I work very closely with a Video Production Company here in Southern California. In fact, I use to be part owner of the company.

Lately, every single client has wanted a Blu-ray version of their video. As a matter of fact, several clients have gone with us over a competitor strictly based on the fact that we offered Blu-ray. You can no longer charge extra for it either, since an increasing number of production companies are offering it as standard. We use Adobe Encore to create our Blu-ray discs and using the templates I created, it makes the authoring process streamlined and extremely efficient. The best part is, the clients are blown away by the motion graphics of the menu before they even start watching the video, definitely setting the tone. We will probably be investing in the Matrox CompressHD to speed up the h264 encodes, since that is currently the process that eats up so much time (close to 36 hours for a couple hours of video).

Despite the increasing number people watching videos online, clients still like to receive a product that they can hold in their hands, and isn't at risk of being unavailable if the internet goes down. I think an online version of their video would be a great addition to a tangible product, but won't be replacing it anytime soon.

Presentation is also important. If you are going to be delivering Blu-ray discs to your clients, make sure you use the new Blu-ray cases. We get ours from Tapeandmedia.com, but I'm sure you can find them at other places. Since the new case is a different size, we designed a Photoshop action that converts all the elements of our Cover templates to fit the new specifications, which is extremely useful when needing to create a Standard DVD and Blu-ray version of your project. You simply create the cover once, and let the action create the 2 different sizes.

With so many of our clients asking for Blu-ray, we had to create a process that was streamlined and yet still maintained our extremely high standards of quality. Let me know if you have any questions about our process, I would be glad to help.

Hi Jon,

I'd love to know how to create the action to convert a Photoshop template from standard DVD size to Blu-ray size. What are the Blu-ray dimensions anyway?

Many thanks,

Gary

Well basically I record an action that scales the elements down a little, then moves them into the correct position.

It actually involves a little more complex work on my end, since Photoshop seems to have a bug with it's action recorder where if you scale an object which already has a scale of lets say 75%, and you scale it to 90% of that size (so its now 67.5% of the original size), the action is recorded as 90% of the original size... so if you go back and play the action, instead of the object shrinking by 10%, it grows to 90% of the original size. So I actually have to do a calculation and change the size to 67.5% of 75%, and it changes the size to an incorrect one, however when the action is played back, it changes it to the correct one... a little confusing, but just a little extra effort I put in to make life easier for our customers.

You can usually download the specs of the blu-ray cover size from the place you purchase the cases from. For example, here is the link to tapeandmedia's page where they sell the nexpak blu-ray cases. At the bottom, they have a pdf of the specs:

http://www.tapeandmedia.com/detail.asp?product_id=BLU-RAY

I was watching the Gadget guy here in Oz and he was explaing this new disc.
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