Welcome to Dorado Films, your cult movie connection. Dorado brings you the best in spaghetti western, euro-crime, euro-spy and exploitation DVDs. Follow the journey as our production staff will jot down notes and thoughts as each project develops from concept to final retail product.
Only waiting for one final element to arrive. Been busy working on covers and Blu-ray menus. The Italian Audio we had was not good enough quality and a new track won't arrive from Europe in time, so Italian audio has been cut from the project. Two posters have arrived and are being processed for the covers.
MENU UPDATE: We are trying something brand new on this project... there will be two on disc methods of viewing chapters. One accessible while the film is playing and one from the main menu structure. The Advanced Chapters Menus, as we are calling them, will display the entirety of each chapter (at 24x speed)... enabling you to pinpoint exactly what scene you are looking for before selecting a chapter. Excited to see the feedback from the final product and if the Advanced Chapters Menus are a feature worth adding in future projects. This will be of interest to those who had any slow navigation no previous releases, as we have removed a LOT of the graphical requirements from the buttons and placed them into a video instead. This should make the whole experience a lot snappier and more responsive.
What have we finished?
Feature Film video
English Audio is captured, in sync, digitally restored
Planning has finished up and we are waiting for some final elements to arrive. We have received the first draft of an article for the general printed booklet and are editing said article. We have pulled a few scenes and some frame grabs out of the print for publicity purposes. All-in-all, we are proceeding nicely!
What have we finished?
Feature Film video
English Audio is captured and in sync
English subtitles
Current Tasks:
We are digitally restoring the English Audio track
Front cover
Brazilian Portuguese translation of Subtitles (15%)
Spanish translation of Subtitles (10%)
Audio track in Spanish is enroute, as well as a poster
Finalizing the pre-sale information, getting ready for posting on DoradoFilms.Video
Tasks not yet started:
Italian translation of Subtitles
Find and analyze Italian audio track to determine if we can synchronize and add into release
Analyze Spanish audio track to determine if we can synchronize and add into release
Several printed artwork pieces have yet to be started
Edited 10/4/2017: We were told that we should differentiate between Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese... so we made that appropriate change.
We are just getting the planning phase of this project finished. Our tentative release window will be in stores at the end of 2017 or early 2018 and we have an internal goal of shipping any pre-sale purchases (if we decide to do a pre-sale) in November (2017). We will be trying something slightly new and be posting an approximately weekly status update (might be every other week on particularly busy stretches)
What have we finished?
We have captured and balanced the colors of the 35mm print
We have done some minor digital restoration (a few trouble spots could not be fixed without losing footage, so we left untouched)
What remains to be done?
English Subtitles (about 20% finished)
Subtitle translation into Spanish
Subtitle translation into Italian
Find and analyze Italian audio track to determine if we can synchronize and add into release
Find and analyze Spanish audio track to determine if we can synchronize and add into release
As you can tell by the above video, your experience may vary greatly with this disc based on what Blu-ray player you use.
Why is this happening on some players?
We have always wanted our menus to stand out, to be a part of the presentation of the product and not an afterthought. As such, we put forth a great deal of time designing them to be visually interesting and appropriate for the film (or films) on the disc. That said, this sluggish problem experienced by some Blu-ray players shows we went too far this time.
Each underline is unique and hand drawn for the buttons, no one button underline is the same. The background elements are all scanned, real life objects. We even went so far as to individually stylize each button's text so each letter is ever so slightly different from the others.
In short, we focused so much on the style and visual elements we neglected focus on the speed of navigation.
Sadly, all the graphics take a decent amount of processing power and a decently quick RAM bus to make a snappy experience while using the menus... and some Blu-ray players just don't have the power to display the graphics in a quick manner.
Is the disk broken?
No. Everyone we have talked to thus far have been able to play both films and play all trailers or each individually. All the subtitles are able to be controlled via the menu structure. All audio is controllable via the menu structure. Everything works, just on some players it works SLOW.
What is the plan?
Obviously moving forward we will be ditching our extravagant menu design on future Blu-ray discs for a simple, easy to load menu structure that focuses on speed.
What to do if your player is sluggish? First, we apologize for our mis-step. We sympathize with the frustration this would cause. If you didn't know what was happening you might keep pressing the "Enter" button on your remote and enter a cycle of trying to display the sub-menu and then trying to hide the sub-menu. That would be aggravating and we apologize for this confusion that it has caused. Second, if you decide that the printed artwork, the three films, and the trailers are not worth dealing with the aggravation of a slow-to-respond menu please get in touch with us. You can email us at production@doradofilms.com. Third, if you want to help us to avoid problems in the future and help us provide a list of fully functional Blu-ray players, you could fill out this very short form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfe5uH39u2AdG7-PAyhLk5WB2DMH3A2q_gRjZbuZY2d1gQfcg/viewform?usp=sf_link
We will use the results from the above form to find problematic Blu-ray players and try to acquire some of them for our internal testing process. This should help future products work on a wider range of blu-ray players.
It has been a very busy (roughly) 3 weeks! I thought I would talk about a few things we have discovered so far from our Pre-Sale website.
Shipping charges are a big deal to people. While this might seem to make sense, we were trying to be super transparent with our pricing and chose not to "mask" shipping fees inside of the product cost. We made the mistake of estimating a total weight of 9 ounces for the entire order shipped to the customer. We felt that was a safe estimate, not looking ahead of time at what the cost of shipping a 9 ounce package was through USPS for international. The cost difference was staggering, about 9 dollars on average more expensive than 8 ounces. We had to quickly get a bunch of samples together and try to choose the smallest weight we felt we could safely set for shipping. We took a lot of flack online for our "shipping charges"... we did not mind fixing them as we would have paid the shipping fee directly to USPS and would not have been able to pocket any of the extra 9 dollars anyway. Several assumed we were up to no good sadly, it took some PR work to build back some trust. Good lesson learned the hard way.
Individually numbered products create interesting problems. We have had to grope with the idea of "should we allow one user to order multiple products" in one fashion or another from the start of this project. We thought it fair if we allowed multiple orders but you had to order it one by one. However, we then came into the problem of shipping single boxes to the same address is more expensive (with box cost and shipping cost) than combining orders. Our internal discussions prior to the launch settled on the disbelief anyone would want to order more than one and it wasn't a priority to fix. We have since found out that is not the case and are in the process of having the shipping portion of the shopping experience re-coded.
Security is misunderstood. We made sure that our entire pre-sale site was encrypted by SSL and made the conscious decision to NOT process any credit card numbers ourselves. Braintree (https://www.braintreepayments.com/) was a perfect solution for our project, however there has been an interesting PR problem that has grown from using this gateway. People assume because of the way the process of checking out LOOKS that WE process credit cards. We have attempted to clarify how this works several times, however it has not changed the trepidation of several and some very outspoken critics of the Pre-Sale in general.
Braintree has interesting quirks. We have also discovered Braintree is an interesting solution that has some very specific quirks. It took a while for PayPal to be integrated (which is very interesting to me as Braintree is a division of PayPal) and PayPal's checkout process is very problematic. The shipping address has to perfectly match an address on file with PayPal, sometimes to the capitalization. Also, we just (hopefully) fixed a recurring challenge for some customers where the Region / State of the shipping address has to be a 2 digit abbreviation in order for the payment to be accepted. Several would write out the full state (like "Oregon", etc) and those orders would be refused by PayPal. We don't know how much lost sales this has resulted in, but we are confident it has been frustrating for many.
We have several more little lessons that we have been finding along the way, but I wanted to share just a few of the big ones today. Overall, we are pleased with the way DoradoFilms.Video has been operating thus far. We would have had to price these Blu-ray's at about 50 USD (not including shipping) if we had used a marketplace like Amazon, Ebay, etc. So, it is our hope that as we work through the little bugs and confusion our customers will continue to give us the patience and benefit of the doubt as we try to save everyone about 20 USD per Blu-ray.
