[Seth Blaustein]

Steve,
I’m really interested in the rig you built. I don’t see any reference to having a shoulder mount with counterweights in your setup. I want to build a rig for a Black Magic Cinema Camera, but I’d really like to be able to have a counterweight shoulder pad for lengthy shoots. Do you have any suggestions for parts that can be pieced together to add this? Would I just need to get longer rails and some weights? Thanks for your help, this thread has been very helpful to me.

[Seth Blaustein]

I don’t understand where all of these assumptions you are making are coming from. First of all, I am grateful for all the advice here. Does that mean I need to agree?

What makes you think I am ignoring ‘audience building and reputation management’? What makes you think I’m unwilling to understand it, given that it has not even been mentioned here and is an entirely other question (which I didn’t ask).

I ask a simple question pertaining to media security and I get a flood of preachy tangents that don’t answer my question in any way.

Yikes.

Thank you to Eric and Mads for actually directly attempting to answer my question.

I appreciate all of the opinions of experienced professionals, but please don’t be so quick to assume that I don’t have any knowledge in the topics you are diverting towards, which I have not asked you about.

Take care all, and thanks for the advice.

[Seth Blaustein]

I’m not going to use DRM. I just wanted to post the information that I found out there in case future readers stumble upon this post with a similar question. It’s expensive and a bad choice for exactly the reasons laid out. I never had real interest in doing it–like I said, I want to research what is out there so I can make an informed decision. I’m actually pretty to close to being on the same page as Mark, generally. I am not going to fret about letting sharing happen, but I don’t want to make it so easy that it is the only way my content is obtained.

The way I will be streaming will be almost the same as a digital download. The customer purchases the video and has unlimited access to watch it as much as they want, forever. The difference is only that they need an internet connection to view the content. My target audience is always on the internet (young/male/lacrosse player).

Your statement about hard copy DVD’s is general and uninformed in terms of my market.

I will be doing hard copy DVD’s as well because that is primarily how these types of videos are purchased–in Lacrosse stores. Parents buy these up like crazy from stores around Christmas. The costs of producing these DVD’s is incredibly cheap and DVDs can be created per-purchase. Ever heard of Kunaki? Only adds minor costs that are covered with each sale and only creates another venue for purchase.

Crappy how-to videos will always be free on YouTube, quality will always be worth paying for.

[Seth Blaustein]

Thanks for the links.

My lol was because I already know everything you are saying. I appreciate your help and opinion, but its simply not what I am asking about on this thread. I expected someone to go off about how giving stuff away for free is better, but it’s not what I am doing at this time. I am interested in exploring security to learn more about it, because I believe it is my right and my choice to protect my product or to give it away, not someone elses.

As I mentioned in my first post, file sharing is inevitable. I’d like to minimize it–this is a choice I am making as a business owner–whether it will be successful or not is a different story.

Thanks again for your perspective.

[Seth Blaustein]

lol

[Seth Blaustein]

One other thing to add, just for the info–

the way to protect against file sharing is with a technology called DRM (digital rights management). This technology binds a unique key from the video to the device, allowing only 1 device to play that video. This DOES work on streaming videos, not only digital downloads. However, this service is incredibly expensive. It would have raised the costs of delivery by about 500% with the particular company I am planning on using to host my streaming.

[Seth Blaustein]

Thank you all for the very well thought out and valuable advice.

I am likely going to be using a service called fordela (fordela.com), and I will probably be going with a streaming service and hard copy DVD. Although sharing is still very possible with the streaming service, the analytics that Fordela offers on the back-end allow you to track the geographical location of where a user has logged in, and at what time. If it looks like one particular account is sharing too much, I think a simple warning would stop it. If it doesn’t, their account can always be revoked.

Thanks again!

[Seth Blaustein]

I am having an issue with this. My export from FCP is 1920 x 1080, but in compressor, when attempting to output MPEG-2 (DVD-90 minute best quality) the dimensions in the geometry tab are locked into 720 x 480. Nothing is cropped in the Preview monitor in compressor, however I am getting cropped a bit on either side when the final DVD is viewed. I’ve check all the DVDSP settings and they are all correct.

I think that my issue may lie with the geometry tab in compressor, but why can’t I change the geometry, or why won’t it recognize that it is NOT 720 x 480??

[Seth Blaustein]

Kevin,
Did you ever figure out exactly what caused the issue? How it was rectified? How it can be avoided? Thanks!

[Seth Blaustein]

Tom, I’m having this issue currently so if you’ve gained additional knowledge on this issue since 2007 it would be much appreciated. I am also getting the two AV1, AV2 files when export and the video doesn’t play without them.

The hard drive is formatted to MS-DOS FAT (FAT 32).

What do you mean when you say that the material has not been properly captured? What can be done to avoid this? What are the consequences of this kind of improper capture? How can this issue be resolved so that the final export can still be put on DVD?

Editing on FCP 7 on macbook pro running OS 10.6.7

Any help is greatly appreciated.