My first 3x EX1 DVD is selling :)
 

I know it probably doesn't belong here (sorry Chris), but I wanted to share my joy of having my first live classic music DVD (shot with 3 EX1's) make quite a success here in Poland. What's more, I have received quotation request for (moderate) amount of its NTSC version from the US and Japan...

Now, I have no idea what the average price of such DVD in those two market places can be; can anybody knowledgeable give me a hint of the retail prices?

Congratulations, Piotr! That's really good news!

A commercially made disc of this nature would probably run about $19.95 here in the USA.

Thanks Jay.

I guess it's more expensive in Japan - or comparable?

I would even say, for classical music, you could go $24.95

Well done,

Regarding prices, that would depend on who the performers are and what they are playing.

I have been paying between £15 and £25 for classical DVDs, I don't mind paying a premium for a good performance by a top artist.

What process did you use to convert the DVD to SD (I pressume it is in SD)

In Vegas, I edited as a HD 1080/25p project (I have a native BD also available). For DVD, I applied a moderate amount of Unsharp Mask FX (ensuring it acts only AFTER downconversion), and rendered out using either PAL (50i) or NTSC (24p with pulldow added) widescreen DVD template. No problems at all at this stage; being a CAD/CAM engineer by main profession though, I noticed a slight change in the picture aspect ratio after downconversion to PAL (NTSC downconverts perfectly in this regard) - I'm told very few people ever see that !. This was taken care of by modifying the video Track Motion (with a little help of my friends in SCS Vegas Forum).

That's cool.

DVDs in Japan are a lot more expensive than anywhere else. Mainstream movies rarely debut for much less than 4000 yen. Special editions usually fetch a lot more. But if you're selling these for resale, you're only going to see a fraction of the retail price, I don't know what fraction that would actually be. I'm not an insider in that business, nor do I have such connections.

A few years ago I put together a double DVD classical music set from live concert by one of the world's best classical music pianists, specialising in Chopin. The program, shot in Digital Betacam, runs over 4 hours, divided into 6 parts plus a few extra features and it sells for about US$40.00.

DVD sales Japan ...
 

The price on classical music DVDs can run around 4,000 yen on the market as Jeff has mentioned. It all depends on the distributor, the musicians, conductor and marketing. There is a big crowd here for classical music. DVD sales often go hand in hand with a live performance tour of the country by foreign artists! You might look into that aspect of the arraignment.

I think the key question here is what would you sell the DVDs to a reseller / retailer for. From the few people I know doing that kind of direct selling it depends on the arrangement. The ones I know were selling 'stocking stuffers' on a sale or return basis and the margins all around were pretty slim. They were pressing 10K copies and it didn't take many returns to kill any profit.
If the Japanese are offering to purchase outright I'd think they'd expect to be able to make a hefty markup as they're carrying the risk. The big question you would need to address is do you duplicate or replicate. There's certain risks involved going down either path.

The big answer is don't Duplicate a commercial product, always Replicate, i.e. have a glass master made. I did a small run of a DVD using duplicate (from a pro service) and we had a 15% reject rate.

You haven't given us any details about your DVD, who is/are the performers and what music are they playing ?

We do have our own glass masters (separate for PAL and NTSC versions), and replicate.

As to the DVD content, it's a live solo recital of a renowned Polish classic guitarist, Marcin Dylla (see Marcin Dylla - the DVD is not listed yet in the Discography there). Marcin is a great musician; within a couple of years he won 19 major guitar contests in Europe and USA! The concert we recorded took place last August in the Wawel Royal Castle in Cracow, Poland, during the "Wawel at Dusk" annual classic music festival we organize there. If anyone is planning holidays in Poland, you're welcome there!

A large part of my business is duplication and I have duplicated literally hundreds of thousands, yes hundreds of thousands of DVDs (I use Databank DVDs) over the past few years with a very, very, very low reject rate - like less than 1% - much less than 1%.

There was a time when one of my towers had a problem but the DVDs never ejected - they just stopped copying.

I do not know why you had such a high reject rate unless the 'professional' duplication house was using very poor quality DVDs or does not verify their copies. Yes, there are quite a few of those poor quality DVD blanks on the market.

You should not have had any rejects at all.

Sorry to read about that but duplicating DVDs is just fine.

It's possible that the change in AR you experimented was caused by the fact that a proper PAL image is NOT 720 pixels width, but 702. I'm amazed that every NLE doesn't know this fact.

If you want a technical explanation of this: when the CCIR 601 standards where defined, they established a common sampling rate of 13.5 MHz for both PAL and NTSC video systems to save costs in early digital equipment. This means that an NTSC video line, which has an active line period of 53.3 microseconds, is sampled with width of 720 pixels. But a PAL line has a shorter active line period 52 microseconds, so its width in pixels is 702. This is why a 704x576 format was established (704 is the closest multiple of 16 to 702), but most equipment used a common 720 pixels width and just the number of lines was changed, because this way the data rate was exactly the same for both systems.

You will see this if you digitize any analogue video source with any digitizing card: there are black bars who appear on the edges of the frame. DVD players, even if the image recorded in the disc is 720 pixels width, work at the 13.5 MHz sampling rate and they also respect the original 52 microseconds time for every line's active period. TV sets, of course, also respect this.

So the "right" pixel aspect ratio that NLE should use for a PAL 4:3 frame is 1.094, and not the 1.067 setting you see in Premiere, FCP, and other softwares. For PAL 16:9, the number would be 1.459, and not 1.422.

Of course, the difference is almost negligible, as is the case, and viewers are not aware of such a subtle difference in aspect ratio. But it seems to me a bit strange that engineers charged to design the Final Cut and Premiere softwares where unaware of that difference. Maybe the Sony Vegas suite was better designed, and this was the difference you saw in your video.

Thanks David - this make sense, based on my experience!

However, many people told me not to use the 704x576 PAL template, as it is obsolete...