Looking at buying an exclusive site but the master DV tapes have been lost. Bad Idea?
 

I know for a fact this guy owns the rights to all his content that he shot and is not trying to scam me but this one particualr site had all its DV tapes "lost in transit" at some point. He has average quality rips of the videos but there are no masters. How much would this affect the price of the site? (If you have never bought or sold exclusive content, please keep your comments sane)

Paperwork lost as well?

nope ... all releases and ids are current

Are the current encodes done well, at a good bit rate?
Do they still have the unedited avi files or whatnot?

Current encodes are of average quality. I will ask about the avi files. Thanks :thumbsup

Sounds fishy. You don't just lose ALL your dv tapes. Only a idiot would ship them all in the same box, and anyone dumb enough to do that, I would not want to do business with.

Could be because there is something on the tapes he does not want you to see?

Not to mention, if you also get the footage raw, you can open other sites with it down the road. If you already get them encoded, you are stuck with that watermark.

They are not watermarked. It was his very first project at the time and he didn't understand that backup copies were essential.

I would'nt mind raw tape loss if the guy has uncompressed avi. files. Wmv/mpeg at 3,5-4 kbps would be good too, that's just enough for online. But that's not enough if you ever want to sell the content on DVD market.

I agree with DWB though regarding the tapes. At least an uncompressed avi backup is a must nowadays, hard to believe someone 'd lost all tapes without even having a backup.

He was brand new to the biz when they were lost. Thanks for the input :)

If it is wmv, I think it should be: 3 - 4,5 Mbps

Is the content provider going to shoot new video content for you??

id still be extremely careful dude.