Blu-ray?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike Hollingshead
  • Start date Start date

Mike Hollingshead

Anyone planning on giving blu-ray burning a go at it this fall on your dvd? I'm slowly pondering it at the moment.

$180 for THIS burner now. Seems the burners are closer to affordability. Disks are still pretty high priced, one would have to tack on $10 over their normal price I suppose as most blank blu-ray discs look like they are in the $4.00 - $12.00 range for one. Sure would suck to make coasters at those prices.

Trying to figure out burn speeds/time from this page: http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/

If I did it right looks like at 2x you'd need 46 minutes to burn 25 gigs. 72mbps is 2x so 25 gigs.... I probably screwed that up. If not one would at least want 4x or better yet 6x capability.

Perhaps it is still a year or so early for this to be worthwhile I guess. Players are coming down in price too though and just seems something some might want in HD.
 
I have personally had trouble with getting good burns on a 4x HP Blu-ray burner. You're right, making coasters at the high price of media can get expensive. That said, it IS HP and I'm sure there is better hardware out there and I should also note that my burner is going on 7 months old which means they are probably 4 generations past my unit by now! Surly things are getting better.
I think your calculations above are correct regarding time/capacity.
 
I hope I don't burst your bubble Mike; but Blu-ray stuff is still waaay out there. I can remember a few years back when a DVD burner/player had a high price tag. The BR's will come down some in price by next year, and then I might consider one.

The price for DVD discs and burner/players are really cheap right now. If you need more space on a disc, they do make double-sided discs that cost more. Sure - you are getting more storage space in these Blu-rays - but it really doesn't warrant the cost. Does it?

Think about how many 500gb hard drives you can get at this time - as compared to a Blu-ray burner and a stack of 100 blank discs. Sure, the BR device might be $180; but how much for the discs? Just 20 of them - for how much?!? Yikes!!!
 
Rob Wadsworth said:
Sure - you are getting more storage space in these Blu-rays - but it really doesn't warrant the cost. Does it?
Click to expand...

The difference in watching quality footage in SD compared to when I watch it in HD certainly has me thinking so. There is the whole, would the purchaser be willing to pay the extra for the Disc question, my guess is yes. Maybe the majority of stormchasers wouldn't, but from my experience, other chasers aren't the chaserDVD market(less than 10 of the 50+ DVD's I've sold went to chasers); from disscussions with a few of the DVD purchasers, I'm pretty certain a good deal of them would be willing to pay a little more to see something in high quality HD, I myself am starting to get acoustumed to the picture quality of HD, if something isn't in HD it's almost getting to the point where it sucks to watch...
 
Rob Wadsworth said:
I hope I don't burst your bubble Mike; but Blu-ray stuff is still waaay out there. I can remember a few years back when a DVD burner/player had a high price tag. The BR's will come down some in price by next year, and then I might consider one.

The price for DVD discs and burner/players are really cheap right now. If you need more space on a disc, they do make double-sided discs that cost more. Sure - you are getting more storage space in these Blu-rays - but it really doesn't warrant the cost. Does it?

Think about how many 500gb hard drives you can get at this time - as compared to a Blu-ray burner and a stack of 100 blank discs. Sure, the BR device might be $180; but how much for the discs? Just 20 of them - for how much?!? Yikes!!!
Click to expand...

Not pondering one for storage sake at all(sounds fairly easy to screw them up so probably not a good idea anyway). And disc cost would just be added to the dvd(bluray) price when you sell one. Folks that have a bluray player and want HD on their LCD or Plasma probably won't have a huge fit over $10 added to a DVD price.

I do remember making coasters at $5 a pop trying to go the DVD route not that terribly long ago. Sure wouldn't want to repeat that. Surely there's a viable option/burner to avoid that on. 2x at 46 minutes isn't an option. 4x at 23 minutes doesn't sound like much of one either. 6x though(like the linked burner) would seem fast enough to not be a huge headache for making copies.

But yeah, early issues probably make things more of a headache than one would want. Sounds like scratching or dust at all creates an even bigger issue on a Blu-ray disc, so I'd wonder about buyers fubar'ing them all up and saying they don't play.

From what I've seen/gathered one would need a small eternity to encode to mpeg2 or 4 after they've created their clips to put into the dvd. But still easy enough to just let the computer run for a day or whatever.
 
The one concern I would have is (and maybe I just have no idea how many people have them) how many people have blu-ray players. Right now they are still pretty expensive, as mentioned above. I would certainly pay the extra for the better resolution, but not sure I'd get a blu-ray player just yet, so I guess it comes down to how many people out there have one. If not many people do that kinda narrows your potential customer population. Might not be worth the risk in the drop of sales (if there are any). Not sure if you were planning on making an SD version of the video too, but just a thought.

who knows maybe I'm full of crap and everyone and their mothers have a blu-ray player.
 
Yeah you'd still have to make both available for sure. I bet those that do get a Blu-ray player are far less likely to buy a SD dvd than before. Half the reason I started to ponder this was seeing how far down in price home Blu-ray players are now. I mean the HD tv thing has been going a while now and is surely pretty widespread(seems it has to be if even I own one), I'm guessing most of those have dropped the $200-$300 on a Blu-ray player(though I'm certainly an exception to this thought lol).
 
Somewhere sitting in a box is a chunky Sony DVD burner that did 2x sometimes(!) and cost almost $500 something like eight years ago. A few weeks ago I replaced an internal DVD burner on a desktop computer that does everything at least 8x, including light-scribe and double-side for $38, including shipping. Come to think of it my first portable audio CD-player (until a cat dropped it on the floor) was a Sony and cost about $250 something like twenty-five years ago. Then there's the Beta tape player and beta tapes anchoring down a cabinet somewhere....

If you detect a pattern here, then you understand why I'm not rushing off to get Blu-ray.
 
Sometimes I wonder if Blu-ray is really going to take off or if a wave of Flash-based media distribution is going to come along and wipe it out. Optical media is looking kinda long in the tooth, IMO.
 
Did a Blu-Ray last year. Author your master to H.264 Blu-Ray and have a professional production house (duplication service) save you the worry and the $$ by professionally duplicating them as sales require.
 
I own a blue-ray player and the quality is amazing though I recently watched a movie that was SD upscaled and it was still pretty good. I am willing to pay more for HD tornado video on blue ray if it is really good. My threshold is very high for buying blue-ray HD tornado video. It would have to be an amazing selection of video and probably most chasers don't have enough quality video to justify the price at this time. I'd rather pay less and buy a DVD that I can upscale for most highlights. The jump from SD to HD is a lot less than the previous jump from VHS to SD on DVD.

I have been looking into making a highlights from my own HD stuff but I still have to buy a new computer that can edit HD material and burn a blue ray. I'd make it for personal use at this time and sell when the price came down farther on blank disks.

Although a slightly different topic, I was reading some reviews on nature blue-rays on Amazon and some of the programs are actually SD that was burned onto blue ray either due to original source material or some downcoding in the editing process. So buyer beware.

Bill Hark
 
If you are shooting HD, go BD. If you aren't then no sweat, the upscaling DVD players do a great job. I'd buy a BD Mike!
 
Yeah...going consumer grade for authoring BluRay is going to bite you in the a$$. Go with pro level equipment, if you can afford it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Skip Talbot
Storm Assist 2013 Charity DVD and Blu-ray
Replies
6
Views
4K
Skip Talbot
Skip Talbot
Skip Talbot
Storm Assist 2012 Charity DVD and Blu-ray
Replies
5
Views
4K
Skip Talbot
Skip Talbot
Blu-ray/HD yet?
2
Replies
24
Views
6K
Mike Hollingshead
Back
Top