How to tell Clients that we are in Control

[Chris Harding]

Hi Josh

I always redit/rough edit commercial shoots but remember we are talking about a final 10 minute promo clip there not hours and hours of social footage so there is a big difference in edit changes timewise. No bride/parents will pay you if they take up 3 days of your time nit picking the entire raw footage!!

I'm quite happy to run thru a promo with a client and pick out the good stuff ... seldom more than an hour or so and I include that in the cost too!

Chris

[Warren Kawamoto]

My opinion differs from the previous posts. Think about the client for a moment. They are paying you big bucks for a product. They receive their product, but aren't totally happy with it. They see things that could make it better to their satisfaction. As a producer, I would make their requested changes for free, regardless of if I had a contract or not. I want to show them that I care about their satisfaction, that I can produce consistent, high quality products EVERY TIME that they will be happy with for the rest of their lives. I never shut the door on a client. Their happiness and satisfaction paves the way to non-stop word of mouth referrals if you show that you're willing to put them first, ahead of yourself. When I work with clients, my customers are ALWAYS right.

[James Manford]

Warren

Are you running a business doing weddings or do you do it as a hobby / extra income?

If it's a hobby / extra income, then you can always put the customer first offering free re-edits.

But if your trying to run a business and weddings are your only source of money. It simply isn't feasible to make changes or bend over backwards on re-edits.

Editing is a hard, strenuous process that requires a lot of enthusiasm and creativity. If you've used up the best clips that you captured and now you keep coming back to this project to make changes as the client isn't happy. It will simply eat in to your time and energy which can be spent on the next wedding that you've just covered.

[Noa Put]

They are paying you big bucks for a product.

If you charging several thousands of dollars/euro's then I"d say yes, you have this covered in your price but many of us here, including me don't charge our actually hourrate which we would charge for a company and in such a case any re-edit comes at a cost. I tell my clients upfront now, especially if it's a wedding from another culture so they can't come and complain afterwards. If they expect this when we first meet I just tell them what it costs extra to re-edit and if they don't like that they can go shop somewhere else. They might be unhappy then but that is not the type of client I"m looking for.

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by James Manford

It will simply eat in to your time and energy which can be spent on the next wedding that you've just covered.

Imagine every client you deliver to comes back and says "redo it", if your only goal would be to keep them happy and do it for free you are not running a business.

[James Manford]

Noa

I've seen some of the big companies in the UK that charge thousands of pounds clearly state in their terms & conditions that re-edits are charged at the daily rate. So even the big fish don't just re-edit for free regardless of price ...

[Don Bloom]

My wedding clients are always right also, unless they're wrong which in 99.999% of cases they are!
Not so much wrong as simply not knowing what makes a good video, or the process that goes on behind it.
For me it's simple, they saw samples or a complete wedding (sometimes 2 or 3 depending on the number of people in their ring of friends whose weddings I've done), they know what they're going to get, they know I can do re-edits at a particular rate and I've had a number of people over the years tell me that they hired me to make the kind of video they saw samples of and since they aren't professionals at it, why would they think about telling me how to edit. I've averaged 50+ weddings a years for over 20 years. If I had to re-edit even 25% of them I would never get anything done nor would I make any money. If I make a mistake in the edit like a misspelled name or something obvious, sure I'll fix it, but creative changes? Nope! Another reason I stopped doing cinematic short form edits and went back to doc style Sorry Warren, on this one we have to agree to disagree.
Corporate clients of course, as I stated earlier, are different.

[Warren Kawamoto]

Originally Posted by James Manford

Warren
Are you running a business doing weddings or do you do it as a hobby / extra income?

I opened my own video business in 1991, and I've shot and edited over 3,500 weddings. Re-edits are very far and few between. The key is to try to get the editing right the first time. TRY TO EXCEED WHAT YOU THINK THEIR EXPECTATIONS WILL BE. That is the secret.

I never show off my lucky shots to potential clients...that raises their expectations.

[Noa Put]

I opened my own video business in 1991, and I've shot and edited over 3,500 weddings.

You did an average of over 150 weddings a year?

[Roger Gunkel]

Wow 3 weddings a week for over 20 years, now that is impressive. I wouldn't have thought it physically possible to maintain that level of work and sleep and eat. So assuming 1 day to film each one, that leaves 4 days to edit 3 weddings continuously week in and week out. I am humbled by someone who can achieve that and still be alive :-).

Roger

[Chris Harding]

That's pretty hard work day in and day out!! I was slammed here for my fast weddings edits (I can normally do a doc edit of a wedding in around 10 hours) but that's normally just one or two a week and it's usually just one so 3 edits to do like Warren!! Then again maybe Warren is not working solo ..we assume these thing but doing 150 weddings a year is a piece of cake if you have a couple of people doing your edits and all you are doing is the shoot.

Are you doing this all on your own Warren?

Chris

[Don Bloom]

I've been to Warrens great state a few times...weddings there (at least according to the venue managers I talked to) are different than say on the mainland. Most are destination weddings and run half the time or less of a typical wedding on the US mainland. I talked to one video guy on Maui who typically did 4 to 5 weddings a week. He had another "crew" working for him and 2 editors in his shop that did nothing else. He could generally turn the product over in 24 to 36 hours. Remember you're talking about prep, ceremony and reception that typically runs about 2.5 to no more than 4 hours total time. I was one hotel where I saw the same video person shoot 2 weddings in one day. Also keep in mind that in Hawaii, they'll do wedding 7 days a week not just on weekends.
Different type of deal there. Yes there are the typical big blowout weddings just like on the mainland but the majority are pretty short gigs.

The place I stayed on Maui told me they typically did 600 plus weddings a year. Even if they blew up the number and it was really only 300 and only 25% got video (75) that was 1 hotel on the beach where there were about 12 BIG hotels doing the same thing. Do the math and you can understand how Warren could do the numbers.

Plus with the cost of living on the islands you need to do a whole lot of weddings to pay the bills. ;-)

[Warren Kawamoto]

Originally Posted by Noa Put

You did an average of over 150 weddings a year?

That's correct. However, some of Hawaii's destination weddings on weekdays were shorter and more simple than the high end weekend ones. My packages consisted of ala carte options. Sometimes, customers wanted only SDE's of the ceremony to be shown at their reception, sometimes they wanted full coverage from beginning to end. Every wedding shot could be customized according to their budget/needs. All the work was done with only my wife and I, plus one assistant. On a busy day, the most we ever handled was 4 weddings; 2 in the morning, and 2 in the afternoon/ evening.

In my opinion, the biggest factor that made it possible to keep up with all the editing was Edius. It could edit just about any footage in real time without rendering, then spit it all back out to a master DVCAM. Up until 2005, we shot and edited everything in DVCAM, which was super fast to edit because it was SD. In 2005 we switched to HD, which bogged things down a bit. We had to wait until computer processors got fast enough to be able to cut like butter again.

[Warren Kawamoto]

Originally Posted by Don Bloom

Most are destination weddings and run half the time or less of a typical wedding on the US mainland. . Do the math and you can understand how Warren could do the numbers.

Don, you hit the nail on the head! Before I started my own company, I used to work for a company that did only destination wedding ceremonies. On the busiest day we ever recorded, we shot 40 weddings at 6 different locations, then edited them in mobile editing vans, in time to be delivered by the end of the day to the customer's hotel room. A salesperson would play back their wedding for them to verify everything was ok before the customer dished out their dough. I think back then (1985) a wedding ceremony video was $400.

[James Manford]

Wow learning quite a lot from this thread ... had no idea how it worked in some parts of the world !

You have 2.5 hour weddings where your able to do more than one, and then you have Asian weddings that span over 4 days of a minimum of 6-7 hours EACH day for just one couple!

Interesting to say the least!