Shon,

I am, by your categories, a hobbyist. I think of myself as an enthusiastic amateur, because I intend to devote a lot of time to this. I am taking Digital8 footage all the time and I have a big backlog (about 100 tapes) of Digital8 footage to process, mostly in the "home movie" category, although there are several weddings and a family reunion in there. To avoid delays, I distributed the weddings as raw footage (without any editing) on VHS tapes to the affected parties (bride/groom), but I will revisit the wedding footage in Vegas. That's funny -- two of the weddings were in Vegas (the place).

I have found the sound to be at least as important as the visual component, and I recently took advantage of Sonic Foundry's discount offer to obtain Sound Forge 6 and Noise Reduction 2 together for a very attractive price ($249). Since that offer expires in a few days (June 30, I believe), you might want to consider it for your purposes. I have found that a lot of my footage can benefit very significantly from the Noise Reduction 2 plugin. And Sound Forge 6 is now the default sound editor for Vegas Video 3. If you haven't already, take a close look at the Sound Forge/Noise Reduction offer. It can help your videos.

-- Burton --

Hobbyist for now but Pro wannabe.

I started doing NLE a little over a year ago with VF 1.0. That version kinda sucked, so I lost interest over the summer until I found out about VF 2.0. That made a World of difference to me. All my footage is analog, so until recently, I captured everyting with an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 Pro. Huge files and A/V sync problems, but with a little adjustments, the videos came out all right. I upgraded to VV3 in March and am amaze at how much more I can do with it over VF. I also recently purchased a Canopus ADVC-100 and love it. I have two current projects, my brother-inlaw's wedding and a training video for my day job. If I do a good job on the wedding video, I may start soliciting customers for to do work for pay. If the training video goes well, I might be transitioning to a new position at work. Right now I am in Product Development for our PC manufacturing.

I'm not sure I want to get into shooting wedding videos (takes up a lot of weekends), but I wouldn't mind coverting couple's wedding videos on old VHS tapes to DVD or SVCD. I think that would be my target market.

Question to the Pro's and Semi-pro's: How to you charge for your work? Flat rate or by the hour or a little of both? How much is a reasonable rate?

"Question to the Pro's and Semi-pro's: How to you charge for your work? Flat rate or by the hour or a little of both? How much is a reasonable rate?"

I'm glad you asked this question. I've been wanting to know the same thing. I'm sure pricing varies by location and project but it would be nice to know a good starting point.

Currently I'm working with my local Community Access Television. Depending on where you live, this can be a fabulous resource. I volunteer some time for their shoots and they let me check out their equiptment. And this particular station has very high end Sony DVCams ($12,000+). I am using their cameras to make a few videos for some local bands. Because it is Community Access I cannot do this for profit but they do allow me to get compensated for production costs. And building up my home editing system counts to them as production costs. Their only other stipulation is that I give them a finished copy of the projects. This works great for me because I can build up my home studio completely financed through the videos I make with other peoples equiptment! Once I build a decent home studio and expand my NLE knowledge base I plan on actually renting equiptment and going for profit. Check out your local community Access, although their capabilities completely depend upon their tax base (ie. your citie's population)They are a handy resource.

Well I guess I am the first "Pro" to chime in. My background is a couple of decades of live entertainment. I added video to my pallet about 1990 while with the 'Mouse'. My strength has always been special venue shows like theme park rides and attractions. I have Exec Produced three major special venue shorts and a host of smaller stuff while employed by a design and build firm. I started using Vegas to gather the rushes from a day's shooting and send teasers to the clients who had 7 figures riding on it. I then started doing basic corporate stuff with it.

Well, the design company let me go when the market went in the toilet recently. The result is I am now an independent producer and for corporate stuff Vegas is my mainstay. In fact, tonight I just delivered a 1 hour project that was 14 layers of compositing!

K

GG,

For your information, the forum lets you edit your messages after you post them. Or you can even delete a message. Incidentally, you have impressive credentials. Oh, by the way, what is O&O ?

-- Burton --

To answer your question... a little bit of both.

I've worked at a PBS affiliate for the last 3-ish years in Engineering (good money, lousy job!), and worked for a few cable & radio stations in the few years previous (I'm all of 25 now... where does the time go?!).

This is still a hobby in the sense that I haven't produced anything on my own yet, although that's where SF comes in. VV is cheaper (a LOT cheaper!) than the Media 100's that I'm used to, and in some regards, really puts them to shame. So I'm hoping to use VV for some student films (it's time to finally finish my degrees), that I hope to ultimately hit the indie circuit with...

Wish me luck!

David.

This should be fun:
I do amature editing work for free non-profit reasons ,"pro bono" as the lawyers say (can that term apply here?) I do documentaries, educational videos in Thailand.
I help out people who has no means in affording a pro to do the work. It's a rewarding job when you see them smile while looking at my video creation :)

I started editing on Premiere 5.1 and Ulead MSP 6ve. My whole way/style of editing change when I received VV3 3 months ago.
In this country, 99% of the people use illegal warez software (BTW I belong to the other 1%)so they are more prone to use the well known "boxed" retail video editing softwares. Heck! I think most have Premiere 6.0 install on their PC as a default installation from the PC shops. A sad thing about all this copying and stealing is that software companies don't have any presence here. From what I know, only microsoft have an office base here.
Products from Sonicfoundry are virtually unknown because you need to have a proper serial and internet connection to unlock them so I am sure it's safe to say that there are no more then 50 users of VV3 in this country.

So apart from being a very lonely VV3 user, I happily editing everyday to make people feel happy ;)

Man, I just want to slap you silly. That's just not fair. I love the ocean, but all I can see out my window is an old olive tree and the pool pump place across the street. NO FAIR!

:)

Tom

Strictly hobbyist (who values the experience of others on this forum)

By day I teach emergency response, advanced driving techniques in London to Police Officers.
In my spare time I take friends & families footage, try to make it a little easier to watch & send most of the DV stuff back to them on DVD as well.
I've only been doing it about a year but discovering Vegas was a god send, so reasoanbly priced for such a great product & great support from you guys & Sonic staff. Learning something new every day !!

PRO Audio for 27 years (studio engineer & broadcaster early on, now producer for Sat Radio & music in NYC).

Semi-pro in the video domain...Got fed up with Adobe Premiere & was familiar w/ S.F.'s audio applications when VV "grew up". LOVE IT! prefer it over Mac based Final cut in many ways. A big horn tooter amongst my co workers for ALL of Sonic Foundrys products. While all SF products have some limitations to the high end user, they are incredibly powerful and cost effective.

With VV it is a hobby, , my real career is a Linear Video Editor. I have worked for a large production company in the US Southeast for 22 years, the last 15 as senior editor. I work generally on Digibeta format with an Abekas switcher and an Accom axial editor, chyron, Abekas A57 DVE.

I got VV and a few other NLE packages to give me some experience with non linear type editing. I am currently training on an Avid Symphony (uncompressed on-line NLE) system and using VV and others has helped a lot in prepping for the move.

In the past I have edited on 2" quad, 2' helical, 1" (and of course who can forget 3/4") and D2 (or digital 3/4 as some call it).

At home I do family movies, vacations and stuff. You couldn't pay me enough to do weddings!!!

Interesting thread.

Dave T2

Hi,
I am serious hobbyist, much the same as you. I am also dreaming of kick starting a second career with DV. My day job is in software development and has been for ~30yrs. I'd love to do this full time and for profit.

I have had an undieing passion for making movies, hopefully not "pro bono", since Super 8 days. With DV at least I can now accomplish what I dearly wanted to with film.

Started using Digital Origin's EditDV as my NLE of choice, dabbled with Premiere and have now settled on VV3. In fact last nite I produced a fully edited audition tape for a friend's daughter who wants to go into musical theatre. So, loosely stated, it was a "music" video.

Three songs, rehearsed, taped, captured, edited (with titles etc.)and printed to DV in just under 6 hours. Could not have done it as simply without VV3.

I tend to lurk in most forums unless I can contribute, but really value to expertise of the folks who participate. I am learning a lot from them. I also hang out at the "Cow" VV3 forum and live in Toronto, Ontario.

Cheers,
Tom

I guess that works. I should have answered the question though.

I intended for it to be a hobby, but I do videos for our church and it has turned into more of an unpaid job than a hobby. I am currently working on a weekly series featuring "John" on the island of Patmos getting the Revelation. This week John finds out they are doing the next Survivor series on Patmos (Survivor Patmos) and he and his friend "Spalding" (a rather large, particularly hairy, coconut wearing a straw hat) are hoping to get themselves voted off the island.

I also did a video of our pastor being interrupted by himself on video and arguing with himself (on the screen) he eventually faded to a test pattern when the "real" pastor snapped his fingers. Another featured the associate pastor. He was supposed to preach that week, but when the time came he was not to be found. We call these train wrecks. The video came on showing him in his office playing solitaire on the computer. My wife (his secretary) went dashing down the hall to find him (on video) and reminded him that he was preaching on Being Reliable. He grabbed his notes, ran down the hall to the front door of Worship Center, then as the door was opening, on video, we switched to real life and he walked in to an incredible ovation of claps, shouts, and whistles.

I started doing videos because I think church should include technology and sometimes a humorous approach to making a point. So far it seems to be working because people appear to like the video "asides" that we've been doing. Vegas Video makes it easy to do a lot of this stuff, even for an upstart like me.

Tom

I've always had a keen interest in video editing since childhood. I worked on video editing at school in the 70's BW only and large open-reel decks here in the UK.

I started editying linearly just by using a camcorder and a couple of VHS recorders in the eighties. No transitions but some pretty good cuts:-)

Having retired on health grounds some years ago I started dabbling recently with Pinnacle DC10 and Studio 7 then boughht a DV camera. I heard about VV3 by accident, downloaded the trial version and fell in love with it having tried Premiere and others.

For the next few months I am working on my own projects to get experience but hope to set up my own business including the transfer of existing stuff to CD, etc.

Is there anyone else here in this forum from the UK. Let's hear it for good ol' blighty.

Great thread.

Tom,
Have you posted any examples, like at chienworks.com? The associate Pastor one sounds great!

DRF

Hobbyist here.

I've liked video for years and decided to do a Christmas present for my parents of their old reel-to-reel films and snapshots. So in May, while they were in Florida for 6 weeks, I raided their house trying to find all the photos and old movies. I ended up scanning about 2,500 photos and several hours of films.

Now I'm in the process of doing the videos with the films and stills throughout. I'm probably 20% done with this project. It's turning out to be alot bigger project than I originally thought - thanks to Vegas! Vegas and all the hints I get here and at the COW have made this a very addicting hobby. I keep trying new things. So, what was going to be a few generic slideshows, has turned into an enjoyable hobby.

Fortunately my wife likes it also, enough to where she wants me to do the same thing for her parents next year, our own wedding video, videos of the kids, etc. I just ordered a camcorder this week, so I can expand my horizons. Me-thinks I'll be busy for a few years at least!

BTW I was planning on getting Premiere because it was "the best." I inadvertantly stumbled across Vegas and some good reviews of it. I bought it on EBay, thinking "what have I got to lose?" - I haven't looked back or regretted it! This program is unbelievable!!

DRF

Hobbyist

I started with two 8mm tapes of my daughters wedding about 3 years ago. I bought Pinnacles Studio 400 to edit with. I never could get it to work correctly. I ended up doing a linear edit with an 8mm camcorder, a Sony DVMC-DA1, and a brand new Canon ZR. I then switched to Pinnacles StudioDV. I fought it for about a year. I did get it to work, but it was always a hassle. I then tried VideoFactory 1.0. I fell in love with it. The love affair was short. I found out that it didn't output from the timeline. I ran into the 2 GIG file limits. So I used VF to edit with and then imported the short 2 Gig clips into StudioDV to export to tape. Still to much of a hassle. I then switched to a Canopus DVRaptor with Premiere 5.1c. What a relief. I just edited. When VF2 came out, I got it and gave it a try. Very impressive. Since then I had a chance to give VV3 a try also. I'm now torn between my old Raptor system that is very reliable, and a new faster computer with VV3. The only editing that I do is of my day hikes that I take in the high Sierras of California. It is hard to justify spending the extra money for VV3 when I have a good system already. I do like the way VV3 and VF2 works! But my Raptor system has more special effects! Whats a person to do?????

Both. I use Premiere for professional clients who give me 4:2:2 footgage. But I also use Vegas for home movies. I am a fencer, and I also use Vegas to edit footage of me and my friends when we go to fencing tournaments.

I also use Vegas for professional multimedia. Vegas has terrific support for the Windwos Media streaming formats and MPEG.

One other use of Vegas is as a simple compositor for 3D work. Sometimes I need to use After Effects for sophisticated bluescreening and compositing. But Vegas works very well for about 80% of compositing needs.

Sincerely,

Nate Hayes
Sunfish Studio