What’s the future for Blu-Ray
 

What’s the future for Blu-Ray.
Will Blu-Ray take over from SD DVD players or will Blu-Ray be bypassed in favor of players like Apple TV and the WD HD TV media player. If the later happens how will media be distributed, will it be on SDHC cards or memory stick via USB.
I have not been ask for one single HD DVD in the past few years since shooting HD.
I have been conducting a survey amongst friends and most say HD looks fantastic (and it is) but some are just happy with their SD DVD and can’t see the point in upgrading again for something that does the same as what they have. When I mention the USB WD HD player then they get excited and can see the benefit.
I wonder what the future holds for HD DVD players. I like the idea of the WD HD Player but which way will the consumer go.
HD DVD players are still expensive in Australia and also the media to burn .

Cheers
Simon

I've been having a heck of a time making BRDs that play on actual players. In the end I've just included the price of a WD HD player and a USB lipstick drive to my media costs (my local electronics store has the WD player on sale now for $99 - which is the cost of the three latest BRD coasters I have sitting on my desk.)

Sony's AAC copyright protection and other profit-making processes may make sense to the studios but everybody else seems to be going the streaming route, and not even in real time on demand, just pay per play and let it load when it can (background loading) for the public, and digital delivery (not physical disks) for the rest of us.

What's the point in paying through the nose (what is it now? $15k per title royalties to Sony?) for some disc standard that will kill all but the biggest businesses? And leave us "amateurs" the option of a menuless direct burn to BR-D for free or something that won't play reliably on anything at Best Buy?

I think Sony will be in its own little sandbox over in the corner on this one.

Remember all those monolothic film studios before digital video came along? The huge 24 track studios that cost an arm and two legs just to cut s music demo? I think this feels like a last hurrah - like a dead dino that just doesn't know it yet.

Hey Chris,
What size lipstick drive do you give the client?

Hey Simon
Whatever is the next size up to fit the project. Currently I'm working on a five minute industrial piece that will loop in an exhibition/trade show rig, so I have a small collection between 4GB to 16GB that I'll send to client and then restock later.

Don't forget it's just an H264 Quicktime movie and usually I'll MP4 it at the highest quality setting, maybe squish it just a little bit (around 2-6%, or between 94-98% quality) to get it to fit on a drive. So I'll output same as source on FCP, check the file size, maybe Quicktime Pro or MPEG Streamclip it down a touch, then reach for the lipstick drive that it fits into, done and dusted.

Anything larger and I've built some of those laptop sized 2.5" USB powered packs that go up to around 230GB for around $120 or so, or used a client supplied USB drive. (or ftp'd/yousendit/megauploaded it to them) But the 3.5" SATAs are around, what $99 per terrabyte now, the bare drive? Plus around $50 or so for the casing?

Blu-ray?
 

The future's bleak as far as becoming "the" next thing.

Enthusiasts that have 7.1 surround and projectors will flock but
look how long laserdisc lasted yet never took control.

consumers can now have 8TB of storage at home. They have home networks
and want to shift stuff around at their whim.

Blu-ray's not helping you if you're a small developer. Where does Sony get off telling
you that AACS encryption is mandatory? That'd be fine if AACS was free but it's not
so there's more $$$ out of your pocket before you've even thought about profit.

Let's face it

The biggest consumers of media are city dwellers

City dwellers have access to decent broadband. Broadband is getting scary fast
(Cable co 50Mbps and Fiber Optic 100Mbps in areas) .

The argument about instant playback is a riot. Time how long your Disney DVD starts
after you've gone through 5 previews, a Blu-ray propaganda advert and the anti smoking
adds.

Consumers don't want that shit. My gf and I are more than happy to stream some Netflix and I'll eventually leverage iTunes, Hulu and other formats.

Will I buy Blu-ray? Of course ...there are those movies you just have to have. Will I ever have as many Blu-ray titles as I have DVD. Doubtful.

By 2015 I figure buying an optical disc to watch a movie will feel about as antiquated as
popping in a philips cassette to play music.

Panasonic just layed off a small village of workers. Sony's losing money in the millions and consumers are looking at $25 disc prices like a cat with two heads.

The movie studios have their feet planted in both camps. When optical discs collapse they'll just remove the foot and accelerate their VoD, download biz.

What Harrison said, especially about the city dwelling part. Great points.

The WD HD player is selling here in Aus for around $190 plus a 16GB USB stick is around $100.

I was thinking of selling this as part of my package for clients to get HD into their homes.
But at this current price it might not be the best option right now.

I have a blu-ray player and a small collection of disks. For big spectacle type movies it's fantastic. For example, "How the West Was Won" which is a huge production from the 1960's shot in 3 panel Cinerama is really impressive. That process used very wide angle lenses with amazing depth of field, and the detail in the landscapes is unlike anything I've seen before. "2001" is also great as is "Blade Runner". Then there are some other movies where you would have to look closely to notice the difference from regular DVD. But I really can't complain, I'm glad I bought it.

There is a real shortage of titles at this point; I've already bought just about everything I want to own. But soon they will release the Star Trek movies on Blu-Ray, so I will definitely be making some more purchases then! CBS & Paramount Announce First Star Trek Blu-ray sets - TOS S1 & All TOS movies coming April/May [UPDATED] | TrekMovie.com

As far as authoring my own disks... not really interested.

Simon
That's what they were usually priced at, over here. But times are a-changing. And quickly too.

Boyd
I agree, I love watching those movies that were shot for the big screen and not with the big screen as a marketing afterthought. I have a PS3 that plays most of them well and a few select titles that I really loved enough to own both DVD and BR copies of.

However, I make these things for a living too, or should do - but find more and more clients choosing the H264 route instead. Out of the 70 or so little projects I've worked on in the past year, all were shot in HD, around 66 were delivered in SD, around 60 of those in DVD or smaller (i.e. 6 were SD broadcast masters), only 4 were actually finished in HD. Only one made it all the way through to BRD: the other three were H264 deliveries.

Maybe as analog SD goes away in the USA, this mix will change, but actually now that I already made the investment to bring my entire production and post pipeline up to HD standards, it makes little difference to me cost-wise what format I finish in.

I would just have thought that if BRD were to be as popular as DVD now is, that it would have taken off a lot better than it has by now.

I'd also like to add that not many of the older or smaller budget films will have their producers or distributors fork up the $15k fee in addition to the remastering fees to get their titles up onto BRD.

So, as quite a few of the older, smaller budget but yet still good films didn't make it from VHS to DVD, so a lot more of the films now readily available on DVD won't make it to BRD.

But I'm very doubtful that the DVD process will go away, like, say, the laser disc process did. Heck, you can still go out and buy VHSs somewhere in town, right?

Film making isn't like other forms of manufacture: you make a car, you sell it once as new, then immediately it's a used car. An old car, at old car prices.

You make a film, it sells again and again - for new prices, maybe discounted, on sale, whatever, but still as new, not as old. A reprint is cheap and is not the cost of a new film.

It's like the process of film making would be not like making a car, but like making the mold to make new cars - you make the mold, you stamp out a few thousand cars, you sell them, stamp out a few more... like that.

Right now the DVD stamp doesn't cost anything. Sony wants us to pay them tax for their stamping.

So for the smaller folks, it's much easier to keep the copies stamping out on DVD (so call it 480i or 525i, it's just old style TV/DVD, but digital, not analog), just as it is, bringing in its rentals, than endangering the smaller movie's existing royalty stream by trying to give it a dubious new life as a BRD release - and paying Sony through the nose for the may-be privilege.

So I say that the DVD stamping process will stay on for a heck of a longer time. For one thing, the players won't have to have a D to A converter in them any more, so they'll be cheaper to produce.

And the programs producer in the newer HD formats will be distributed closer to the raw file formats then ever before - also saving money in the stamping process. And some of them may even make it big enough to go for the big bucks - and then $15k per title to Sony won't seem a big deal at all.

Come on now...

Is Blu-Ray a profit center for Sony? You bet. Is Blu-Ray good technology? Yes.

How much overlap was there between good old VHS and those shiny new-fangled discs? I can go right now and walk into the local rental store (national chain) and get VHS tapes. Why is it that just because Blu-Ray has not yet taken over from DVDs that people want to toll the bell for it?

You don't think DVDs were expensive to cut when they arrived? At this same point in DVD history, the recorders were still $1k and the media costs were more expensive than Blu-Rays are. And all the same hand-wringing and nay saying happened then too. And all the consumers said the same thing.. my tapes are fine, why do I need DVDs? And all the DVDs (and VHS tapes) came with advertisements for the new DVD technology.

But there were no www based forums back then. it was rec.xxx.xxx on usenet. And it was a lot different.

Optical is still a long-term delivery solution in the right form factor, with Hollywood support, and players coming from most major manufacturers. Unless that changes, I don't see it going away any time soon.

Perrone
But at no time in history did someone say "hey, you want to make a VHS/DVD? Pay us $15k per title for the right. Plus the cost of the media, and the hardware, and the software". Every time before, the open architecture solution won.

Simon,

I have a 26 minute project shot at 1920x1080 that rendered to a 1280x720 at 60p HD WMV file came in at just under 1GB. On my quad core Q6600 Dell with 4GB RAM and an Nvidia 8800GT 512MB card the render took 12 hours in Pinnacle Studio 12.

But I was picking up 4GB Sandisk thumb drives on sales at about $19.95, then 8GB at that price level (Verbatim and sometimes Sandisk) and the latest was a 16GB Sandisk at $19.95 (again on sale).

I need to try a 1920x1080 render on that one sometime when I won't need my editing machine for a day to day and a half to see what size it would come in at, comparing some shorter sequence test renders I'm going to guess between 1 to 1.5GB.

So we can get quite a bit on these thumb drives (is this what you guys mean by "lipstick" drives). I'm retired and while I do a project for others now and then I'm primarily into this for my own pleasure. I love the WD TV and being able to show my own created content on my TV in HD.

Is that right? Do you remember how long it took before the industry would even LET people burn DVDs? They locked up mpeg2 so tight NO ONE could play. Not until they had Macrovision and CSS and whatever other protections were out there, did they even ALLOW burners to hit the market. We are still reeling from some of that which is why the market for DVD rippers is what it is.

Back then, it was a The DVD Consortium, today it's Sony with others now joining in. Who knows what it will be tomorrow.

Run the timeline. DVD was introduced to the US in 1997. It took until June 2003 before rentals of DVD surpassed VHS. SIX years...

Remeber the format wars of DVD? writable DVD: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED | Emedia Professional | Find Articles at BNET

6 different standards. That article, written in 1999 is hilarious when you consider where we are with BluRay:

And we're complaining about BluRay prices....

I'd have to say I'm with Perrone on this one. One can argue that the costs and restrictions imposed by Sony might impede we small fry, but as Perrone said, it's a long term delivery medium in the right format. It is for many users, especially the older demographic that have been buying VHS and DVDs since disco died.

I had a client that wanted BD so bad he bought me the burner. If he hadn't, I probably wouldn't have one. But I am doing key retail projects on BD and DVD and boy, can you tell the difference.

As for movies, I own two. "No Country For Old Men" which looked great but I could have lived with the DVD, and "We Were Soldiers". The sound and visuals were epic! I haven't found another movie locally that I'd want to see on BD.

As for downloading, aside from some issues highlighted in previous posts, a big potential issue is the move by US cable companies to place a monthly cap on how much a user can download. While everything I've read says nothing's set in concrete just yet, I've seen figures from 20-50GB/mo. That would be about a max of two movies a month, if you don't want to get your email. To be fair, these rules are being formed in response to the huge amount of Torrent downloads. There is also some talk of tiered pricing based upon the amount of data downloaded. I would not be surprised to see a US cell phone style pricing model with high costs for overages.

But that's just me talking and I sometimes forget my own name.