OK, I just got off the phone with the company (Allied Vaughn) that has all these archived commercials. It turns out they are not actually a part of GM, but rather a outside company that has all of the dealership archives. They are a donation based company and according to her, all auto mfr's are required to send them their commercials, videos, etc when they are no longer needed or used. They have over 50,000 items in their archives and she assured me they will have what I/we are looking for. If this sounds a little scetchy, don't be alarmed. Before this process could even begin, General Motors had to sign off on this request before it could even get off the ground. Not only did GM sign off, they waived the licensing fees because of the fact I am obtaining this information for 73-87.com.
Here is what is going to happen next...
I gave her my credit card info and told her I wanted three hours of research time. They will begin the research process sometime this afternoon and call me when they are finished or when the three hours is up. Once they have all the commercials gathered up, they will then burn three VHS timecode window burn tapes (there will be a timeclock on the video) and mail one to me, one to a GM, and one for themselves. Once the tape is in my possesion, I have to view it and then get back to Allied Vaughn and GM and tell them which ones I want on my final copy (It will be all of them of course
). GM will then view the ones I want and decide if they can give them to me or not. Apparently GM does not like to give out commercials with songs or people in them, according to AV, it is for copyright reasons.
Once AV has its final approval from GM they will then burn the commercials to VHS or DVD, and mail me the final copy. Once I get the final copy, I will make additional copies and mail them out for all who have paid.
One more question for everyone, do we all want DVD's or are them some people who still want VHS tapes? I would prefer to do all of them in the same format, and my personal choice would be DVD. Let me know your thoughts
Thanks, sorry for the long post.