Boat, you’re looking at the present tense. You need to look at the Big Picture. The past an the future. An example; before I jumped into IT, my “past life” was in TV Broadcasting. So don’t let the MS credentials fool you, I know a few things about DVD manufacturing and the creative process.
Lily brought up some great points, including a bit about educational materials often costing more (I’ll get into that later). But like I said earlier, I enjoy these kinds of things so lets roll. In fact, I think I can justify a high price point despite the fact I haven’t even seen the DVD’s,
||> We need to take into account the editing platform they use. These platforms can cost considerable amounts of money. And you can’t expect them to use pirated software either, as they are trying to make money off of these DVD’s. So now we need to look at the initial start up costs it took to build an editing platform.
- Assume for a moment they are brainwashed and think that “we need to get a Mac for video editing” (very common, sadly). For what they are doing, they need to use a Mac Pro if they want to do it right. This of course, will cost them a few grand, not including a version of Final Cut Pro. Or they might have dropped two grand on Adobe Creative Suite so they can use Photoshop as well as Premiere.
*** Productivity suites are needed as well. MS Office costs some coin.
This is all assuming, of course, they have only one system doing all of the work. You’re looking at a price point of $10,000. At this point, to break even, they need to sell 33 DVD’s at 300 bucks a pop.
(This, of course, is assuming they didn’t by Discreet Logic. It also assumes they did not go all out and buy Media 100. Which, if they did buy Media 100, Father Corapi (or whoever decided to use it) has my near-infinite respect for their outstanding taste in editing platforms).
||> Next up is Disaster Recovery Management. They need to come up with a plan to back up their work (and video takes up a lot of hard drive space). Keep in mind they might do some rough edits with a lower quality video (20kb/second in addition to the standard 250kb/second) which means even more space will be chewed up. As a result they will need to come up with a system to back these up. To set up the infrastructure will of course cost money. Included in the cost of the Mac Pro above was RAID functionality and four functional hard drives. We will at this point assume that they are NOT using Windows Server 2008 or 2003 to manage this system and that this system is a stand alone machine. We will then assume, with four hard drives, they will utilize RAID 5 for both performance and redundancy. The cost of this was included above, however there still needs to be a general backup, as RAID only protects against hardware failure. So we back it up to an external device, such as automate a backup on some terabyte drives during off hours. Hard drives aren’t cheap, you know. Throw down two grand on that. We’re up to $12,000 of start up costs, which is 40 DVD’s.
||> Time. They need to hire someone to put this all together, to maintain it, and to do the editing. Assuming that someone is making 15 bucks an hour doing this, working eight hours a day. That works out to 600 bucks a week, which is two DVD’s. How many weeks does it take to make a video and edit it? I’ll be generous and say four (very generous). Now we’re up to 48 DVD’s needing to be sold to cover the cost of starting up.
||> Graphics need to be made. Probably at the same time as the editing. You need to drop another 5000 bucks for another system, (including software). About 17 DVD’s worth so we’re at 65 DVD’s to break even for start up costs.
||> The fun part begins now. I see the DVD’s are sold on a web site. If they host their own web server…there is some money involved with starting that up. You need a copy of Windows Server 2003/2008, you need a machine to host the web site, you need to set up IIS, you need to get security on the site, you need to secure your network from hackers. You need to pay domain name costs and bandwidth. You need someone to design the site, update the site, maintain the site,code the site.
Do their have their own E-Mail addresses? Now you need an EXCHANGE SERVER. Now we’re up to two servers. And in my humble MCITP opinion, you might as well throw down a domain controller too to help with everything and for centralized administration of the network so your IT guy doesn’t go insane in a mixed OS environment.
Three servers and now three additional pieces to backup some place. Three extra servers to administrate…and you won’t be paying that administrator 15 bucks an hour.
Should I spell the start up costs for that? I can if you want. But suffice to say…they’re need to sell some of those DVD’s.
||> Maintenance and administration is ongoing. You need to pay these salaries. These people are professionals and will be paid as such. You will not pay the head of your IT 10 bucks an hour. The editing guy needs money. Graphics guy needs money. The CAMERA guy needs money.
Money.
Keep in mind at this point as well, those 300 dollar DVD’s are heading to parishes like Lily said. That means that people might not buy a “take it home” series when they can just take it out at a library.
Oh wait, there IS no “take it home” version of the series. Because they likely know that this is designed for a class setting. This means that fewer people will buy the series, so they need to recoup the monies accordingly.
The implication is that the cost of a parish buying it will be outweighed by the amount of usage there is. 30 people take it out…10 bucks a person. Sounds more reasonable there, doesn’t it? Or maybe you buy the video and show it to 300 people over two years? 1 dollar a person. And just like if they brought it home…these people may never see it again.
