Has Anybody Made Money From The Knowledge They've Gotten...

[birdygal]

I have made quite abit of money from this site
Simply by learning what Hardware! Software! and Media to stop throwing money away on. Great guides, Great forum to get answers to your questions?

[EddyH]

Made? No... not yet... and have no real intent to do so, unless I get very broke and start selling VCDs cheaply. Scored a few free beers by transferring a friend's band's demo tape to CD with some skill filtering last year but thats about the end of it.

*saved* money by not buying/renting DVDs? Ohhhhhh yes.
*wasted* a sack of money on CDRs and time on doing the conversions? more than I can count... though it's still far less than i would have on the films so the industry hasn't lost very much to it.

[DaveS]

re the set top boxes ... I haven't seen any in action but I would have to think that the quality can't really compare to what a good amateur would do w/ some s/w tools and then there's no menu, labelling, etc. My guess is whatever compression & generic filter they could put on a chip would be all that it would do, then create a DVD w/ no menus that just plays when it's put into a player....I guess that's ok for the run of the mill kid's tape,etc. but I would think for other applications, the quality, etc. wouldn't cut it (e.g. I know what I paid for the burner, a quality transcoder, a cpu fast enough to do all this, etc.)...

re the many local houses that do this, my take on it is that sending a video in the mail/ups/fedex is a pain in the next, and if it gets lost, you don't have another - an in-person handoff / drop off would be better - e.g. serving a local market thru friends, etc...granted its not a large market, but maybe enough to earn back some scratch for what I paid out on the equipment...I wouldn't try to go after a larger market, e.g. people I never heard of sending me their tapes, just in town stuff...and, the price would be better - decent quality - obviously not professional, but probably pretty good & all that this type of application would need...

[leebo]

re the set top boxes ... I haven't seen any in action but I would have to think that the quality can't really compare to what a good amateur would do w/ some s/w tools and then there's no menu, labelling, etc. My guess is whatever compression & generic filter they could put on a chip would be all that it would do, then create a DVD w/ no menus that just plays when it's put into a player.....

Well, I have one. The Pioneer DVR-7000. And I don't think the quality is as good as even capturing mpeg2 directly to your computer using a hardware encoder, then authoring yourself.

However, these things DO make generic menus, and the average person will not notice the quality difference. Add in the fact that there's very little labor and you can see why transfering to DVD is being offered so cheap.

Also, this unit has MANY input picture adjustments, so there is a lot of room to tweak.

Pioneer is comming out with a more professional unit in a month or two that will allow importing of bitmaps to create custom menus. The price will be $3999 however.

[Cornucopia]

Made money, huh?

Well let's see...

Time is money. I've saved plenty of time with some of the tricks I've learned here.

Knowledge is money. Not sure what the balance is for me, but I HAVE learned things here. Stuff that normally is really hard to know unless you go through the time and trouble to try it out yourself.

Since my job is Audio Production / CDROM Programming / DVD Authoring, and I keep my job cuz I'm faster and slicker and more knowledgeable than JOHN DOE, yeah I guess you could say I make money from this site.

And if you don't think that Knowledge is money--here are 2 glaring examples.

• 1991
  
  Knowing what I wanted to do in Audio would require using a computer and guessing rightly that DAW's would take over, I connived to acquire copies of the ProTools v1.0 manual. Learned it cover-to-cover. 1 year later, got a heavyduty audio job primarily with my knowledge of PT.
  
  1999
  
  Knowing that DVD was a major way to go, but not knowing all the peculiarities of the DVD spec, and also knowing that my company would NOT pay for Sonic Creator or Daikin Scenarist, I again acquired a demo copy of Astarte DVDdirector and put it through its paces. 1 year and a half later, I got a job in NY doing DVD Authoring on a nice Spruce Maestro system--again primarily based on knowledge and expertise.

This site is certainly leaning toward "DVD Copying" lately, but is still invaluable. Let's all try to make it better!

Scott

[DaveS]

leebo - that's interesting .. I wouldn't have expected them to put all that in the product but that's good...I'm curious to know / see how well they'll sell...