Should I offer a Blu-ray DVD?
 

and at what extra cost?
I wonder if I am opening a can of worms by offering to put the stage show on Blu-ray. Obviously I would have to charge more but how much more is one of my questions.
My second question is that I don't have the large tower to burn large numbers of Blu-ray disks as I do for regular DVD's.
Any advice to help me with my quandry would be greatly appreciated.

Clarity I meant a BD disk not a DVD.

Personally I would NEVER offer a Blu Ray DVD. I may consider a Blu Ray DISK, but not a DVD.

What you should charge for that BRD depends on your market and competition, but my gut feeling is around three times that of a SD DVD. Your media are about 5-6 times as expensive, there is no extra work, just different. Your inserts and printing is the same, etc.

If you exchange the DVD burners you have for BR burners, you are ready to go.
You may consider a larger tower and a more powerfull PSU. I currently have 17 disks internally AND 2 BR burners, all in the same tower, so space should not be a problem with a good case.

You could be. Do you edit HD now? If you do and it works well for you then it shouldn't be that tough. If your workflow is downsampling HDV to DV in the camera and using a DV workflow, you might need to beef up your computer and storage. There could be some teething pains and depending upon how you shoot (interlaced or progressive) you might need to figure out what to do with interlaced fields in your source projects. You might want to invest in an intermediate format for editing. There are things to consider but it certainly can be done.
That really depends. For my retail projects, I'll charge between US$10-15 more. That's mostly to cover the higher BD media cost, but the price delta between BD and DVD media is narrowing. The price is also higher because the experience in HD is better than SD.

You're going to have to suss that out on your own in order to get it right. Remember, pricing should be based upon value, not resolution.

Will you do the same volume of BDs as DVDs? Figure out the ratio of one to the other and I think your options get clearer. If you will do the same number of DVDs as BDs, then you'll probably want another tower.

I offer my wedding clients to upgrade to BluRay between $400 to $600 depends on the hours they have in the contract. It comes with 1 BD disk. Additional BD is $100 each on paper. But I always offer them at $50.

Thanks for the advice
 

I now record and edit completely in an HD environment.
There is such a variety on what to charge depending on who you are recording for.

I am most interested in the extra cost I should charge to offer BD disks for a stage event such as a dance show or theatre production.

A Blu-ray tower with 8 bays is very costly, so for now I would have to burn the BD from my computer one by one.

Greg,

If you have two or three 5.25" slots free, just populate them with BR burners. That is not too expensive. Then use Nero to burn using multiple burners, that will save you quite some time when you need multiple copies. This shows how handy it can be to have a large tower for multiple disks and burners.

I ditched Nero for a long time. The free ImgBurn rocks. I can also run multiple instance of ImgBurn and burn 3 DVDs at the same time.

Here are some tips:

Blu-ray encoding to h264 takes a VERY long time. Almost 10 times longer than mpeg2. Expect 3 hours of footage to take approx. 30+ hours to encode (depends on how fast your system is of course). This is what might kill your productivity. I would highly recommend investing in a hardware h264 encoder such as the Matrox CompressHD which can do it faster than realtime. It's very affordable and well worth the purchase if you consider how much more productive you will be in the time saved.

Before offering blu-ray to your clients, you should test it out on a project to make sure you can actually do it. You want to make sure your software and burner are all working as they should without any errors.

Make sure you also get a BD-RE disc to test your projects out on before delivering them to your clients. If you will be using Adobe Encore to author the disc, the software preview doesn't work very well, so the only way to really test it is to burn it.

Wow your viewers with impressive motion menus.

Deliver your discs in the new Blu-ray cases. It makes for a much more professional presentation. You can get Nexpak Blu-ray cases from Tapeandmedia.com

Don't charge too much extra for them. Most production companies are doing them standard now at no additional cost, so if you spring an extra $400 price for it on your client... they probably won't recommend you to other people if you are lucky enough to keep them as a client.

Anything you can do to hand your customers a better looking video is worth it. The average Joe can burn a Blu-ray disc on a Sony stand-alone recorder for under $300, as long as they have a compatible camera...and we need to stay at least one step ahead of him/her. The only two reasons I can think of to not go Blu-ray is if it will expose flaws in your work, or if it will put too much of a strain on you (financially or time-wise).

Alec Moreno
http://www.1Day1ShotProductions.com

There is no need to use H264 if you are only going to put about 2 1/2 hours or so on then I would stay with MPEG 2, essentially a VBR version of HDV( I use max 30mbps,average 23mbps, min 18 mbps). Encode times are very fast. Render from Vegas of HDV to compatible Bluray takes less than realtime and the files can be used in DVD Architect 5.0 including any markers that will used as chapter markers automatically and used to make menus, buttons or text.
I use the same authoring for Bluray and SD versions by just changing properties.
If you really need the time then it will need hardware encoding like the Grass Valley Firecoder Blu that will do it in about 1/2 realtime from the Edius timeline.

Ron Evans

You don't have to encode using h264 for a BluRay disk. You can use MPEG-2 for the BluRay version as well and, with the extra capacity of a BluRay disk, the quality of the HD MPEG-2 version for BluRay can be very close to the quality of the SD MPEG-2 version for DVD.

One issue to notice is BluRay menus. Unlike DVD, it doesn't have root menu and title menu. There is only 1 Top menu. Then use Popup Menu to replace the title menu. It's tricky to do in Encore CS4 but I managed it. Just finished a second BluRay disc with Popup menu. =)

Jon, I don't know what platform or software you are running, but my experience with h.264 has not been as you describe.

Using Edius 5 and making an AVC (h.264) file from the timeline it takes ~1 1/2x to 2x project length. This is with a 9450 quad core.

Robert are you saying hd mpeg2 BLU RAY is only close to the quality of sd mpeg 2 DVD,i am a bit confused and probobly missing your point, certainly MPEG2 BDs i make are vastly superior to DVD.

Render times will vary depending on your system of course. The times I gave were using a Dual Opteron 270 w/ 3GB RAM and Premiere CS3. Obviously if you are using a program that efficiently makes use of all 2, 4, or 8 cores of your system, and you have a fast processor, your times will be better. Also, the times I listed are for multipass encoding which take much longer but improve quality.

Offering a BR disc in the current market is a dicey proposition at best for one reason: Direct-play HD files.

Take a look at this device:

Western Digital | WD TV HD Media Player | WDAVN00BN | B&H Photo

For less than the cost of any BR player you get this HD movie playback device that can be connected to *anything*, an HDTV, a computer or even an SD-TV via composite connector. You can't beat that level of output choices compared to BR because not all computers have BR players and not everyone has a stand-alone set-top BR player. But *everyone* has a computer and either an HD or SD-TV.

And the cost of this device is so little you can easily build this into your current price schedule and still make a very nice profit.

The best part is, you don't have to worry about authoring a disc or worry about encoding types, bitrates etc. Finalize your movie, export it to this device (in supported formats) and you're done.

Now for the downside: It's not a menu-driven experience like a DVD or BR disc, it just plays movie files. I'm sure that if it doesn't exist already someone will create a menu-driven interface to use with devices such as this to replace the DVD-style motion menus we're used to - something like what Macromedia Director used to be. There may already be software that does this and I just don't know about it, but surely someone with programming knowledge will make this an eventuality.

Until (or if) BR authoring capabilities like Scenarist or Blu-Print make it down to the level of DVD Studio Pro or Encore offering BR may or may not make sense from a cost-of-workflow output perspective. These HD-movie devices offer a very tasty and extremely simple and cost-effective alternative.

The lack of menu is really not impressive to clients. All my wedding couples want their wedding DVD movie like. My DVD menu structure provides extra features such as multiple audio track and language settings.

Then I also don't want to just copy them a file. I would like them to order more copies of DVD and BluRay.

I'm saying the compression quality (bitrate per pixel) can be reasonably similar between SD MPEG-2 on a DVD and HD MPEG-2 on a BluRay disk.

I don't think that is quite correct. Assuming SD at 8Mbps and Bluray at 25Mbps the bits per pixel will be 23.15 for SD and 12.06 for HD. However for the same screen area HD will have 6 times the number of pixels. So that will be 3 times the data per screen area which is what really matters. When one considers that a BLuray disc holds 2 hours at this 25Mbps rate but one would have to drop the SD data rate to closer to 4 Mbps to get 2 hours on ( or of course use a dual layer at the 8Mbps) the difference could be more than a 3 times improvement for HD.

Ron Evans

A single layer BluRay disk holds between 5-6 times as much data as a single layer DVD disk. The ratio is about the same comparing a dual layer BluRay disk to a dual layer DVD disk. As you mentioned, HD material has about 6 times as many pixels as SD material. Comparing (same number of layer) BluRay HD to DVD SD, for the same time length of video, the number of bits per pixel is roughly in the same neighborhood.

Now I understand what your saying. Of course this is why one needs a Bluray disc to hold all the extra data for the 6 times as many pixels. That extra data is used to improve the picture quality by at least a factor of 3.

Ron Evans