Not proud to report the same old / same old with respect to the Treasure Hunt disks, but there it is. My wife has had the same issue with the authoring software as I was having (though with essentially no cursing, yelling or destruction – imagine that), to wit finding it (so far) impossible to get the software to do what it’s purported to be designed to do. She has suggested buying a copy thinking, magically, to my mind, that the paid version will somehow work properly, but I’m quite skeptical and have resisted her suggestion. It seems so simple, yet has proven so difficult. At least I understand why others are charging $500+ to do this – I’d sure as hell do so after going through such a painful learning curve.
And then there’s this idea that’s captured my mind: re-edit the movie to improve the deficiencies that are clogging up my mental pathways when it comes time to consider selling disks or promoting VOD, etc. E.g., monetizing it. I finally found an editor who would consider taking all or part of his compensation on speculation, meaning if the re-edited version sold then he’d get paid. We negotiated for a $100 sample for a couple of select scenes and I made available the around 8 GB of raw video files, dialog and sound files. A week later he gave me his version.
Yeah, about that… I like to write chatty scripts that, shockingly, produce chatty raw video. He didn’t like my chattiness and cut what I originally had as a bit more than 4 minutes into a smidge more than 2. Were he to continue that trend for the whole flick (I have to think yes), my already short 60 minute feature would be trimmed to a no-longer feature-length 30 minutes. My wife liked his use of the music, though, and we all agreed his day-for-night was less bad than mine. However, after some consideration and discussion with another movie making friend, I decided to pass.
Coincidentally (or not), a day or two later I found a guy on Reddit who was interested in doing some color correction for free. I made my original version available for him to play with and a day or two ago got his version of the same scene. Since he wasn’t re-editing, the focus was entirely on the look of the day-for-night. After queuing up my version and his for a side-by-side comparison, frankly, I don’t see any difference. We haven’t really communicated since then, so I don’t know if he’s decided I’m not worth the effort or if he’s going to try something else. My movie-making friend had some suggestions and I thought to make a couple (and experimented myself as well), but it seems, unless I hear back, this approach may be dead in the water.
I’ll be encouraging my wife to try some other authoring software, hoping that, possibly, going through the learning curve with something else will jog loose the required elements to finally get this ‘simple’ task done. Then I can finally get my owesies to those that helped fund the flick through their donations. I thank them for their patience.
