[Matt Townley]

I don’t think there is a startup chime file or anything like that anywhere in the OS that you can just replace. I think it’s stored in the hardware ROM.

[Matt Townley]

Hi Aaron,

I am not a videographer, so I cannot speak from that point of view, BUT, I have a number of friends that are wedding videographers. They do other work, too, but their bread-n-butter is wedding work. I only speak for myself and not any of them, but I think it is pretty insulting to hear you say that their work is “cliche, boring, and insulting to a videographer with any self-respect.”

If you look at some of their work, I think you will find it hard to call good wedding videography boring and cliche.

Here are links to just a few of them:
https://studiomsv.com/
https://burkartvideo.com/gallery.php
https://www.oharafilms.com/gallery.html
https://www.blissvideoproductions.com/seebliss.html

Matt

[Matt Townley]

David, I don’t do a lot of content/production, as that is not my main focus of business, but I have a handful of clients I do little things for.

I had a client that I was working with this week that I edited a short (9min) piece. They shot it and gave me a rough EDL with ins/outs and I was just doing the cut with some titles, music, a few effects and a tad bit of color correction. I spent about 5 hours on it by the time it was said and done. He approved it and then I encoded it for his website.

After he put it on his website he called and asked if I could “just throw a title on the beginning of it real quick.” To do that would have been another 45 minutes of work plus a few hours of encoding time, but he didn’t know that. He thought it was just as simple as typing in the title, so I took a few minutes to explain why it took more time and work than that. He totally understood and I suggested just typing the title on the website under the video. He was more than happy with that solution.

A little client education can go a long ways sometimes and now he will understand why things cost what they do (especially change orders) on the next project we do together.

Matt

[Matt Townley]

Jeff, I agree with your sentiment completely. Sony has severely limited the expansion and adoption of smaller corporate, commercial and entertainment folks, who like you said, comprise a very large ecosystem of people that would like to upgrade to Blu-ray. Enter BD-R.

BD-Rs don’t have the over shadowing licensing, costs and control that Sony/BDA has put on BD-Rom, but instead they have a crippled technology spectrum available on them. They can’t use BD-Java, can’t be copy-protected, are not compatible with BD-Live and have other compatibility issues that replicated discs don’t have.

So to Bruce’s question, yes, you can make your own Blu-rays ans distribute them easily without having to go through huge licensing hoops. When you buy a blank BD-R, you are paying your due royalties on them, just like a CD-R or DVD-R. But you are essentially limited to authoring a DVD like disc that happens to playback in HD. You cannot really take advantage of any of the great advanced features that Blu-ray is known for.

On a side note, in response to the licensing costs of AACS, the BDA recently announced new pricing structures and fees that are lower than before and offer a bit more flexibility to the payment options.

[Matt Townley]

Hi Mike, It sounds like you are looking for some type of DVD publisher; essentially a fancy duplicator that runs from a host PC with software that can feed a cue of orders on-demand as you send them so you can walk away and let each drive burn a different disc. Or at least I hope I understood this right.

Rimage has a few different products that do this, specifically the Producer and the Professional line. Depending on which model you look at, they can burn anywhere from 1 – 4 discs at a time (all different content) and then print on it with unique artwork. It can be send different types of files for masters all over a network. We have a few of the Producer 7100s and I have been quite happy with them. It took quite a while to get past the initial quirky and outright frustrating learning curve of our early models (now discontinued), but I quite like our current models. Only downside is they are not cheap!

Microtech also makes some similar products, but I have not used them.

Microboards and Primera both have some units, but I don’t think they will give you the flexibility to burn different content to discs simultaneously like the Rimage units will.

Matt

[Matt Townley]

Hi Bruce,

I don’t have an exact system like CreateSpace, but I do provide Blu-ray Disc duplication. I could at least do the publishing, packaging and fulfillment, minus listing it on Amazon, and without quite as fancy of an online interface. If you can’t find anyone else and are open to a slightly different approach, feel free to email or call me and I’d be happy to talk with you and see if we can make something work for what you need.

Matt

[Matt Townley]

Hi Chris,

I run Quickbooks on Windows XP, which I have running through Parallels 4 on my Macbook Pro. I have a newer MPB with a 2.53 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of ram. Windows runs wonderfully within Parallels and the convenience of being able to keep Quickbooks open in the dock as part of my regular work flow is excellent. Quickbooks is fast and it runs just as well as it did when I was running it on my older Dell Optiplex machine. I have certain external devices (form printer, barcode scanner, etc) that Parallels is set to recognize and automatically claim to work with it and not Mac OS when they are plugged in or turned on. I also use Parallels to run UPS Worldship, Microsoft Project, Dev C++, and some Powerpoint utilities. While it is certainly not perfect, it’s pretty darn close for my dollar, and it is by far the best option I have tried and I like it a lot better than having to boot up in one of the other using bootcamp.

Matt

[Matt Townley]

I have a duplicator from ILY Enterprises with 8 LG Super Multi Blue drives in it. I don’t know the exact model’s off hand, but they are earlier model drives that are hybrid Blu-ray and HD DVD, as well as SD DVD. We have other equipment that we use for our main duplication, and try to reserve these for Blu-ray only, but we have burned SD DVDs on it without any problem and have been quite happy with it. I purchased it through The Tape Company (https://www.thetapecompany.com)

Matt
MST Productions

[Matt Townley]

Hi Jeff,

I’m not a COW leader, but I do duplication, replication and packaging. I use Rimage Everest (thermal) printers for our in-house duplication and offer replication for larger orders or for any project you specifically want/need replication. I have a partnership with one of the leading disc manufacturers on the West Coast and can be very flexible with turn around, printing, packaging, pricing, etc. I just shipped a job yesterday for a client that needed 8,000 DVD5s with process printing replicated in 24 hours, along with 300 copies with variable printing on each one that we duplicated in house. You can call or email me if you have a specific need for something.

Cheers!
Matt

Matt Townley
MST Productions
https://www.mstproductions.com
(925) 380-1977

[Matt Townley]

Hi Brad, I don’t think there is a way to preserve or include captions with MPEG4 or WMV without using open captions (ie. having the captions displayed over the video as part of the video itself). You can do it with Flash, however. This was discussed over in the Corporate Video forum (https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/12/856301) a few weeks back and Jeff Breuer gave some good notes on how to accomplish it. Hope this helps.

Matt