F55: F55 Rental Price

nsoltz said:
Of course... supply and demand. Rental prices are really comparatively low here in NYC area thanks in part to Adorama's deep discount of rentals (bad when I want to rent out my F3; good when I want to rent some nice glass).

Ned
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yes, i was going to point out Adorama as well. their pricing really is vicious. but then, i've been amazed at the prices a tenacious producer can wrangle out of the bigger rental houses as well. i think i'm getting a deal from them as a dp when i rent from them, and then i find out what the real bottom line is. as you say, it's great when i'm trying to squeeze some additional gear out of a producer's budget, but then they go and pull the rug out from under me. it's a tough market, it didn't used to be quite like this.
 
yeah, they're going for the throat. by all appearances, they've made a substantial investment in trying to drive a lot of people out of the business. and imagine having to match those prices as an owner/operator.
 
Yeah, I never quote producers/clients Adorama's prices for my gear or third party rental equipment. I try and use other smaller rental houses on jobs and Adorama when it's a non-paying personal project.
 
Adorama's merely mimicking the small rental house rates here in LA. Sucks for people, but it's not unique.

The good news is that the best jobs and producers still budget "real rental house" rates like Abel, etc, so it is still possible to get good rates for your gear if you have the right clients.
 
MPB said:
yeah, they're going for the throat. by all appearances, they've made a substantial investment in trying to drive a lot of people out of the business. and imagine having to match those prices as an owner/operator.
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Rental is a rotten world sometimes and it goes both ways. When I was in the rental biz, we had to price gear suitable to cover the cost of the item and our overhead. We had a building, vans, trucks, staff, insurance, etc that all be paid for of course. We would regularly compete with our customers turned owner/ops that decided to buy a specific package and could rent it much lower because they have no costs outside of the gear itself. Then they would come to us to rent a wide angle lens or a matte-box because they couldn't afford their own. If we rented out all of our support, we had nothing left for our own cameras. My solution was to sell my business to a larger rental house to give me access to the bigger jobs that would never mess with ownership. That was only slightly better because as the job get bigger, so do the discounts.

Obviously it is doable, but you REALLY have to work the system to make money in rentals. I don't know anything about how Adorama operates, but I would guess that they were sick of negotiating for hours and hours for every single rental and just said "Here is our price!" The micro-economy of video rentals is remarkably (overly) complicated.
 
i don't think Adorama ever really was in a situation where they could tire of haggling over rental rates. video rental is a relatively recent sideline for them. imagine a smaller version of B&H starting a modest dslr rental operation, then slowly branching into video. they aren't what you'd call a full service rental house.

Carlos, i hear what you're saying, it's tough all over. but i think we all have operating costs, insurance, vehicle expenses, etc that have to be built into our rates.
 
starcentral said:
nkerezov, price of equipment is logical starting point and as I mentioned earlier where a market is super saturated as it is with RED the "equipment price" becomes irrelevant - which will also depend on what's available in your city.

I can rent RED Epic for $500/day, Alexa $1800++.

In the end the F55 price will be high and settle down eventually.

Time will tell.
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From what I hear / sense around here, the Epic crowd dont care too much about the coming Sony. I tried argumenting the quick turn around time with not having to transcode files and what not and their argument was always "just get a fast enough computer so you can work RED raw files...."
That coupled with and Epic package incl. 7-8-9 batteries, bomb evf, lots of mags and so on.... for around 550 dollars a day, I'm affraid people wont pay the price for the F55 which would land around the same.

I guess marketing and so on would come in handy now. More Sony hype please!
 
legrevedotcom said:
From what I hear / sense around here, the Epic crowd dont care too much about the coming Sony. I tried argumenting the quick turn around time with not having to transcode files and what not and their argument was always "just get a fast enough computer so you can work RED raw files...."
That coupled with and Epic package incl. 7-8-9 batteries, bomb evf, lots of mags and so on.... for around 550 dollars a day, I'm affraid people wont pay the price for the F55 which would land around the same.

I guess marketing and so on would come in handy now. More Sony hype please!
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I think you'd be surprised. The reason for Alexa's dominance isn't just the beautiful, creamy pictures, but also the speed and simplicity of the ProRes shoot-to-edit workflow. It's why even some of Red's greatest aficionados keep asking for a ProRes/DNxHD module - because that's the kind of deliverable the vast majority of clients want.

If the SR or XAVC codecs on the F5/F55 can offer a similarly seamless workflow to ProRes/DNxHD (I'm yet to see examples of that yet), that could well trump clients' desire for raw recording - it remains to be seen though.
 
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