P2 off loading as a career?

D

didjman

New member
I'm a newbie looking to explore the possibility of doing P2 off loading for a living. I have an extensive audio background and some PA and pc experience and would like to know if any shooters or production companies would hire a person just for that task. I've been scouring this forum and other sites gleening all the info I can regarding the process and have a friend that does location audio who suggested there's a need for this type of work, as cameramen may not want that responsibility. I'm also wondering what the best gear would be for this purpose, Mac Book Pro with Final Cut Pro and multiple portable hard drives?
Also, what would companies be willing to pay for this service? I realize that many companies use whoever is available on the shoot. Would this service be of value to them? And what would be the longevity of this career as technology/demand may make current and future P2 cards cheaper, making it more affordable to just buy a bunch and download them after the shoot rather than rotating cards during the shoot? If anybody could offer any advice I'd be eternally grateful as I have to get out of the life-sucking job I currently have.
Thanks folks!:undecided
 
With the increased size of cards coming around and the dropping prices many people may no longer need to constantly swap P2 cards. In any case, a PA would likely do that job.

I can't see it as a valid career option (i.e. solely focused on P2 offloading). I don't think you would make a decent living doing that.
 
32 GB cards will put that career out of business methinks. Still it's better than working with lasers...

Noah
 
i don't know about a career but i have a buddy making decent day rates as a p2 guy right now. he also captures and renames clips and sometimes does rough assemblies. if you have final cut and can do all this stuff you are way more valuable than a guy who simply dumps cards.
 
I'm working as a P2 loader on a feature. I'm writing up a daily blog about what's going on and what have you. Is it a viable source of income? Yes if you know what y ou're doing and have a set system to work from.
 
The man doing that task in our production is the assistant to the editor. His abilyty to organise the material according to the wishes of the director on the set and to show him the day after the first editing conforts the director and wins a lot of time. We are shooting a serial: one film per week and time is precious. Protected cards transfered to hard drives through P2 cms PC, then with Raylight to a Mac with FCP2. His collaboration is precious.
But he is an assistant editor and we are in Turkey where such a work flow is a premiere.
 
All great advice, just what I was looking for. Thanks everyone for your time and thoughts! I guess it's "back to the drawing board" as they say.
 
$600 a day for p2 offloading? jeez. people are getting easy jobs and easy money these days. i have a college education, and not making 600 a day. any monkey can swap p2's, you dont wan that as a career choice, especially since 5 years from now we probably wont even be using p2's...the next generation of cameras will have built in harddrives (built in p2 cards basically), so i wouldnt set out on a career path of something so fleeting...this kind of stuff changes format every year. p2 cards in 5-10 years will be archaic.

-connor
 
$600 is ridiculous for that task, I don't care what they're shooting, it's still just silly. I paid $200 on my last shoot because he's my editor and I trust him with my equipment, too.

In any case the way some of you think about space and P2 cards isn't like I think about it. I don't care if that thing has 100 terabytes on it, I'm offloading that footage as often as possible and I want someone like my editor, my right-hand man, to check that footage and make sure we're getting what we think we're getting, and I want backups frequently not like end of the day kind of thing unless it's just impossible with the crew size to manage that. Then we can keep them on cards until day's end but I like to check throughout the day if possible.
 
$600 is not "ridiculous" for any position. If that's what the producer felt like paying, and that's what he felt he needed to pay to get someone of the competence level that he needed, then that's the rate.
 
crobs808 said:
$600 a day for p2 offloading? jeez. people are getting easy jobs and easy money these days. i have a college education, and not making 600 a day. any monkey can swap p2's, you dont wan that as a career choice, especially since 5 years from now we probably wont even be using p2's...the next generation of cameras will have built in harddrives (built in p2 cards basically), so i wouldnt set out on a career path of something so fleeting...this kind of stuff changes format every year. p2 cards in 5-10 years will be archaic.

-connor
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I doubt there will be built in hard drives as the main means of capturing in any professional or prosumer cameras. Are they just going to stop production and say "the camera is full". There will always be removable media. If you want a flawless and fail safe transfers of these you need someone that isnt "any monkey", but instead has a high level of organization and attention to detail. Thats worth what its worth. 600 a day isnt unreasonable at all.
 
I pay plumbers $60 an hour. Six bills is completely reasonable for a ten hour day. Offloading (and maintaining) thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands - of dollars worth of data requires a competent and trust-worthy technician.

If you can source this individual for less, then I suppose you should. For me, I wouldn't risk hiring a warm body on this one.

e
 
JonathanLB said:
$600 is ridiculous for that task, I don't care what they're shooting, it's still just silly. I paid $200 on my last shoot because he's my editor and I trust him with my equipment, too.

In any case the way some of you think about space and P2 cards isn't like I think about it. I don't care if that thing has 100 terabytes on it, I'm offloading that footage as often as possible and I want someone like my editor, my right-hand man, to check that footage and make sure we're getting what we think we're getting, and I want backups frequently not like end of the day kind of thing unless it's just impossible with the crew size to manage that. Then we can keep them on cards until day's end but I like to check throughout the day if possible.
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I was the technical producer for a TV pilot that shot P2 with four cameras just a few months after the HVX debuted. I made considerably more than $600.00 per day. The production rented me a motor home, I had an assistant and three computers. Not only was I downloading P2 cards, I was taking screen grabs, printing them out, assembling a log book for the editors in Los Angeles. Let's just say that the cost for me, my assistant, all of the hardware I rented to the production, the motorhome, etc. was about $25k per week.

You can read about the details here http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/tv_pilot_hvx_200_brockett.html

One thing you have to remember, HVXs, P2, day rates, etc. and most of the gear discussed on this site are all chump change for real Hollywood productions. The pilot that I worked on wasn't even picked up and Sony/Imagine spent about half a million dollars to shoot the pilot.

That said, this was also the days of only 8GB P2 cards. We shot almost 800 cards worth of material in a week. Improv comedy with four cameras, 30 minute takes, it all adds up quickly.

I agree with the other posts here, 32 and 64GB P2 cards negate this position for most productions. I shot a doc in Scotland last year, it was just me, the HVX, eight 16GB cards and shooting standups and scenic footage all day. I would dump the cards at night, make a cloned drive, verify and go to bed.

Ahh, but the good old days of P2 technician! ;-)

Dan
 
Yeah but Dan, to me it sounds like you were doing a lot more real work than just every hour or two taking a card and transferring it. That's a job that a well trained monkey could do. But you were handling an entire workflow with a lot of complicated tasks going on there to make post-production work easier, at least that's what it sounds like.

But yes, $600 a day is ridiculous. I love producers who have no idea what things cost. They make great producers. Not. This attitude needs to stop in Hollywood, it's great for the people getting overpaid but it's wasteful and hurts the bottom line. Hire the best people you can for the cheapest rates, that should always be the goal. No use overpaying people for simple jobs, or even for complicated ones. It's like makeup artists making $1,200 a day, it's absolutely absurd unless they're doing all kinds of blood / gore work that only they can do this well. But to pay a makeup artist for a music video that much money to do some basic makeup is just silly beyond belief. I can get someone to do just as good of a job for $300 without worrying about whether they're good or not. I could get it for $150 but I'd be more worried if they were really any good. Even so, so what, hire 2-3 at that rate, let them work together, christ, still better than $1,200 for something like that. It's all about complexity. If you are going to pay someone to do zombie makeup, ok, I get it, hire the best if you can afford it. But if you're going to pay someone to put on some concealer and mascara, honestly, any 14-year-old girl can do that.
 
Damn, I got 2 academic grades and was an associate professor at the University of Salzburg for 4 years teaching editing and 3D animation. They payed me $250 a day and I was happy. And over in the US you get $600 for a job a monkey can do?

Live in the wrong country, got the wrong job.

Frank
 
JonathanLB said:
I love producers who have no idea what things cost.
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A snarky poster might be tempted to say "then you must be amazingly narcissistic."

They make great producers. Not.
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Jonathan, this is tiring. You make this same rant over and over, but somehow manage to miss the simple fact that you're slaving away making tiny little projects, and the people you're complaining about are the ones making $100,000 lawyer commercials or $330,000 car commercials or $80,000,000 movies. They're the BEST producers in the world, they make the best products in the world, they get paid very well for what they do, and everyone who works for them gets paid very well, and the clients get the best product in the world.

It was this same naive attitude that got you a lot of unwanted attention over on reduser, and it's really not going to serve you any better here on DVXUser.

This attitude needs to stop in Hollywood
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No, it doesn't. Quite the opposite. The attitude that needs to stop is bottom-feeding rateslashers who cut everything to the bone so they can grab some business, without realizing that they're in fact destroying the business itself. THAT's the attitude that needs to stop.

Let me put it this way, as succinctly as I can: Hollywood is THE BIGGEST EXPORT INDUSTRY IN THIS COUNTRY, outside of Agriculture and Aerospace, and those two are heavily government subsidized. Hollywood is the most successful, biggest, most powerful, most influential, richest industry in the country. For an outsider who knows nothing about the actual business to come here and proclaim that Hollywood needs to "stop" doing what they do so very successfully is, on the face of it, ludicrous.

But if you're going to pay someone to put on some concealer and mascara, honestly, any 14-year-old girl can do that.
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And if that's your idea of the value of a makeup artist, I wish you well with your 14-year-old-girl staff, and it pretty much lets us all know what level of productions you aspire to. Some of us are making professional productions for valuable clients. For those productions, we hire professionals. And pay them as such. And the staff is happy. And they do great work. And the client is thrilled with the outcome. And *nothing* about that process needs to "stop."

Please, get a clue about the industry before you come on here and rant so forcefully and so woefully ignorantly. If you're doing freebie stuff for fun, fine, go ahead and hire 14-year-old girls and hire $100/day gaffers. But don't try to equate that with the actual business.
 
Postmaster said:
Damn, I got 2 academic grades and was an associate professor at the University of Salzburg for 4 years teaching editing and 3D animation. They payed me $250 a day and I was happy. And over in the US you get $600 for a job a monkey can do?

Live in the wrong country, got the wrong job.

Frank
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But we don't pay monkeys $600/day, that's the point. The monkeys only get $300/day.

Sigh.
 
Barry_Green said:
But we don't pay monkeys $600/day, that's the point. The monkeys only get $300/day.

Sigh.
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Very well said in the earlier post Barry, and echoes what I believe many of us are thinking. Actually my thinking involved lots of cursing and violence, so I kept it in my head :)

You just better hope those monkeys dont start a union. Then they'll be demanding that $600 a day. You know I heard that if you had an infinite amount of monkeys and an infinite amount of time and locked them in the room (yes I said to lock the time in the room) they would eventually make Speed 2.
 
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