What do you guys put on your demo reels? How do you do it? Do you just stick five spots on there with two or so seconds of black between them, or is there a text intro at the beginning? What?

This is to send to someone to hopefully land an interview, so I don't know if I'll be there while he's looking at it, if that makes a difference.

My deom reel is a CD with a website on it. There are several choices ov clips to watch. Below each video, is a brief descriptive paragraph.

stick with a codec that is readable on any system

Windows avi and mac quicktime.

Josh you need to find a friend with a mac, and use toast and do a dual bootable cd. If it is popped into a mac, it will load up your site orientated in (flash or html or even powerpoint, but powerpoint sucks) within a mac config so all the files are quicktime, or a windows config so it links to all windows avi files.

Toast will load an autorun ini, and we as whatever macs use to auto run, and will boot up the applicable version of the presentation, dependent on the system it is loaded into, with the correct links.

Zac

I cannot help you on demo reel formats (I doubt there is a
"standard" format) but the most things I have heard say:

- don't make it too long
- put your best work on it
- make it interesting directly from the start

The longer you wait with interesting things to happen (and
I'm not talking all flashy, but just the stuff that the client
is really interested to see) the more they will fall a sleep
and not continue watching.

Also tailer the demo reel (if you have that much to show) to
the market and footage most applicable to the client and
not stuff he could care less about (this is a grey area)