DVD duplication - Indie-Musicians Are Missing Out!

At the present time very few of our independent-music clients have pushed into the realm of DVD duplication as to release live performance footage. Some very talented performers come to us for CD work so it seems a shame that the idea of live performances aren't being promoted in this fashion.

When you think about it, some very creative things could be done with a hand-held video camera, a basic video editing program (hey... almost every computer's operating system includes a video editing program these days), a couple of hours of time at the computer, and some short-run DVD duplication.

A while back I did that very thing for a friend of mine who sent me a bunch of video he had taken at 2 or 3 different performances. As you can imagine, the video quality was pretty good but the sound quality was just awful (those built-in microphones in hand-held video cameras cannot handle the volume levels at a live show very well) so I ended up using a song from his CD as the audio track and cut video on-top of it.

It wasn't possible to synch up the audio with the video performance (do you notice how a lot of bands always play the songs faster at a show?) so I grabbed a lot of short clips from the footage of the different shows and purposely selected anything that looked energetic, because energetic images would tie-in well with the energy of the song I chose.

The end result was pretty good (if I must say so myself). He put it on his website and got lots of favorable comments including some who said they wanted to check out an upcoming gig because (from the video) it looked like he put on an entertaining and energetic performance.

In addition to putting it on his website we also got some DVD duplication of the video done so he could include them as a bonus in his CDs. Because DVD duplication is cost-effective and quick for small runs of DVDs he still gets DVDs done from time to time and uses them for promotional and marketing purposes, sells them at shows and even gives them away to fans via his website.

I think indie-artists could get some good mileage out of DVD duplication. Nothing ventured, nothing gained!!

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