Cheap products isn’t best investment in video production

We all know that buying cheap food, cheap technical equipment and cheap car service does nothing good for you. In many cases it is even more expensive than buying quality and guaranteed stuff. With cheap food you can get stomach problems and health care can be very expensive. This is where you will never go cheap, though.

There is a lot of people buying new car and finding the cheapest car service after few years of strict retailer service. But cheap car service can lead to death. Your car must be 100% working if you are a lot on the road. Unless you like to play Russian roulette. Cheap braking disks can fall apart when you least expect. Cheap motor belt can break and blow up your car bonnet. Cheap motor oil can destroy the motor pistons.

People like to save money anywhere they can. We too in some cases like to save money if we can. But only if saving few bucks doesn’t effect our life or our work. Sometimes we try to buy cheap food, but in many cases it sucks very much and we don’t buy it anymore. Even with equipment, if we would buy only cheap lenses and cameras, we would never able to offer high quality products. Of course buying expensive professional equipment dries up our wallet extremely fast. And because we would like to make quality footage for our customers, we do expect from our customers to understand the price of service. Many companies don’t understand, that is why we learned to decline work. Lowering prices on our service will only do us harm. We wouldn’t be able to use professional equipment, pay all the bills, our vacation and time of being sick. In worst scenario if something happens with our main equipment we could just have to close down our company. Many young video productions don’t aware of this. Some are just living with parents, or they are working part-time another steady job. It is much easier if you don’t need to pay for food, apartment rent, electricity, water, internet, mobile phone, car insurance, personal insurance, taxes, car repairs, home repairs, clothing, etc. Once when you are full-time filmmaker, pricing your work the right way becomes the main thing where 90% of newcomers fail. With all living costs there are high business costs too. And because they fail to say no to dumping prices, they are not even close to be fair competition on the market. With such competition the professional video productions have big problems competing with under-priced services. Being pushed to corner the overall production quality will drop, because you have to work more and faster to earn enough for own existence. From that point it is just a matter of time when newcomers go bankrupt. Even well-established companies might go bankrupt too.

There is another side effect of cheap and low quality video production. It doesn’t serve its purpose anymore. Making video that nobody will want to see isn’t what clients are looking for. Video products should drastically improve sales or recognition. Making bad video is the same as bad website nobody finds it on the world wide web. Throwing money away.

Does that mean that cheap stock footage agencies sell under-priced works? Yes. Well, no. They are mostly selling properly priced low quality stock footage works. And good footage of few other newcomers who don’t know how to price their own work.

What can we do about it? Nothing at all. We just sit back and eat popcorn until everything falls apart.

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