Workplace reviews and discussion: 欣志傳播事業有限公司

You can be trained as a lantern craftsman within the communications company.

The boss and supervisors are willing to teach, talk, and share.

Occasionally, the boss’s younger sister can provide fortune-telling services for you.

It is near Wuxing Street, with a fair number of restaurants and snacks nearby. Transportation is convenient, and it is close to Taipei Medical University and Taipei 101.

There are three editing rooms decorated with egg-carton acoustic foam.

Although it is called a communications company, lantern-related business is more important than communications work—it's almost impossible to tell which is actually the side business.

If you want to work in the film and television industry, you’d better not come here. There is very little to learn, and what you can learn is quite outdated. However, if you want to become a lantern-making master, this place is just right.

Don’t assume that if you are hired for the post-production, cinematography, or lantern-art department, you will only work in that department. Basically, you have to know how to do everything and support every department, especially lantern-related work.

As others have said, editing is done exclusively with the extremely outdated Avid Liquid 7 editing software.

That is simply because the boss only knows how to use this software, yet he talks about it as though it were highly professional and advanced. In reality, even the software used by ordinary amateur video editors is far better.

To briefly explain the state of this software: it stopped receiving updates in 2007, supports only up to Windows XP, and its maximum output is 1080i.

It also runs extremely slowly and has no proxy system, so you have to wait for the system to render the entire video before you can play it back. If the boss asks you to edit a four-hour event recording, calculate for yourself what time you will be able to leave work.

Its UI is also extremely crude and violates basic human intuition. Forget 2020—even in 2010, it could not be considered a first-line editing software.

As far as I know, apart from India, there does not seem to be anywhere in the industry that uses this software. Spending time learning it is a complete waste of your valuable time. Including it on your résumé will not make the industry think you are talented. Only somewhat amateurish people would mistake it for the Avid used in Hollywood, not realizing that the two are completely different.

The boss is willing to teach, but unfortunately his concepts are all extremely outdated and old-fashioned. He likes using contrived, PPT-like transition effects. If you want to recreate the editing style of television programs from the 1980s and ’90s, you can study it here. He is willing to teach but unwilling to learn, so there is absolutely no way for you to share modern software editing techniques and concepts with him—perhaps because he has no time.

The company is extremely small, and the boss is also very fond of “micromanagement” (please Google the definition of micromanagement yourself). After taking on a project, there is no standardized workflow. Before starting work, anything requiring a superior’s decision is left for you to figure out on your own; there is no way to discuss the direction or structure of the work. After you finish, anything requiring a superior’s decision is handled poorly, and you are blamed for not asking the boss or supervisor (who is overwhelmed with work). Your prior assessments and judgments do not matter; he is the boss, so his decision is final. As a result, the project may be overhauled and redone from the structural stage. Calculate for yourself what time you will be able to leave work under these circumstances.

The attendance system applies when starting work, but responsibility applies when leaving: official working hours begin at 9 a.m., and you cannot be more than five minutes late. The scheduled end of the workday is 7 p.m. At seven, you are very hungry, but the businesses on Wuxing Street are gradually closing, so you can only go farther away to eat. Also, if you finish your work, leave on time, and other people still have unfinished work, the boss may sarcastically call you a civil servant and say that people in this industry do not leave work on time. In that case, I do not understand why employees are required to arrive so punctually.

Most post-production work arrives just before the end of the workday and is then required by the next day, so you inevitably have to work overtime, with no overtime pay.

So I also do not understand why they do not simply have people work the late shift.

They say they do not want to see employees working overtime and that overtime is caused by employees’ own inefficiency. In reality, the entire workflow, review process, and decision-making process are problematic. On top of that, how can you work efficiently with editing software that is unbelievably bad and slow?

Moreover, even if you actually finish your work and leave on time, you will still be criticized and lectured.

It is precisely because they do not have to pay overtime that they make arbitrary demands for overtime without restraint. The low efficiency is caused by serious management failures, absolutely not by your work efficiency.

The boss and supervisor are too busy just dealing with planning and proposals to finish managing them, leaving them no time for management or quality control. Naturally, efficiency is low.

The company is a private family business with strong party-state characteristics, so anyone who joins should pay attention to their own political stance.

Accordingly, the company venerates classic Chinese Nationalist aesthetics, with no exceptions—from lanterns to video animation.

If you are also a fan of Chinese Nationalist aesthetics, or really want to learn them, this place is a good fit for you.

According to company policy, Saturdays off are considered a welfare leave benefit. If the company says that you have to work or work overtime on a particular Saturday, there is no overtime pay.

Therefore, strictly speaking, the company only provides four days off per month.

In addition to wages below the market rate, they deduct welfare fees from your pay even though there is no employee welfare committee.

Calculate for yourself whether this combination of pay, working hours, and experience is worthwhile for you.