The client is always right, right?

Chienworks wrote on 7/14/2014, 7:53 AM
Just a mild rant, more of a laugh actually.

Project has a 7 hour 43 minute timeline that needs to be edited down a little. In the mean time the client wants to make a 4 or 5 minute highlight video to use for promotion and sent me a list of the 5 speakers they want to use. Each speaker had about 10 to 15 minutes so we need to trim that down to just the 'good parts'. I send the client MPEG files of those 5 speakers with the whole project timecode burned into the corner and ask them to select the best minute or so from each and tell me the start & end timecode.

Three week deadline, and they give me the in&outs pretty much the day before it's due. The first thing i notice is that none of them have hours, just minutes:seconds. I figure they were lazy and didn't bother writing down the hour. Not a huge problem as i know Doris is in hour 3 and Maggie in hour 6. But when i start trying to find the part they want, i'm not even getting the right speaker. After about an hour of head scratching i finally realize they used MediaPlayer's playback time counter and completely ignored the burned in time code. Oy! So i have to go play those clips in media player myself and write down the correct in&outs myself.

The other fun thing was that for the 5th clip they specified two ranges of about 55 seconds each and told me i had to cut out the part in between. Well, it turns out that the second range overlapped the first by about 50 seconds, so the start of the first to the end of the second was just about 1 minute. By that time it was 1am and i didn't feel like waking up the client for clarification, so i just used the whole minute, including the "gap", as it were.

Client called me up the next day and said it was all wonderful! Especially the last speaker where i cut out the part they didn't want.

*shrug* Who am i to argue with the client?

Comments

ushere wrote on 7/14/2014, 8:12 AM
ALWAYS, even when they're wrong ;-)

i thoroughly TRAIN my clients about the use of burned in tc, even give them log sheets, etc.,

haven't had a problem in over 30 years, BUT, as i wrote, i train them, and part of that original training is carefully explaining that if they don't do it properly i'm professional enough to figure out what they meant, but expensive enough so they wont do it again ;-)
Rory Cooper wrote on 7/14/2014, 9:03 AM
Lol, I got bombed out once, actually a few times.. because I cut the Pas de deux short, Adagio to long, Balançoire was a Aplomb. ...no..no.nnooo....theese is a Faille? Ok bro got it now! ... cut after the jumpy thing.
dxdy wrote on 7/14/2014, 11:21 AM
@Rory:

Yah, the jumpy thing. And the part where the dancer is laying on the floor looking stunned, cut just before that.
Chienworks wrote on 7/14/2014, 12:54 PM
Probably my most nightmarish edit was an audio-only, back in the days before i had access to DAW or NLE. A local dance troupe was putting on a performance for some company's 30th anniversary. The piece they had picked out was 24 minutes long, which was too much, so they wanted it cut down to about 11 minutes. Now, i think it would have made sense to simply choose a subset of the movements to add up to the required time, and i accepted the job with that notion in my head. Wrong.

I was handed the CD and a photocopy of the score, full of red marks. They wanted it trimmed down by removing 16 beats here, 8 beats there, 4 beats in these spots, etc. The whole score was riddled with red marks, probably over 200 edits. I sighed, dubbed the CD over to 1/4" tape, and sat there with the tape deck on half speed, sharpie in one hand, and score in the other, physically marking all the ins & outs on the tape.

There was one edit i balked on. The marking specified 3 beats out of the middle of a phrase. I called the director up and said "would you like me to correct this edit for you, or would you prefer to have all your dancers stub their toes and fall over on stage?" He relented and let me change it to 4 beats.

It took about 4 hours to do the marking, then another day to cut & splice the tape. I dubbed the result back to a few cassettes so they could have practice tapes and took them to the studio. The dancers were there rehearsing to the full version. I asked why he was doing that when so much of it was being removed. He said, "oh, that's because the performance is tomorrow night so i wanted them to know the choreography in time."

I just accepted my pay and walked away shaking my head.
Rory Cooper wrote on 7/15/2014, 3:28 AM
Oh no..its mind boggling how some guys in the industry have no idea of time.

In the old days before big print they used to paint the back props as I was an artist and could paint large realistic scenes so I got a few of these to do in my time.
The one I got the brief at 4 bells, the shoot was the following day starting at 6 bells and involved new born babies! I worked through the whole night, made the deadline.
The lights set the cyc and my artwork alight so there was smoke and fire and moms running around terrified but they got the shots and I got paid 9 months later.
The production crew was Voodoo productions.
stbo wrote on 7/15/2014, 7:39 AM
Thank you so much for making my day... I love this thread.... I thought it was just me...

"Yah, the jumpy thing. And the part where the dancer is laying on the floor looking stunned, cut just before that."

Chienworks wrote on 8/24/2016, 4:01 PM

I just remembered one more to add ... Another dance show, this time students. The ballet teacher gave me a stack of CDs and track numbers to dub to a master cassette for performance, then make a few copies for rehearsals. One of them she specified track 14. No problem. I copied track 14 next on the tape, left 4 seconds blank, and went on to the next track.

Next day endless wailing and gnashing of teef that i had RUINED the rehearsal by cutting the track too soon!!! The end of the song wasn't there and all the dancers nearly fell over on stage when the music didn't continue. So i went back and checked. Track list on the CD case said 4 minutes 19 seconds. I played the track; 4 minutes 19 seconds. Played the tape; 4 minutes 19 seconds. I couldn't figure out what was wrong so i called the teacher for clarification. She said, "well, the whole, you know, the whole next part, the movement is missing." I asked how long she thought it should be and she guessed about 8 minutes. I look at the CD case again and track 15 is 3 minutes, 42 seconds. I play it right then and there and she's still listening over the phone and says "YES! That part!". Good thing she can't hear my eyes roll over the phone.

Fortunately that dance was near the end, so i copy both tracks to that spot on the tape and redo the last 4 songs, and make new rehearsal copies since the students have all already lost their tapes. Mind you, all i did was press play on the CD player and let it play both tracks straight through continuously while the tape recorded in real time. Next evening, more gnashing and wailing because the gap between the two movements is WAAAAAAAAAAAYYYY too long. Ummmm, on the CD the gap was about 2.5 seconds. On the tape the gap is about 2.5 seconds. "NO!" she hollers. "It's amost instantanenous when we play the CD here."

*shrug* OK, pause the tape this time to cut about 2 seconds out of the gap, make more copies. This time all is well, except when i go to the studio to personally deliver the tapes, i play the CD for them, and sure enough, it's a 2.5 second gap and all the dancers say "Yeah, that's right. The tape you gave us yesterday the gap was too short and we couldn't get set up in time for the next movement." Which is odd, because the tape they had rehearsed to the night before had the same 2.5 second gap as the CD, even though the teacher said it was too long.

Ya just can't win.