Chief Engineer salary expectations
 

Hello,

I have searched the web for many weeks and found no listings of average earnings for positions in the Post industry. So I am turning to this board for some help.

I am currently working in a Post studio in Vancouver and have been here for three years. I am in charge of all the technical operations on a day to day basis. The facility has 2 mixing theatres, 10 protools edit suites, 3 avid film composers and 1 final cut pro room. I am responsible for purchasing, installing and maintaining these suites and mix rooms. I'm also the network admin for email and internet access using Windows NT 4 and Microsoft exchange. Finally, I support about 15 wintel workstations for the admin and accounting departments.

With all of these duties, I find myself extremely busy. I am currently up for salary review and find that I don't have a good idea of what someone in my postition should earn. I now have 7 years experience in this industry. I started in the machine room at a local sound studio, moved to London England for a year and helped the head tech install an ssl 5.1 television mixing stage. I then moved back to Vancouver and have taken on all of the above duties. While here, I have designed and installed a 5.1 theatrical mixing stage which is certified by dolby for print masters and deliveries. The theater is equiped with two Protools HD3 rigs and is digitially tied together via a digital zsys router. Pro controls are used in conjucntion with outboard lexions, tc electronics, an avalon 737, and a urie 565. V1 digital picture is used to supply our Sharpe DLP projector as the primary source of viewing. We are currently not equipped with film projection and have no plans to do so. Instead, we have forged a relationship with a local theatre where we bring our mix stems on da98s which are synced to film via biphase for final screenings. Our room acoustics have translated extremely well to one of the cities largest theatres and I am very proud of this accomplishemnt.

The Avids consist of three film composers with meridian and AVBV board sets. Dailies are telecined at the local lab to Digital betas and are then down converted to dvcam for loading. I oversee the techincal aspects of transfering data from the picture dept to the sound dept and vise versa via omf's and edls.

The reason for the lengthy description is to give an idea of the scope of our facility and my technical experience.

If there are any engineers out there that would be willing to post an average salary range, I would be most grateful.

If you do not feel comfortable posting this info you can email me privately at

[email protected]

Thanks Again

Jon

Re: Chief Engineer salary expectations
 

I have not heard from anybody yet so I suppose my question was a touchy one. The best I have been able to do so far is visit sites like salary.com and plug in my IT skills with my years of experience in the field and assume the wages could be comparable. I suppose the Post industry is so small that it does not warrant a category in the various career websites I have found. If anyone has found any websites that list info for post production positions, please let me know.

Cheers,

Jon

Re: Chief Engineer salary expectations
 

Why don't you tell us how much your making in U.S. Dollars

I have colleagues who do half of that and make $100,000 and up.