Here is the full story straight from the taper:
http://www.seekup.org/
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Myself and my 2 friends are the tapers of the the now traded 8/20/05 show. My buddy who had the video equipment and did the majority of the actual taping was very reluctant to trade the show. After a few months of pleeding with him I was able to convince him to trade it and get the footage out to the DMB community. I felt compelled to try and give back to all of you who have given me so much over the years.
The conditions that we agreed on were as follows: that we used all our own footage and pictures for the menu's, that the three of us would not be identified as the tapers (an alias production co. name was fine, but he didn't want any legal backlash I suppose), and that we put our own unique intro onto the DVD prior to the Main Menu screen.
After about a month and a half of painstaking synch work, menu work, and video work I thought it was at a point where it was ready. I had contacted John Semon prior to this to tell him I had the vid and was hoping he could help me get it out into the community, maybe through a tree. He was extremely pushy about it, but I took my time nonetheless.
I finally sent him the dvd's thinking that all was well in the world. He got back to me a few days later, telling me that there was a synch problem at the end of the first disc, and that there was a portion of Crash missing. (I had already told him about Crash, and how I got around the 50 seconds or so of the song we had to cut out but that didn't matter.) He asked if I could re-work the synch and get it back to him. I said no problem, but that it could take some time as I was in the middle of moving from NYC to Washington DC for a new job. This was back in August. At that time he asked if it would be okay if he gave the video to someone else to synch and author and I said I would prefer if we did it ourselves (because of the conditions listed above). I asked for his patience in the matter, telling him that the finshed product would be great.
Imagine my shock when I was browsing the antsmarching.org boards on day and came across this post. I got in touch with Tim Brown and told him I was the taper and asked how he got ahold of the video. He said John gave it to him to author. I didn't ask him not to trade it, because the damage was already done at that point, but he said he would send me a copy of his version. I got it, watched it hoping it would be just as good or better than mine, but it wasn't. I have no issues with Tim, it's not his fault, he had no idea what had happend with it, but it still bugged me.
The more I think about it, the more it bothers me. It put a really bad taste in my mouth in trusting some people in the taping community, especially after what happened when I initially inquired about making the DVD (that's another crazy story). But here I am, a new taper/author, and the guy who I thought was my mentor takes my work, says it's junk and gives it to someone else to work on. Just makes me mad.
So there it is, anything you can do to help would be great. I actually dug the footage out of my hard drive last week to start working on again, and hopefully get a finished product to trade out there.
Thanks for your help.
-Nick
