I have been making that argument for some time myself, but a few weeks ago I got a BD player and have gradually been buying disks. I've gotta say... it's great. Once you start watching Blu-ray movies then regular DVD's look kind of "out of focus".

Clearly it's going to take awhile to become mainstream, but the BD section at Best Buy keeps getting larger. And you can find disks on sale sometime - $20 isn't unusual. Last week I was at Target and they had an end cap display of $15 disks which were all major movies.

For those of you too young to remember the Beta/VHS war, the reason the consumer was deeply involved was that home recording was new. Never before had you been able to timeslip TV and watch movies in your home (conveniently). That motivation is no longer there. For most of the consumers, DVD is "good enough".

I think the reason for the move toward flat screen TVs is all the hype about the digital TV transition in Feb 09.

And I agree a BR storage medium beats tape all to dickens. I just don't think a handful of video professionals is going to affect the market. Unless BR becomes a big consumer item, it will remain at "pro" prices.

The big reason why I haven't bought a Blu-Ray player: there's nothing to watch. All the movies I like to watch are made by smaller studios who don't and can't put out blu-ray.

It is a licencing mess, and Sony knows it. Sony's ideal situation has always been Sony cameras shooting onto Sony tape, exported to Sony computers, burned on Sony Burners, sent to Sony Pictures, distributed by Sony Distribution, sold in Sony Stores for use in Sony Players connected to Sony TVs and Sony speakers via Sony cables. Sony is the -king- of vendor lock-down and I think Blu-Ray is dead because of these reasons. Consumers will just skip this generation of the technology until someone else comes up with something better or Sony gets it's licensing head out of it's butt and starts letting others play fair.

I'm personally not interested in Blu-Ray at this moment, but a Macbook PRO... has a PRO pricetag. It still doesn't have a Blu-Ray or an option for it.

I use MPEG Streamclip. 2-pass h.264 as low as 12mbps for 1080p looks decent for most material and lets you fit 90+ minutes on an 8Gb thumb drive. Not sure how best to get AC3 though, I just use AAC.

Buy a Blu-Ray burner, get Toast and get going. Or archive to a hard disk and wait. It's not like we can't make Blu-Ray discs now, it's just that Apple isn't including it yet in the base cost of the computer and OS doesn't directly support it. Remember, DVD burners were expensive extras when it first became possible to do it.

This is a great thread - I showed a bunch of friends Golden Compass on blu-ray on 42" plasma and nobody commented how amazing it looked - they just took it for granted -
when i told them it was bluray i just got a blank look - I must agree with those who are saying that bluray hasn't gone mass-appeal yet - most people are getting Sky HD and thats it - - the only people i know who know and watch bluray are the people who like technology gadgets ! Real strange.....

So this is a burner? looks like you cant author anything but you could out put your program to this disc from final cut and keep it in HD quality, of course you would have to have someone else author it for you for distribution it would not work with dvd studio pro.

Toast would be great if it had a authoring program like dvd studio pro but it dose not so it is not a viable solution at this time in my opinion, its a solution but not a good one.

Here’s an external burner that’s slower than the FastMac but at least it carries an attractive price of $289.
AMEX | Portable Blu-ray Super Multi Drive for New MacBook

These Blu-ray burners wont obviously work with Final Cut Pro but it will work with Adobe’s CS3 and soon to be released CS4.

I agree; however, everyone else seems to be biting the bullet and doing it.

$389 for the blu-ray burner actually

I should have paid more attention to the prices at the bottom.

Still not bad considering how portable it is. It would have been a steal if it were at least a 4x.

The MCE looks like the right product for me.

MCE Internal 6X Blu-ray Recordable Drive for Mac Pro and Power Mac

Now take this with a grain of salt since I have never done it but a friend has been very successful making Blu-ray discs... he plays them on his Playstation3 and they look great.

Use DVD Studio Pro to create an HD DVD project. When finished use the Build function to create the data folder. Import that data folder into Toast and burn the disc.

If this doesn't work, please someone correct me.

No one asking for BD?
 

1) Do you offer BD delivery? Does your competition?
2) Would you like to offer pro looking menus like the ones on DVD SP?
3) How may HDTVs sold before the HD transition "forced" people buy to HDTVs?
4) Given the opportunity to make a few more bucks offering HD delivery of your wonderfull HD footage would you do that?

I can't see why anyone would have any serious reason to defend apple's position here. Let's have a poll and ask what would you pay for an apple BD solution?

$500 for a BD burner?
FCS 3 $500 upgrade?

I would in a minute and think many others here would too. Would apple make money at those prices, I think so. SO what is the flippin issue.

Count me in. At this point I'm looking at spending $1800 CDN for Adobe CS4 Production Premium JUST to get Encore (It doesn't come solo!) for a PC I'll need to buy at $1200+ just for the PRIVILEGE of being able to author BluRay since my Mac running FCS2 won't.

Shaun, you can BootCamp your mac and attach a BD drive (likely external). Then you're just down to CS4 (and you'll need a Windows license to run under BootCamp). If you get a TLP (Volume Licensing) license you get both Win and Mac codes per license and you can run either one on your Mac.

Regarding Adobe licensing; I can only speak for my region here, but terms are pretty much the same globally (unlike pricing). Adobe Transactional Licensing Program has dropped the minimum number of 'points' to qualify for TLP to 1, essentially making it available for single licenses. With TLP maintenance options also become available, making it easy to keep current.

Upgrades are also available in TLP, of course.

George/

So am I missing something here or what? $529 for a Fastmac with 4x BD-R or $240 for a 6X BD-R?

Newegg.com - Blu-Ray Burners, CD / DVD Burners & Media

No Blueray huh ? How 'bout no firewire ?
 

The blueray thread highlights Apples new market philosophy change-of-heart towards the independant artist types but no mention has been made of an even darker change on the horizon . The new macbooks don't even have firewire . What is Steven smoking ?

When people upgrade , they do it alittle at a time , and they expect that the new toy will know how to play with the older toys . No firewire in it's easiest to buy portable means the Apple doesn't care to cater to the creative set any longer . It's got it's eye on the corporate junkies of the world , stock traders and other evil doers !

www.kurthbousman.com

It's already discussed here (look at the second page, but the first one is also interesting):

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/non-linea...dont-know.html

In short: no blu-ray is not nice, but it isn't nearly as bad as no firewire on the new macbooks, the loss of firewire400 on the MBP, the new displayport (it has some advantages as well, but disadvantages too), and offering the Macbook Pro only in glossy.

I have this burner (the LG one) in my old G5 tower. It works fine but I had to pry off the drive tray's front plate to fit it, and I needed to purchase an adapter to connect it. I have been using it with Toast 9.02 with the Blu-ray plug-in.

We've put together a package that gives you the Pioneer BDR-202 burner with external housing:

ATTN Mac & PC Laptop Owners... Create High-Definition Discs with this All New EXTERNAL Blu-Ray Disc Bundle!


• Pioneer BDR-202B Black Blu-ray Disc Burner ($375.00 Value)
• Vantec NexStar DX 5.25" External Enclosure - Just install the drive and connect to any USB 2.0 port. No tools required! ($45 Value)
• Eye Scream Factory DVD Art Essentials ($30 Value)
• Verbatim BD-R 25GB 5-pack ($50 Value) & Verbatim BD-RE 25GB Disc ($15 Value)
Laptop Not Included. Requires assembly. No tools required

Complete bundle only $425.00
Videoguys Pioneer BDR-202 Blu-ray Disc/DVD/CD Writer

Gary

Kurth man I'm right there with you, I got in many a battle on the appleinsider boards about and I ended up writing to apple to voice my dissatisfaction. Vote with your wallet and use the feedback form for the macbooks on apple's site to give them a piece of your mind.

Why do you really need Firewire? Capture? Print to tape? I can see Firewire is needed for a few more years, but as tapeless camcorders take over, none of us will want to deal with Firewire. Just try living with a Sony EX1 for tapeless joy, although Sony has burdened us with an incompatible MP4 format that requires a special transfer program. Yuck.

For my footage submissions, I've started to deliver on data DVD-Rs. Some editing houses seem to pay transfer houses to convert my HDV and DV tapes to something else anyway, so they may as well deal with DVD-R, which is faster and easier for me.

What if somebody already owns a DV or HDV based camera that they love and have no intention of replacing anytime soon. Sure maybe tapeless is going to be the way of the future but that doesn't change the tens of thousands of people that already have a video camera and will want to edit their material in Imovie. Maybe 5 years from now this sort of decision will make sense but I think Apple jumped the gun a little bit here. Tapeless is nice but it is far from the norm yet.

I see more television ads for Mac products than I do for Windows products. The latest Mac ad slams the Gates group for spending money on advertising instead of spending the money on fixing Vista. Gee, Mac guy, why don't you spend some money on Blu-Ray recording rights and firewire ports instead of spending so much on advertising about how Mac is so much cooler than Windows?

Well, Apple didn't remove Firewire from the new Macbooks 'in a few years', they removed it NOW. That's one of the problems.

On the other hand: there are still DV and HDV camera's being made, and many people already have them. Apple expecting them to all just throw it away or replace it, is insane. Apple used to be about making multimedia on your computer, they always highlighted that. How do you do that if you can't even import your images?

But then there are also:
- Musicians... Many musicians worked with normal Macbooks, because these have enough process power, and are very small to take on a stage. But many external audio interfaces, and pro audio interfaces... only work with Firewire400. Oops.
- All those Firewire 400 Hard drives... USB can't compete with Firewire400, and although USB2 is more used by consumers, Firewire400 is also a big norm in the market.

There literally is no excuse for Apple to take away the Firewire on the MAcbook's, exept for pushing people to shell out the money for a Macbook Pro.
I'm a big fan of Apple's software, and I really think they have many fantastic products, but in the life of me, I can't defend any of the decissions they made in these new laptop upgrades.

And don't get us started about the new über glossy shiny screens, without an option for matte, even on the Macbook Pro's...

Anyhow, this is already being discussed in another thread to which I pointed above, so.

I've been in the mothervoard chipset business, and Firewire hasn't seen much support. More customers ask for USB connectors, so you can see that chipset manufacturers will drop a licensed hardware block to make their chips more competitive in price. When there are fewer chipsets to choose from, you can understand a manufacturer (Apple) choosing on the basis of performance, power usage, area. The fact is that very few computer users connect anything to their Firewire ports yet commonly use their USB ports for Printers and Flash memory dongles.

I'm sorry that the MacBooks have lost the Firewire port. All is not lost. You can buy an adapter that will give you more. How about Firewire capture to an external Firewire disk? With an ExpressCard slot and $70, you can add more ports:

Belkin 2-Port SATA II ExpressCard
FRYS.com*|*belkin

Sonnet Firewire + USB2
Sonnet - FireWire/USB ExpressCard/34: FireWire + USB 2.0

Belkin USB 2.0 and FireWire ExpressCard
FRYS.com*|*Belkin

Gints, you would be right and I think there wouldn't be any complaints about firewire IF the Macbook had an Expresscard slot. Unfortunately, it doesn't. You'd better forget about working with video or music editing on the new Macbooks because they have zero expansion capability.

What bugs me is that "Get a Mac, any Mac." used to be the simple, foolproof advice to give to anyone who needed a computer that could handle nearly everything. Give a pre-Aluminum Macbook to a college kid and you could be sure that no matter where his interests ventured, the Macbook could handle it (well except for the latest PC games). Now, it's a lot harder for me to recommend "any Mac" as a solution for everything. If you have to qualify the statement with "Get a Mac, except for the new Macbooks if you want to work with music or video, in which case you either have to pay a lot more or get a PC notebook with firewire," then it isn't nearly as simple or foolproof as it used to be.

Apple basically built the consumer Mac brand around the ubiquity of creative editing abilities. When it was hard to find a PC that could do video editing, music, DVD writing, etc. you knew you could count on Mac to support all the latest buzzwords. I don't understand how Apple were able to justify to themselves the crippling of the Macbook to little more than basic $300 netbook tasks.

But the new Mac Book Pro have Firewire 800.
I´ll go for the Pro model.





...

I've seen some newer consumer style video cameras that have also dropped the FW port in favor of USB transfer.

As we move away from the tape medium towards file based video, FW is no longer a necessity for sustaining high data rates. I could easily shoot with the Sony EX, remove the card and plug it into Sony's EX card reader which has? Yup, you guessed it... a USB interface. Or let's take it a notch further. The EX-30 deck, which retails for around 6K attaches with... that's right, a USB cable.

Firewire has been a great interface, but it's getting supplanted with newer and faster interface standards. E-SATA is going to outperform an external FW drive, hands down. Wouldn't it be nice if cameras started showing up with SATA ports on them for the file transfer? Some higher end cameras already offer ethernet based video transfer. But those are not streaming AV, they are file based.

-gb-

For example, all AVCHD format camcorders, from Sony, Panasonic, Canon and JVC.

It's already "later", Blu-ray discs are available in bulk for under $7 each, and I know someone who bought a Blu-ray burner on sale for around $150. The licensing fees can't be too bad given that some authoring programs selling for under $100 support Blu-ray.

Apple has become the Microsoft of media distribution, and is doing everything they can to resist competitive solutions.

So this brings something up that I have wondered about. Why couldn't someone have developed a high speed tape reader- one that would pull the digital information off a DV Tape at 4 x speed, or something like that. Is it a physical limitation on the tape itself, or a technical issue with the data stream ? Any geeks out there know why ?

While you're correct on your points, there is high def content on Cable TV as well as high def PVRs. Some HD channels are fantastic (NatGeo, ESPN), but most of the movie channels are blocky as well as good-ol-DVD-data. I'm planning to ditch cable and go with an antenna (ATSC), as that worked very well in my previous house. There are some HD channels that look HD and require no monthly subcription. Sometime in 2009, your neighbor will notice that his TV looks better .

As for a CRT TV, I have a Sony WEGA 40" that is 305 lbs. The good part about that is that it's nearly theft proof as you need two strong theives to carry it to the truck.

I remember Pinnacle Systems polling for a 2x DV reader device. Some DVCAM modes on some recorders operate the tape at a slightly higher speed. There is probably a good reason for the DV tape data rate: that's all that tape technology can do reliably, both with respect to data accuracy and medium integrity.