Get People Excited About Your
DVD,
Create Your Own Streaming Trailer.
You want to do everything you can to help persuade your customers to purchase your title. Providing a trailer for the movie which can be watched directly on the website gives your customers a much better idea of what they'd be getting.
A streaming trailer is optional, but highly recommended. If you do not have the time or expertise to create your own trailer you can find a duplication company to create a 60 second trailer for you. However, only you can make a trailer which does full justice to your title, so I suggest you create your own streaming trailer if possible. Information is provided below on how to do this.
 In either event, the trailer should be in QuickTime format, with a maximum file size of 1.5MByte. It will be served via http, so it will be downloadable, and your customers can save copies if they wish. Since it is an advertisement, generally no more than one minute long, it's a good thing for it to be kept and passed around — hopefully that will lead more people to seeing your title.
One of the key elements in producing compelling video is knowing what to throw away. Editing a trailer takes this to the extreme: you need to chop an hour or more of video down to 60 seconds.
 For educational or training titles, we suggest finding a relevant
section of the material, preferably one that is visually interesting.
Fancy editing may not be required, as the goal is to convince the
customer that the video will be informative and approachable. For
entertainment or documentary titles, it is more important to tell a
compelling story in the limited time the trailer will run. Please resist
the temptation to give away too much of the plot.
When editing a trailer which will end up online, it's important to
follow several guidelines:
Avoid cross-fades, and
use hard cuts. They compress far better. Avoid small text, which
may be illegible at small sizes, and especially when compressed.
If at all possible, include your title's sales URL (such as
www.CustomFlix.com), so that if the trailer gets passed around, anyone
who watches it will know how to order a copy.
We generally recommend you use these compression settings as a starting
point for 60 second trailers: Sorenson Video 3 with 2-pass VBR, at
240x180 pixels, 15fps, 168kbit/s; and MP3 (or MPEG-4) audio at 22kHz
mono, 32 kbit/s. A few tips on compressing streaming trailers:
Crop off the "rough
edges" of your video (typically about 8 pixels left and right, 6 top and
bottom). Although they aren't seen on a television screen, they will
show up on a computer monitor. Apply deinterlacing (or inverse
telecine if the material originated on 24fps film). If your
trailer is 16:9 ratio, use 288x160 pixels.
There are significant bandwidth costs to serve streaming video,
especially at high bitrates. A reasonable amount of viewing is included
in your setup fee. However, we do impose a limit on the number of times
your trailer may be viewed. There is a restriction of 50 viewings of the
trailer per sale. Neither you nor your customers should ever normally
experience this limit, but it protects you from the odd cases which
could result in high fees.
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