Between video production companies and clients that commission films from them, the question of intellectual property and copyright comes up all the time. Who owns the final film? Who owns the raw video footage shot on the day that didn’t make it into the video? These are known in the industry as the rushes.
We’ll tackle the very grey area of who owns the final film another time. Here, let’s answer this question - who owns the rushes to a commissioned video production, the production company or the client?
To a client, this should be very simple. I (the client) paid you (the production company) to make this film for me. At the end I give you money, so you hand it all over, and I now own it. A coffee shop doesn’t carry on owning the coffee I just bought from them!
For video production companies, there are multiple very valid reasons why handing over rushes to a project at the end of it is not correct. At Penny4, we keep the intellectual property (also known as the IP or in general, copyright) to our rushes. Here are the reasons why:
1. Rushes are like boot sales. There’s treasure to be found, but inevitably some junk too...
Honestly, it won’t all be gold. You might press record, then decide you have something in shot you don’t want, and have to reframe it whilst filming. The shot’s useless, but it’s still in the rushes. A client doesn’t want that shot, and the production company certainly doesn’t want to run the risk of that shot being included in a future cut of the film they have no control over. Keeping the rushes means presenting only the final film at the best quality it can be, maintaining creative control and the reputation of the production company.
2. Production companies film in 4K resolution and upwards now. That’s mega data!
The logistics of getting all the footage from multiple days of filming in high resolution can be a tall order. Sometimes folder sizes run into the terabytes, meaning all the costs of the hard drive, plus the time to securely transfer over all that footage. That has to be arranged by the production company. In the event that’s achievable, the client has to have a computer system capable of handling file sizes that large! Often, rushes are in a codec not always instantly accessible. For the vast majority of clients, the rushes frankly won’t be editable without an expert editor on hand to make sense of it all.
3. Production companies need to pay the bills too.
Production companies have overheads like everyone else. If a production company hands over the IP to all the rushes, there could be valuable video content in there that isn’t relevant for this particular edit of a video, but would be very good for another one in the future!
In the case of the client owning the rushes, they no longer need to go back to the production company. The client doesn't need to pay the production company to use footage from one video in a totally different one. Or in a different format like a TV advert campaign, where budgets tend to be much higher. They don’t even need to ask the production company for permission. They could ask someone else to recut the rushes into countless different versions, without needing to pay the original production company anything. For production companies, all these situations amount to a lot of lost revenue.
I won’t labour the coffee metaphor too much here because it’s not completely accurate, but it does explain the problem in some form!
You’ve just bought a coffee from your favourite coffee shop. But hang on, what about all the coffee beans in the machine that didn’t get put into the final coffee? If the coffee shop were to hand over not just the ground beans that got turned into your coffee, but all the other beans that weren’t needed too, there would be a few problems:
Firstly, you might get some of the coffee beans that shouldn’t have been in the machine. Those beans aren’t that great.
There would also be a lot of cost to get you all of the beans delivered to you. Those bags are heavy, and the cost of having them shipped to you would be high. Where would you store them all once they were delivered?
You might use our coffee beans to make your coffee in a way that isn’t very good! Somebody else might taste it, not like it, and it would be our coffee beans that are deemed not good enough!
You now own all the coffee beans. So in theory, you wouldn’t ever need to come back to the shop for more coffee in the future.
Now like I said, the coffee metaphor obviously isn’t totally accurate here, and of course a little silly. Production companies don’t tend to sell confidential rushes to another client, like a coffee shop sells to multiple people - we certainly don’t! But the point is this - it is never in the production company’s interest to hand over all the unused parts of a final product, when the client is only paying for the final product. Many young, unestablished companies are led into believe that handing over the rushes is expected. For more established ones who do decide to sell the rushes to a project, the going rate for selling is estimated to be two to three times the total budget of the project, to cover potential lost revenue in the future. For many clients, this steep cost is enough to put them off.