Do you remember planning your dissolve renders during lunch? Do you feel like you are not only an editor but also a color corrector, graphics designer, special effects expert and DVD author to name a few added specialties and you now charge less! Have you had clients tell you their son can do what you do on iMovie? If so then you could really relate to Sid Levin's humorous presentation on "Managing Client Expectations: past, present and future". A transcription of Sid's presentation follows the video.
My first Avid had serial number 500001. Which meant that it was the first version of the Gold release of the software on the AVBV system, version 5.
It was a great time to be in this business back then. It was just a great time. Nobody knew any more about this stuff, it was just so new, and really exciting. I don’t know if any of you remember these days but, you planned your dissolves on your ABVB system during lunch. There were no real-time dissolves. So the client would say, “OK, aren’t we going to do a dissolve here?” “Yeah, why don’t we do it when we come back from lunch.” And while you’re at lunch, the thing is rendering out your dissolves. That was how you did it. And the nice thing is, you weren’t charging the client for that time. Which made it a little easier on them. Of course, when you came back from lunch and saw the little red stop sign on your computer and you go, the next hours on me.
But somehow the client saw the magic in all of it as well. They could not believe that in one session. I could give them three different scenarios of a project, where before we could barely show them one. Because in the linear world, you don’t go in and make a change. You either have to dub down a good portion of the show you’ve already done. Because you can’t move things around. You can record over them, but then you have half a show is a second generation where the first half is first generation, well that doesn’t work. So if you had a great editing system, maybe you just go ahead and take the EDL and start from scratch and rebuild it.
But what are we today? Today we’re editors, we’re graphic designers. We upconvert, we downconvert. We create web files. We do CG. We do After Effects…compression, authoring. How many do all that. I mean, look at this. Audio mix-to-pics. Color correction, look at us, a room full of color correctors. So, how much do we charge now for all of that? Less. I don’t get that, that’s what still stymies me. How is it that I have to learn DVD authoring, rendering. All that time and I can’t charge any more money for it. It’s because we’ve taken the magic out of the process. I don’t know if anyone in this room knows how a TV works. Anybody? How it scans? Anyone know how zeros and ones make video? I don’t know. It was still magic to me. But now that the clients know this…now we’re in trouble. And that’s a real dilemma now.
You know, I’ve been out there for a long time. My clients that I’ve nurtured see the value add that experience brings to a project and I hope that they will continue to see that kind of experience and continue to want to pay for that experience. That I’m a human being and that I can tell a good story, and I can sort of figure these problems out for you. Let me do that for you. And as long as we understand that this is a service that we are providing…I’m willing to give back. I’m not going to take every last dime, just to get a project done. But I think we all have to understand, this is how we plan on making a living. And if we can’t do that…what are we gonna do.
You know what I did? I did value adding. That’s another thing I did. I said you know what, for just a little bit more, I can give you something else. Getting back to the whole editing thing…I think we have to figure that in. What’s the apple pie with the burger. What is that extra thing you can bring to the table and actually charge for. Maybe it is the harddrive at the end of the session. For me it is anyways, and charging my client some sort of fee for that. What ever that is. I’m trying to think of the value add.
I spent a gazillion dollars on equipment to create an edit suite and an editing environment for clients. I expect it to get paid value added with all this equipment in house. How do we substantiate that right now? And I think this value added thing that Mark was saying is the same thing I do when I’m shooting. You know for a hundred dollars more, I’ll bring a jib arm on the shoot. I’ll put it in the car. We don’t use it, I won’t charge you. But if you want it, it’s a hundred dollars if I pull it out of the car. Most of the time, I’m pulling the jib arm out of the car. It’s an extra hundred bucks. Well the jib arm cost me a thousand, eleven-hundred bucks. If I pull it out ten times, I’ve made my money. If I pull it out twenty times, I’m starting to make money. How do we value add in the edit suite? A lot of us won’t get that opportunity. But some of us might.
Focus, discipline, work under stressful situations, timelines. I need it done by the end of today. Figure out ways to make things faster, smoother, better. And then bring something special to the table. Something they never expected you to bring to the table. I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what you have inside. But you need to find that one thing the other guy doesn’t have…to make you the guy they’re going to call that day. Absolutely. I’m not saying you have to be great every time you put a piece together but you have to be good every time you put a piece together. Once you’re bad…they’re gone. And there’s thousands of us waiting to grab a client that isn’t happy with their last project. They go fast.
One thing that I’ve started doing many, many years ago is I ask my clients what they’re favorite food items were. And when the next day they came into the edit suite, the next session, the refrigerator and the candy jars were stocked with their favorite food items. They thought that was the best thing since non-linear editing. The fact that when they came into the suite, they were actually having the foods that they wanted. And it pretty much made them fat.
Special Thanks:
Kenneth Herbet & Arnie Harchik of WGBH
for production and post-production services.