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Posted by nobody special on 09/04/06 00:06
I would suggest that for many businesses, even though the cost of gear
has gone down quite a bit, your money is usually better spent going to
an out-of-house setup on an as-needed basis. I have seen this happen in
real life several times, where a client of ours decides they've looked
over our shoulders long enough and they want to bring the productions
"in-house". I caution them, I ask them is their business making
widgets or making videos. If you're an experienced pro, sorry to be
talking down to you. If you are a causal, 'prosumer' user with a
reputation around the office, I would say DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!!.
Here in brief is what I have seen happen:
Guy/gal in office talks their boss into this, or it's the boss's idea.
First they go out and they buy gear. They never buy the right stuff the
first time out, or the purchases are incomplete, i.e. they'll buy a
halfway decent camera, but no lights, mics or even a tripod. (they
should be renting instead at this stage, but that's another discussion)
Then the lucky new videomaker person gets pulled off their full-time
work for quite a while learning the new stuff, training on the edit
system doing tutorials, etc. Meanwhile they have to hire a temp or
another worker to cover the stuff the videographer employee used to do
full-time. Then they start to figure out standard office spaces do not
make terrific studio spaces or editing rooms. By the time they have
everything together right, the same product we could have knocked out
for them for $200 has cost them thousands, it still doesn't look as
good as what we make, and it's way late to boot. And their accountants
are going nuts over the extra staff costs, expensive office floor space
being used for studio space and all this depreciating equipment they
bought that has little to do with the actual product they make.
Comes the next round of corporate belt-tightening, they dump the whole
department, we pick up some of their better gear for pennies on the
dollar, and then we get to make more videos for them again, billing
them for the use of the gear THEY BOUGHT.
Seen it. Lived it. More than once.
You can buy a camera, but you have to "make" a cameraman. Likewise
someone typing stuff into powerpoint does not equal a well thought-out
script. No, for cost-effective product, you get better results, faster,
by staying with your core competency and trusting the video work to
experienced professionals, producers, writers, shooters editors, who
have already made the commitments of time, study, practice and money to
perfect a craft and a facility to execute it in.
Sometimes it can make sense to take production in-house, but IMO you'd
have to be a really large company or doing it three times a week for it
to make financial sense. What kind of public image does poorly-done
video give your company, to potential customers, to investors? And
think about it this way: your salesmen probably fly to various places
out of town from time to time. Does the company buy them a plane, or an
airline ticket?
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