Freelance Editing

[avidfaa]

Hello all...

I took the plunge and now have a smoking G5 set-up with Final Cut Pro HD sitting in my spare bedroom. I haven't quit my day job as a videographer and don't plan to anytime soon.

My question is finding gigs. I know Craigslist and have been contacting old clients, but was wondering what other resources are out there for freelance work. I live in Florida by the by...

Thanks!

[Baltimore Shooter]

How much drive space do you have and do you have it on a RAID arrary? I think you're going to need a RAID set up for broadcast video, unless you're compressing the hell out of it.

Warren

[Icarus112277]

AJust a question: What are you HD mastering to?

[BluesCam]

Well, if it's in your bedroom you will need clients that are willing to go there or don't want to sit in on the edit. Agencies will want to sit in on the edit so they can drive you crazy. Put together a rate card and list of available formats you have (you will need feeder machines). Check with companies who regularly need media services and tell them what you can do. Be sure to have a great editing demo. Contact production companies and TV stations and see if you can get some overflow work. You will have to keep reminding them that you are there, but don't be a pest. Try to offer DVD authoring as well or at least DVD transfer.

[avidfaa]

For speed and doing HD and HDV work I went SCSI and bought a RORKE MX320 4 BAY W/300GB for a total of 1200GB. My vendor has had great success with these with FCP.

Mastering will be done to DVD for now. My first project was shot on mini-DV and DVCam.

[Icarus112277]

For speed and doing HD and HDV work I went SCSI and bought a RORKE MX320 4 BAY W/300GB for a total of 1200GB. My vendor has had great success with these with FCP.

Mastering will be done to DVD for now. My first project was shot on mini-DV and DVCam.


HD-DVD?
mmmmmmm

[Nino]

Hello all...
I took the plunge and now have a smoking G5 set-up with Final Cut Pro HD sitting in my spare bedroom. I haven't quit my day job as a videographer and don't plan to anytime soon.

My question is finding gigs. I know Craigslist and have been contacting old clients, but was wondering what other resources are out there for freelance work. I live in Florida by the by...

I hope you didn't pay much for your G5, Apple just released their much anticipated Mac Pro and it's a powerhouse.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/?cid=CDM-NA-3252F
A must for HD editing. The G5 is way too slow for HD work. With my current 2.5 dual G5 (soon to be replaced with the new Mac) it takes almost 5 hours to compress a 14 minutes HDV program from the timeline into MPEG2. The G5 quad is (was) better but still not enough for a good HD workflow.

If you have the FCPHD version you should upgrade to the FCP5 studio version with all the extras such as Motion, Soundtrack, Live Type, etc.
I believe FCPHD does not support HDV format in itself. HDV and all current HD formats are native to the FCP5 (5.1) version including add-on software (soon) for XDHD format.

If you are only mastering DVD you should pretty much rule out broadcasting clients.

Being a freelance editor means that you will have to be prepared to handle (log&capture) every format out there; there are many and growing every day. This means having several VCR formats available and that can get very expensive, even renting a unit to capture the footage can get very expensive. This means that you might have to put out several hundreds of dollars even before you start the job and the job must be big enough to justify the investment, that's not something that you can charge the client extra.
Where in Florida are you? Unless you are in Miami finding a rental company with a large selection of VCR in this state is almost impossible.

BetacamSP is still king in this state, and everywhere else I imagine. You will need some sort of analog to digital converter such the AJA IO box to digitize analog uncompressed, a must if you want good quality.

[Stoney]

In the San Francisco area there are tons of ads for freelance editors, but mostly for using other's editing set-ups. Lots of work available here, though.

[avidfaa]

Yes, seems to be much more work out in Cali as evidenced on editjobs.net, but I am loving life in North Florida!

I am currently working as a full-time contractor for Uncle Sam and will probably pursue a few jobs with some of my contacts there. Start small and keep the day job. I have seen some new specs for Federal video jobs and most all our now looking for HD. I am set-up to do HDV and when the job calls for it, will rent an HD deck.

I am a bit po that I didn't wait for the new Macs, but my G5 should be fine for the next couple years.

[Icarus112277]

I see Bexel has a DVCPRO HD deck available for 25,500 if you've got the spare scratch.