My band the Quadrafonics played at the Red Rooster in November, and when you play the Red Rooster you get a very professional-looking DVD of your performance.
If you're in a band that played the Rooster, here are some fun things you can do with your disc.
DVD cases are cheap. Buy a pack and use a colour printer to make a nice insert if you have any graphic design skills, or enlist the help of a skilled friend, or pay somebody to do it as a last resort - that shouldn't be necessary though. Most DVD burners come with software to make DVD covers and have standard templates. Slap your yearbook photo on that shit and you're good to go.
It makes your DVD way more official when it has a nice case. You can put background and contact information about your band on the back cover and sell it at shows, or include it in a promo kit that you shop to venues and labels.
They sell blank DVD insert pages for printing, but those aren't necessary. You can use a sheet of white paper and a pair of scissors - just make the cover 10.75" wide and 7.25" tall, with 5" for the front and back panels and 0.75" for the spine.
I don't know about you, but we don't intend to get rich selling our DVD. For us it has a lot more value as a promotional tool, so the traditional notion of restrictive copyright isn't very useful. The Creative Commons gives you tools to release media under less restrictive licenses while still retaining ownership and control.
For example we released ours under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share alike license. That means it is free for anyone to copy and distribute, but it can't be used in a commercial setting without our permission. We also permit people to remix and mash-up the work, as long as they release the new work under the same license.
Releasing your work under a relaxed license like this lets it spread around more easily, which is a good thing if you want to promote your band. It also means that your fans aren't criminals if they copy and share your video.
Despite the fact that it's under a free license, you can still sell your DVD at shows if you make a nice case and cover for it. Be sure to detail the license on the back cover so your fans know the additional rights you've granted them above a normal copyrighted CD or DVD that they would buy at the store. You've made it more valuable, not less.
If you rip your DVD to a file on your hard drive, you can make it much smaller and therefore easier to copy and pass around on the net. We ripped our disc to a 350 megabyte file which people can download from our website and play on just about any computer. The video quality at that size is not bad and the sound at 160kbps MP3 is very good.
You might have your own preference for tools and codecs, but if you have no idea where to start (and you're using a Windows PC) these are great free tools:
There are lots of other tools out there for PC, Mac and Linux users to do this job. Do a little googling or call your nerdy friend and you'll be all set.
The age of free video hosting on the net has truly arrived. What used to be expensive for the hoster and complicated for the viewer is now free and easy. YouTube is fantastic but they will only host a 10 minute video - you'll need more than that. Google will host files of any length for you, provided you own the copyright to the work. Once your upload is approved, you can drop the video player right into your website, myspace profile, whatever. You can see how we did ours on our website here.
To do this, rip the DVD as I described in item number 3 above, go to Google Video and create an account. You'll have to install their file uploading tool if your video is over 100 megabytes (it will be.)
I knew that $300 toy was good for something! Any iPod that came out in the last few years can play video (not the mini or nano though, just the regular iPod.) Maybe I just have too much free time on my hands, but i've used my iPod to play our video for people on the road, and with an A/V cable you can play it on your buddy's TV, the TV over your table at a sports bar, the bigscreen in the electronics department at Sears - use your imagination!
Videora iPod Converter is a free tool for turning an AVI file like the one we made in #3 above into an iPod video MP4 file. Download and install that, convert your AVI, sync it to your iPod, and you're ready to rock.
If you think that your performance was good enough, rip the audio from your disc and burn it to a CD - voila! Instant live album. You could even sell it in a 2-pack case alongside the DVD - costs an extra 25 cents to burn, but the double pack looks way more attractive on the merch table.
You can get WAV files from your DVD using AC3Decode.
This disc is a great way to tune both your sound and your live show. Normally you don't get to be a member of the audience, so this is a rare opportunity to critique your own work. Why didn't anybody dance? Maybe because your bass player was standing there like a mannequin. Take the second bridge out of that last tune, it's boring! Did you address the crowd well enough to get them fired up? Sit down and take notes, then do better next time.
If you have any other great ideas or questions about your Rooster DVD, feel free to post them here. Oh and by the way, the Q4 are playing again on February 17th, maybe we'll see you there.
