Any money in video encoding?
 

I've just ordered a quad core CPU finally to replace my E6400 and I've recently switched over to ubuntu and have been writing some tools for helping automate video encoding, thumbnail creation, clip creation and basically every step you could possibly think of from the time you take it off your camera to when you use it.

If you were to give me a raw video straight from your camera and I gave it back to you in several formats (MP4, divx, wmv, x264, flv) and complete with something like a 30 second clip which is say 3 10 second grabs from various parts of the video all in multiple resolutions and plenty of screencaps complete with thumbs and working on being able to offer more.

Is there anybody looking for somebody to do this kind of thing? Also wondering what kind of price would be fair. I can even automate sending it BACK to you either mail or FTP or .zip or .tar packages.

I know of a few content producers not too far from me that have been telling me what a PITA it is to encode all of the various formats they need/use.

Any thoughts on somebody thinking about offering this service soon?

PLenty of money to be made, just make sure you know your trade before trying to make money from it. Otherwise you're just wasting people's time and burning lots of bridges

Really big money dude, imagine making money in small amount of time :)

I plan on going over things quite a few times with my local guys or people I do some other things for and offering free or cheap labor to a few people at first to basically hold my hand through understanding the needs of this market. Since I do a LOT with web videos already i know the tricks such as high bit rate beats high resolution practically every time (unless high bitrate and high res are BOTH involved.

I've even started playing around with CLUSTERING so encoding very large files will actually be able to be done incredibly fast once I get 2-3 quad core systems pieced together.

I know how much picayune work goes into quality video encoding since I do a lot of video encoding for my self and some clients. Recently, I was curious about what some of the existing outsourcing companies were charging for similar services. So I recently asked a company that serves the adult market what he was charging for similar services, and the price was so low that I was shocked. So even if you automate the process significantly I can't imagine there is a lot of money to be made unless you have have high volume and steady customers. Then again, if you don't mind the laborious aspect of it and you have the computers already, and are sitting nearby in your office anyway so that you can set batch processes up and attend to them from time to time to make sure there are no crashes or errors , I imagine that whatever you are charging is almost all profit.

To encode a MPEF2 (DVD or Raw) into to WMV I have seen prices as low as $5 and at the same time I know a company that paid 5K to encode a 30 min clip to some one who is considered a guru. i think he spent like a week on this 30 min clip.