? Is there a director involved? How long does it take?
One quick thing…one resolution I did make, I stopped bitching to Avid about everything they do. I’m not blaming them for my life’s sorrows, I’m not blaming them because I can’t get work, I’ve stopped blaming them because it’s not their fault. It’s my fault. I am in control. If I’m not getting enough work, maybe it’s because I didn’t make the phone call at the end of the day to follow up on the project I just finished. Or I didn’t nuture that client just a little bit better. Or I didn’t take them out to coffee and just say hey, how did the last edit go. We have to be our own salespeople. And I think if we can retain a small niche of clients to keep you busy if you’re working independently, I think we can get through this.
I tried to edit a pro-bono project on Premiere…my wife’s going “you still cutting that? You gotta be kidding me.” I said, I don’t even now how to collapse the tracks. It’s like OK, with Avid if you have two tracks on your source material and you only want to use one of them you can do that. And if you want to use one of those tracks and mono them out to the stereo, both left and right, you can do that fairly easily. Premiere Pro, I have no clue. I have read the books, and I don’t know how you do that.
Special Thanks:
Kenneth Herbet & Arnie Harchik of WGBH
for production and post-production services.