AU is producing the bonus disc themselves??????

[phelix]

Deep in another thread, Jason finally got fed up with AU and posted the following (I've quoted all of it here because it's too important)

I agree, and I believe that it is a bit of a "last straw" backlash. I also believe that this is the tip of the iceberg.

I cannot believe the bullshit that customers put up with, that BMG put up with, that GWhizOnline (the lunchbox manufacturers) put up with. Given that much leeway from everybody, any 1/10th decent company would have taken this project and ran with it and been hugely successful.

I guess that as each new problem cropped up, and it seemed like this happened daily, I would ask myself "ok, nobody fucks things up this badly, I'm sure that things will improve."

I have to give Ross Rojek a lot of credit. If there was something that could be fucked up, his company managed to do it.

I, for one, cannot contain my rage any longer.

Doublecharges not bad enough for you? We'll triple charge people!

Then we won't respond to their emails!

Two months later, we'll still have their money!

We'll charge people up front and make vendors have to pull teeth just to get paid!

Then when we pay them, we will bounce the checks!

While everybody else is waiting for refunds or to get paid, we will be earning interest on the money in CDs!

It will be October and the lunchbox manufactuer will still be owed $8,600!

We won't just promise and miss one deadline! We'll promise 3 and miss them all!

Instead of using a good company to burn the bonus disc, we'll have Justin, our web master, do it, so we can save a few bucks!

So, accoring to Jason, they're going to make the bonus disc themselves. This is unbelievably stupid.

I've been making my own VCDs and SVCDs for over a year now and have just started looking at making DVDs. In all that time, I've learned that authoring a disc is a very complex process. I make pretty good discs, but I've been at it for over a year, and I'm STILL LEARNING things.

There's so many ways to screw up a disc. Without a professionally calibrated studio NTSC monitor, they'll never get the whitepoint and color balance right. This means that for some of you, the disc will be too dark or too light, and the colors will be off. Not drastically, but enough to be noticable (and distracting)

Encoding is easy to do, unless you want to get it right. The pros "ride the controls" i.e., they tweak the compression paramters on a scene-by-scene basis. This is necessary to ensure that there are no encoding artificats in the final video. I'm not aware of any consumer level program that even supports that ability.

Do they know how to preprocess their source material? What filters should be used and how to use them? There is no set answer; it all depends on the quality of the source material. I've been at this a year and I wouldn't consider myself expereinced enough for a commercial project.

Then there's the whole authoring and testing issues. How can they ensure that the disc will work in all dvd players. Every once in a while, I make a disc that plays fine in my compter and one DVD player, but won't play at all in my other standalone DVD player. Even the professionals sometimes release a disc that doesn't work in some players. It's hard to do it right.


So, in conclusion, the lunchboxes haven't been paid for yet, and the bonus disc will be crap. What possible reason does anybody have to keep their order with AU?

A question for Jason and Ross. If AU can't find the money to pay the lunchbox manufacturer, where will they find the money to pay BMG for the discs (which is certainly alot more than $8600).

[Jason R]

Well, BMG was actually paid, so that is one less thing keeping me up at night.

Here is what Justin had to say about his role.

"Not doing the authoring in-house. The only thing I am doing is prepping the video and working on the menu screens in Photoshop. I am using Premiere, After Effects, and a few other little cleaner tools on the video. "

Sounds like he is not doing *everything* with the disc. I don't know enough about what he said to say if this is good or bad. Maybe it sucks! I don't know.

[phelix]

Here is what Justin had to say about his role.

"Not doing the authoring in-house. The only thing I am doing is prepping the video and working on the menu screens in Photoshop. I am using Premiere, After Effects, and a few other little cleaner tools on the video. "

Sounds like he is not doing *everything* with the disc. I don't know enough about what he said to say if this is good or bad. Maybe it sucks! I don't know.

This is somewhere between slightly-bad and horribly-sucks. It all depends on how much work he's doing in premiere. If Justin's final result is encoded as mpeg2 video, then he doing almost everything himself which is really bad. If not, then he could still be messing things up but not as much.

Let me give an example. He's using cleaner tools to clean up the video. These tools (either standalone or Permiere plugins) do something to the video and then save it. In the saving process, it is encoded with a codec of Justin's choice. Some codecs are lossless, others are not. Using a lossy codec will result in signal degradation. It's as if you took an image compressed as a JPEG, did something in photoshop, and then recompressed it as a JPEG. Each time you do that compression, more artifacts are introduced. The final video that ends up on the DVD is heavily compressed ( as a mpeg2 file), so it's important ot have the source material as artifact-free as possible.

My advice to Justin is not to do any filtering/cleanup at all. Just do your editing in Permiere and send it on to the authoring company (using uncompressed or HuffyVU codec preferably, or DV if necessary). They'll know better than you (and me) what filtering works best with mpeg2. Of course, this will cost more, so Ross probably won't allow it.

Doing the menu screens is not that important; it's something that can be done inhouse without serious problems. I just hope Justin is previewing his work on a TV set. Looking good on a computer monitor is no guarnteee it will look right on a TV.

[Ross Rojek]

No we are not burning them themselves. All Justin told Jason was that he was going to prep the video and menus for the production company. It will be authored and duplicated by a local firm that can turn it around quickly.

[Chase Cat]

Will Jason preview the bonus disc like he has done with episode discs. I think that would partly eliminate our concerns about the quality. He should check the menus, if everything is working and the picture and sound before the whole run will be manufactured.

Since I start to distrusting AU, I would be glad to hear just a second opinion about one of our last goodies in this project.

Thanks a lot to Jason!

[special_k]

call me cynical, but i just don't see ross rojek allowing this to happen- not within any of our lifetimes. after this fiasco, i wouldn't buy a stick of gum from rojek. given his attitude one may only surmise rojek doesn't give a bloody damn about this project or it's implosion. when he e-mailed me to confirm my cancellation there wasn't even a hint of apology. glad my money earned you some interest, rojek- your going to need it.

-kassandra

ps- where's my refund, rojek?

Will Jason preview the bonus disc like he has done with episode discs. I think that would partly eliminate our concerns about the quality. He should check the menus, if everything is working and the picture and sound before the whole run will be manufactured.

Since I start to distrusting AU, I would be glad to hear just a second opinion about one of our last goodies in this project.

Thanks a lot to Jason!

[Ross Rojek]

ps- where's my refund, rojek?

Well you requested it on Monday, I think it was processed yesterday and should show up on your card within a couple of days.