Book Status… and missing DVD’s

Well, it looks like copies of the book have started to ship. Sort of.

Unfortunately this isn’t the good news that I was hoping for because apparently any books that have shipped out so far were all missing the DVD that is supposed to accompany the book! Grr.

Here’s the full story, as far as I can tell: The book was sent back to the states (after being printed in China) to my publisher’s warehouse where the DVD’s were then supposed to be pasted into the back of the book. (Yeah, I know it seems a bit silly that they just didn’t bind the DVD’s into the book at the printer’s, but don’t get me started on that whole fiasco). Revised ship date is scheduled to be on June 16th. However, in the meantime, my publisher tells me that:

“a small number of the books were mistakenly shipped out without the DVDs. Our Inventory Management and Customer Service departments are running reports of all already sold copies and will draft and send a letter explaining the situation to each of the customers who mistakenly received a copy without the DVD.”

I don’t know how ‘small’ a number this actually is – hopefully not too many. Hey, maybe they’ll become collector’s items :-).

At any rate, if you were indeed one of the lucky few that got the book w/o the DVD, presumably you’ll be hearing from someone… although I’m not sure exactly how they know who you are. Big Brother is watching. I’ll try to get a contact email for someone at my publisher as well and post it here.

What’s actually on the DVD? Primarily it contains (as with the 1st edition) digital copies of all the images that are featured within the book. I also included some of the (Shake) scripts that were used to put together the example images. More importantly, a couple of the studios allowed us to include digital images from a couple of the case-studies. By far the most extensive of these is a shot from Ep3 of Star Wars – we were able to get the full shot (all the elements as well as the Shake script used to put it together) which should give a nice idea of how a real-world shot comes together. There are a few other miscellaneous pieces – some sample bluescreen footage that was generously provided by fxphd and The Pixelcorps.

So, that’s where we stand. Presumably this is all rolling along well now and the book will be shipping in less than a week. Thanks for everybody’s patience and thanks, too, for all the interest that people are showing in the new edition – I hope you all find it useful!

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