US companies hiring out of country freelancers

Is that a thing? anyone knows the legal issues with that? “freelancer” in the EU would technically be a “company” just wondering, I dont see how this would be any kind of issue, and it would be pretty cheap and easy actually for a us company as they just pay a european/german invoice from a company and thats that, no extra taxes and whatnot?

Just wondering there doesnt seem to be much going on in that direction from what I have seen, could be pretty nice for overnight things I recon?

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Yeah, no legal problem there, just a matter of logistics. Are you talking about RGS/Teradici type stuff, or send the element and return a finished comp type stuff?

tera would be too much lag, would more be like send and receive files type work just due to distance from a work perspective.

Basically looking to grab some US based jobs, we have skilled artists, gigabit upload and are hungry for some nice stuff to enhance our showreel, so i want to look beyond the german market, rates are getting more competitive as well with the euro beign so weak, might as well make it a win-win situation for all parties involved.

So this is really more of an “outsourcing” thing, than a hiring out of country freelancers thing.

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How would a company send and receive files securely. @ALan, lets say you wanted to use a freelancer to use there own gear and do a shot for you. What security would you need to put in place?

massive.io is the best.

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dissagree, wayyy to expensive, there should also be a 2 way thing that doesnt involve manual file download and upload at all, like working on shared storage all synced up.

Accsyn rulez, but even dropbox does the trick for smaller jobs or even synology drive, doing manual up/downloads is so 2000s, its just way too much overhead.

freallance/outsource depends on what kind of setup one has, a agency hiring a flame freelancer would be the same as outsourcing then but the setup would be the same as hiring me as a freelancer really, ive got a setup like small studio because i am a bit crazy .

Owncloud on your synology is a dream for autosyncing project data to and from remote edgepoints with zero administration once set up.

I currently have two people on my team who log in from Europe through RGS. There’s really no technical problem, as far as I can see. Both can work legally in the US, so there’s no issue legal issue, either. It makes me wonder where I could go, and still do my job!
Farming out would be a much harder sell in my studio.

why need owncloud? Synology Drive is built in and works great .

In our case the main office isn’t running a synology or synology drive so Owncloud has been a great middleware that runs on Synology for those freelancers or just on a desktop for others.

Worked flawless from LA to STHLM for a few projects over the summer too.

from europe to where? whats the latency? We tried this a bunch of time and even london-> stockholm was allready too much lag (60ms) to be considered good enough and not a hit in productivity, even for nuke tasks it was allready on the edge of beign workable for the testing we have done which was a hella lot of testing.

Some bigger studios i heard have artists take a screen recording of their displays when playing back fullscreen video to judge if its really “good enough” which I found interesting.

For billing though wether thats outsourcing with files (more of a freelance flame aritsts commercial situation) or a freelance hire for a vfx studio that works remotely would be the same issue, good to hear that thats not a issue to anyone.

synology drive app works the same as installing owncloud app though? I use this for freelancers all the time. Biggest downside is however with any selfhosted solution that you need enough upload bandwidth to supply all sync clients with files while a cloud service like dropbox does this for you (but has its own set of issues)

Ive had massive performance issues and overhead with nextcloud and owncloud, espeically with desktop sync in the past, glad that this is working for you.

Of course there is the halfway solution of Owncloud to google, Dropbox or some Amazon bucket and syncing edge points from there. All of those integrate as bi-directional sync targets. We’re looking at that a bit more… the overhead hasn’t reached critical mass bandwidth-wise largely because most of the files moving around are relatively small after the initial source or graded dump but the more artists and jobs we add…

Anyway, sure you already knew but thought I might mention it.

I am still hoping synology hybrid cloud for drive will work for that in the future, currently it only supports nas to nas syncing via cloud.

Do look into synology drive though, it works extremely well even for very large datasets and its all build in.

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freelancers in germany woukd be considered companies as I understand it, in germany you can only be a “freelancer” for certain jobs like journalists and stuff , its a bit weird but I an not really sure, generally freelancers here will invoice the client and they dont get employed (but it all depends, sone jobs you have to employ like production assistants … its weird).

I have been working for Chicago for three large projects without any problems using Terradici, being based in Austria. Super fast performance. Also freelancing for the US, I do this since 2015, so should not be a problem. You have to go through some paperwork but once you are setup as a “vendor” basically then it’s easy.

I an kibda flabbergasted that people work with teradici on 100ms+ latency connections, i have bever see this workinf well enough on such long distances personally.

Do you mean paperwork in the US as a austrian citizen, like something with the state or with that conpany?

I can tell you that it worked better than remoting into a machine based in Munich or Vienna. Maybe also depends on the infrastructure on the US company side as well, because I used to work for international oriented ones, so they were used to those kind of work.
For the paperwork as a freelancer you basically have to provide proof that you are not tax liable in the US. To do that there is an official document from the government you have to fill out. The rest is just the basics you need to have for international work as a company like a tax ID. Like I said, I have worked as freelancer and also as a vendor for commercials, feature and episodic. So I cannot see a problem there.

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Hmm interesting, ill look into this tax excempt thingy, seems weird if i am a german company that this would even be e thing or where you “employed” by the US company?

But still, you cant beat the latency, everytime you click something in a remote machine in the us it will be at least 120-200ms of delay until anything happens on your side, the more hops you have the more likely there will be package loss, the indtalls in vienna etc might have just been bad implementsrions

so this is highly interesting to hear that it was ok for you, when I - even in just s lab situation dial up my latency to over 100ms it starts to really feel like crap even without any package loss.