Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. What the trial covers differs by discipline — two images, a 30-second cut of your own footage, one mastered episode, a technical review of a page you already own — and each service page says which one applies.

No card, no invoice, no subscription that starts quietly afterward. It is done by the same people who would do the paid job, to the same standard, because a trial that flatters the work is useless to both of us.

Most image work comes back in 6 to 24 hours. Video and 3D depend on the shot and the length, and we tell you the turnaround in the quote rather than after you have committed.

If you have a deadline that cannot move, say so in the brief. We will tell you honestly whether we can hit it.

By what the job actually involves, not an average. A clipping path around a box and one around a bicycle are different amounts of work, and so are a two-minute explainer and a two-minute product film.

The unit differs by discipline: per image, per finished minute, per episode, per product, per project, or monthly for retained work. Every service has a pricing page with our published rates and the US market ranges beside them, so you can sanity-check any quote including ours.

We accept stills, camera raw, vector formats, common video and audio containers, the usual 3D interchange formats and PDFs. Zip anything large, or send a link. Each service page lists the formats that discipline actually works in.

We deliver whatever you need — layered masters, transparent PNGs, marketplace-spec exports, broadcast-spec video, stems, or straight to your naming convention.

They go to private storage, not the public web. They are used to do your work and nothing else.

We do not publish client work as portfolio without asking first, and we will sign an NDA if you need one.

Yes, and a good deal of our work is that. We can deliver under your naming conventions with no branding of ours anywhere near the files.

Tell us what is wrong and we fix it. Revisions against the original brief are included rather than billed.

If the brief itself changes, we will say so and re-quote rather than quietly absorbing it and resenting it.

Yes. Work at volume is most of what we do, and the process is built around consistency across a set rather than one good result — four hundred images that match matter more than one brilliant one, and the same is true of a video series or a product range.

For ongoing volume a retained arrangement is usually cheaper than per-unit pricing. Ask and we will model both honestly, including when the per-unit rate wins.

Yes, and it is the fastest and most accurate route. Good CAD or dimensioned drawings remove the guesswork about scale, which is the thing that quietly ruins renders.

Without them we can work from clear reference photographs from several angles, but expect an extra approval round on proportions.

Because it is a different object. A model for a render farm can carry all the geometry it likes; one for a browser has a polygon budget, a texture budget and a download budget, and hitting them is optimization work in its own right.

We agree those budgets before anyone starts modeling, because retrofitting them means starting again.

It is one frame rendered at final quality, with the materials and lighting finished, approved before anything goes to the farm.

Render time is a real cost. Approving the look on one frame rather than discovering a problem across three hundred is what keeps the budget where the quote put it.

Yes, and it takes deliberate matching rather than grading to taste — camera, lens, lighting, grain and color pipeline aligned to the photographic plates.

Done properly nobody can tell which is which in a category grid. Done casually the CG reads as plastic, which is the usual failure.

Yes. Models, textures and scene files are delivered alongside the renders, so a variant later is a change rather than a rebuild.

We also record the render settings and version, so an image produced months later matches the ones already published.

Every deliverable, not a sample of them, and it is included in the price rather than sold as an upgrade.

Hands, text, counts, edges and continuity are where generative models fail, and they fail confidently. Checking them is a few seconds per item and it is the whole reason the service is worth buying.

No, and it is in the contract rather than a policy page. Your material is used to do your work and for nothing else.

If you need the work done inside your own environment, or without touching a third-party model at all, that is possible and costs more to set up. Tell us at the quote stage.

This is genuinely unsettled and we will not pretend otherwise. The US Copyright Office has stated that work produced purely by a machine without human authorship is not registrable, and has issued guidance on disclosing AI-generated material.

Where ownership matters to you, the human contribution matters legally as well as editorially. That shapes how we scope the job, and it is worth twenty minutes with your own counsel.

Ten representative items run end to end, returned with an honest list of where the process got it wrong and why.

A pilot that hides the failure modes is worthless, because those are exactly what you are buying against. Ours reports them, which occasionally talks a client out of the project.

It depends where the output is used, and the rules are tightening. The FTC has warned against overstating what AI does, several states now regulate synthetic media, and some platforms require labeling.

We record provenance and tell you plainly what was AI-assisted, so the disclosure decision is one you can actually make.

Sometimes, and we will tell you honestly before you pay. Noise reduction, de-reverb and clip repair all work up to a point, and past that the artifacts are worse than the problem.

If a section is beyond rescue we say so and suggest re-recording it rather than charging you for a result neither of us would be happy with.

Apple Podcasts publishes guidance around −16 LUFS for stereo, and −19 LUFS is the common mono convention. Platforms normalize on playback, so mastering louder than the target gains nothing and costs you dynamics.

Broadcast is a different number entirely — ATSC A/85 at −24 LKFS in the US. Tell us where it publishes.

Because two voices on one track cannot be leveled independently. If one person is quiet and the other is loud, nothing can fully fix it afterward.

It costs nothing at the recording end and saves an hour at the editing end on every episode. It is the single highest-return change most shows can make.

Yes, where they are useful — dialogue, music and effects as separate groups alongside the master. That makes a later change possible without a remix.

An M&E version, which is music and effects without dialogue, is what you need if the piece will ever be dubbed into another language. Ask for it up front; building it retrospectively costs more.

Only if you want it cheap. A raw automatic transcript is quick and gets names, jargon and product terms wrong.

A corrected transcript is a person's time and is quoted as such. For anything published or used for accessibility, the corrected one is the one that counts.

Because color hides weak form. If a mark does not work in one color it is not finished, and adding color only postpones finding that out.

It also forces the conversation to be about the idea rather than about whether somebody likes teal, which is a conversation worth having later.

We run a preliminary USPTO search and domain and social checks before presenting anything, because names die at screening more often than at presentation.

That is a screen, not legal clearance. A trademark attorney should do the formal search before you file, and we will tell you when it is time for that.

A rebrand changes what you stand for. A refresh changes how it looks. Confusing the two is how companies spend rebrand money on a new logo and wonder why nothing else moved.

We will ask which one you actually need, and sometimes the answer is neither — a set of guidelines and templates fixes more drift than a redesign does.

The selection is; the license usually is not, and it is worth knowing early. US font licenses are normally sold per use case, and desktop, web, app and broadcast are frequently separate tiers.

We will tell you what each option costs to license for the uses you actually have, before you fall in love with one.

Guidelines that show incorrect usage alongside correct, templates for the things people make most often, and one named owner.

Without those, four people recreate the logo in four tools and the identity is unrecognizable within a year. The guidelines are the deliverable that decides whether the rest was worth it.

A clipping path is a vector outline drawn with the pen tool. It gives a crisp, re-editable edge and suits hard-edged subjects — boxes, bottles, tools, most products.

Masking works on pixels and handles soft or semi-transparent edges: hair, fur, fabric, smoke, glass. If your subject has any of those, masking is the right service and a path will disappoint you.

How many anchor points the subject needs, which is what the time goes on.

Basic is a simple closed shape like a phone or a book. Complex has many curves or internal holes — a bicycle, a chair with slats. Super-complex is something like jewelry with chain links or a garment with lacing. We grade your images and tell you the mix before quoting.

Yes. The path is saved inside the delivered file, so you or anyone downstream can re-use or adjust it rather than starting again.

We also supply flattened outputs — transparent PNG and white-background JPEG — so the files are usable immediately.

As long as it takes to answer the question, and no longer. Length is an output, not a brief — commissioning "2,000 words" produces 2,000 words, most of which nobody reads.

We brief on audience, intent, sources and what the reader should be able to do afterward. The word count falls out of that.

A named person with relevant experience, credited on the page. Not a pseudonym, and not an unattributed house voice.

That is partly an E-E-A-T consideration and mostly a trust one: a reader deciding whether to act on something wants to know who is telling them.

We use it where it genuinely helps — research scaffolding, first-pass outlines — and a person writes, checks and signs everything that publishes.

Where output has been AI-assisted we will tell you, so your own disclosure obligations are something you can actually meet. What we will not do is ship a model's draft as a person's work.

Audit them and record a decision against each: keep, merge, rewrite, redirect or retire. Usually a large share should be merged into fewer, stronger pages.

It is unglamorous and it is frequently worth more than anything new you could publish that quarter.

Governance: who owns what, who approves, and when each page is reviewed. Plus briefs specific enough that your own writers can work from them.

A content program that stops when one person leaves did not have any of that. Documenting the process is often worth more than any individual piece we write.

Because platform-reported conversions are not the same number as sales, and optimizing to the wrong one is how a year of decisions gets built on a fiction.

We have seen a platform report forty percent more conversions than the order system — duplicate tags, a misconfigured thank-you page and a session dropping across domains. Reconciling the two is the first thing we do.

Long enough to reach the sample size calculated before it started, and in whole business weeks so day-of-week effects cancel out.

Stopping a test the day it looks good is the most common way noise gets shipped as a result. We agree the stopping rule in advance, and we do not move it.

Often not, and that is worth knowing before you pay for a testing program. At low volume a two percent lift is undetectable however long you wait.

What works instead is qualitative research — expert review and watching real people attempt the task. It answers why rather than how much, and at low traffic it is the better spend.

We quote a flat monthly fee against the spend under management rather than a percentage, because a percentage rewards us for spending more of your money.

There is no markup on media. You pay the platforms directly and see exactly what they charged.

Configured properly, yes — and configured to respect consent rather than to route around it, which several state privacy laws now make an enforcement matter.

Expect some measurement loss. We would rather model it honestly than give you a number that looks complete and is not.

The garment on the form, plus separate shots of the inside neck, and the cuffs and hem where those will show.

Shoot everything from a locked-off camera position with the lighting unchanged between exposures. Without the inside shots the effect cannot be built, and that is the commonest reason a set has to be reshot.

Sometimes, and it is always a compromise. Without an inside-neck exposure the neck opening has to be reconstructed rather than composited, and on a close look it shows.

Send us one image as a free trial and we will tell you honestly what we can get from it.

2D keeps the garment flat-on, which suits most listing photography. 3D builds the sense of a body inside it — more depth, more work, and better for hero imagery and lookbooks.

We quote them separately because they are genuinely different amounts of work.

One image is edited to your brief and approved first. Everything after that is matched to it rather than edited independently, and a second person checks the whole batch against that reference before anything ships.

That single step is the difference between a catalog and four hundred separate decisions. It is also why we ask for the hardest files rather than the best ones when you send a trial.

A clipping path is a vector outline drawn with the pen tool. It gives a crisp, re-editable edge and suits hard-edged subjects — boxes, bottles, tools, most products.

Masking works on pixels and handles soft or semi-transparent edges: hair, fur, fabric, smoke, glass. If your subject has any of those, masking is the right service and a path will disappoint you.

Usually the background is not pure white, the image is under the minimum pixel size, or the product fills too little of the frame. Amazon, Walmart and Target all publish binding specs and enforce them automatically, so these are engineering requirements rather than preferences.

Tell us which marketplace and we will deliver to that spec rather than to a general one.

Yes, and it is the thing that most reduces returns. Send the product or a color reference shot in the same session and we match to that rather than to a screen.

Without a reference we can make images consistent with each other, which is worth having, but we cannot promise they match an object we have never seen.

Both. The layered master is yours, which is what makes a later change cheap instead of a re-edit.

You also get whatever flattened outputs you need — transparent PNG, white-background JPEG, marketplace exports — named to your convention.

No, and any studio offering to is not going to do it properly — a shoot has a real fixed cost before the shutter moves.

What we do instead is edit two images you already have, free and color-matched. It is a genuine test of the same eye and the same standard.

Because without one, matching a reshoot to the original is guesswork, and a category grid shows the mismatch immediately.

A calibrated target photographed in every session costs nothing and makes the whole range matchable months later. It is the cheapest insurance in product photography.

The products, in the packaging they ship in, cleaned and steamed and assembled. Plus a shot list, references for the look, and where the images will be used at what crop.

Prep takes longer than anyone expects, and doing it on the shoot day costs studio time you are paying for.

For commercial use of a recognizable person in the United States, generally yes, and several states have their own right-of-publicity statutes. Some property and trademarked buildings need releases too.

We handle them on shoots we run. If you are supplying imagery, the release is your responsibility and we will ask whether one exists.

Whatever is written into the quote — where, for how long, and in what territory. Usage is priced separately from the shoot, and it is where a cheap quote usually turns expensive later.

If a campaign runs longer or wider than licensed, renegotiating at short notice costs a premium. Reading the release at the start costs nothing.

No, and nobody outside the search engine honestly can. Anyone promising a position is either mistaken or selling you something.

What we commit to is work you can check: technical findings tied to published guidance, changes tracked with dates so movement can be attributed, and reporting reconciled against your own analytics and revenue rather than a rank tracker.

Technical fixes can move things within weeks. Content compounds over months — typically three to six before meaningful movement, and nine to eighteen before a library pulls its weight.

We would rather tell you that at the start than book a three-month engagement that was never going to show a result in three months.

Often, yes, and it is frequently the fastest improvement available. An estate that only ever grows gets judged on its weakest pages, and two of your own pages competing for the same query means neither wins.

An audit records a decision against every page — keep, merge, rewrite, redirect or retire — and merging is usually more valuable than writing something new.

We earn references by making things worth referencing, and we will not buy links. Paid link schemes are against published search engine guidelines and the risk lands on your domain, not ours.

That makes authority work slower and less predictable than the alternative, and we would rather be straight about that than promise a number.

Read-only Search Console and analytics to start, which is enough for an audit. Implementation needs either a developer on your side or access to ship changes ourselves.

Recommendations only count when they ship. An engagement with no engineering time behind it produces documents, not results.

Send a few minutes of representative material rather than everything. What matters more is the story you want and the length you need, because those decide the edit.

For a quote, the number to tell us is the shooting ratio — how many hours were shot for the finished runtime. That predicts the edit budget better than runtime does.

Yes, and it is much cheaper agreed at the start than added afterward. A 16:9 master, a 9:16 vertical, a square, a 30-second cutdown and six social clips is ten separate edits, not one export.

Give us the deliverables matrix in the brief and it is planned as a single job.

Whatever the destination actually uses. US broadcast is ATSC A/85 at −24 LKFS under the CALM Act; European delivery is EBU R 128 at −23 LUFS; streaming platforms normalize to their own targets.

They are not interchangeable, and mastering to the wrong one is a rejection. Tell us where it is going and it is mastered to that.

Corrected captions are quoted as a line rather than assumed, because raw auto-generated ones are not worth shipping — every product name comes back spelled phonetically.

Most social video is watched with the sound off, so captions are a reach decision as much as an accessibility one. FCC rules also require them on most video that has aired on US television.

You do, including the edit project and the source media, and it is assigned to you in writing rather than assumed.

Under US copyright law work by an outside contractor does not transfer automatically without a written assignment, so this is worth confirming with any supplier.

Only if the redirect map is skipped, which is the single most common way it happens. Every old URL either keeps working or redirects once, with no chains, and that map is part of the launch rather than a follow-up task.

If you have already launched without one, it is recoverable — we rebuild it from the old sitemap and server logs, and most of the traffic returns over six to ten weeks.

Yes, and it is worth paying a little more up front for. We build editable regions with guardrails, so marketing can change copy and images without being able to break the layout.

The alternative — every text change being a developer ticket — is how sites quietly go stale, and it costs more over three years than the difference did.

WCAG 2.1 AA, designed in rather than audited on. Keyboard operation, visible focus states, 4.5:1 contrast on body text, real labels on form fields, and tested with an actual screen reader.

In the US this matters commercially: ADA web claims are common and Section 508 applies if you sell to federal agencies. Building it in adds modestly; retrofitting it costs several times more.

By counting templates, not pages. A fifty-page site with six layouts is a smaller job than a twelve-page site with eleven.

The other variables are integrations, migration and how ready your content is. Content readiness is the one that most often moves the date.

We watch the first few weeks of real traffic, because real use finds things testing never does, and fix what it turns up.

You also get documentation and training, so you are not dependent on us to change a phone number.