Need help with court case

[namenone]

Hey,

My sister recently got married and the video guy did an awful job of making the video.

• claimed it would be HD
• We are now going to court over it
• He's told the court he never said it would be HD and claims it to be SD quality
• The quality is really bad, really grainy and stuff
• filmed on DV tapes.
• Camera moves all over the place while filming.

What i need help with is finding a way to prove to the judge that the quality of the files hes given are not what you'd expect from a standard quality DVD. I'm going to try and get a standard def clip from YouTube to show the difference, but i was wondering what else i could do to help my case?

Is it possible i could use some of the MediaInfo information in court to prove my point?

Heres the MediaInfo export: http://pastie.org/4455988

[poisondeathray]

Hey,

My sister recently got married and the video guy did an awful job of making the video.

• claimed it would be HD
• We are now going to court over it
• He's told the court he never said it would be HD and claims it to be SD quality
• The quality is really bad, really grainy and stuff
• filmed on DV tapes.
• Camera moves all over the place while filming.

What i need help with is finding a way to prove to the judge that the quality of the files hes given are not what you'd expect from a standard quality DVD. I'm going to try and get a standard def clip from YouTube to show the difference, but i was wondering what else i could do to help my case?

Is it possible i could use some of the MediaInfo information in court to prove my point?

Heres the MediaInfo export: http://pastie.org/4455988

Sorry to hear about your problems

You can't really prove or disprove anything with a youtube clip (it's been re-encoded) . You might request samples from other Wedding shooters/filmakers in the area to establish a rough idea of the "typical" quality you might expect

Similarly mediainfo won't prove or establish anything other than this is dvd compliant

Unless it's in writing or advertised (maybe a brochure or website) that he would produce HD content or specified what the end deliverable really was, you don't really have a case on those grounds (It boils down to "he said, she said")

[namenone]

Thanks for the advice

- Is there anything i can do with the DV tapes to help my case? (bear in mind this wedding was about 2 years ago)

[jman98]

I am not a lawyer, nor are most of the people here. However my best friend is and I know more about the US legal system than most people do.

Your clip is PAL video. That means that you do NOT live in the USA or even Canada. Tell us where you live genius so you can get some kind of guidance on your country's legal system, but since you weren't smart enough to tell us in your post and it's not in your profile, I have my doubts that you're going to be able to help your sister much.

Judges in the USA do NOT like to be lectured and that's probably the same where you live, so you need to be really careful with trying to use MediaInfo to "prove" your point. If the video guy hires an attorney, in the USA it would be easy to slap you down in court by questioning you as an "expert" and basically getting your points thrown out, but nobody is likely to understand MediaInfo any way except maybe the video guy. Or to put it another way it's likely to go down like this:
Nameone: Look at MediaInfo here. Blah blah blah... this proves that I don't have HD video.
Video guy's attorney: Have you ever given testimony in court before as an expert witness in video matters?
Nameone: Uh. no.
Judge: I'm not going to allow this testimony. The jury is instructed to disregard.

If you don't hire an attorney you may not win, but that may push the cost up to where you lose money even if you "win" in court. However, some countries have a "loser pays" legal system (the US does NOT) that might aid you. Then again, if YOU lose it will drive up YOUR cost under such a system. Finally, in the USA I can tell you that with no documentation to back up your claim that it was supposed to be in HD (ie. a signed contract specifically stating that) that you are unlikely to prevail on the point that you paid for HD and got SD in return but you might possibly be able to prove by just showing the tape that it's very bad quality and you should get a refund on it not being what you expected to get when you paid the video guy.

[jman98]

TWO years ago and you're just NOW trying to sue?

Good freakin' luck. Unless you live in some corrupt country where you can bribe a judge, you and your sister have most likely long exceeded your ability to sue over this.

There's no point in us adding to this thread. You are clearly not playing with a full deck and continuing to post is just feeding your insanity.

[namenone]

Im sorry if i came across wrong.

However, we filed for this in the UK ages ago but the court lost the papers so we had to reapply,

This is going to the small claims court, i'm not sure about the US legal system so i don't know if you guys have anything similar. This isn't some sort of big case we are trying to go through, it will just be the video guy and myself and a small claims court judge to view the case. We are not hiring lawyers or anything of that sort.

There is no need for you guys to start ripping me apart, i'm just saying what i know.

[poisondeathray]

- Is there anything i can do with the DV tapes to help my case? (bear in mind this wedding was about 2 years ago)

Not really. Whether or not the DV tapes show high or low quality video doesn't necessarily prove anything. Often there is other processing that goes on like denoising, stabilization, color correction before the DVD gets produced (i.e. what you see on the DVD might look quite different than the DV tapes)

DV is notoriously grainy, noisy and poor for low light situations. An experienced shooter has lots of additional lighting if they use DV for acquistion. It sounds to me like this guy just did a handheld shoot in the dark

So you demonstrate you have crappy video... now what ? A lot of wedding shooters produce exceptionally poor video.

I don' t think you have a very strong case unless you have the other documents or contracts that stipulate what the deliverables were

[aedipuss]

about all that matters is the contract or receipt with a description for the work performed. but you might help demonstrate your case of general bad videography if you had samples of real pro work to compare to his. you might try online for pro's showing off their work on their websites or find a local pro who will give you samples of how a wedding should be shot. or at least the guides available online like this one.
http://vimeo.com/videoschool/lesson/171/how-to-shoot-a-wedding-video
for a general overview.