Phil Harris
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Nov 19, 2004, 11:56 AM
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"Burning" DVD duplications
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In order to keep my Television Prouduction program equiped with state-of-the-art equipment, we have created a video production company with my students as employees. We are hired by the school system and the public to produce a variety of programming for private viewing as well as cablecasting. The money we earn, and it is substantial, is returned to the classroom and is used to purchase the professional level gear I need to teach a professional level training program in Television Production.
The release format for our product has always been VHS in the past. However, I am increasingly getting requests for releases in DVD format. I have resisted. I have spoken with DVD duplication vendors at both the Government Video Expo in Washington, DC as well as at NAB and Have not received encouraging responses.
What follows is a compilation of comments I've gleaned from conversations with vendors and articles on this subject. I'd like to open a serious discussion on this forum on the topic of the feasability of DVD duplication. Anyone interested in this subject is asked to respond to this posting with your reaction to the below comments.
You see, the DVD’s you get at Blockbuster are made thru a process called DVD “MOLDING”. This is a process whose patents are totally locked up by the Hollywood industry and some few replicators here and there. What consumers are familiar with are the DVD “burners” found in nearly every computer sold today. The problem with burners is that the product it creates is not a true DVD in the Hollywood sense of the word. And most importantly, the product of any DVD burner today will only play on approximately 80% of the DVD players in the country. The rest of the players are older and use a totally different technology that is incompatible with the burned DVD’s of today. The only way to make a DVD of a video program at this time that is guaranteed to play on anyone’s DVD player in their living room is to give a digital master of that program to a replicator. Most replicators charge a set-up fee of between 5 and 7 THOUSAND dollars to digitize the program. Then they make the DVD’s in minimum lots of 1,000 DVD’s for about $4 per DVD. That means on the conservative end, you’d need:
$5,000 set up fee
$4,000 fee for 1,000 minimum DVD’s at $4.00 each
$9,000 total needed even if you only want 50 DVD’s.
Just to break even, I’d have to charge $180.00 each for the DVD’s
THAT’s why I don’t do DVD’s. J
See below for more info from an article copied from a trade magazine:
“If I can get a DVD movie from Blockbuster that plays on my DVD Player in my living room, why can't you use a DVD burner to make one?"
Simply put, the patents on the equipment and the format (called DVD-RAM) used in creating true Hollywood-style DVD’s have all been locked up by the Entertainment Industry. The format of the Hollywood movies DVD’s is such that those DVD’s will play on virtually all DVD players available. The format for DVD “burning” most consumers have on their home computers is completely different and results in DVD’s which will only play in about 80% of the players available.
It is possible to take master tapes and send them to a DVD replicator who can author the DVD’s in DVD-RAM format so they will play in every DVD player available. However, there is a huge (four figures) setup fee charged by the replicator. That cost will have to be passed onto the consumer and the relatively small number of DVD’s ordered by customers would result in a per DVD cost that would be astronomical!
At this time it is not possible to create a DVD using industrial level DVD burners that will play back in all DVD players in customer’s living rooms. Desktop DVD burners use DVD-R General disks and depending upon what brand of disk you use, what data-rate is used for encoding the video and the brand and model of players, DVD-R General disks will, on average, play in somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the DVD players out there. If you wanted to make mass copies that work in all types of players, you would burn your disk and then take it to a professional replicator (mentioned above) who would use it as a master for making copies. There are other types of recordable disks, but any of the ones that are compatible with desktop DVD players will be even less compatible than DVD-R General disks.
To create a DVD we would first have to engage in the far greater than real-time upload (up to 14 hours) and digitization of a 2 hour show and then you have to consider the time it would take to burn the one DVD they want. This doesn't even take into account the amount of hard drive space that would have to be freed up to upload a long program on the computer. Finally, any consumer who compares the quality of picture of a DVD made on an industrial burner to the quality of picture of a DVD made on Hollywood movie type DVD’s will notice a definitely lower quality picture.
The bottom line: there for sure is no money to be made in simply transferring video to DVD, unless you find that rare customer who wants the highest archival quality on a DVD and is ready to pay for you to use a high-quality two-pass variable bit-rate encoder to convert the video to MPEG-2 (which takes anywhere from 10 to 14 times real-time) or unless you have a customer who is ordering thousands of copies allowing you to reduce the cost per DVD due to quantity.
Phil.L.Harris@fcps.edu
Phil Harris
Television Production Instructor
Fairfax Academy
3500 Old Lee Hwy.
Fairfax, VA 22030
703-219-2249
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