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Skydive2

DZO/Video concession owners, how do you get the customer there product?

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I'm wondering what volume hand-cam DZ's do as far as getting the customer there photo/video packages. For the past two years we edit Sunday nights/Mondays and mail the customers there videos. As the business has grown, it is becoming much harder (if not darn near impossible) for us to keep track of 60+ videos/photos that are shot in a weekend and get them all mailed to the correct address in a timely manner.
How do you guys handle this? (keep in mind, its not an option for instructors to edit as they are doing 15+ jumps a day).

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most large volume dz hire an editor who's job it is to sit there all day and edit videos and burn stills. You should be looking to automate as much as you can with something like Sony Vegas running production assistant, so that once up and running in the right editors hands you can product end product DVDs in minutes and have them walk out the door.

There are a number of people on this forum who are doing it, such as E-snore for one. I'm sure there are others as well. If you really want to scoop on it do a search on here for Sony Vegas & production assistant and if that fails you ask the old spotted one.;)

There are a number of ways to send your clients out the door with videos and stills in hand as long as your not a cheap tight ass about it, and if your as busy as you say then there should be no real reason to be a cheap tight ass about, unless your just a cheap tight ass.

you can't pay for kids schoolin' with love of skydiving! ~ Airtwardo

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Exactly. Put the money into a good edit station and a good editor and the customers can walk out with their videos within 20 minutes of landing.

Think of the cost for the postage, the envelopes, etc and you'll find that you are spending more than what you would pay to high some high school kid an hourly rate to edit the videos based on the volume they could crank out. We have 2 editors that are turning on average 70 videos a day on the weekend and the video team frequently gets some jumps in too when its a tad slow. Having the videos in hand right then can also let them see them before they leave and that can generate more customers seeing the videos and getting their own video also.

If you spend the money it can more than pay for itself and you don't have to give up your time during the week also.
Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

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Ditto the idea of setting up the right edit suite to handle the volume. You can set up a template in the editing program so the editor has very little work to do aside from loading memory cards and labeling folders/DVDs.

Pree has it right about high school kids (or close). Check the local high schools and colleges for audio visual clubs/programs, and see if anyone wants a job. There are always kids looking to get into editing or movie making who would love a summer job being paid to do just that.

We have a high schooler as our editor, and videos and stills go home with the customer within 15 or 20 min of them landing. The camera staff gets the memory cards right to the editor, and by the time the students are out of jumpsuits/harnesses and got their certificates, it's only minutes until the DVDs are in their hands.

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"Their" product. Just saying...

And ditto to having the customers walk away with their video the same day they jump. Anything else should be the rare exception. Cost, customer satisfaction, immediate gratification etc.

Our manifest makes little manila envelopes (2-1/2"x4") for each load with the customers' names on them, along with the name of the videographer/TI. We drop the cards in the envelopes and leave them for the editor. This way, when he/she edits the video, they have the name for the video/DVD. When the editor is done, he puts the re-formatted cards in each videographer's bin. Until then, no one can touch the envelope/card so the card doesn't get inadvertently re-written.

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I work in production and your best bet would be to get an Apple computer with Final Cut Pro. Don't bother with any other editing software. A very large majority of the production industry uses FCP. If FCP is out of your budget, Apple provides iMovie & iDVD with the operating system. iDVD has templets which are drag and drop. You could even simplify the process by just importing the footage and dropping it into iDVD, then burn the DVD. In this case the footage would be raw and un-edited. If you are going to find a high school/college student, most likely they'll be editing on FCP.

To generate more revenue off the videos, offer your customers the options of having the chance to buy a digital version. People love to post their video on social media sites. Plus you can bug the video with your logo. The digital options I would go with would be YouTube and iPHONE to start with.

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Your advice would great advice if we were talking about a video flyer who is doing their own editing between loads and who has the 25 to 30 minutes per video to edit each one and burn it without render time added in, and for those people imovie and idvd is more then enough to handle the job, however the gain in ease of use is traded for time to do the job. I have done thousands of tandem videos in the mac world, there is simply no way to do it under 20 minutes per video, unless your making shitty videos!

However we are talking about high volume and quick turn around times and the Sony Vegas production asst. was developed in part by a skydiver with a large understanding not only of the "production world" but the skydiving tandem video world and how to speed it up to solve the very problem the OP is asking about.

There is no way you can beat or edit faster then SV PA in it's automated format that can produce a complete dvd in 10 minutes or less.

You need to spend sometime doing skydiving videos to really understand the needs of the professional camera flying rotation and business needs.
you can't pay for kids schoolin' with love of skydiving! ~ Airtwardo

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Quote

I work in production and your best bet would be to get an Apple computer with Final Cut Pro. Don't bother with any other editing software. A very large majority of the production industry uses FCP. If FCP is out of your budget, Apple provides iMovie & iDVD with the operating system. iDVD has templets which are drag and drop. You could even simplify the process by just importing the footage and dropping it into iDVD, then burn the DVD. In this case the footage would be raw and un-edited. If you are going to find a high school/college student, most likely they'll be editing on FCP.

To generate more revenue off the videos, offer your customers the options of having the chance to buy a digital version. People love to post their video on social media sites. Plus you can bug the video with your logo. The digital options I would go with would be YouTube and iPHONE to start with.




I work in production as well. The kind of production you likely work in....most have left FCP behind, but that's another topic.
No Apple product will work well in a tandem environment, as the product doesn't allow multiple copies to be open.
Need to be editing, rendering, burning all at the same time? Can't do it in FCP (or any other app) and this is one of the singular reasons Sony Vegas is used on most dropzones around the world in some config or another.
Need to automate ingest, naming, editing process? Same answer as above.
Need support for AVC or AVCHD without transcoding (GoPro, CX Series, and most other small format cameras)...Apple doesn't have a solution.

Speed on a day when you have 100 tandems is critical. Production becomes "mass production." Any application that can't multitask is immediately out the window. Unless you're also suggesting that the DZO purchase 5-6 8core systems?:P

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I can get out a DVD from iMovie in 15 minutes. And that is on a 4-5 year old computer. Probably 3-4 minutes of that is actual editing and the rest is just the computer doing its thing. I'll use the time when I am waiting to burn the stills on a cd or print out a picture.

I can be burning a DVD in iDVD while editing in iMovie and burning stills. ( we keep an external burner on our macs ). The individual software can't have multiple copies open, but you can be burning in iDVD and editing in iMovie without a problem. I can get 2 videos normally burned in the time it takes the tandem master to get the next set of students dressed. ( we normally do back to back loads and then a break to get the next students ready ). I'm pretty confident that with a newer machine with more memory I could get that time down even less.

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if the customer leaves before they get their video which can be as little as 10 minutes after their jump it has to be mailed which is costly and time consuming so we use tickets which have the students name and address written on them so they can be put in to the DVD cover and manifest has a copy for their records it reduces allot of confusion. also get the may get the student to write their mailing address on the envelope saves some time.

faster computers and expenisve nle's always help.
I have not yet worked with vegas production assistant yet or other add ons to Vegas but i thinik its worth the money to get a better quality product to the customer before they leave.

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