Keep footage forever or delete?

[Gabe Strong]

Originally Posted by Josh Bass

That all sounds great!

Except. . .

Let's say I send the email putting the onus on them, only to hear back, two months later:

"OH MY GOD, I WAS OUT OF THE COUNTRY FOR THE LAST TWO MONTHS ON AN ARCTIC EXPEDITION AND HAD NO ACCESS TO EMAIL! HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?"

I joke, but the basic gist of that is a problem. How do you KNOW they've seen that message and understand it?

Just thinking of ways these things could backfire.

Yup, and that is one of many reasons I chose to just archive for them....because you just never know for sure what is going on at their end of things. But you seemed to be saying that you did NOT want to go that direction when you said: "Charging more and archiving is a no go for me as I am already losing work because of my rates".

You have to make hard choices in this business. It sounds like you feel you cannot raise rates anymore. If that is the case, I think the email is the best way to go. Might it bite you sometime? Yup. But that's the price you pay for keeping your rates down and not archiving. I don't mean to be harsh, but you make your choices and take your chances. I would try and make all this clear to the client up front BEFORE you do the job as well, but as we all know, the client often doesn't listen to those types of things. No matter what you do, you could get burnt if you don't archive. They can agree to everything and still come back and be mad at you for not archiving. Over the years I've had clients pick SD production instead of HD because it would be cheaper, pick single camera coverage instead of multi because it would be cheaper, and even after signing off on paper to how it would affect their production, they come back at the end and are mad at me because 'It looks blurry on a big screen' or 'Everything I wanted wasn't captured'. I show them the contract they signed, which explains that these very things they are mad about will occur and remind them THEY CHOSE it because it was cheaper, and it doesn't matter, they are still mad. So now I just decline to offer those 'budget' services and charge more money for offering a more professional service. If that is not possible, I think you just do the best you can, tell them about it beforehand, send the email, and call it good. If they don't want to pay extra for it, then they don't get it, simple as that.

[Josh Bass]

I will have to rethink some of what I said if prices on drives are down as far as you guys are saying. Going forward, though, I will try what you said, making clear I will delete in X amount of time, or offer to archive for an additional fee.

[Paul R Johnson]

I really like that comment about when people insist on the cheaper option then complain. In one area of my business I set a price, they say yea or nea. However, in my video work, which is quite narrow and specialised normally, nobody EVER asks about quality. I routinely shoot in HD now, simply because I can, but it never gets to the client in HD, always on a DVD, and from the work of others I see doing the same kinds of work, my SD is damn good.

In fact quite a bit of what I do then gets squished down to mobile frame sizes, so I'm doing the opposite of many of you.

My preference for never deleting anything is simply that for me, the old material is worthy in itself. I've been working on a project where the aim is to collect material on an actor, and we've been collecting archive pictures, programmes and video for a BBC project. I've just finished working on video recorded in 1993, that just happened to be still around. So it's no longer mine to fiddle with, it now belongs to somebody else, and we're all happy. Kind of justifies my collecting and keeping old stuff mania. I've still got some material of a very young currently famous person, but this, I can't do anything with as the record company have VERY expensive lawyers.

[Shaun Roemich]

On corporate gigs, I now factor in (and include in my invoice) an external hard drive bought specifically for the production. When folks complain (which is about 30% of the time) I point out that the $150 would have bought them 6 x 1 hour DV tapes only 15 years ago. Moving to tapeless hasn't done away with media costs, it has only shifted them.

[Josh Bass]

THAT i understand if they were to complain about, being that many times footage will fit on a flash drive or they may have a drive of their own they want to send me.