Michael Ziersch

The Mega Corp has been trying to get the band on their books for years... as one of the head honchos is a big fan of the band. The Mega Corp is quite mega... They would be one of the largest in this country, they have about 6 different production companies under the same umbrella, work on commercials, feature films, television. In our film/tv district in my city they own about 90% of the buildings along one of the major roads. The band didn't use them last time as the company charge biblically expensive rates, but this time the company lowered their pricing to the same as us just to get the project. They wouldn't be making any money at all. In fact I'm pretty sure they would be making a loss. The band went into their offices to plan their music video and were dazzled by all the facilities and studios etc... and compared to my crappy little home editing suite I simply could not compete.

Thankyou all for your sound advice. I am based in Australia. So is the band. They did tell us a budget on how much we would get to complete the project and we agreed and started work. I did fail to mention an important point in my last post, that we became good friends with the band from the last project, I count one of the members as one of my best mates. So this is why there were no written agreements or contracts drawn out. I'm confident we will work something out. I will post links when it gets released! It was our biggest job so far, a sold out theatre crowd of about 5000 people, we used 7x sony EX1s including one on a 24 ft jib. The lighting guys did a fantastic job and hence the footage looks really good. Now I just hope I can edit it!

Hello all. I apologise if this is a stupid question but I'm trying to get as many opinions as possible. My production business was hired a few years back to produce a live in concert DVD for a hip hop act, which turned out very well and the band was very happy. Fast forward to a few months back and the band want another live DVD to accompany their new album, so we are hired to film the show. We were paid a sum for equipment and crew for the one night. The footage looks great and the band instruct us to start editing the show straight away. We have put in approx 100 hours so far. At the same time the band hires another company, a far far bigger and better known one to produce their new music video, as we are busy handling the live stuff. I assumed the bigger company would be in the ear of the band asking about the DVD etc, and exactly that has happened, the band emailed me today saying the live DVD has been 'put on the backburner while we tour' yet they are asking for all of the raw live footage ASAP. I'm presuming they want to hand the footage to the larger company to handle and edit instead of us. We had no written agreement on who was going to edit the footage, but they assured us several times verbally we would be. So. We were paid for the shooting of the concert. We haven't been paid for any of our editing hours. Should we just hand over the raw footage? Who owns the footage? A big thanks to anyone who read all that. Any advice? edit - I must add all of the footage is data on my HD. No actual tapes or hard copies.

Hi all, my business shot and edited a live hip hop show for release nationally on DVD. This was my biggest project to date, and sales are going well, within a month its halfway to being certified gold by ARIA. (Australian Record Industry Assoc) There are tons of things I don't like and would have done differently but overall I think its not bad for a first go. I'd love to know what you guys think. (warning - coarse language abounds!)

Ok, so my business got a gig recording a live hip hop show. I have hired a small lipstick camera that is going to be trained on the tunrtables that apparently has composite out, my question is can I plug that into a miniDV camera and record like that? The camera is a panasonic gs400. Otherwise hiring a DV recorder deck is going to cost me loads of $$$.

Fantastic, thanks a lot! We are picking up the cameras at 430 in the afternoon and the show is on at midnight, so at least we have a few very precious hours to work our way around the cameras.

Hi everybody! My friends and I will be filming a hip hop show tomorrow night. We have hired HVR Z1P's to use. (A camera I have never used before!) The organisers have just called and asked me if I can provide a video feed off one of the cameras to their vision mixer so they can throw the image up onto some of the plasma screens that are scattered around the venue. They have told me they have aquired some component looms (20M BNC) with various adaptors to do the job. Is this possible? I have no idea what I'm doing I'm afraid. Help!

May I ask a question? My friends and I are shooting a hip hop show on friday night, we are using HVR Z1Ps. (A camera I haven't even used before!) The group asked us today if we could provide a video feed from one of the cameras to their in house vision mixer so they can display it on various screens around the venue... but I have no idea how to do it, seeing as we don't particularly know what we are doing. They told me they had aquired some component looms (20m BNC) with assorted adaptors for us to use to run to the mixer. Is this an easy straight forward thing to do?