It never fails. On a day when I have to make a FEDEX delivery by 5 pm, just about everything that could go wrong goes wrong. Michael Bishop, formerly of Telarc and now a partner in Five four Productions, recently recorded a very interesting project in Dallas, Texas and recommended AIX Media Group to do the DVD production. So I’ve been busy designing, compressing, and authoring a DVD of a charity concert event called, “Cancer Blows”. The organizers brought together at least twenty notch trumpet players including Doc Severinsen and Arturo Sandoval, a symphony orchestra, and a jazz ensemble in support of cancer research. By the looks of the video, this was a very special evening (I’ll be proofing the video tomorrow…so I haven’t yet seen the program).<\/p>\n
The concert took place in March and there’s another event coming up that requires the DVDs to be completed (they’re going to be duplicated discs…not replicated. Not enough time.). But they have to have a master and I only received the assets on Friday. The project coordinator is based in Ohio and has supplied the packaging graphics from which I created the DVD menus. After a couple of rounds and tweaks, they approved the menus yesterday.<\/p>\n
To cut to the case, I encoded the videos yesterday and planned to author the disc today. That was until the power in West LA cut off. That was 5 hours ago and it’s still off. Time for some creative thinking because all of the graphics are on a machine at my studio that I can’t access. I have my laptop and I have the small portable drive that Erica sent with the videos AND that I used to dump the MPEG-2 encodes onto.<\/p>\n
So I called her and asked if she would send me the approved menus that I had previously delivered. I planned to head home and rebuild the graphics and author a preliminary disc. I got most of the work done at home but headed back to the studio when the electric company said the power was back on. I returned to the studio…they were mistaken. My laptop was out of batteries so I headed to Staples and plugged into a workstation to burn a couple of discs. For a 90-minute program it takes about 30 minutes to mux and burn a disc. With an hour to go before my FEDEX deadline and knowing the closest FEDEX is only 5 minutes away, I figured I had it made.<\/p>\n
I left the Staples with 2 DVD-Rs and headed to FEDEX. It was 4:48 pm…plenty of time. Until the guy behind the counter informed me that this particular FEDEX has a 3:30 pm cutoff. Oh great! But the location down Wilshire Boulevard takes packages until 5 pm. So I raced a couple of miles in the middle of traffic and arrived with 2 minutes to spare. Success and a lot of stress!<\/p>\n
But I hadn’t written the blog and couldn’t get access to the ADMIN panel without supplying the IP at my home to my ISP. I really didn’t think the blog would get written and posted today. Better late than never.<\/p>\n
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<\/p>\n