Anyone know the math (or know of a calculator) that will help me with balancing .wav with MPEG? I would imagine the bitrate that I could go with on the video would depend on the amount of audio I have.

I do MTV style music videos and “booking videos” for bands. They typically want just your basic DVD and an AVI version on DV tape.
Booking videos seems to be the way to go. Usually a compilation done at one or more locations with the audiences reactions and an interview/bio thrown in somehow.

Hey Fleshpainter....

Long time....any new videos to see ?

Stonefield

Will be posting a couple soon... Just did a Hip-Hop thing recently, not exactly my specialty since I'm about as Gothic as they get. might have to change servers though, mine doesn't seem to be streaming too well.

"Booking Videos" sounds like a good idea. If you don't mind me asking, do you charge a set rate for that or an hourly?

I do this all the time for local bands. Go out and videotape a few of their shows in diffrent venues. Edit together a 5-10 minute promo video. Make them a nice CD-ROM with the video, some audio samples from albums if they have any original music. Put on some web links, contact info, sponsors, pictures....whatever they want. Then they send out the CD-ROM's to record labels and other clubs that they want to play at. I actually got a call from a record executive at Curb records a while back when he saw on of the promos I did, he was really impressed and thought it was a great idea.
The big problem is though that most bands don't have a lot of money to spend on stuff like this, luckily I have hooked up with some of the top name bands in the area that actually do make pretty good money.

Some Sample pictures here of the CD-ROM

Anyway I could get a ballpark on what you charge for these type of DVD's?

We have many diffrent packages ranging from a few hundred dollars up to thousands of dollars. For most of the bands that I have been with for a while I just charge them a flat hourly fee for shooting, editing and putting together the CD's or DVD's. Then they also do all the duplication through me as well.
A lot of times I won't charge them very much, maybe $10-$20 an hour, mainly because I have known and been with the band for many years. There are some bands that I know definately have the potential to hit the big time and land a record deal, hopefully they won't forget about me when that happens and can throw some extra cash my way :)

Thanks for the information.

I used to rent practice space to bands and yes, they're always broke. It's not about the money, it's about the publicity you can get from them. I try to get $8-1200.00 per finished minute.
You can look at some samples HERE.
Take a look at “2 Shae Out-Takes” to see some behind the scenes techniques.

Nice job. That little girl has some talent. The actual music video has an old skool BET 80s feel. Nice beats. Good personality. Good camera work, nice editing.

Flesh, you in Orlando?

Casselberry... the client for 2 Shae is in Sanford. BET is I believe the final destination for that particular video.
It's not always what I would want or do myself, I work to the specifications of the artist. They set the theme and/or mood based on my showing them the same clip with different looks applied to it, that way I'm guaranteed that the client will be happy with the results.

Ah yes. I am very familiar with Casselberry and Sanford. Actually, the Sanford Airport got hit hard with the first hurricane. We ended up staying up the road from Casselberry after the second cane hit Did Casselberry ever managed to get rid of the adult clubs? I know the guy running for Mayor was pushing hard to get rid of them.

God, I miss Orlando. I miss Florida.

Thomas31:
The math is really simple. Divide 600 by the amount of minutes of material you have. The resulting number is the overall bitrate you have to meet or keep under in order to fit the material on a 4.37GB DVD blank. For example, if you have 90 minutes of stuff, your bitrate has to be about 600 / 90 = 6.7Mb/sec. Dolby digital stereo takes 0.2Mb/sec of that, leaving 6.5 for the MPEG2 portion. Raw audio runs about 1.5Mb/sec, so if you used raw audio you would only have a video bitrate of 5.2Mb/sec. A very good MPEG2 encoder would give you excellent results at 5.2, while a cheapo one wouldn't.

Cinemacraft encoder is awesome. Multipasses are extremely nice (try a six pass CCE encode, you cant tell a difference fromt he source.)