Film / TV / Media Crew - Technical, employment opportunities and ranting

These have been the go to guys for a while and will no doubt have exactly who you are looking for on their books:

https://bigbanana.co.za/cv/

Having not updated my showreel or sorted my website for almost 10 years, a later in the year move to France means I need to sort my shit out. After spending the last couple of days doing it I'm about ready to blow my brains out, I knew there was a good reason why I've been sacking it off for so long.

I've been asked for a reel 3 times in the past 10 days. Realised the last one I made was in 2014.

Thank you - missed this. Will check 'em out.

My reel is ready to go! On DigiBeta from 2004.

Fucking pain in the arse, pointless too. The amount of editors I've worked with who've got cracking reels but it's all bullshit are too numerous to count.

Ha, I was freelancing at an agency where a leaving producer brought in a fucking ton of DigiBeta's to transcode for their reel. Having gone to the trouble of renting a massive deck they were confronted with the realisation that the oldest person in the post department was 28 and no one had a fucking clue how to use it.

I did finally offer to help after watching the struggle for a good few hours.

What would people like to see on an edit reel? I'm a producer/director but for the past couple of years have been editing docs freelance as some side cash for a couple of very big agencies. Another one asked to see an edit reel the other day. To my mind you'd need to watch more than 30 seconds of transitions as it's about story development. So maybe a bit of technical whozzery and then a few short story arcs?

I've always thought that about reels, unless you're a DOP

I feel that a reel is just a small selection to hook someone, and that if they are really interested they will ask to see some previous work.

I mainly cut ads and short form content but have also cut a few docs.

For shortform it really is just as many sexy shots as you can cram into as short a time as possible, you really don't want to be longer than a minute, 50 year old creative directors have a worse attention span than a 14 year old tiktoker.

For docs it's as you say, you need to show more. Depending on what you have I'd be trying to show as much variety as possible so for example if you had 5 scenes at a couple of mins each, try to show as much of your narrative skills as possible, one building tension, one with humour, one with good use of score and/or sfx etc.

What do one man bands / videographers / company owners do for media backup here? Is anyone using a cloud solution? I’m amassing a huge amount of footage and don’t want to be storing it all on two drives for physical space and cost reasons, would rather have one physical drive and one copy in the cloud (also taking care of the off-site copy should my office burn down).

I’ve been looking at Dropbox business. Thoughts?

We have a trio of 32TB raids on spinning disks but I hate them. They're old, loud, slow, lots of work to do multiple backups etc. Each project I quote for with above 256GB predicted data (i.e. most of them) is allocated a hard drive budget so footage'll go on an NVME as well. Optional extra for a client-owned duplicate then it's really on them. Then I keep broadcast ready masters and project files in a cloud (google drive).

I think honestly speaking though I could get the data down. In nearly 10 years of running this business and 12 years of being self employed I've needed to access to older footage 5 times after a project has been delivered. I did a test a couple of years ago and turned a load of very old rushes into H265 proxies and got rid of the raw stuff. Haven't needed any of it. Very freeing just deleting stuff.

I'm more interested in clouds now NLEs are catching up with editing on shared timelines (stuff like blackmagic cloud store) etc. But not interested enough to be an 'early' adopter.

What sort of stuff are you shooting and do you really need to keep it? The reason I ask is in the last 20 years I can count on one hand the stuff I've needed to cut from archived rushes. The majority of the time with even the biggest production companies things get archived off to LTO, sent off site never to be seen again.

As long as you've got clean masters at the highest resolution possible and audio stems (and consolidated project with just that line and supers etc) that'll do 99.99% of the time for any reversioning you might need to do.

I just cut so I don't have the need but if i was running a full service production company I'd charge clients for long term storage, first year free and then a yearly charge if they want ongoing, if they don't want to pay then they'll have the rushes themselves. These days the majority of things I cut are around the 10tb mark in raw footage for a 30 second ad, it's just becomes an unmanageable and unnecessary cost to store it.

Obviously for feature films, docs, or any narrative longform I think archiving rushes is important but for ads and corporate there's a lot of dusty old drives and tapes that'll never get turned over again.

Have an agency we've worked for for years. Contributed to a lot of our revenue early days but has dropped off sharply as they've downsized and the two main guys near retirement and just don't do a lot of sales. Maybe one job every 6 months if we're lucky.

One in particular treats us as though we're on a retainer and constantly asks for proof of concept type things with animation. 'Can you do this effect?' 'Yes, it would take X weeks @ Y cost'. 'ok, well we've got a meeting with a client to sell this effect in 2 weeks so if you can share an example in 1 week so we know if we can do it or not in case we need to go back to the drawing board.'

I typically busy myself with other things but they're still tedious requests to have to give more than a seconds thought to.

csb

If it’s large stuff photo video files I just use two hard drives and back them up so they are mirrors. Online storage you need a lot and it becomes expensive imo

I just cut so I don't have the need but if i was running a full service production company I'd charge clients for long term storage, first year free and then a yearly charge if they want ongoing, if they don't want to pay then they'll have the rushes themselves. These days the majority of things I cut are around the 10tb mark in raw footage for a 30 second ad, it's just becomes an unmanageable and unnecessary cost to store it.

Yep, long term narrative doc. Ended up with a trip to proTape, a pile of 12TB G Drive Mk2's, and all of them on the invoice to the client (which we agreed on). 👍

Bring on massive capacity Lacie Rugged size SSD's !

Glad you managed to sort it, I think small production companies in general are quite bad for taking on costs which really should be the clients.

Autocues/teleprompters.

I haven't used one in about 15 years. I often see iPads being used these days.

I've got a shoot next week which needs one.

I've potentially got a lot of shoots that need one later in the year.

I'm a buyer not a renter because I live in the middle of nowhere.

iPad and datavideo/ikan or whatever.

Hardware prompter like an actual Autocue (they've just announced their next gen version starting at about 2.2k+VAT but not sure it'll be around in time for my next shoot: https://www.newsshooter.com/2023/04/05/autocue-announces-new-teleprompter-range )

Are hardware prompters worth the money for sporadic use? Are they visibly easier to work with? I feel 'no' but can anyone with experience chime in? (Obvious answer of 'hire an autocue op with kit' isn't what I'm after).

@CYOA
Have used both Datavideo/ Ikan iPad setups (TP-300 in the case of Datavideo, can't remember the ikan model but similar setup). Use them 2-3 times a year so I rent.

They are a little fiddly to set up but work well. Pair the iPad with a wireless keyboard and you can op it yourself too.

Just finished using a budget teleprompter and a free app about half an hour ago. Worked pretty well for the price. You have to spend time dialling the settings and I've never used a pro version but for the money it was great. Issues were build quality - heavy use for more than a year and I can see it falling to bits and there wasn't sufficient shielding for ambient refelctions. Using it outside I could see issues.

Wireless keyboard a good shout.

I wonder if there's a way to monitor the ipad output as well so you can easily scroll back and forth without having to ask talent? I know that's the point of the HDMI and SDI hardware prompters. Wonder if there's an easy ipad workaround.

We use iPad+Neewer prompter regularly and works well. It can be awkward standing off to the side and following the mirrored text to set the pace (most talent didn't want to operate the remote themselves, some do though) so I can agree that's the main drawback.

That said, if you have a spare 7" monitor for example that might work well hooked to a laptop. Some prompter apps can daisy chain an iPhone and iPad I think, but I haven't tested those yet. I've done some tests with some of the paid-for apps (prices tento to hover around £15) which scroll automatically with speech recognition and they seemed very good and something I'll delve deeper into. Keep in mind you'll want an actual audio feed into the iPad for those to work well, so might not be an option unless you use an external monitor which can provide an extra headphone out.

We also have a Teleprompter pad (same thing, different brand) but the remote it comes with is much inferior to the Neewer's, which also comes with a rigid case for storing and transporting.

You could connect the iPad to an external monitor with a USB-C hub and mirror the display there?
(said with no experience of using an iPad)

That was kind of what I had mind, however I've just seen this and the quick set-up/folding mechanism has me sold, so I've ordered one:

https://primelightdesign.co.uk/pages/zeeprompt

Also comes with software that has 3 seats and, unlike AutoCue, you don't need to pay a 225 quid a year subscription for.

Optional hard case and d-tap power (also ordered), very light weight, fits on 15mm rails (so no silly balancing of sleds), good for between 4 and 8m distance indoors.

I'll need to bring a second small laptop (one for autocue, one for zooming the interview out to remote client) but that's OK

Will report back.