Client wants to see all the footage.

[Brentincal]

My client loves what I've shown her... but she wants to see ALL the footage. What is the best way to show your client large volumes of source footage? Down convert? Tape? What is the most efficient way?

Thanks for your opinion.

[Sumfun]

Probably the most efficient is to invite her to your edit suite and let her look at the footage. Most of the footage you didn't submit is probably not so good anyway, so you can probably fast forward through them.

[Steve Shovlar]

Never let them see it. Prolongs the whole process and time is money. Tell them they got the best shots and you don't want to show them the jerky shots etc and they got all the best shots. I shoot weddings and often get asked if they can have everything. I refuse as it overall it reduces the quality of your business if they get to see out of focus/under/over exposed shots etc.

[Michael T]

It depends on the client some demand to see all of it and some have good reasons to see all of it depending on the nature of the footage. For event shooting some clients want all the footage so they can see their people performing from different angles and their footwork. I shoot for a dance company and they don't interfere with editing they just want to look at all their footwork.

I'm buyin another new portable Sony dvd burner with a built in screen and controls to dump all my footage to and this thing can be used out in the field without a computer. Its self contained. I think it is available at costco for $129 or $159. cheap and easy to use and the quickest way to dump off footage straight out of the camera.

I never give all the high rez footage to clients. DVD quality only.

Good luck.

[kubalsky]

smoke pellets. as soon as they ask, throw one to the ground. by the time the smoke clears your out

...just an idea but you might want to consider buying a small Lacie Rugged or something that you loan out to the client after the shoot with all the files transferred in as Quicktime movies.

I've just done this....which reminds me, I gotta get that thing back!

[thxdave]

Most of my clients don't have computers with enough "horsepower" to run these clips without problems. I have to dumb them down to SD before they can view them.

[doofalot]

smoke pellets. as soon as they ask, throw one to the ground. by the time the smoke clears your out

...just an idea but you might want to consider buying a small Lacie Rugged or something that you loan out to the client after the shoot with all the files transferred in as Quicktime movies.

I've just done this....which reminds me, I gotta get that thing back!

I guess maybe I have been overdoing it with tear gas.

[dandobi.com]

very well put

[ezpop]

Never let them see it. ....
Words of Wisdom;

[MikeGunter]

Hi,

The general consensus seems to be that you're an event shooter and this is a wedding?

While I agree that showing bad footage is bad business, not showing what you're paid to show up and shoot (in their eyes) will seem awfully bad, too.

In any case, your best out is to at least get paid for it (or perhaps put a price tag that you can live with on it). It will take you some hours of effort to transfer to whatever media or have the customer come in and sit with you (likely a best bet - you might as well learn something from her reactions to what you didn't put into the mix, too).

Transferring the content to DVD or VHS in toto infringes on your copyright management, a tough pill for her to swallow. Negotiating for all the footage is a real crap shoot, because it's probable that most of it is bad - you would have used it if it wasn't, but it yours to protect. After the fact is a bad time to talk money. Ask any judge.

I should think you should tell her that you made the decision of the edit based on what there was to make a good video. The rest likely isn't that interesting. But if she really wants to see it with you, I'd hold to my published hourly rate. At the worse, she'll say no and likely realize that you don't have anything to show. At the best, you'll do well for your time and get some duplication out of the job.

[rainermann]

I had the "problem" once shooting a concert. My client wanted to have all the footage at of course no extra charge. I made him a quick DVD, 3.7GB for about 6 hours of footage. Of course it looked blocky as a chessboard, just awfull. So he could see the material but could not use it to make his own cut. So there is my film which they liked very much and some rough stuff which nobody ever is interested to see again, I am sure. Now I usually say I deleted almost all of the bad stuff because of harddiskspace. However - rough footage should never be shown to clients as it was shot. Delete the worst stuff, tell some stories, but don't show it to your clients because there allways will be some trouble in the air. Your are the professional, they are the clients and you get paid to deliver best quality and not to show your way of working...

[Bokes]

I get this all the time.
What I do is give a Rough Cutback of all the Footage I consider good and decent.
The junk shots- I trash and they never see it- never know about it.

[Michael T]

Hey guys I just picked up one of these little Sony portable DVD burners to dump footage to so some of my clients can see all of their footage. I shoot some dance studios and they want to watch all of the footwork. We shoot a warm up session and then the final performance as well as some of the rehearsal and some of them go to nationals just after the final performances of the year and I believe this unit will save me a lot of time delivering them all the footage in a non HI REZ format on dvd. It has a lcd screen built to preview in and can record AVCHD from a Sony AVCHD HDD that can be played back on Blueray. It looks like you should be able to load it up and dump live to it from either DV - SVHS - or Composit. Either way you can dump to it and deliver dvds to a client cheap and quick and in the field if nessasary.

I'll repost after I try it out this weekend. It seems to be pretty solidly built.

Its the Sony VRD-MC5 which I bought at Costco for $189.00

[Brentincal]

When I originally posted this thread, I needed to know the quickest way to provide the client with dailies from a shoot.

There are some good ideas, thank you.

I’m guessing I should have included a little more detail. But, I do wonder how it went from this post…

“My client loves what I've shown her... but she wants to see ALL the footage. What is the best way to show your client large volumes of source footage? Down convert? Tape? What is the most efficient way?

To…

“The general consensus seems to be that you're an event shooter and this is a wedding?”

Not that it matters, even if it were a wedding, I’m happy to get any work that I can get.

The shoot was for a commercial agency for a television commercial. When they want to see all the dailies from their shoot, I have to show them all their footage. They own it; I don’t have the luxury of deleting the shots of my feet.

In this case, I needed to be efficient, because I was leaving the next day for another client in a different city.

Since then I have been lead to a bigger question…

Back in the old days, if I wasn’t editing the project, after a shoot, I could just hand over the tapes and be on my way.

I would like to be sure that when I hand my client a drive full of media files that they can edit with them tomorrow or 5 years down the road.

What is the most common edit friendly file format that can assure that?

Thus far, I shoot, transfer in to FCP via Sony XDCAM Transfer, check the footage, and then copy those QuickTime’s to a small hard drive and deliver it to the client.

I know they can edit the media if they’re using current FCP software, but what if they want to edit with an older version of FCP or AVID or something else? I can’t really tell my client, thanks for hiring me, upgrade your old FCP, or you can’t edit what you paid me for.

Is there another more generic file format that I should convert those files to so to assure my client will have a greater ability to edit across a spectrum of edit platforms?

Thanks for your input.

[spa_edwards]

Wont an uncompressed .mov be good enough for your client?

[Michael T]

Hey Brentincal I bought the Sony VRD-MC5 and love this thing and if you turn on time code in the camera it feeds out to the dvd unit. I am going to test to see if you can record with it live so I can save the time of copying but so far I really like this unit. This should be a quick and cheap way of making low rez dallies.

To let the client edit the footage I'd ask them what format they want it in first and see if you have that option already.

Good luck