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Shipping documentaries

Got the first shipment of DVDs in yesterday, and sent first shipment out at 8:30 this morning, covering all that had come in by then. Whew! It was a 30+ minute wait to get to the head of the line. (The postal meter equipment comes in today, and when I get it set up things will be much easier). The first load was of about 20 of them (I didn't stop to count). You can order here.

Actually, this is the easy part. I've got an ad coming out in America's First Freedom, probably hits on Monday, and that's gonna lead to a big surge. But by then I'll have 5,000 on hand, probably 500 of them already in envelopes, so it should be do-able with a lot of work.

I'd planned to have them in hand 3 weeks before the ad hit, so I'd have time to start internet movement, give the systems I've created time for testing, etc. But the firm creating the DVDs had a problem -- that I had to diagnose -- the software used for video compression at certain points made video transitions rather blocky. Diagnosing and fixing that took the 3 weeks. So I've only had a day to work out kinks in the system, such as.... the label-creating software is a mediocre port for the Mac, and wouldn't cut and paste. Nor will it allow a template to be created in Word. It took hours to find a way around that, but now I think the assembly line is working, as it were.

BTW, I'm very pleased with the job they did on it. The cover, and DVD art, are great, and with this encoding all of the transitions went very smoothly, no blockiness.

· documentary film