Re: Event Board Recording SNAFU
I offered the 25 percent discount initially because my engineer said things had not gone well and I wanted to address it sooner rather than have her ask me for it. To address some of the other things said so far...
--There was no video producer to coordinate the production.
--There were many sources of distraction, from the moment our crew arrived even. While my engineer was supposed to be setting up shortly after arriving, she was instead grabbed by the client to go over the script.
--The gear was Shure SLX wireless. It wasn't an RF dropout (I have found them to be very stable), rather it was a bad connection somewhere in the chain, and my engineer couldn't find it. As I said before, I learned an expensive lesson about her inability to troubleshoot under pressure. I haven't really given her a hard time about this event though because I think she realizes how bad it is, and--this is a different topic entirely--I've seen too many young women traumatized out of the audio world.
--I did not upcharge for the feed, and this gets to the core of the lesson here. It's a separate service, and it requires either more preparation or more equipment.
--I don't think anyone coached her into demanding the refund. My business partner is convinced that she didn't know what she was supposed to get, but I couldn't really argue that with her when the final product sounded as bad as it did.
--Should the videographer have taken some responsibility for the audio, and communicated his needs to us better in the runup to the event (which was only a week, BTW)? Yes. But, to Dick Rees and Per's points, it wasn't that kind of show. It was almost literally a neighborhood production; the videographer was a personal friend from the neighborhood of the client, and the venue was in the neighborhood, etc.
