HVX Users: UNITE!

J P

J P

Well-known member
I'm getting sick of productions expecting something for nothing. All the calls and Mandy.com ads where people expect to pay a cameraman $100/day or less for their labor and a HD camera package. I understand the constraints of low-budget filmmaking, but I feel like producers are just abusing us camera owners for our equipment.

It doesn't have to be this way, and I'm sure alot of you guys must feel the same way.

Try hiring a sound guy w/ equipment for no money -- you can't. Why? Because sound guys don't give themselves away for free. Why should camera people?

What I am getting at is: us HVX users should unite together and refuse to rent our equipment for anything significantly less than the going rate. We aught not undercut each other, because in the long run, it will hurt us.
 
It'll hurt in the short run, too.

In the US an HVX shouldn't be going out the door for under about $300/day, and an operator should be minimum $300/day too.
 
Thousands behind you.

Thousands behind you.

I feel your pain brother. Problem is there are thousands of people behind you that want exactly what you want, and certain desperados will use your desperation to reduce their costs.
Better find a relative or new friends fast.
 
I have faced this in the still photography since 6mp cameras became affordable. Everyone is now a "photographer" and is giving themselves away to get into the game. In the long run, the don't have the skill or management ability to survive and make clients happy. Differentiate your services by offering a superior product, and charge a premium for it. You don't want to work for the people who can't see the difference anyway. Stick to your guns.
 
When I say you'll hurt yourself in the short run -- it works like this: cheap clients are the *worst* clients. They resent every penny they give you, and they give it begrudgingly. It's a miserable experience. Cheap clients are the worst, and you'll spend so much time maintaining them...

With quality clients, if you showed up and said "yep, I'll shoot, $100 for me & my camera" they'll show you the door and wish you well somewhere else. They know what quality costs and they're comfortable paying it. They expect you to be the best and to do your best, and if you are and if you do, you'll have a great working relationship with them.

In short -- if someone will only pay $100/day, run. No good will come from it.
 
Barry's right, as usual. As an owner operators you not only have to think of paying back your camera and associated gear, but factor in the cost of maintenance, replacement (you want the next generation right?) and profit. So if you have an HVX package with 2 or more P2 Cards, decent sticks/fluid head, and maybe a matte box you are into it for about $10K. Being realistic it has a rental life of 18-30 months (sweet spot of 24 for maths sake). Let's add $100 a month for maintainance * 24 m for two years of maintainance, so you are up to $12,400. Now figure you want 20% profit on those costs. That would equal another $2,480 and now you are up to $14,880. Now add the cost to replace all the equipment again after two years so you can buy the new one (you really won't have to buy all new again, unless you are adding another package to rent) and that is another $10K. So you are up to $24,880 that you have to charge over 24 months (just for gear, using my really loose assumptions) to grow your little rental business. This would not yet feed & cloth a family. You still have to get your day rate to do that.

So based on Barry's minimum you would only need 4 camera rental days a month for
24 months to easily cover the above scenario. Now don't jump all over me because I left off the cost insurance, opportunity lost costs of initial $10,000, finance charges etc. You can easily add 20 more things this to realize that you should really be charging more for your gear than Barry's minimum. A $10K package should really be fetching $375 to $450 depending on the market.

And the part about cheap customers is 100% accurate. They are the ones who want to pick it up Thursday afternoon and return it late Monday morning, pay a day rate, want their nephews college student discount, and then think they should get an additional break upon return because the P2 "thingy" filled up during the wedding vows and the auto focus didn't work at the candlelit reception. Rent to pros, or to those who at least act professionally at professional rates.

Heck I tell some people to go buy a $300 - $400 camera at Best Buy instead of renting mine. When they say "but your stuff looks so beautiful, we want your camera." That is when I tell them that what they want is me and my camera and my assistant and then their project will look beatuful too.

Any way, listen to JP and Barry. Don't go cheap.

Rob
 
haha earlier today, someone wanted me to shoot a wedding video for them TOMORROW including the entire ceremony AND the reception, edit the thing and have 25 DVD's printed for the following day... they wanted me to do it for 100$. I about slit my own wrists when they told me the compensation.
 
And the part about cheap customers is 100% accurate. They are the ones who want to pick it up Thursday afternoon and return it late Monday morning, pay a day rate, want their nephews college student discount, and then think they should get an additional break upon return because the P2 "thingy" filled up during the wedding vows and the auto focus didn't work at the candlelit reception.
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:eek:
 
Guys I just start to realize this problem too, especially the example of the wedding. First of all, never film weddings for people you know. Like the 'oh maybe her son can film our wedding, it is nice for the guy'. I was supposed to film a wedding like dj200423 too. They said; I want a nice menu, some nice music and I had to film the whole wedding from 9 in the morning till 1 o'clock at night. Then edit it in FCP and FC studio etc. etc. the whole deal. It was a person I know from my youth so I made a sharp price for 500 euro's. He called me that it was way over butget. They pay easily 1500 euro's for a photographer, but filming and editing it NO WAY. People have no idea about how much work it is and that you are filming with professional equipement all together for about 10000 euro's. He even told me that at one point he filmed a wedding for his friend, with a holiday mini dv cam, just to tell me that it means nothing.
The same thing with some of the companies costumers for a company movie. People have no idea, but we have to make sure they are aware of the cost of a professional approach, otherwise they should do it with their mini dv and give that to their costumers or look at shaky wedding movies. HVX users UNITE, I am in!

Niels
 
Yeah, my realtives wanted me to edit an 5 hours worth of wedding footage onto a one half hour DVD with menus, music, still photos, and black and lots of color correction (put some in black and white) for $200. This simply wasn't realistic. I tried to be nice. I called a bunch of houses in their area and got their cheapest estimates and then went ahead and knocked $100 off of that because they are family but it was still three times as much as they wanted it for. The man hours on minimum wage as well as the neccesary hard disk space wouldn't near be covered by that much.
 
Barry_Green said:
When I say you'll hurt yourself in the short run -- it works like this: cheap clients are the *worst* clients. They resent every penny they give you, and they give it begrudgingly. It's a miserable experience. Cheap clients are the worst, and you'll spend so much time maintaining them...

With quality clients, if you showed up and said "yep, I'll shoot, $100 for me & my camera" they'll show you the door and wish you well somewhere else. They know what quality costs and they're comfortable paying it. They expect you to be the best and to do your best, and if you are and if you do, you'll have a great working relationship with them.

In short -- if someone will only pay $100/day, run. No good will come from it.
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That is some really solid advice well said Barry. Theres guys around me shooting for £100 a day with their £4000+ cameras which cost over £150 a day to rent & it absolutely makes no sense to me why they would do that.
 
Niels Neeskens said:
They pay easily 1500 euro's for a photographer, but filming and editing it NO WAY. People have no idea about how much work it is and that you are filming with professional equipement all together for about 10000 euro's. He even told me that at one point he filmed a wedding for his friend, with a holiday mini dv cam, just to tell me that it means nothing.
Click to expand...

LOL i know its funny how they pay the Photographer more than the Videographer & i think it all comes down to the fact that the Photographers present themselves in a better way they have better marketing stratagies & know how to deal with clients better. A friend of mine is a digital artist who works at a Satalite Tv Channel also does wedding photography & videography, one thing i learnt from him is that to be successful in terms of bussiness your presentation, markering & customer relationship is way more important than your technical know how & what equipment you use. As i said in my last post i see people with £4000+ camcorders going for as little as £150 a day & it includes all the editing, dubbing, dvd authoring etc & this guy i am telling you about uses Canon XM2 & Canon 300D with the stock lens & guess how much he would charge for Photography? 1500 euro is a close guess my friend :)

So work on your presentation & have a breathtaking demo & portfolio have a marketing strategy & you would see a change in your bussiness. :thumbsup:
 
I have to agree with you all! I am down for the HVX Union!

I don't shoot weddings, my market is totaly different. I shot indie features. And, my god, the griping about rates is even worse. I am thankful that they are making the cameras affordable. But, now I have producers telling me they would buy the camera, and not pay me the approriate rate to lens thier movie, which they in turn will try to make a profit on! It drives me nuts! I love my HVX, but it is starting to drive me nuts the negotiations I have to go through to be at service to someone else! A rate is a rate! Trying to dicker someone down, to try and buy a camera is ridiculous! Sure you canmake money afterwards, but what people are failing to see is that buying a bare bones HVX is not the total answer to shooting HD, you will also need to make some additional investments in additional gear to shot with it effectively. As a producer, you do not do your budget any justice by blowing a third of it on a bare bones camera package, and then try to shoot a HD feature for resale, and tell your DP that we won't rent your full package from you because it is better to buy the camera tham rent it! Hmmmm...a bare bones camera ($6,500+) or a DP with a full HVX Package($15,000 of HD kitted out accessories) and a assistant, and a flate rate of less than the purchase of the camera! You do the math! Bad, Bad, Bad production move!

Look out fellow HVX owner/operators! There is gonna be a lot of grifting going on in the next year! Stick to your guns!!! Stick to your rates!!!!
 
Im curious what the going rates should be around exactly for videography. We might start taking jobs for it soon to help pay off the camera, with the laptop included we are almost at 12k so far (HVX/M2/500$ Sticks and Fluid Head, etc etc) We did get 1000$ for a DVD shoot plus royalties of said DVD but im in a special situation where i work for a DVD publisher, the DVD was already sold and we needed to shoot it and put on DVD. Took about 5 hours to shoot, and 12 to edit and get a final burn to DVD. So i think we got a good rate locked in there.
 
everybody situation is different, when it comes to rates.

It comes down to a lot of things,....overhead, time, experience, etc.
we all have to analyze our situation. But what ever your rate, stick to it!
Because, all this low balling going on is gonna totaly hurt the future of owner/ops.
 
Union schmunion. A union is not the answer- just a rip off in another form. Start by saying no to the ridiculous prices. Call others out for doing the same. Learn the business, and learn business practices if you ever hope to put food on the table with this profession. If you don't plan on doing so, have the courtesy to not screw the rates up for those of us who do.

This too shall pass. We are where graphic artists were when desktop publishing came out. Still photographers are getting near to the end of this unfortunate tunnel as well. Eventually the confusion between whiz bang digital gear and talent will dissipate. The truth is that this confusion of talent/experience and cool tech is embodied in our own ranks.

I attended HD bootcamp in LA last weekend and there were more than a few folks with a lot more money than work experience and most likely skills, that were emblematic of this problem. The reasoning seems to go: "If I have a camera then that makes me a DP, videographer, Lighting cameraman etc..." The relatively cheap price of this technology has made this delusion all the easier to believe. I met one individual who hoped to jump into the industry without coming up through the ranks - because he knew a cameraman. He stated it just that plainly.

As a friend once wisely put it: "I have a garden hose, that doesn't make me a fireman."
 
Look at the airline pilots union, the teamsters, unless you can get every single cameraman in america to band together forget about it. There are unions in the news organiztions and such. Really hard to break in. I started out doing freelance news shooting, really tough. Look at the stock footage industry. It's hard to keep the balance between what customers will pay for footage vs. what shooters think the footage is worth. You would think all the shooters would go to the large houses first but they soon discover that it's a 35MM, Cine-Alta world over there and even then the shooter only gets about 20%. So why are shooters posting footage at $25-$35 per download to only make $11.25-$15.75 per download?
Thats probably below minimum wage when you think about it. It would be easy to say join a union to keep pay up and I have tried to do that with my site where shooters get 60% commission!
 
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