How I hate DVDs....

[Tim Polster]

I do not shoot weddings anymore, but if I did I would include a Blu-ray in the price of the service. The impression of your work compared to DVD is worth the $30-$50 for the player.

I am finding about 10% - 25% adoption for Blu-ray at our events. I really do think Blu-ray is the best delivery experience but folks just are not going crazy to replace their DVD players. Then some folks are going all streaming and do not even have an optical player anymore. It is safe to say many of us have built our businesses around optical media. It is a shame they are going out of style.

Sending up something we shoot that is over an hour to "I-Tunes" etc... just does not work for small business. It might sound convenient but people use these services for downloading songs, programs and short little clips. They are not in the habit of downloading a 2 hour event. Same goes for YouTube.

On top of that, filesize has to enter into this equation. Heck, even a DVD gets up to 4GB+ You are not going to send a file of this size to very many people. So you are faced with degrading the quality of your product just to deliver it.

[D.R. Gates]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

I'd guess that 1/2 or more of my customers have Blurays already, if not more. People are not replacing DVD players with DVD players, they are buying Bluray players because the price is SO low. Bluray has not taken the world by storm, that is true. However they are very common and the slowness of their catching on is not a good excuse (in my opinion) for avoiding offering Bluray discs to wedding customers.

I think it's the same here. Blu-ray being backwards compatible with DVD and selling for under 100 bucks, it's a no brainer. Not to mention that most come with Netflix and other streaming options. People want to see HD when thy buy those huge HD TV's.

[Mitch Phillips]

In terms of USB delivery, do you guys find you need to use USB 3.0 sticks? I've found that USB 2.0 always freezes during playback. Wondering if it's something to do with my export settings, as the freeze occurs at the same point on DVD as well.

Any help is much appreciated!

[Steven Shea]

I hate them too. They stink.

Making menus is annoying. The quality is garbage. I don't think it's solely an HD and SD thing either... part of it is that Mpg2 as a compression format is really old and things have advanced since then.

In hollywood, where they can spend thousands of dollars and weeks on compression, DVD for them can look okay. Out of most of our NLEs, the Mpg2 compression is junk.

Not to mention being able to make copies of the files, transfer them to family, etc.... USB is far superior. You don't even have to be that tech savvy.

I don't get it, but every wedding last summer with the exception of 1 was delivered on DVD.

[Vincent Oliver]

Just a quick question here. I have been doing nativity plays for the past 5 or 7 years and produce DVDs for the parents etc. They all seem very happy with them. This year I have filmed 12 performances and will deliver all orders before the schools break up (on Thursday).

My question is, how much is everyone charging for their Nativity (or wedding) DVDs, generally they have a duration of about 30 minutes or 45 min max. I charge £15 per copy. Generally we get between 20 to 30 orders per show, sometimes more, sometimes less. We do not charge an attendance fee, does anybody charge to attend?

[Mark Whittle]

We do dancing school graduation concerts and weddings. The concerts are still DVDs as it is too hard to convince them all to go for blu-ray. USB MP4s would be a disaster as you would get so many returns and because they are so easy to copy you would get ripped off.

Weddings on the other hand I don't give them an option. They're paying for a premium product so it is on the best HD medium currently available. Blu-ray or the highway. Surely most of you wedding guys would require a meal at the reception? The couples just agree, yet the cost of a meal or two is easily more than the cost of a BD player & HDMI cable (at least over here).

If they say "Oh we don't have a Blu-ray player" I say, "Well you might get one as a wedding present" and leave it at that.

When I hire a movie at the local video shop, it is always on BD. Their DVD section is still way bigger of course but the BD section gets bigger all the time. Same price to hire too.

Another advantage is because you can use H264 you can fit more time onto a BD disk for those that do really long form stuff.

I've been called elitist on here before but I don't care. I'm happy, clients are happy. If I miss out on a booking for not delivering on DVD, I can live with that, but no-one has insisted on DVD and if they did, I'd probably shrug and say OK, fine.

Cheers

[Noa Put]

Delivering no dvd's is ruling out the parents and grandparents because right now most still will be using a dvdplayer for as long as they work. I don't like the idea of forcing a certain format upon a couple as in my case they still can choose. This is also the reason why you can't convince the dancing schools to switch to blu-ray, because most of these dvdcopies go to the parents and grandparents.

[Mark Whittle]

So if granny only had a VHS player would you run off a tape for her?

There comes a time when you just have to adapt to change. VHS is gone, DVDs should be too.

I don't refuse them DVDs. If they insisted on them that's what I'd give them, but no-one has.

[Michael Wisniewski]

Yes, I've actually had to make a few VHS tapes for some people. It turned out, that the best way to make a VHS tape nowadays is to burn a DVD first, then go to a local studio that still has a VHS recorder and record a copy from the DVD! Urgh.

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Mark Whittle

I don't refuse them DVDs. If they insisted on them that's what I'd give them

Ah ok, you first said you don't give them the option ("Blu-ray or the highway") but now you say you do if they ask? :) if a couple would ask me for a vhs tape, I would make it if I would have the equipment and charge extra for it, as long as they are paying I don't care.

[Roger Gunkel]

Originally Posted by Vincent Oliver

Just a quick question here. I have been doing nativity plays for the past 5 or 7 years and produce DVDs for the parents etc. They all seem very happy with them. This year I have filmed 12 performances and will deliver all orders before the schools break up (on Thursday).

My question is, how much is everyone charging for their Nativity (or wedding) DVDs, generally they have a duration of about 30 minutes or 45 min max. I charge £15 per copy. Generally we get between 20 to 30 orders per show, sometimes more, sometimes less. We do not charge an attendance fee, does anybody charge to attend?

We've been filming nativity and end of term productions for about 8 years and always work the same way. We don't charge the schools anything for the production. but they have to order a minimum quantity based on the length of the production. we charge them £10 each for the first minimum order quantity, which would usually be 25-30 and each extra dvd costs them £5. That means that the school deals with the parents so we don't have to and they sell to the parents at £10. We typically have orders for 40-80 copies which guarantees us a return of £325-£525.

The nativity plays are quite short, we shoot with 4 cameras and can multi camera edit in an evening. I edit and my wife copies and does the sleeves. It's useful extra income for a hectic week of filming just before Christmas. We've also found that the schools love it as we have never supplied less than 40 copies, so the school ends up raising money from the sales. Parents love it as they get a 4 camera production with lots of closeups, for less than the cost of a school photo.

We actually had a parent's mass complaint at one school this year, because we had filmed every Christmas for the last 7 years apart from last year when they left it too late to book us for one show. They have two productions for different year groups and last year we filmed one, but as we were already booked for the other date, they got another company in. Apparently it was a disaster and the parents insisted that they booked us for this year or they would not buy any dvds that weren't filmed by us, so they booked 3 months in advance. Nice to know that our work is appreciated.

Roger

[Tim Polster]

Way to go Roger. Looks like you are doing a great job.

[Roger Gunkel]

Originally Posted by Tim Polster

Way to go Roger. Looks like you are doing a great job.

As long as the clients are happy and we can pay the bills then I'm happy:-)

Roger

[Chris Harding]

Surely our job is to give the client what they want (as long as we can produce it on that media) ? If my brides want DVD then they get DVD's .. I certainly will not force them to accept a media type they cannot or are not happy using. That's almost getting back to the Henry Ford era where he said " You can have any colour as long as it's black"

It's not about what is convenient for us but what is convenient for the customer.

Chris

[Andrew Smith]

The good thing about DVDs is that they pretty much just work.

I've encoded mp4 video files for a playback device (a Beyonwiz P2 in this case) and found that the file abruptly stopped playing part way through a long programme. Never quite had the time to go back and sort out what had happened. I've also had times when it just didn't like the flavour of mp4/h264 video that the file was encoded to.

I mention this as the risk in supporting HD this way will be that: if your encoded file doesn't work on someone's media player then it will come back to you ... and you may find yourself spending unbudgeted hours of device support for dummies. This I would want to avoid like the plague.

Andrew