[meteorite-list] AD: Video Footage of our trip to Oman

Sun Jun 5 03:03:38 EDT 2005

Hi,

    Street price on a Plextor 16X internal about $100, externals a little more
but how many USB 2.0 ports can you support (with beefed up power supply)?
Answer is:  lots!  You also need the software that allows simultaneous burning
of multiple DVD's at the same time.
    A $500 XP box plus stack of Plextors = cheap production DVD factory!  Ten
16X burners all going at once is the same as turning out one disc at a time on a
160X burner if there were such a thing!  The real bottleneck is the time spent
changing discs.
    Do your first 1500 copies for customers at a price that includes $1 apiece
to amortize the cost of the system, then take those extra 1500 bucks and
buy/build another setup and hire more nice Puerto Rican ladies to change discs
and double your volume.  When your volume won't go up any more, cut your price
to compete more effectively.
    Hire an impoverished art and design student or two to run a front-end
editing and professional pre-production service (for an extra charge, of
course).  But the truth is that there are loads of software programs that will
create a variety of professional looking edits of raw footage with very little
work on the part of the user.
    Business 101 in a nutshell.
    Of course, the truth is that one person trying to make a few hundred DVD's
on his own home machine has to do everything, fix everyhting, fiddle with
everything, and is hence not at first a necessarily efficient producer of short
run DVD's.  About the time you get everything right and begin to be efficient --
it's all over.
    15 years ago or more, in the Early Paleolithic Age of computers, when I sold
my own software (Google "SKWare One"), I had a stack of floppy drives (slow)
chained together, wrote my own duplicating software, running on 16mhz computers
(slow!), bought mountains of factory sealed cartons of 500 each SONY black HD
floppies, hired 12-year-olds to change discs, and sat there happily labeling
discs and boxes with self-stick printed labels, boxing them, bagging them,
mailing them in batches, and drinking way too much coffee, and managed 800 to
1000 floppy discs a week.  If you've ever tried mass-producing floppy discs
(Argh!), that's a lot.
    Things are much easier now.

Sterling
-----------------------------------------
Rob Wesel wrote:

> When I was selling the Park Forest Newsreel DVD's they set me back $10 each,
> but DVD burners weren't common then.
>
> Rob Wesel
> http://www.nakhladogmeteorites.com
> ------------------
> We are the music makers...
> and we are the dreamers of the dreams.
> Willy Wonka, 1971
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sterling K. Webb" <kelly at bhil.com>
> To: <cynapse at charter.net>
> Cc: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>; <MeteorHntr at aol.com>
> Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2005 10:30 PM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] AD: Video Footage of our trip to Oman
>
> > Darren, Steve, List
> >
> >    DON'T use a sharpie!!  The solvents in conventional markers will damage
> > the disc initially and progressively.  There are special DVD markers
> > formulated
> > to be safe, that are available.  Like, BestBuy has'em.
> >    DVD production costs are paradoxical.  Unlike printing, where the cost
> > per copy goes down as the number of copies increase, the opposite is true
> > of
> > DVD's.  Short-run production is vastly cheaper than professional long-run
> > production.
> >    In any production run of less than 1000-1500 DVD's it is much cheaper
> > to use PC's with burners and pay somebody to feed them discs at minimum
> > wage than
> > to use professional production machinery even if you owned the machinery
> > and could do it at cost.
> >    In New York, there are 100's of little shops stuffed into basements,
> > apartments, storage warehouses even, pumping out DVD's on orders of 100 to
> > 1000
> > copies at prices that no production company could ever match.  It's a
> > strange and counterintuitive phenomenon.
> >
> >
> > Sterling
> > -------------------------------------------------------------
> > Darren Garrison wrote:
> >
> >> On Sun, 05 Jun 2005 00:28:33 -0400, MeteorHntr at aol.com wrote:
> >>
> >> >Hello List,
> >> >
> >> > DVD labels, the dozens of bad prints onto the labels, the making of the
> >> > insert to the DVD holders, then printer running out of ink, yadda yadda
> >> > yadda.
> >>
> >> Not to mention shortening the lifetime and playability of the discs by
> >> putting on said labels.
> >> Unless placed absoultely perfectly on the disc, a label can cause the
> >> disc to rattle around enough
> >> to not play correctly (those discs spin really fast-- we're talking
> >> centrifuge fast) and the labels
> >> do peel off, often taking the data layer of the disc with it.  If you
> >> have a printer that can print
> >> directly on printable discs, great.  If you have a recorder with
> >> Lightscribe
> >> http://www.lightscribe.com/, great.  Otherwise, use a Sharpie.
> >> ______________________________________________
> >> Meteorite-list mailing list
> >> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> >> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
> >
> >
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> >