I don't give a fuck what anyone thinks of Robbie, that man just taught me, an industry vet some new tricks.

Thanks Robbie!

I'm not sure if "cropping" is the right word, as I don't see anything missing. What I mean is if I crop a picture I remove some of it. When I encode the 720 x 480 AVI over to a 640 X 480 .mp4 using h264 compresson it doesn't crop anything off...it just seems to change the aspect slightly, and makes it look "correct" My understanding is that is simply the change in pixel shape which accounts for the difference of 80 pixels in width for the entire movie. I hope that makes sense, because I know I'm not communicating this in the correct technical terminology.

Robbie, great posts. Thanks for sharing the info. I am too thrifty to spend eleven grand on a new computer but yours sure sounds awesome. I have a few Dell pc's chugging away doing my video capturing, editing and encoding here in my office. The h264 & encrypted Flash streaming software sounds like a great solution. When I am ready to launch new sites with exclusive content I would definitely look into using that too. If you need any help with HD shooting, editing or encoding, hit me up anytime.

I think the correct term for this is "scaling" The pixels start out as horizontal shapes. So I scale it to 640 x 480 so it displays correctly using square pixels.

I need a drink lol

gotcha :thumbsup

about the same 20 LA pornstars fucking the same 10 stunt cocks on every hardcore site - the only hardcore program that is different is Bangbros/NastyDollars - they spend an incredible amount of energy/resources recruiting their own talent, even with all that they still probably use LA/Florida talent everybody else uses in 75% of their scenes.

it's absolutely impossible to find that many attractive females to do hardcore porn - you can do it for one site with a lot of work and time spent - but for more than one site, impossible.

The pixel aspect ratio of SD digital video is .9, so when you capture SD 720 x 480 footage you should always change the pixel aspect ratio to square pixels (1.0) for display on your computer monitor, which will result in a 640 x 480 frame size which can then be encoded into 320 x 240 video clips for example. I prefer to convert to square pixels when I encode my video clips from the edited DV AVI in a video encoding app like Cleaner XL.


On the other hand, HDV cameras record footage with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.333, so when you capture footage from your camera it will appear to be 1440 x 1080, until you convert it to square pixels, which has the opposite effect of the way the conversion from SD works and makes the frame size bigger. 1920 x 1080. Then one can one can encode to computer files like WMV or Flash or Quicktime in smaller multiples, most commonly 1280 x 720 or 480 x 270. Likewise, I do this when I encode the edited movie in an encoding app.

Come on Jim...quit bullshitting.

For those who have never met Jim Gunn, let me tell you the truth.

I first met him at Internext in Miami this past summer. I'm standing there at the Diplomat surrounded by big players and all of a sudden the crowd parted like Moses parted the Red Sea.

10 black guys who were HUGE walked through first. All in suits and ties with sunglasses on.

They were followed by 20 whores all dressed like a bunch of hoochie mamas.

Then finally, wearing a big fur coat and a pimp hat, Jim Gunn himself came in the room dancing. One by one I watched as everybody in the business bowed down and kissed his diamond encrusted hand.

I tried to introduce myself...but as I reached out to shake his hand, one of the bodyguards grabbed me by the throat and told me: "Don't touch Mr. Gunn"

Later that night I sent over a bottle of Cristal to his table as a way to apologize for attempting to shake his hand. Of course Jim was too busy to personally aknowledge me because he was too busy with his whores. So he had one of his bodyguards bring over a bucket of money to let me know we were cool.

That was how I "met" Jim Gunn.

He also let me stand on the roof at the heli-pad as he took off in his private copter for the airport and his private lear.

Thanks JG! :pimp

I'm gonna take you up on that offer of advice when I go HD by the way. :)

Robbie - that is awesome!! I can only imagine those initial sleepless nights. And thanks for the great example and the information!!

And I totally agree with your thoughts about the people shooting the same girls all the time. I understand the girls are popular and that's what people are looking for. But, damn! Give me some fresh faces on a more regular basis.

Nautilus - seems we're pretty much on the same page when it comes the larger picture :thumbsup

I agree, customer satisfaction is paramount. What people tend to forget it actually costs more money to get a new client than it does to keep one.

I want to thank Robbie for his input on this thread, THANKS. You have put me on a new path with the flash server and encryption. and I'm gonna try phantomflicks.com as well.

Many thanks

I concur... and use about 99% of brand new never before seen first timers and have for 8 years that www.POVPorn.com has been online. But, I can't afford to make mistakes on content.

Dunno... I wouldn't be that optimistic. We started to shoot some HD recently (we're also backward in that regard and still shoot most of our stuff in SD), but I was not really satisfied with how it looks at full HD resolution when encoded in h264 at 3mbps. Heck even raw 100 mpbs DVCPro HD footage didn't look nowhere near those recent Hollywood HD trailers that impressed me just like you.

Sure it's still much better than SD, but not million bucks worth imo. When you downres it to about SD size it looks really gorgeous, but not at full HD. Check Vimeo for examples - when they stream HD footage through about SD size player it looks great, but click full screen and it doesn't look that good anymore.

http://www.vimeo.com/762333 (just a random video)

And so I'm lost.

yes i get what you're saying but, again, quality of the content is only one in a combination of issues. whether content is worthy of being protected is in the eye of the beholder. joe blow with his average run-of-the-mill scene deems his content just as worthy of protecting as one of yours.

That's some great looking vid there. When you say "at full HD" what do you mean? You don't mean that monster "nostril the size of my monitor" size that I talked about do you? lol I just don't know enough about HD yet to speak intelligently about it. :( But I would THINK that you wouldn't want to have a huge resolution for your members area anyway would you? Or am I way offbase? I would think something that would fit most of the available screen on a "non-widescreen" monitor would be great. And it should look damn good too.

I use Adobe Premiere to encode these things. When I was using the Premiere Pro CS3 version it looked like crap until I clicked on the "de-interlace" check box in the "Output" tab. That's when I was able to take it down to 1,200 kps without it looking like a bunch of squares.

Now I have CS4 and that checkbox is no longer there...but it seems to just do it on it's own now when encoding flash and/or h264

Anyway, everyone that has helped me along has told me that you simply don't have to use a very high bit rate with h264. I worked and worked and ended up at that huge variable 2 to 6 mb bitrate to begin with. But once I got that de-interlace checked off...I was able to go down and get pretty close to the same quality (not really, but close enough for rock-n-roll)

You're gonna have to keep tweaking and get those bit rates down. I made the mistake of thinking that "Oh, everybody is on broadband so it's now big deal they can easily stream this fast" And I was right about the consumers ability to stream that fast...But I didn't take into account that the higher the bit rate, the more CPU it uses on the user side. I guarantee you, you would have half your members complaining because they have so many background tasks using up their CPU's that the vid wouldn't stream properly at 3 mb

Don't be discouraged. You just need to keep tweaking. You'll know you have it right when you are down in the 1000 to 1200 range and getting a good image that you can live with.

Sometimes I have to walk away and take a second look. Especially since I do all my own editing. I get used to it looking crystal clear and sharp because it's raw and uncompressed. So when I first see the compressed version it looks bad to me.

But when I walk away, and watch vids on other paysites and acclimate my eyes to that...my shit looks good to me afterwards. I guess our eyes get used to seeing either compressed or uncompressed video.

And, I think what Robbie is doing is brilliant. The technology that is "fucking us" is the technology protecting his content.

I started a thread not too long ago asking what happened to DRM. Amongst everything, people said they tried it and surfers complained about it so much that they had to stop. But I guess this proves that people will deal with DRM of some sort.

Not only that...but everything I read about DRM said it was cracked almost instantly

Robbie what have you done to address the fact that their are lots of programs out there that can capture and record video to a HD from a rtmp stream. I really like the idea you have put forward but to me it seems pointless in removing the download link to the full scene if the member can easily rip the stream, I know less surfers will know how to do this but like everything your method can be beaten by those in the know and it doesn't take much for people to find out how to beat it.

I would say to you to give it a try. I did. Didn't work worth a shit. The vid was quirky and jumpy...like a bad animated GIF And the sound was TOTALLY distorted. The screen recording was basically unwatchable.

I'm not saying that it's "unbeatable" I'm just saying that I haven't figured out a way to do it yet.

And I got tired of watching my shit stolen everywhere and my sales starting to fall backwards. So I decided to do something about it. And when and if this no longer works...I'm gonna figure out something else.

I guess I just made up my mind to stop complaining and take action to handle things myself. If nothing else, it took away that feeling of helplessness I had for months and allowed me to sleep at night.

By the way, when I say "give it a try" I don't mean on my stuff. All my encrypted streaming is in the members area. The trailers on the tour are just .flv's streaming on Lighthttp, so it won't prove anything to try it on those.

Try it on some of the public encrypted streams and see what the results are. I'm assuming they will be the same as what happened when I tried it in my members area.

Wow this is a very unusual post for GFY and i might add a great one. I particularly like this thought.

"imagine if a virus hits the net that wipes peoples wmv and mpg files off their HD clearing their porn stash, I think billing servers will crash that day".

If only :winkwink:

Where is the lighting truck on a porn set? Exactly... it's not there.

Quit blaming the quality of the encoding on the computer or the editor and start blaming it on the lighting. The clip you posted was in full sun. The film granules (in this case pixels) are bigger - the less light there is - the oposite is lots of light filling out all the info on your HD tapes = High definition. But take out that light and demand the same detail, and have everyone bouncing around in the horizontal Mambo and you loose the affect that you were looking for with HD. That is why SD looks better in lower light - hence - a porno shot inside with all the windows drawn and lit with low output (miniscule compared to mainstream) lights - and lots of movement.

I've got alot to learn about editing and encoding but I do know alot about lighting and photography - the graphing of light if you speak Latin. The graphing of light... not fast moving unlit images in the dark.

I used to do lighting for mainstream movie sets - we are talking about 3-10 Semi trucks FULL of lights, ballasts, reflectors, flags, generators, and wires thick as snakes. Too bad we can't close down streets and get some 10K's out to light a set... no-one would ever complain about HD looking muddy ever again.:2 cents:

Yeah good point. I used to find brand new girls to send to ND all the time. They loved that.

I wasn't knocking you are all, I think you are heading down the right path with your method, I also think using phantomflicks is also a very good thing to do, I also use that and it does help.

I was trying to work out if you had tested it with any programs that are around, as i am considering your method it wouldn't be too much of a change I just wouldn't want it to be a change for nothing if it can be easily ripped and saved.

I made $10k-15K a month for 9 years scouting brand new talent and sending trhem to Magazine photographers for 80% softcore and 20% hardcore. One time I brought a brand new model (Justine Jolie) to Suze Randal who had only shot with 1 other photographer... Suze found out she shot with someone else already and SHE PUNCHED ME!!! She said: "Oh, she shot with Hank Londoner already... SHE'S ALL SHOT UP!!!" That is how competetive this industry is.

We need that upper 2% of the talent to drive sales - not new sites, story lines and programs. We are selling porn to people that have lots of choices and a more limited income than ever before. It's not boxes on a shelf, surfers are very picky especially if money is tight and they can only make 1 choice to buy.

No... I'll never be an agent again! But those who hire me to shoot for them get the added treat of undiscovered fruit. And 99% of the girls on www.POVPorn.com shot thier very first scene for me. No BS.

I'm not spamming your thead EB - that's just my 20 years in this biz personal opinion. It's all about the talent!!!

It is indeed a lot of work to recruit new talent, Mutt. I have connections all over North America sending me as many new girls as possible, especially teens, and it costs both time and money to separate the wheat from the chaff. Matter of fact I got a couple of my filming jobs in part because I do film a lot of girls who aren't porn stars, at least not until I get a hold of them!

Ditto on that man.

What I did was google up screen recorders and then downloaded a few of them and tried it. You should give it a shot too and confirm what I saw. And from what I saw: Screen Recording = Unwatchable....at least with these vids.

Yes I think that was what I meant :) Full HD means usually either 1280x720 or 1920x1080 resolution. While it may seem excessive for those who get used to SD sized picture, HD is the trend now. Everything looks better in HD except for closeups (those monitor sized nostrils you mentioned), but I hate closeups and we never shoot then anyway so that's not a problem.

When you can get crystal clear picture in HD, it looks really good with it's big image. But as I mentioned earlier, I just cannot get same crystal clear image Hollywood trailers are showing. So when I view our or other program's HD vids (which have the same problem, not sharp enough at full HD) I usually downres my player to about 900 horizontal pixels. It looks sharp enough at that size and is still bigger and more fun to watch than SD.

Anyway, what's the point of shooting HD at all if you downres it to SD? Picture will look better than original SD footage of the same resolution, but not that much better imo to worth the hassle. The point is in providing customers with full HD resolution and let them decide what to do with it - either view as is, or downres their players and view smaller picture if that's more convenient. True HD has many advantages. But when you go streaming and cannot encode even at 3mbps which is minimum for HD to look any good at full resolution, the entire point of using HD is lost. Or maybe I'm missing something?

We shoot progressive and thus do not need to deinterlace, so that wouldn't help. We'll tweak it of course, but it'll not help much. Because, as I've already said, even raw 100 mbps DVCPro HD footage looks considerably worse than 3mbps 1280x720 Hollywood trailers.

No wonder though, in spite of them using 4K cameras or 4K film scans (we use 1/3" semi professional camera), and then downresing their videos to 1280x720. I once got raw footage from 4K Red One camera, and when you crop any part of it at 1280x720 it doesn't look any different from what we shoot with our cam. But when you downres the whole image to 1280x720, that's the whole different story. That footage looks amazing to say at least.

Yeah I know that effect :) But still, it looks not nearly as good as I had hoped for. Maybe I'm just being overly critical though and customers will be just fine with the look of it.

What's bothering me is that giving customers downloadable full HD vids is one thing, while streaming them is very different story. With downloadable vids they can select any resolution they like from 1280x720 down, but with the streaming vid they have only two options - size of the player and full screen. Not to mention lesser bitrate, which takes away most of then fun you have with HD.

I think the problem is these girls are basically the female equivalent of "stunt cocks". They work the strip clubs at night, hook, and shoot for every site out there that will pay them.

In other words, it's not so much the same girls getting shot over and over again...it's just that they are shooting for EVERYBODY.

And then it's all over the place for free on the tubes and torrents.

If Puma Swede, Sara Jay, Deauxma, Penny Flame, etc., etc. each were only shooting exclusively for ONE site it would be different. But these girls are making a living out of shooting. So when Naughty America says they have a shoot for one of them...that's an easy $1500 for a couple of hours morning work. Then Brazzers calls the next day. Bang Bros the next.

To me, it's short sited on the part of the girls and the companies. There's a lot more money the girls could be making with their own sites if they could stop thinking like strippers for one minute and see the big picture in long term thinking.

Same with the companies shooting. There aren't enough "new" girls out there when some of these companies have 20 + websites that need updating weekly. So it all starts to look the same.

Today I ran over 300 new hosted galleries each on ShavedGoat.Com and Grampland.Com. There are thousands and thousands of galleries in the archives. Mostly just those same girls doing the same guys over and over and over.

When you combine that with the fact that EVERY ONE of the scenes is available for absolutely free on tubes and torrents...well, it doesn't work real well.

I'd take Puma Swede for instance...and create a website with "episodes" of her "adventures". And she would shoot for NOBODY except her own site. At least for a couple of years. And her site would be VERY hardcore. And the content would be protected.

That would make money. A lot of money. And you can insert Puma Swedes name for any of the other party/content/stripper girls in Porn Valley. They are all branded...hell almost "over-branded" if that's possible.

But you can't make a fucking dime on any of them the way things stand right now. :(

They are all hot, we love to watch them fuck, and if this was 8 years ago we would all be millionaires just running the hosted galleries on our tgp's.

The approach to this needs to change.

Have you tried this one?
http://www.wmrecorder.com/demo.php

It popped up when I googled keywords you suggested earlier. Was linked to from a surfers board and they said it works perfectly.

Wow am I still reading on GFY? :error

Great post and thread :thumbsup
I did quote that part of your post, because I have said that too a couple of months ago. Most people here don't realize that. The people who are doing this are commiting real fraud and can end up in jail for a long time. "Just like in the normal world". Ripping of the surfers has its price.... :2 cents:

Lol, are you kidding man? I'm sure you know as well as I do, your average pornstar spends all their time partying, snorting coke, and fucking. No way they are capable of running their own sites. The few that do run their own sites only do so because they have someone else doing all the work, usually the poor hubby.

I never blamed it on encoding - as I've stated two times already, even raw unencoded footage didn't look as great as I had hoped for. I blame it mostly on camera (1/3" matrix against 35mm on film or similar sized matrixes of high end digital cameras), and lower dynamic range (7 stops against 11 of high end digital cameras and 13-14 on film). And lower resolution of course - 1280x720 against 4K .

Don't know why I hoped our new camera will produce footage that will look close to high end production to begin with :) That was silly I guess.

I understand what you're saying about the the lightning though. Yes, that's part of the problem, but no lighting will give you the same results you get with 4K resolution, 1 inch matrix and 12 stops of dynamic range cameras.

I directed several shoots myself when we started shooting with the new HD camera couple of months ago, check this one for example:

http://media.ferrocash.com/video/ero...eland_g701.wmv
(no action, just girl changing several pairs of pantyhose of different colors to check how camera will handle different colors, textures, details etc)

To rule lights out of equation I lit the scene enough, and still image is not good enough imo to view at full HD. After downresing to about 900 pixels it looks fine but not at 1280. I've even intentionally overlit some other scenes to check if that will reduce grain, but no. Still a bit grainy and not crisp enough at full HD.

Again, maybe I'm just being overly critical.

Jesus dude... I clicked on that clip like 10 minutes ago, surfed all my myspace profiles and came back and it was only @ 45% buffered.

Listen man - Subject, lighting, format. In that order.

Translation to the oposite: Ugly overshot drugged out girl with bad skin, with 1/10th the light as an industrial film, with a consumer quality 1 chip HD camera = not worthy of HD. Or SD for that matter. No offense to your clip, it just came up after 10 minutes of buffering. She's a little muffin-top chunkster!!! Her boobs are good and she's actually kinda cute. Good casting.

I think your lighting is very good - nice an even and alot of Ambient which I love. But... it's still 1/10th the amount of light of a mainstream set. I like the mirror, I have one in my studio too - perfect for conserving and bouncing the light if you can keep the models from staring at themselves all day long. I'm guessing that you are at about 3.1 f-stop just think how good it would look @ f-8!!!

Hey EB - post an HD clip of some of that stuff I shot for you in Hawaii in 1440 X 1080i to show something with enough light worthy of HD. I was using two 4x4 gold reflectors in full sun and part-cloudy. If I was a mainstream shooter I would have used two 12 foot X 12 foot reflectors and a 10K on a high scaffold for fill depending on where the sun was. But, since I was tucked behind a rock and our lookout yelled "Nice Tushy!!!" whenever someone came strolling by... I did what I could.

Anyways... this is almost off subject here but - Talent, lighting, format, delivery and marketing. In that order. That's what I think will make or break a paysite these days. DRM sounds like the wave of the future too. But, I try not to think about all this too much - worry just gives me a headache. It will be safe to jerk off again I'm sure of it. Heck, I'm back up to 85% of my normal sales today. Every day thousands of girls turn 18 and looking to make a quick legal $100 Grand or more - and every day thousands of guys get sick of jerking off to the same old porno. My job is connect the 2, everything else is just entertainment.

They are absolutely partying their asses off. But there is no reason that you can't party, snort coke, and fuck...and not make a lot of money. I'm proof of that! LOL!

Seriously, I wasn't implying that they run their own sites. I was saying that IF someone with a creative direction, the skills, the knowledge, and the contacts took those girls and made sites for them with real focus and direction...and didn't have them shooting for every company every day, and protected the content from tubes and torrents, THEN money could be made.

Claudia-Marie wasn't in the adult business at all...except for being with me. I had her shoot for Naughty America in Jan. of 2007 just to see if she could do it. The feedback from their members was through the roof and Mark and Laura wanted her to come back and shoot, shoot, shoot.

But I said no, no, no. And started shooting myself for her own site. We started out with everything I had learned all these years. Having run tgp's since 1998 (real ones, not scripts) I knew what sold and what didn't. So we didn't do any of that softcore bullshit. We went straight to work and competed against the big sites. I had no desire to start another solo girl "Look at me with a dildo for the thousandth time site".

It exploded. Made more money than even I though it could. I was sure that members would get bored with a single girl. Nope. Not when you present it correctly and make sure there is interraction with the girl and the customers. (And that's something that tubes, torrents, and unfortunately megas sites can't do)

In my humble opinion...those girls in Porn Vallery are the equivalent of the true "porn stars" back in the 1970's and 1980's. They are FAR better known than the girls who shoot only for the DVD companies. Nobody buys those anymore. It's all "net" baby.

These girls are seen by millions and millions of people everyday. They are money...but not the way things are now. Right now they are just useless...very hot, but useless for making money.

And as you are saying...they only see that quick $1500 and the next party to go to. I know how that can be. And it's a big time dead end street for them. Claudia-Marie has been in the biz for a little over a year. She doesn't strip. She doesn't hook. She shoots twice a month for her OWN site.

She drives a new corvette, lives in this million dollar house, and doesn't have to worry about money. Recurring billing is a beautiful thing. And yeah, I know the idea is to pay the bitches one time and send 'em on their way to the strip club so they never have a concept of real money.

Well, that could be done too. You could take one and put her under contract. Pay her to shoot 5 days a week and work her ass off. Pay her everytime for every shoot. Almost like a "Contract" girl. But you'd have to real good. And you would have to be able to come up with interesting storylines.

We use a lot of comedy and pure cheesiness. It seems to work great.

Point is, the girls are getting paid their $1500. Production costs are still there for these companies (production crew, location, male talent, 2257, food, drink, etc.) and it's no longer paying off.

A few years ago surfers didn't even realize what an affiliate program is. Now, thanks to the "Webmaster Click Here For $$$" links all over hosted galleries and tours...plus the complete and total STUPIDITY of giving away every secret of the business (what affiilate programs are, what x-sells are, etc. , etc. ) to surfers right here on GFY...well, the surfer now knows the game is afoot.

So as some have said in this thread...to beat the tubes and torrents you have first have something unique that people want. Then you have to protect it.

I can tell you that making sales for the big companies is getting harder and harder and harder to do. Surfers now know how things work. They used to join a site and just stay. They didn't know that the hot girl with the big tits and big round ass was also on 200 other sites fucking too. And now they know she can be found on 200 FREE full scenes on a tube. That's a tough sell. Especially when the surfer can't talk to her on the site he's paying for.

Interraction is a good thing. Can't be duplicated.

most internet users don't have the speed to stream 720 hd much less full 1080 hd

Right, that's why I encode in 3 bit rates: 3000kbps, 1200kbps, 500kbps.

Pick your poison. And jerk it till it squirts. And try not to get any cum on the monitor! Right Robbie?

By the way... nice fish in your Avatar - what kind is it?

thank's it's a Jack Crevalle

you talking HD or SD?

i asume SD if your largest bitrate is 3000?

kankerlang verhaal

Actually I don't think a lot of my content is worth protecting. When we started shooting for the content store market we were hindered by the amount we could afford to spend on a scene. So we produced cut price porn. Also we shot porn for general sale, if we made it very different and stylized it would not of sold as much. We went for the easy fast money.

The Retro porn site Astral Blue will be using a lot of the tips Robbie is passing on. :thumbsup