Blu-Ray for Mac: Past the Tipping Point

[Andy Mees]

Nice! Christopher, does it use your Elgato Turbo.264 HD to power (or assist) the encode? That would be awesome.

[Jason Lowe]

Originally Posted by Robert Lane

This so-called "new" Blu-Ray option is a joke.

While it's hardly DVD SP, I wouldn't call it a "joke".

Apple - Final Cut Studio - Compressor 3.5 - Streamlined Encoding & Delivery

Watch the "burning a disc" movie on the page above. Looks like compressor has become iDVD. Templates, chapters you can add yourself (unlike Toast) and the ability to customize the templates.

No, you can't add pop up menus or BD Live content, but it's a huge step up from Toast or what Apple offered before, which was nothing.

I just gotta figure out if any of my old licenses qualify me for upgrade pricing...

[Chuck Spaulding]

Originally Posted by Torv Carlsen

Great thread everyone, but I believe that ALL disk based video delivery will be a thing of the past within 2 years. The handwriting is already on the wall. DVD sales are have been plummeting for years, and Blu-Ray is barely a blip on the market.... Most HD content is already being delivered by your cable provider via "On Demand" or through sources like AppleTV or Netflix, Amazon and others on-line which is where I frankly am getting most of my HD content.

Apple's recent inclusion of SD card slots on their Macbook Pro line indicates to me a migration away from disk based media delivery in its entirety. I read somewhere (I honestly don't remember where) that film distributors are already planning for the eventual distribution of HD films on SD cards because they're small and really cheap. I frankly can see that even software installs will be on SD cards instead of the optical disks we use today.

Apple has done this kind of thing before... I can see a time when Super-drives and DVD (and Blu-Ray) will be a thing of the past.

There's a lot there to refute. The notion that DVD is dead is truly mind blowing. DVD was, and still is the fastest and best selling medium in history at more than $27 BILLION in revenue this year. That beats the Movie box office and television revenues combined. Most of the studios that thought on-line sales [VOD, streaming or downloading] would supplant their DVD sales have lost a ton of money. The question that they should have asked is not whether the Internet would play a significant role but WHEN. The majority of media [moving images] is still distributed and paid for via DVD and television.

A primary reason for the availability of HD content online is because it has been too difficult and costly for enough producers to distribute HD any other way. With channels like NETFLIX, U-verse and VIOS that is changing. But these distribution channels are not streaming or downloading HD from the Internet, they are using VPN's [managed networks] to deliver HD content via IP. Although there is a strong adoption rate for IPTV it is still five to ten years away from being able to supplant DVD/Blu Ray sales.

There is a lot of gas left in the tank for shinny disks, I know most of you won't believe this, which is fine with me because I'm making a killing producing content and selling it on DVD's.

For those smaller producers on the fence about Blu-Ray, its a bit of a chicken and egg proposition, do you wiat for your customer to ask for it or do you start selling them on it. I have yet to have a single customer who has seen their projects on Blu-Ray complain about the additional expense. Once they see it they want it. However, we produce 100% in XDCAM HD so its very easy for us to master for Blu-Ray and me to preach about it.

If the majority of your production is still SD or HDV then this issue is very different for you than it is for me. I just wanted to pipe-up regarding the notion that "DVD" sales are declining. The major contributing factor to softer DVD sales is DVD RENTALS, not the Internet.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Chuck Spaulding

For those smaller producers on the fence about Blu-Ray, its a bit of a chicken and egg proposition, do you wiat for your customer to ask for it or do you start selling them on it. I have yet to have a single customer who has seen their projects on Blu-Ray complain about the additional expense. Once they see it they want it. However, we produce 100% in XDCAM HD so its very easy for us to master for Blu-Ray and me to preach about it.

I have made exactly one BluRay for movie purposes. However, I went BluRay over a year ago for the DATA capacity. The ability to walk away from tapes end-to-end was worth the few hundred bucks. I can now master my hour long shows, put the master, several web versions, my subtitles/caption file, the necessary codecs, and other ancillary material on a single 25GB BluRay for $2.65.

Honestly, I don't know what the hold up is for anyone shooting tapeless. Where do you keep your masters? On your live RAID system? Or run them off to HDV tapes?

Buying into BluRay for data storage only is worth the investment, even if you never deliver a single one for a customer. Where else are you going to store 25GB of data for the price of a tub of popcorn?

[Christopher Drews]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

Where else are you going to store 25GB of data for the price of a tub of popcorn?

Actually, a large tub of popcorn is $7.00 at the movies now.
Would $7.00 buy a dual layer?
-C

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Christopher Drews

Actually, a large tub of popcorn is $7.00 at the movies now.
Would $7.00 buy a dual layer?
-C

Hollywood demand is keeping these scarce. I buy 10 every quarter or so. My last purchase was 10 @ 29.95 each for TDK's.

[Edit]

Looks like $18.19 each for Verbatims now: http://www.thenerds.net/VERBATIM.10P...5649-2&affid=3

and Amazon has the same for $19.82 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002A4PKCW/...0&linkCode=asn

[Chuck Spaulding]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

Honestly, I don't know what the hold up is for anyone shooting tapeless. Where do you keep your masters? On your live RAID system? Or run them off to HDV tapes?

Buying into BluRay for data storage only is worth the investment, even if you never deliver a single one for a customer. Where else are you going to store 25GB of data for the price of a tub of popcorn?

TAPE SUCKS!
My workflow is:

Download the SxS cards using Clip browser. The BPAV's are capture directly to an offline RAID 5.

Convert the BPAV's to Quicktimes for FCP and store them on a fiber channel SAN that is shared between all editors.

After editorial, render a MASTER that is stored on another (online esata) RAID 5.

I backup all BPAV's, project files and anything else that required significant human intervention to create to LTO3.

So we have online (realtime) storage, two levels of near line (non-realtime) stotage and data tape. Sounds expensive but it really isn't. Each removable drive and tape holds a lot of projects. Once the project is complete I delete the .MOV's, I don't back up any .MOV's. if I ever need them in the future, which happens time-to-time, I restore from the archived BPAV.

I never want to go back to tape.

[Ethan Cooper]

Originally Posted by Torv Carlsen

Great thread everyone, but I believe that ALL disk based video delivery will be a thing of the past within 2 years.

Maybe so, but the vast majority of my clients still want plain old DVD's and I don't see that changing soon. Just because we see the shift coming often times the general public takes some time to see it and more importantly it takes corporate infrastructure time to adjust.

Why Apple doesn't allow us, the content producers, the option to professionally author our own BluRays without having to run a windows app or buy Adobe's studio is beyond me. The compressor option is amateur in it's implementation and sometimes we need the ability to do more. It's frustrating.

It would be like limiting Logic Studio to exporting only mp3's for web delivery and leaving out the ability to export wav's or aiff's for other types of delivery. It's backwards and stupid.

Sure, disc may be on the way out but it's not out, not by a long shot. Till it's dead why pretend that it's already gone?

[Michael Wisniewski]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

Do you REALLY think That after spending BILLIONS of dollars investing in BluRay technology, Hollywood is going to abandon it in 2 years time?

I think the majority of professionals and consumers will have abandoned Blu-Ray in two years ... if they haven't abandoned it already. But you're right about Hollywood, they'll still be trying to push Blu-Ray 10 years from now.

When I see inexpensive devices like the Western Digital HD Media Player, it's pretty obvious what's coming down the pipe at all levels of the industry.

[Chuck Spaulding]

Sure and everyone will be driving electric cars by the end of the year.

It took 50 years to go from black and white to color, an additional 10 years to go from analog to digital and it has already been over 20 years since HD was introduced and it still has yet to become the standard for TV today.

It takes a long time for the infrastructure/value chains to be in place that allow a new technology to become a standard. I know standards committees like to think they make it all happen, but they don't. It has more to do with economics than technology.

The WD HD player is cute and it can serve an important role in displaying HD in the right application. But I'd be willing to bet that WD has sold less than .01% of those units compared to Blu-Ray players. You can't get a movie on a USB drive from Netflix, but you can get an increasing number of movies on Blu-Ray.

I'm not an advocate for Blu-Ray nor am I suggesting that everyone should go out and buy a BR-Burner, but if we're going to discuss these types of issues wouldn't it be prudent if we also evaluated it from a business perspective?

I love the WDHD player, I have four of them, along with two Apple TV's and assortment of other web enabled devices, all designed to help me play HD on the customers big beautiful 52" plasma's. But the best, maybe not the cheapest or easiest, consumer device for playing HD is a Blu-Ray player.

Also regarding the WDHD player, I spent somewhere around $45 for a 64GB USB drive and I believe the smallest WD-Passport USB hard drive is around $75, both of which you have to continually load and unload data from if you want to continually change content. Not exactly efficient or cost effective. Again it depends on the application.

[Simon Wyndham]

The issues for me are currently:

1. I could get Adobe Encore, but it means buying the whole CS4 suite, which I don't want or need.

2. The inconsistency of BR players abilities to play BD-R discs. I went through all that with DVD and I am loathe to go through it again.

3. Need. Most of my clients are only concerned with the information that the video provides, not whether it is HD or not. In fact almost 100% of my work at the moment is destined as a Flash video on a website somewhere. i can't remember the last time I created a DVD deliverable.

Most of my HD shooting is done as archive work, for footage that needs future proofing. The only way BR is going to become totally unstoppable is when manufacturers get to the point where they might as well only make BR players.

There are some cheap BR players around now, but I have my doubts as to whether they are any good at all. Selling a client on BR is one thing. But to find that they can't play your writeable discs is another!

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

Where else are you going to store 25GB of data for the price of a tub of popcorn?

On a hard disk. 1TB disks cost around $80 & hold as much data as 40 of those 25GB BD disks which even at that bargain price of $2.65 each would cost $106. Bare hard disks can be read & written in $50 eSATA/USB/Firewire docking station. Using hard disks has the advantage of far higher read & write speeds plus higher data reliability/integrity.

I gave up using DVD (particularly cheap DVD) for archival purposes a few years ago as it took too long to write them let alone author them. Silver disks are easily damaged & the failure rate was unacceptable.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

Using hard disks has the advantage of far higher read & write speeds plus higher data reliability/integrity.

I think this is HIGHLY debatable. ANYTHING with moving parts is going to have a lot more issues than anything with no moving parts.

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

Silver disks are easily damaged & the failure rate was unacceptable.

I still have CDs from 20 years ago that work fine. How many hard drives you have from that era? There is no MTBF for optical. Store an optical in a slim-line shell, and it'll last a VERY long time with no damage.

[Jason Lowe]

If there's no master tape, I wouldn't hesitate to use both a hard drive and a BD disc for backup, not to mention storing copies off-site.

Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but a friend lost a large slide collection once in a house fire, and I'd hate to loose something forever when it could be duplicated and moved so easily and cheaply.

[Perrone Ford]

Good point Jason. My work is housed in a secure facility. Any work that I get paid for is housed in more than one place.

Hard drives are ok, but drop one and it could be toast. Get it wet, it's toast. Tape is even worse. Optical is relatively cheap, though slow. None are perfect solutions.