how much "production" work do you do as an exhibitor?

[Frank Cox]

Deluxe does some kind of magical remote connection through my NAT so I don't think load sharing would work with their black box gadget.

[Ryan Gallagher]

You're right. Those charges were just for making the customer's existing media play. If the customer wanted any editing or content creation, we would do that for an additional fee which depended on what they wanted to do. If it was a simple "cut and paste" job, we might just let it slide. If they wanted complex editing or content creation, they paid by the hour.

We didn't advertise the fact that we could do that kind of work because, if we did, we'd be spending all our time in the computer room, making videos and PowerPoints for every Tom, Dick and Harry that walked through the door instead of putting on shows.

Sounds logical.

Leo is also very much correct.

Our CEO has a mantra of "Unreasonable Accommodation" of late (there is a book he likes). And time permitting, short of true post production work, I'm usually happy to do whatever is needed while on the clock for a show as I am hourly/FT, provided I have the resources and skill.

Where it get sticky is when i'm doing a bunch of prep while technically being paid by a different show days ahead (if I’m lucky enough to have idle time in booth), or need to come in when I wasn't otherwise scheduled to get it done. Which might not have been in their show labor budget.

Another wrinkle is communication, I'm not the one advancing these shows, and we may very well get content links very early, but often I don't get the information I need until closer to that 24 hour mark, or day of, and sometimes it's a scramble when the production manager didn't realize how media intensive a given show was. Sounds like I need to pitch your fee structure concept to our management team, perhaps that would build a financial buffer over time to permit the occasional unexpected hours etc.

Our other hurdle is my department lacks the tools at work to do a lot of that processor intensive stuff efficiently. Just a couple laptops, only one of which is modern enough to handle 4K rendering/playback, no NAS, relegated to Wifi most places you could sit down to work except the booth and stage itself, as production staff at our level don't have offices, just our work areas around stage/booth.

Feature length 2K DCPs exports run below real-time, like 16fps. 4K even slower. God forbid they need an animated walkin or Q&A too that can't just be a shorter DCP stacked etc.

If you get into charging by the hour, our prices would be inflated just because of compute time etc. Our internet (wired) is fairly fast at least, but a single day festival (BANFF World Tour for example) was still an 8 hour DCP package download compared to 3 at home coming from MediaShuttle, and required two attempts cause my boss's 1st attempt in his office was incomplete. Historically they always travelled a CRU as a backup plan, but this year they did not as no actual BANFF staff were coming to the Austin stop.

As a union venue, we have almost maintained our wages compared to national inflation from about ‘86 onward, rates were better before that, we were behind for a while but managed some recent catch-up, post pandemic is another story, bargaining right now for that and COLA corrections.

Where we and the employer have failed is to account for regional cost of living changes in any meaningful way, in those same time periods Austin had gone from like 40% below national average, to basically matching (or above), and rates do NOT reflect that market “glow up”.

Our base professional (non-casual) stagehand/technician wages used to represent a comfortable living you could start a family with, afford a 2 bedroom rental etc. Now they are quantifiably below a comfortable living for a single person in a studio efficiency, especially when you consider that our industry does not typically pull 40 hour week averages on the overhire gig side in our jurisdiction. 30 average is someone doing quite well in the schedule juggling. They might match data for area minimum "Living Wages" but only if you are getting full time equivalent hours, and historically as a technical professional trade, they would have paid well above the area's minimum "living wage".

And yup, digital has created aspect ratio and format proliferation. And in our house, besides knowing all the digital presentation stuff, you still gotta be up to speed on 35/70mm and maintenance topics on that front too, not for a bunch of films annually, but they still want to do them at a high level of quality, not to mention the rest of my job is video local dept head for touring shows, involving camera knowledge, PTZ, video switchers, distribution, visiting projectors/screens, etc etc. Many shows lack video and I just become the 1st stagehand and help all other departments, but I "earn my paycheck" on the ones that do have video elements.