CD/DVD creation for clients.

[dwdallam]

What way do you all create DVD or CD image galleries or slide type shows for clients?

I'm getting requests for this sort of media instead of actual prints. People want them for promo uses, mainly online and for computer uses. Of course they would be low resolution.

So how do you go about this sort of request, that I assume will become more and more the rule. In fact, many people who want print images understand the archival aspect of having them on a DVD also, even though they cannot reprint them--low resolution prevents quality reprints if they try.

This brings another question to surface. We will be getting more requests to give up the "negatives" on a DVD so the person can reprint them when and if they need them. Traditionally, if you wanted more images, you had to pay the photographer.  The rule is, "never give up your proofs, ever!"

I feel this rule could be coming to its end, however. Besides, no one is going to want to print the same images over and over. So how do you all feel about this and how do you compensate for the fact that your proofs are going to be requested in the future--given the nature of digital and one hour labs that print directly from the DVD/CD.

I'm actually looking forward to this transition. If the customer wants a DVD instead of print images, more power to him or her. If they want print images, then they have to come to me.

Anyway, what's going on in this area? I mean it seems, for instance, that if you were a model or actor, and you wanted to show your portfolio, it would be much easier to simply mail the CDs to your prospective employers, not images.

[Jonathan Wienke]

I don't mind giving a client "negatives" for two reasons:

1: Unlike film, digital allows as many identical "negatives" as you care to copy, so if a client has a "negative", that doesn't mean you don't.

2: Given #1, and the market demand for negatives, it's unwise to ignore customer wishes. Just make sure that you're charging an appropriate amount for them, something like maximum usage rights, plus all likely print sales from that image. You're giving up print sales, make sure you get your money's worth from the negative.

[Hank]

In the portrait/wedding side of our business prints are our principal product form, from which we make our greatest income.  We're not about to turn loose digital files large enough for clients to do their own printing!  They can buy their prints from us or go elsewhere for another shoot.  We retain the large files and all rights to them for 10 years, following which we contact the clients and offer them the image set at a discount.  If they don't want to buy them, we destroy them.  

You are letting significant income slip through your fingers if you release large files to portrait and wedding clients.  You are also allowing them to use cheap discount printers rather than a professional lab to produce prints that will have your name and reputation on them.  By selling only prints we have complete control over who prints our images and how they appear.  Which variety of lab would you rather have generate the prints that will appear on your clients' walls?  How much income am I talking?  On average we generate 10 times the income from print sales over and above the initial shooting fees.  In our eyes (and bank accounts) it makes wedding and portrait photographers who turn loose their large files look really foolish.

I'm not sure whether it's more a reflection of our clients' lack of computer sophistication or a measure of protection, but so far clients have not been able to extract individual images from the Quicktime movies we use for slide shows.  We prepare the slide shows from small files (sized for optimum viewing on home televisions, but too small for producing worthwhile prints), convert them to Quicktime movies, then burn them to DVD.  We've had clients complain that they couldn't get prints from the slide shows, creating the opportunity to re-explain our policy on prints.

[Jonathan Wienke]

You are letting significant income slip through your fingers if you release large files to portrait and wedding clients.

Not if you charge for all of the print sales you're likely to make off of the image when you release the file. You're only losing income if you don't do this.

You are also allowing them to use cheap discount printers rather than a professional lab to produce prints that will have your name and reputation on them.  By selling only prints we have complete control over who prints our images and how they appear.

This is somewhat of an issue, but there are a lot of vendors out there that deliver good quality prints at reasonable prices. I've had good results simply giving the client a list of recommended print vendors, and telling them if they go elsewhere they are taking their chances getting crappy results.

How much income am I talking?  On average we generate 10 times the income from print sales over and above the initial shooting fees.

So charge 10x your shooting fee for the negs and be done with it. If the client is willing to pay that much, you're better off not having to undertake the hassle of doing the printing yourself, and most clients who spend that much on the negs are going to be reasonable about getting a reputable vendor to print them. As long as you're not losing money and the client is happy, what's the problem?

[Hank]

"So charge 10x your shooting fee for the negs and be done with it. If the client is willing to pay that much, you're better off not having to undertake the hassle of doing the printing yourself, and most clients who spend that much on the negs are going to be reasonable about getting a reputable vendor to print them. As long as you're not losing money and the client is happy, what's the problem?"

Your words are a poor fit in my mouth, Jonathan.

I repeat.  We don't sell negatives.  

The income we generate from print sales averages ten times what we get from the shooting fees in the same shoot.

I won't bother with the rest of your points.  It's our business and we run it the way we want.  It's worked well for the last 16 years, paying for the commercial building that houses our studio as well as retirement funds, houses, vehicles and lots of vacations.  I can't imagine a better way to run the business or measure success.

Drop your leg and back away from the fire hydrant.

[jjj]

I won't bother with the rest of your points.  It's our business and we run it the way we want.  It's worked well for the last 16 years, paying for the commercial building that houses our studio as well as retirement funds, houses, vehicles and lots of vacations.  I can't imagine a better way to run the business or measure success.
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I know where you are coming from, but in case you hadn't noticed, photography and people's expectations have changed drammaticaly in the last 5 years.
A friend's weddding business model is to charge a large fee which includes the album and a DVD of images. The idea being time+costs are saved by having a standard package and not having the hassle of doing reprints. It works well for them and they are booked solid 18months ahead.

[Jonathan Wienke]

The income we generate from print sales averages ten times what we get from the shooting fees in the same shoot.

And if you gross the exact same amount by selling negatives only, you're ahead by the cost of the paper, ink, wear and tear on your printer, and the labor costs involved in printing. And if you ever do anything besides weddings, like say any kind of commercial work, delivering high-resolution digital images to the client is pretty much mandatory.

You are free to run your business as you see fit. But your business model is becoming less acceptable to clients than it used to be in the days of film, and you may find it profitable to offer your clients additional options. If you price those options appropriately, you will not lose one cent, and may very well garner additional clients.

[dwdallam]

This confirms my ideas on the matter accurately. All of your points are valid and exactly what I've been trying to nail down.

For landscape, fine art, and those types, no way would I give away a neg. However, portraits are a very different animal.

First, there is no reason for anyone to want reprints, except the subject.

Second, even if the subject wants to reprint, such as a gal I'm getting ready to shoot who wants them for possible television advertising jobs, they won't want to reprint them too much because they will always need up to date photos.

Third, low resolution images on a DVD or CD allow people to share their pictures in email to relatives fast and easy, and if they are printed, they'll look like shit anyway (Probably just a matter of time before enlargement algorithms make it possible to get good 12" images with a 72DPI 600 wide image saved in sRGB--lol).

What do you think about offering prints with low resolution DVDs only? That way people can share their images casually, and if they need professional prints, we do them, or turn them over to a print house of their choice with copyright and usage notes.

Note also that I would never let even low resolution images go before I did my processing on them, including any necessary cropping. And I charge for processing. So we could make money on each image processed, even though it's going out on DVD in low resolution.

The only real problem I have with this idea is that every monitor not calibrated looks different, and some make our processed images look horrible, especially monitors that default to 9300K (which makes them look brighter for sales purposes), and lower end monitors, cheap Z-machine type LCDs being horrible. The upside is that most newer laptops have decent screens.

Anyway, this is a problem for sure. I wish there was an easy answer.
I think we should keep discussing this and come to a sort of consensus that would work in the vast majority of situations, and offer alternates for things like wedding photography.

[Hank]

The biggest benefit (over and above your financial return) of working side by side with your clients to get really high quality prints on their wall, and especially canvases, is demontrating to them that you really care about how the work looks- all the way through the finished product.  Heck, we even sell custom frames.  The typical client needs "nurturing" through the printing process, which we can provide while a cheap print lab just slaps the results on the counter, more or less saying "Here you go, Mac.  Seeya later."  You're creating that same "Seeya later" impression with clients by only providing a disc and refusing to participate in the "hassle" of printing.  

The payoff is also in repeat clients and client referrals.  We have individual clients for whom we initially shot "Santa" photos when they were young, family portraits with their parents, high school senior pics, wedding photos, preganancy photos, photos of their infants, and Santa photos with their youngsters- whole generations of service.  They come to rely on us for top quality work on their walls and they keep coming back to us.  I think that long train of sales would break if we simply handed them a disc and left them to their own devices for printing.  I'd also bet that photos from the cheaper sources they find wouldn't look as good 15 years later as ours do.

Also recognize that weddings come in "batches."  Many in each high school graduating class get married within a year or two of each other.  They're young newlyweds and all their friends get to see their wedding photos and they look to the first-married for help with their own.  If the newlyweds are excited about your services and have really topnotch examples on their walls, guess who all their friends are going to want as wedding photographer?

We've explored the question of simply adding the equivalent of licensing fees to the price of a disc and ending the relationship there.  The clients freaked!  They want our help with prints, and they simply don't understand the whole licensing business.  All they can see is the price increase without any photos on their wall yet.   It took a lot of reassuring to convince them that we weren't simply trying to "duck" the hassle of getting them really good prints.

We've built our business on the perception of service, repeat clients and referrals.  If all you are providing is a disc- at any price- you miss out on all the other opportunities after the shoot to build relationships with them.  

Frankly, local photographers who simply provide discs are doing us a HUGE favor.  Their clients have very little experience with printing and labs and such.  Guess who they come to for help?  Us of course, while at the same time they are feeling pretty abandoned by the photographer they originally hired.  Yeah, that's right.  A fair portion of our print orders come from other photographers' clients.  And guess who those same clients come back to the next time they need photos?  The current "trend" (or is it a fad?) of dumping a disc on clients rather than participating in the print production is a dandy for us.  May it long continue!  Talk about an easy opportunity to pick off other photographers' clients and convert them into lifetime clients for our own business.

Still think the print side of the business, and especially dealing with the clients, is too big of a hassle?  At the very least, hook up with an online portfolio hosting service like LabPrints and couple that with a good pro lab.  You'll still get a cut of the print sales while assuring that only quality prints result from your work, even if you limit your opportunities to build personal relationships with your clients.

[D White]

Maybe this is not the right thread for my question but it is somewhat related.

When I create DVD slide shows for myself or for distribution, I have had problems with longevity of the disc. They play fine initially but a few weeks or months later they will begin to break up about half way into the show and eventually stop. A replay of the disc at that point has these effects happen even sooner during the play.

I have experimented with discs created at the same time, but stored under different conditions, with the same effect.

The same discs will store image data fine with no playback problem even years later.

When the DVD slide show fails, it will not play on the original computer either.

I create my discs on a Mac by exporting from iphoto into a quicktime movie format. I then drag one or more of these onto iDVD to create and burn a show.

I have used Fuji DVD media in both DVD-R and DVD+R in 8 to 16X

I have tried reducing the music tracts from 44k / 16 bit to 22k / 8 bit as I have heard that cheaper DVD players may not have enough buffer. I initially thought that was it but the problem remains.

Any thoughts?

[dwdallam]

Still think the print side of the business, and especially dealing with the clients, is too big of a hassle?  At the very least, hook up with an online portfolio hosting service like LabPrints and couple that with a good pro lab.  You'll still get a cut of the print sales while assuring that only quality prints result from your work, even if you limit your opportunities to build personal relationships with your clients.
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OK this is a useful bit of information here. This sounds like you upload the processed prints to the lab, and your clients and look online and choose which ones they want to print, then you get a cut of each print? How does this work %age wise and etc. This sounds interesting.

What I usually do is upload them to my website. Then they can look at the images after processing and pick which ones they want. Then I have then printed.

I've had an increasing amount of customers request disks for web usage, newspapers, promotions, etc. that they mainly do online, and then they give the pictures, from the internet, to local papers and other advertisers before they arrive to entertain. You either give them a disk they can use in that situation, or they go elsewhere. Sometimes they just want me to show up, take a few show pictures--provided they are good--and then cut them to disk after processing, with knowledge that they will be using them electronically, and in flyers, papers, etc., to announce their schedules. It's actually fun, since it is so creative, and it's quite profitable: couple hundred bucks for an hours work.

[dwdallam]

Maybe this is not the right thread for my question but it is somewhat related.

When I create DVD slide shows for myself or for distribution, I have had problems with longevity of the disc. They play fine initially but a few weeks or months later they will begin to break up about half way into the show and eventually stop. A replay of the disc at that point has these effects happen even sooner during the play.

I have experimented with discs created at the same time, but stored under different conditions, with the same effect.

The same discs will store image data fine with no playback problem even years later.

When the DVD slide show fails, it will not play on the original computer either.

I create my discs on a Mac by exporting from iphoto into a quicktime movie format. I then drag one or more of these onto iDVD to create and burn a show.

I have used Fuji DVD media in both DVD-R and DVD+R in 8 to 16X

I have tried reducing the music tracts from 44k / 16 bit to 22k / 8 bit as I have heard that cheaper DVD players may not have enough buffer. I initially thought that was it but the problem remains.

Any thoughts?
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There is no reason a .mov file should degrade, for any reason. That is strange. Have you tried copying the same file to your hard drive, and then trying to play that file after several weeks, while comparing it to the same copy ion a DVD? This would identify if it is the DVD or not. It's where I would start my analysis, after Googling it--lol.

[Hank]

There are a number of such services around.  Check the web site for your pro lab, and they should identify which (if any) they work with.  Our lab (H&H Color) works with three, but we're exploring LabPrints because we already use them for album construction and some other things.  You essentially have it right on how they function.  LabPrints explains how their service works on their site, as should the other services.  We prefer face-to-face dealings with clients for print delivery for the reasons I previously cited, so we're exploring delivery of the prints to us as a default rather than directly to clients, except when specified.  We are willing to have deliveries direct to clients when we specify as an alternative function, since we have a fair number of clients in distant locations and there is no point in accruing the double shipping costs in those cases.

The situations you describe for disc delivery are essentially the same as our own.  We manage the service and set prices around the size and format of the files delivered, with prices rising with the size of the files and planned usage.  We also specify usage limits in our delivery memo, and they are also incorporated into our order forms and invoices.  Our attorneys assure us that since clients both sign the order form and pay the invoice containing the terms of use, we have pretty good legal standing in case of abuse.  Nothing is sure in court however, and thankfully we haven't had to go there to test that belief.  So far the legal blather and stern tone of a letter from the law firm pointing out a client's prior agreement to terms has been enough to shake loose an immediate adjustment in fees.  

Of course we're unlikely to sue for small amounts due to costs, but we are most certainly prepared to do so for larger abuses.  It's important to surveil actual usage and make efforts to enforce terms, PITA and time consuming though it may be.  Lots of money can be at stake as you might guess comparing fees that are normal and traditional for diverse uses.  By specifying usage and negotiating file delivery specs, there can be a whole lot more than a couple of hundred bucks involved, especially when dealing with large corporations and substantial uses.  Three or four 200k files for electronic usage may be in the couple hundred dollar range, but when you start delivering large files and unlimited usage rights, you're talking about a disc delivery that's worth anything from a new DSLR body to a new car.