Have you adapted the services you are offering?

egproductions

egproductions

Veteran
As my clients are starting to figure things out on their end, i'm trying not to give up but rather adapt what I can offer them. It seems to be working to be getting me some business. I'm curious what others have been doing.

 
I'm really interested to see how this sorts itself out. Right now, in many states it is technically against the rules to do nonessential business. Almost all of my work is on location. Will businesses put on rules about not allowing visitors and contractors on site? Will they bend those rules or have some type of testing criteria for visitors? Would they prefer to have their employees travel to external locations for promotional work? I have no idea. Maybe this turns into a turnkey approach where we supply equipment for filming with instructions and then just act as the editor.
 
I'll go anywhere, do anything (within the limits of propriety). The bulk of my work has always been in hospitals and research institutes... so I have intimate ongoing knowledge of HOW to do video with biosafety, but all those places are essentially closed for video work. Working on a tutorial for this... if I can film an instructional video in a BSL4 lab or a total artificial heart transplant and not kill anybody, I think a local small-to-medium business settings can also be safe. Unfortunately my kids aren't hip to being on-camera, finding stand-in actors has been a challenge. Hoping to finally wrap it this week, nonetheless.

Otherwise personally, finally sorted out the streaming bit so I can confidently offer that... upgraded to a Shogun 7 to give myself ready pro switching capability... and have ordered 50ish assorted cornish rock cross chickens and turkeys to raise for the freezer.
 
Afraid to fly.

I'm hoping that works out to benefit owner / ops.

The corporation doesn't want to fly their in-house video guy or gal because of COVID, so they hire a local instead. Belt-tightening might result in corporations eliminating their in-house videographer altogether.
 
Nice video EG! Quite interesting to me. And some good ideas in there - especially having a "virtual" producer being able to watch live. I'm curious how you kept the HVAC separate from your home (just a 2nd unit already there?).
Funny, I have downsized over the years... and have been working from home for many years now with no studio. About 6-7 years ago or so, studio work just really started dropping off for me personally and maybe gets requested about once a year now. All my clients want me to come to them. Will be interesting to see if that trend reverses. (I've done about 3 shoots in the past 2 months, one today ... all having to do with Covid-19.)

As far as adapting... I haven't really done anything greatly different thus far. Did offer free streaming consultation when things got locked down... but didn't get many takers on that. Seems built-in web cam is king.
 
markfpv said:
I'm curious how you kept the HVAC separate from your home (just a 2nd unit already there?).
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Yes, the main house has it's own HVAC system with a totally separate supplies and return (not just zoned). I recently renovated the garage so that it could store my equipment and planned to put the studio in the basement. The idea was to load in and out very easily but of course this required climate control (humidity was my biggest concern). Since it seems like I'll be shooting on location less and in the studio more I decided to flip it and put the equipment in the basement.
 
EG, thanks for sharing the video. I wish I could offer something like that (I don't have a garage). Looks like you've considered just about all of the concerns that I client might have. Have you been booking a fair amount of work?

I just had a shoot yesterday; my first since this began. The client has been designated as an "essential business" so they have been working throughout. My gaffer and I wore masks, tried to stay six feet apart, brought our own food, ate lunch in our cars, and wiped all surfaces that the talent would be touching. I'll tell you, it's hard to wear one of those masks for 8 hours straight.

There were some people on set from the client side who chose not to wear masks or practice social distancing. It made me nervous but there wasn't much that I could do.

It was really good to shoot something again.
 
FWIW... you don’t have to wear a mask for 8 hours straight. In fact, you SHOULDN’T wear a mask for 8 hours straight unless you’re on an airplane or doing major abdominal or thoracic surgery... and even surgeons scrub out and take short breaks. Rebreathing your own CO2 can lead to problems, especially with N95 type masks. Think of it like a reverse smoke break... plan on taking 5-10m every so often, go outside, and breathe. Your brain will thank you. If there’s nobody around for you to breathe on, you’re perfectly safe to take the mask off.

And for Gods sake humanity, STOP WEARING MASKS WHEN YOU ARE ALONE IN YOUR CAR. Grumble.
 
mcbob said:
And for Gods sake humanity, STOP WEARING MASKS WHEN YOU ARE ALONE IN YOUR CAR. Grumble.
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I can't speak for everyone, but I think a lot of people are not wanting to touch their face and the mask after they've been around other people and environments where they have to handle stuff that has been handled by others. You can of course disinfect your hands, but....
 
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mcbob said:
plan on taking 5-10m every so often, go outside, and breathe. Your brain will thank you. If there’s nobody around for you to breathe on, you’re perfectly safe to take the mask off.
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That's a good idea. I'm often directing talent, crew, making art direction tweaks AND shooting. Usually, I don't take any bathroom breaks. I'm lucky if I get 10 minutes for lunch. Building in some "fresh air time" would probably help. I'd need to write it into the schedule.

I see the benefit of the mask as threefold: I'm less likely to expel droplets onto touchable surfaces, less likely to breath in the droplets of others, and less likely to touch my face. With that in mind, I'm comfortable taking the mask off outside, or maybe in an inside area without furniture if there's no one around. Definitely in my car. I don't get that either.
 
Last night, I produced a Live Stream Fundraiser Auction for a private school. Their goal was to raise $650k. It was our first proof of concept project using some new software and hardware we've never tried.
Overall, went well. All A list talent, both as host, and appearing on camera. We dropped off and setup four different camera packages at talent's home, lit the scene, setup camera and tested connection from their
router to our studio about 20 miles away, setup a wired lav on each camera. We had about 1,000 viewers and they ended up raising close to a million dollars to finance the less advantaged kids scholarships to
attend the school.

We kind of invented a green room function to talent could talk to us and I could give them direction as the roll in segments and pre-recorded commercials aired out to the audience. We worked with an auction
company who ran the actual RT bidding setup, but we displayed their feed so the talent could name names of donors, etc. It was pretty cool and went well, lasted almost three hours. We are using this footage for our new reel
to land more of these gigs with the Hollywood Foreign Press, TCA and other entertainment related concerns who are scrambling right now.

Thank goodness my partner is kind of a genius engineer, I could never have figured out how to customize and deploy all of this technology. I am beginning to think that 2020 might not be the financial car crash that
I thought it would be for me and my business. There are still plenty of people out there with money, you just have to position yourself to provide goods and services to them that others cannot and you'll possibly be okay.
Not easy but all of us kind of have to re-invent ourselves to survive.

If you would have told me in 2019 that this was my career direction in 2020, I would have laughed at you but here we are and I am not DPing, other than doing some simple streaming setups. It's all
about sales, marketing, producing and team assembling. Adapt or die, the market is RADICALLY changing and if you think things are ever going back to normal, they aren't.

https://www.cinema5d.com/remote-broadcast-production-and-post/
 
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Sounds pretty cool. I haven't seen livestream requests on my gigs sites much. Either I'm looking in the wrong places or everybody who needs it has someone or is going through referrals. Hard to believe there wouldn't be new livestream clients putting out gig offers now, but maybe everything in NY is dead.
 
groveChuck said:
Thanks! What about internet connection?
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Our connection on the receiving end at my friends studio is in the San Fernando Valley. He gets really unbalanced speed of of almost 700Mbps down but only 40Mbps up. That's all that's available in his area. As far as the clients
whose homes/businesses we set up the cameras in, highly variable. The headmaster of the school's home Internet was unusable it was so slow so we relocated him to the school itself which about 200Mbps up and down. Other than
a little choppy audio here and there, it all worked remarkably well.

That's the thing with live stream remotes, you have to become comfortable and make your clients aware that there is a significant chance that the whole endeavor is a house of cards and any power blackout, brownouts (we had several at my friends studio but all of our gear is on UPS to it was fine)
or Internet weirdness on anyones connection can cause the whole thing to fall apart. We only have one wireless system that we can bring that by passes the client's home Internet router, we would have needed four more of these for this gig to have had complete redundancy in case of an
localized Internet outage. At this point, it's just the nature of the beast. Five full wireless independent modem/router systems is a decent amount of money and once we make some more money with this business, we will be buying more of these. This live streaming, at this level of complexity, is the
Wild West, it's very fly by the seat of your pants but when it works, it's pretty cool. High risk though.

We have another one slated possibly the end of May. If we win that contract, it's going to be a similar sort of fundraiser only multi millions of dollars on the line for this one instead of almost a milion. We have all A listers, bigger audience and I don't think we'll be able to setup real cameras for everyone,
too many participants so we'll probably deal with more outages and issues from wireless connections from Phones and tablets. We may make a hard and fast rule for that one that the talent must stream from their laptop or desktop only, hard wired into their router. Wireless streaming is still too nascent
from our experience. it kind of, sort of works, some of the time. But it sucks a lot of the time.

When we did tech rehearsal and I went through the run of show, I was actually quite amazed at the complexity of what we did, seamlessly swapping between singles, two, three, four up in boxes, switcher moves from green screen with it's own bus and DVE moves, integrating that into the master output with
other bus effects. The VMix Live and Call software is really impressive. This show couldn't have been done on an ATEM Mini Pro or anything simple and I'm not even sure of the Newtek Tricaster could have handled what we accomplished with the Vmix Call functionality. I know our own Live Stream Studio couldn't handle it, all of the functions
and even with VMix, we had to create and implement our own green room. I'm pretty stoked how it all worked out, it was impressive.
 
puredrifting said:
Custom built high-end PC (don't ask me specs, I dont know which CPU/GPU my partner used since I am not a PC person) with VMix Live and VMix Call with our own integrated API green room.
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VMix is not new software...it’s been around for quite a few
years. Wirecast will do similar things with Rendevous on
a Mac. VMix is very widely used though as live streaming
seems to be more of a PC thing than a Mac thing....which
sort of makes sense as a lot of the live-streaming gear
and software developed from computer ‘gamers’ trying
to live stream themselves gaming (which has always
baffled me....who watches other people playing video
games?)
 
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