Archive for June 17th, 2009

Someone with a video production experience put up a post on AZ Starnet that’s worth a read. The story is on the City of Tucson’s $820,000 journey into movie business. Apparently based on stock footage, video production market rates both locally and from national firms and video editing techniques we could have got the same 15 minute film from local access Channel 12 for just under a grand.

Nothing really surprises me anymore about Tucson’s leadership.

229. Comment by Don M. (saffronbindy) — June 17,2009 @ 4:37PM
Ratings:   -1 +10
Loose ends…
The more I look at this video clip the madder I get. It is horrible. I’ll get into more technical details just later.
I’m most PO’d that the city spends taxpayer money for the Tucson Film Office every year to bring films here. We OWN them. Why not use them? Same for Tucson 12. Nobody watches them, but they do produce very pretty video and win awards for it. We pay for every cent of them. We OWN them. Same for whoever shoots the videos for the Desert Museum. Some of those are nothing short of spectacular. Why not find out who that is? Strangely, someone told me it was really Tucson 12 who shoots the Desert Museum videos, which doesn’t surprise me.
Next, the cost. I spent some time today calling around. Produced locally a 15 minute promotional video runs between $30,000 and $50,000. From the national companies it runs between $200,000 and $300,000. Not $820,000. We got took, big time.
Then there is the $70,000 “oversight fee.” I mentioned this to one of the national companies and the person just laughed and said I was being “milked.” If you contract a video with any money behind it the video company gives you a full-time person to oversee your project. You and your employees have to do nothing. Even the smaller local companies will do this, but they will be part-time. Then there is the time deal. I asked all how long it would be before I got my video. Five years? Three? Two? Our video project has taken five. They all work on about the same schedule. Forty-five to 60 days for the first edit to be delivered, and about 90 days for the final product.
Now the technical part. Being born and raised in Tucson I was annoyed that so much of the video (most of it, actually) was shot in Cochise and Santa Cruz counties. As I looked at the video it hit me. This was stock footage spliced together. I knew this because of the edits, and the fact that some of the cactus pictures had types of cactus we don’t have within 200 miles of here, and the cow herding picture had black cows in it. We don’t have black ones. Ours are brown.
This is the technical part. Splicing stock footage together is hard. Takes a good video company to do it. You can see this yourself. When a scene shifts, from one clip to another, the video editor makes sure the colors in the first few seconds of the clip just shifted to more or less match the colors in the clip just shifted away from. This makes the transition easy on the eye. This video for Tucson is almost a tutorial in how not to do do scene shifts. One scene shifts from a man on horseback which is 85% pure white to another shot at night which is 90% pure black. Your eye cannot adjust that fast, and you will miss the first part of the second scene. Sloppy editing. Go to a new-release Hollywood movie and look at nothing other than the scene-shift colors. They will be perfect. They are perfect because they now use software to manage colors across scene shifts. If it shifts abruptly, it’s because the director wants you to notice it.
I started looking for where the stock video might have come from. I found some of it. The black cows live in Colorado. You can buy your own video of the black cows. Same cows, same cowboy, same meadow, same mountains in the background. But is will cost you $500 to license it.
We’ve been ripped off. For only $100,000 I would have been willing to put together a video just as good as the one the city bought. I would buy stock footage and download it. Stuff it into my movie maker software which can write broadcast-quality output, and deliver it. I would never leave my house.