[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

Anyone who has the Volume 2 of the Mars Mission books will have a DVD that includes the Opportunity EDL coverage and the first post landing Press Conf - but since Spirit landed, I've never seen that footage again of Spirit's landing.

It costs money to get footage from JPL ( not an enormous ammount, but it's not exactly cheap ) but I was thinking of getting some footage, putting together as much as I could on a DVD and selling it.

Now - a DVD can only hold so much - and this may have to be a 2 disk set to make it worth while, but I was thinking of doing all live commentary that I can find, (several hours of it) and the key press confs - basically from the period from Spirit's landing till Opportunity arrived. There's probably 20hrs of footage, maybe more from that period - so to include it all would be madness - but I could perhaps include much of it as DVD, and then the rest as highly compressed WMV's or similar.

Anyway - opinions, likely sales etc

Doug

[djellison]

Perhaps I could do briefings as compressed Quicktime movies, and the live mission coverage as full DVD quality - think that would work?

Tonight I'm going to have a good look at the video catalogue - see how much stuff there actually is (without duplicating) and how much it's going to cost me ( something like $40 per hour long piece )

The only downside I've found so far is that I'll have to get the footage on VHS and capture from that. You can order it on BetaSP - but buying or renting a BetaSP deck will costs hundreds and hundreds of pounds that I just can't justify for a small project like this. You can even order it on Digi Beta - at more than 10x the price. So I'll invest in the best analogue capture card I can - I have a very very good VHS deck from which I can work as well - and it's happy with NTSC thank goodness...look at that..4x the cost just to go to Pal - that's insane.

If I could get on a plane with a bag of external HDD's and capture it myself, I would...but they don't let you do that either.

http://www.dgsystems.com/jpl_ratecard.htm

I asked if they could do Mini DV - and they said no. I asked if they could dump footage straight to HDD, and they also said no - frustrating on both counts.

Anyway - as you can imagine, 10 press confs and a couple of live events is quickly going to add up to $500 or more - so I think I'll be comparatively selective

Doug