7 Tales of Bureaucracy
the agreement and upped the quantity to 100 tapes a month, and they started sending Betacam masters.
For about $10,000, we've built up a nice little studio that does professional-quality encoding of the Betacam masters, producing 8-megabit H.264 MP4 files We don't do anything fancy like color correcting or normalizing the sound, but for the content we have that just doesn't seem necessary.
FedFlix really isn't a funded project, it is something to fill in gaps in the day. Instead of writing to a Facebook wall, I choose to rip. I put an egg timer on top of the Betacam deck, and pop in a tape and set the timer. When it goes off, I put in another tape.
After a few weeks, there will be a nice collection of files, I put together a packing list with the metadata, then use a big old hairy RegEx to turn the packing list into a bunch of curl calls that use the Internet Archive S3 interface and Python scripts that use the YouTube API.
Perhaps the most subversive thing we do with this video is put the masters on our server for FTP and rsync. The hardest part of making a film or a news piece today is clearing the rights in that absurd thicket of copyright-obsessed stock footage libraries. With our multi-terabyte public domain stock footage library, you don't have to ask, and there are never any late charges in the public domain.
It sometimes amazes me what video gets popular. A World War II film called "Principles of Refrigeration" has received 78,000 views. Turns out there isn't any good HVAC material on the net. The biggest hit on YouTube is a
