“I had a heavy dose of cinema growing up,” says India-born Debdoot Das. “I wrote my first script when I was 11. Living in central Calcutta, which has a really old film industry, everyone knew me. I was a curiosity. To humor me the movie people gave me strips of negatives to play with. People used to say, ‘One day you will be a great filmmaker.’”

So it wasn’t mere fancy for the movie-loving son of a photographer and nephew of an actress well known in Satyajit Ray films to imagine himself directing his own feature. It is slightly more improbable that what has brought Das within reach of his dream is the unexpected success of his dance instruction video, “The Quick and Dirty Guide to Salsa.”

Made on a Mac with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro, “The Quick and Dirty Guide to Salsa” has been the highest-selling dance video on Amazon.com, leading to distribution deals with Navarre and NetFlix.

“Everyone was filming the class. But my friends noticed that only my footage was really useful. So they said, ‘Why don’t you make a real video, and we’ll buy it?’”

“I became my own label based on the success of one video,” marvels Das. “And that guarantees entry in the brick-and-mortar stores.” Now, two more videos — featuring intermediate and advanced salsa lessons — are in the works.

Capturing the Moves

The project wasn’t conceived as a strategic move to launch Das’ film career. In fact, it wasn’t planned at all.

“I’d travel to Miami to take these workshops from the best salsa dancers in the U.S.,” relates Das, who’s been spicing up his steps for six years. “We’d learn so many new moves we were overwhelmed, and I didn’t want to forget them.

“So I took my camera. Everyone was filming the class. But my friends noticed that only my footage was really useful — people could actually learn from it. So they said, ‘Why don’t you make a real video, and we’ll buy it?’”

Das hired Cuban-American salsa teacher Gigi Leon to appear in the video. Although she was just 16 when he first met her and 19 when he began shooting, Das sensed that she was right for his project. “We had a lot of people to choose from,” he says. “I picked Gigi because I had a feeling her presence would be incredible — and this turned out to be true. She is a forceful and spectacular teacher.”

For Das, who earned his stripes as a film editor in Bollywood and Hollywood, and his tech savvy at Internet startups, approaching the project creatively wasn’t especially daunting. But as a self-funded first-timer, he had to keep a strict budget. “The coolest thing about this project is that I could do it with about $1,000 worth of Apple software and my Power Mac G4,” says Das.

Scoring in Post

“The difficulty of doing a production like this one are the logistics in post,” says Das. “And that’s where Apple scores big. The tools are so evolved. In Final Cut Pro you can color-correct your footage without spending $30,000 for a DaVinci workstation. And you can edit three tracks of video simultaneously.

“In DVD Studio Pro you can author and compress multiple tracks to work perfectly and fit on a DVD 5. Being able to do that is a massive deal. It would have literally been impossible a few years ago.”

Das fairly crows about the snazzy features he was able to craft in DVD Studio Pro. “We have the only six-minute motion menu in the industry,” he says. “We took a song and looped it with the entire dance sequence, so the menu gives a feel of what the whole video is about.”

He continues, “As a dancer, I’m a user of this video too. And I have no patience to wait. I made it to use while you’re practicing salsa — you can go really fast to the place where you want to see a particular move. The navigation menu lets you click on the headers from every page to get to the main menu, so you don’t have to go forward and back.”

Next page: Sneaking Up on Success