The Value of Experience and My Slap in the Face – StressControl Update

When I wrote the project plan for StressControl the goal was to get the thing finished by the end of July so I’d have a full month to prepare for the launch at the end of August.

Now as anyone with experience knows, the road to success is not a straight road, and this project is no exception.

It was going so smoothly too.

We shot the 2 day workshop with Philip on the weekend of the 29th and 30th of June as planned.

I was pleased once we had that in the bag considering it took me 2 years to talk Philip into doing it! (I had to convince him that this wasn’t just a project to make money).

Anyway, I spent the week following the shoot getting all the footage editing into the 8 DVDs that would form the course. That all went well and the footage looked great, we were on schedule.

Then, disaster struck.

When I tested the first DVD in an actual DVD player it looked very different when playing it on a computer.

To cut a long story short, the lovely Sarah Staar who I have known for a little while now identified the problem as being a difference in refresh rate between the camera that recorded the footage and the projector that was displaying the slides during the workshop.

She is a bit of a pro when it comes to video production.

When we screened the footage on the editing computer, everything was fine, but when we tested the real DVDs, you can see some serious flicker on the projector screen.

While technically you could still watch it, it’s just not good enough for us to put out a product that isn’t of a certain standard.

The key question you have to ask yourself as a business owner (I believe) is ‘if I bought this would I be delighted?’.

Now you might say that’s subjective (which it is) and you might say that totally doesn’t work if you have poor standards yourself! I however happen to have exacting standards which is why it works for me.

To cut the second part of the story short we’ve had to go back and completely re-edit all the footage to fix this problem. While what we’ve done is very effective, it has taken absolutely ages and hence put back the launch schedule.

Having said that, it’s not the end of July yet, so it’s entirely possible that we’ll make the original deadline.

This post was simply designed to show a bit of transparency and show that few people are perfect. Yes even me ; ).

Getting things right first time doesn’t test you as much as if you have a set back.

And as my old pal Les Brown quotes “A set back is a setup for a comeback!”.

Had any experiences like this? What did you do about them?

Share them with me on the new Chris Coney International Facebook page.