Blu-Ray for Mac: Past the Tipping Point
 

Over the past 3 years I've been collaborating with several other production and post facilities ranging from one-man-band indies to large companies with huge business on the books. We've all scratched our collective heads on the lack of progress in the Final Cut suite of apps and from time to time shake our heads at the hardware offerings as well. One of the hot-buttons for almost all of these post houses has been the lack of Blu-Ray support from Apple and Jobs' direct "bag of hurt" descriptive of bringing on BR.

About a year ago we all agreed that the necessity for BR was "on the cusp", meaning that it would be a nice addition to our product and service offerings but that demand hadn't caught up to the point of actually requiring BR in the toolkit. That landscape has changed drastically today.

2 months ago I received an email from an indie who does mostly weddings and events who was clamoring for a method that had greater capabilities than Toast or Encore without having to resort to any Windows-based apps - and to VIEW the completed work after a successful burn. That solution of course doesn't exist yet.

Today I received yet another email from a big post facility that just reviewed their business model and planned earnings from the last 2 quarters. Based on their findings they've lost more than $40k worth of business simply because they too have no Mac-based solutions to author and deliver replication-standard BR with the same configurable options available in DVDSP4 or even Scenarist.

That same facility just made the decision to migrate their *entire* post facility to a Windows/Avid/Scenarist environment, stating that based on their 2010 business projects and client-planned business if they DON'T have a solid method for offering BR to their clients they'd lose so much business that they could in fact start a downward spiral of losses to competitors who ARE offering BR. And while they are aware that the "reliable" rumor-mill expects that Snow Leopard will be BR capable there's no guarantee that the next iteration of FCS will in fact come with a full BR authoring capable application, and they simply can't take that chance that Apple will stay on this solitary "no BR" path.

Why is this information significant? Because last year none of us considered BR to be a "must have right now" option. Today, clients from all sides of the business - from single-event, one-time users to large-scale commercial customers - are demanding BR as a final output. No longer can BR be considered a high-end option it's quickly becoming the must-have service offering that DVD has been.

Nobody knows for sure what Apple will or won't do this fall when Snow Leopard and FCS3 releases, but my advice to ANY Apple-only based production and post company is that it's time to think about and prepare for options outside of Apple's offerings just in case they stay the course with not offering native BR capabilities - if you're going to stay competitive.

Not saying I disagree with you at all... I do think it's a shame that Apple is so far behind the times on this one, and they are definitely hurting themselves and their customers.

On the other hand, in the past couple of months I've seen several major Avid houses switch completely over to Mac/FCP simply because Avids are totally incapable of HD closed captioning without a massive investment in 3rd party legacy gear. (The only workaround being the "1980's workflow", i.e. shipping master tapes back and forth to closed captioning facilities and incurring generation loss and delays, not to mention the costs.)

Blu-ray for now is a bonus... closed captioning is the law.

As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. Personally I think it's a mistake for any facility to be shackled to a single technology or vendor, whether that be Apple's, Avid's, or anyone else's.

Which is more to my point: There is no perfect, single-vendor solution for our industry. However since most dedicated Mac users have a negative viewpoint of using Windows-based apps those same users have resisted using a hybrid workflow to achieve professional goals.

The big picture here (no pun intended) is that unless Apple finally gives us everything we need both for BR authoring and the fixing the weaknesses in FCP that using *any* application that can deliver professional-grade results should be considered and adopted, regardless which brand it lives under.

Interesting post. A couple things here. First, as in any business, you must know your market. Apparently in your market Blu-Ray is big. In mine....not even close. I have been TRYING to offer it, but NO ONE and I mean no one is interested. Why? Well, my speculation is $$$$$. Most of these people don't want to invest money into a new home
theatre system....and by system I don't just mean Blu-Ray player and HD TV, but also
the surround sound and then there is the fact that they don't want to pay for the 800 movies they already have on DVD all over again. Now, Blu-Ray players have come down in price, as have HDTV's. The other day I saw a Blu-Ray player for $130 at Walmart and a 42 inch 1920x1080 HDTV set for $790. In normal times I'd think....great deals! With the current economic situation.....well, lets just say there are a lot of people that don't have that kind of money to throw around. Even showing clients the difference between HD video and SD video isn't enough for me. They basically say that SD on a DVD is 'good enough'.

Now on the other hand, it IS the future....and getting yourself prepared in advance is
ALWAYS smart....then when it comes time to shoot, edit and deliver in HD, you won't
be learning as you go along. So I'm still looking at figuring out the whole way to have
a 'end to end HD studio' in my home edit bay. And sorry Apple, but Blu-Ray is the way
to do it! I know you can FTP files around and all that stuff, but for event clients,
they are going to want a physical disc so they can take it with them and play it on
their computer (if they have a windows machine), their Blu-Ray home theater or what
have you. They are NOT going to want to have to 'download' something from the internet
and watch it at only their computer. Having a small, physical disc, that a client can
take on an airplane to a trade show, a bride can mail to her mother, or a neighbor can
take home to watch highlights of his kid's football game is just easier. And not everyone
is as 'tech savvy' as the people on this board. Downloading a file from the internet to view????
Shoot, my mom has a bit of a time figuring out how to turn a computer on.
And Blu-Ray follows in the steps of something that most people are familiar with....a
DVD. Pretty much the same kind of thing, put the disc in the player and hit play.
So, although I am not yet at the point you are in regards to demand for Blu-Ray,
I see that it is in the future. HD will be in demand at some point, and if Apple hasn't
pulled their head out of the sand, they are going to lose some professional video
customers, it's as simple as that. On the other hand, now that a Mac Pro can run
as a PC, I could still see some demand for their hardware at least. It will just be
that people will be using a mix of Apple's software, along with Windows software on
those machines. Even now, people are doing that.....running Sony Vegas on
the same machine that they run FCP. That's a cool 'feature' of the Mac Pro, but
it seems that Apple could do so much better by simply adding the Blu-Ray support
to their Final Cut Studio package. That way they could keep all their loyal pro customers.
And keep those who may be chased away by the cost of buying two sets of software
(Final Cut Studio AND a Blu-Ray solution like Encore) when they would only have
to buy one set of software on a windows computer.
Sometimes, I wonder if Apple has got 'too big'. They used to have a loyal base of
pro video/audio/photo/graphic/design types,......and that was who they catered too.
Now.....sometimes it seems that they are looking towards the 'iPhone' crowd.
And I don't really buy the 'big bag of hurt' explanation. The other computer
manufacturers are figuring out how to include Blu-Ray, Apple can do it as well if
they want. I THINK they will do it in the next version of Final Cut Studio.....because
they HAVE to be smart enough to realize that if they don't do it.....the 'bag of hurt'
may be the bag they empty over their own head.......they CAN see this....right?

Your lips to Gods ears. Or Steve Jobs.

Well, I never get a single client request for Blu-Ray, although I'll probably get one sooner or later so I am ready with Toast for simple jobs. If a big client comes around, say waving a few thousand dollars at me, I'll go for the Adobe suite and get into Encore otherwise I'll outsource the finished job to some friends with BluRay authoring capabilities. The story about a business losing $40k "because of Apple" leads me to a question. Why would they not get the Adobe solution and a BluRay burner? That's a fraction of $40k. I bought a DAT player once so I could keep a client, the player was a half of the first invoice but the client didn't go somewhere else and I still have the client 15 years later. Maybe three clients since have used the DAT player. In the end it was a good investment.

While Apple's reluctance in the Sony BluRay licensing issue is curious, have anyone noticed how new Windows computers now have problems with DVDs unless you buy a third party program? What's that about? Also I have discovered that several cheap BluRay players can not play recordable BluRays authored in Toast or Encore.

Actually, Apple isn't the only one to blame here. Sony's BluRay cost structure is ridiculous. Simply compare them to the licensing of red light DVD. It takes two to tango here - Sony with absorbent licensing costs and Apple with it's eclectic stubbornness.

-C

Take a walk through Best Buy. Guess who's the ONLY manufacturer displayed there that can't play a BluRay. It takes two to tango, and everyone else is enjoying the dance, while we have one stubborn wallflower who seems to think that internet delivery is THE answer. Maybe in 10 years, but not in 2009/2010.

I'm not a Mac guy, but Apple's refusal to support Blu-Ray seems to have not been a business decision, but one that was personally motivated. I could understand waiting for the BD/HDDVD shakeout, but to continue this lack of support seems like arrogance to me.

Meaning no disrespect but for YOU CC may be "the law" (and for broadcast, you're right!), for those of us looking to do HD client deliverables and not have to explain why we're providing them with a DEVICE to play back on, the delay is asinine.

This reminds me of the early days of DVD authoring/burning! I remember having to tell clients their discs may not be compatible with some DVD players. Because it's a second generation thing, I really hope the path to stable and inexpensive Blu-Ray production will be faster and less turbulent than DVD.

I kind of have to agree here. That was pretty silly to loose $40,000.00 just because they couldn't use a Mac to do it. Especially when any Mac can dual boot Windows. I think the company only has themselves to blame for just sitting around waiting for Apple to tell them how to do things. Most companies I know that deal with that sort of cash have no problem using a few PC tools now and then to get the job done. DVDit Pro HD is a pretty decent program and that combined with a copy of Windows and a Blu-ray burner would have only set the company back about $1,000.00. I'm no genius when it comes to money but that is still a pretty darn good profit margin.

Why are people getting so dependant on Apple instead of being creative to get the job done? Quit whining about glorious Apple not making the tools you need and go out there and find ones that will. The world will not end if you use something not made by Apple.

Well said Thomas.

looks like the new Compressor has an option...

"Compressor now includes a setting that allows you to create Blu-ray–compatible H.264 files that can be imported directly into third-party Blu-ray disc authoring software."

and...

"You can now easily burn a Blu-ray disc or a DVD directly from Compressor. Quickly add a menu to your disc by choosing one of the beautiful Apple-designed HD or SD templates included in Compressor. Because Compressor uses an open XML-based template format, you can import third-party or custom templates for a specific look."

Interesting timing for this discussion.

Still DVDSP is still DVDSP not BRSP. Not really one to speculate but perhaps Snow Leopard will come with some BluRay change. Or Apple could let us come up with the extra money for BluRay authoring just like we have to do with Toast. And those blanks are still expensive!

this looks promising... there is an option to author/burn a Blu-ray disc straight from the FCP timeline - all you need is a Blu-ray burner. Check out the training clips showing the new features:

Ripple Training

This so-called "new" Blu-Ray option is a joke.

Compressor already has in it's now previous iteration the option to make a BR-compatible encodings (see pic), and this has been around since FCS2 came out. The only difference now is that you can burn to a BR disc directly from the timeline/Compressor rather than sending it to a third-party application.

Speaking of third-party, the interface for the BR burn is nearly identical to Toast both in it's outline and feature set - which is so oversimplified it's worse than iDVD! This is not a solution, this yet another glossy marketing ploy to placate the user-base who've been very vocal about asking for a real BR solution for Mac.

And I'm sorry to say, that along with the lack of other things FCP *didn't* get it would appear the aforementioned company who jumped ship to a Windows platform made a very smart choice.

Again I just don't really see what the big deal is. There are options out there for authoring. I bet DVDitPro HD would even work under parallels. I just don't see the reason why a Blu-ray authoring program has to come from Apple. I do a lot of 3D and compositing so I guess I'm used to using other non Apple 3rd party software. To me this just isn't a huge deal. An authoring program is an authoring program to me and really no different then using a program like Adobe Director or Adobe Flash. I have never used a tool just because it was made by a specific company. I always choose the best tool for the job no matter who made it. Sometimes even open source software ends up being the best tool for the job.

The future is obviously streaming, but it would be nice to play or record a blu-ray on a Mac without 3rd party stuff. However, I'm pretty sure the shift away from silver disks is going to happen much faster than our shift to the silver disks. This could be suicide for Apple or it could be a brilliant move to force us away from putting stuff on silver disks.

I finally bought a Blu-ray player for my 1080P plasma. It looks really freaking great to finally see a nice 1080P signal instead of the crushed 1080i stuff from cable. But you know what else looks really freaking great? Standard def DVDs that the LG player upconverts to 1080P. You know what else looks pretty darn good? Netflix HD streamed directly to my Blu-ray player in real-time with very minimal buffering.

We are all going to be tuning into IP addresses instead of stations pretty soon. With newer TVs shipping with Neflix (and others) players and wi-fi built in, I think everyone is just covering their asses right now.

Well, for my business the new limited BluRay authoring is just about right for 90% of the disc burning I do. Not great but a very workable option.

Well said, William. After watching the free tutorial by Brian Gary (see the link in Danny's post above) where he walks you through the simple menu options for a Blu-ray disc burned from Compressor, I realized it will be perfect for an upcoming slate of corporate training videos where this particular client only wants a simple chapter menu for each.

I am glad that Apple have progressed into supported Blu-ray burning. But there are a smaller percentage of clients with more sophisticated needs (such as subtitles, etc.) so I agree Apple need to upgrade to direct Blu-ray support through DVD SP and not think that this very basic support is all they need to provide. But for the short-term, this is a very workable solution for certain businesses, as William said.

Same here for me...

I guess it's a start for Apple into BR. But going from compressor and then into Toast is the same thing just a few more clicks and cheaper if you have Toast.

I have to say I have one client that wants BR all the rest are still SD DVD. It makes me wonder why I went out and bought all this HD gear when all I do is SD. I should have gone out and got a great second hand 2/3" chip camera and lens to fit.
I still have my doubts about BR untill prices come down both for burners, players and disc's here in Australia.

Ahhh.........What do I know anyway

Hi Simon. I'm not sure whether you're near a major city, but your local MSY store has good prices for Blu-ray burners and blank Blu-ray discs:

http://www.msy.com.au/Parts/PARTS.pdf

$235 for a Blu-ray burner (internal). Or you could buy a cheap case for maybe $35 and use it externally. They also sell a ready-made external Blu-ray burner for $375.

$8 for a blank 25GB Blu-ray disc. Or $11 for a re-writable one.

I was at Office works yesterday and spotted a Liteon BR burner for $138.00 and media @ $17 per disc. Also a Pioneer BR burner around the $300 mark. Non of the said burners were compatible with Macs.

Your source looks great.

Anyone can buy 25GB BluRay for $3.50 a disk all day long. This place has them for $2.65 a disk:

ANTOnline.com - Memorex 32020013358 BD-R 4x, 15Pk Spindle

Cheaper than miniDV tape. I keep saying it and people just refuse to research it or believe it. Bluray is NOT that expensive. I can store and hour of HD cheaper on BluRay cheaper than I can store an hour of DV video on tape.

Don't know about shipping costs to send something Down Under but OWC has had Mac-compatible BR burners for a couple years now, internal & external:

SuperDrive Internal Optical Drive Upgrades for Apple Macs - DVD-R/RW, DVD Dual-Layer, Blu-Ray, CD-R/RW, & More Optical Drive Performance Upgrades at OtherWorldComputing.com

Blu-Ray is already dead (or at least on life support) and it doesn't even know it...
 

Great thread everyone, but I believe that ALL disk based video delivery will be a thing of the past within 2 years. The handwriting is already on the wall. DVD sales are have been plummeting for years, and Blu-Ray is barely a blip on the market. Think about from your own personal points of view -- how many Blu-ray disks have you bought in the last year? How many of you even own a Blu-ray player? In my case I have maybe a dozen Blu-ray films I've acquired in the last year, and my player is a PS3 used mostly for gaming by my lay-about sons! Most HD content is already being delivered by your cable provider via "On Demand" or through sources like AppleTV or Netflix, Amazon and others on-line which is where I frankly am getting most of my HD content.

Apple's recent inclusion of SD card slots on their Macbook Pro line indicates to me a migration away from disk based media delivery in its entirety. I read somewhere (I honestly don't remember where) that film distributors are already planning for the eventual distribution of HD films on SD cards because they're small and really cheap. I frankly can see that even software installs will be on SD cards instead of the optical disks we use today.

Apple has done this kind of thing before. Think about how Apple was the first to use the 3.5" floppy which became the defacto standard throughout the computer industry. They did it again with the elimination of the 3.5" floppy with the inclusion of just an optical super-drive. Now with the inclusion of SD card slots I can see a time when Super-drives and DVD (and Blu-Ray) will be a thing of the past.

Do you REALLY think That after spending BILLIONS of dollars investing in BluRay technology, Hollywood is going to abandon it in 2 years time? Regardless of what Apple does?

Film distrubution on SDHC or SDXC or some flavor is solid state media makes perfect sense. And frankly I'd support it. But we're quite a ways away. Blank 16GB SDHC is still in the $30-$50 price range. I don't know of any current mechanism to replicate them in bulk like we have for optical media, and the market just isn't there yet. In nearly every instance, the computer market leads the movie market. Whether it be in tape based technology like LTO, data storage like CDs and DVDs, or other. And right now, I'm just not seeing the computer market embracing SD cards for anything significant. Desktop machines aren't coming standard with SD readers yet. When we start seeing that, software manufacturers might move to shipping software that way for those who don't want to download, and then we might see a shift in Hollywood.

So I agree with your premise about the move away from optical, but I think your timeline is way off. Unless you're smoking the same stuff Steve Jobs is.

Check THIS OUT!
 

Installed Today and Loving it!

Nice! Christopher, does it use your Elgato Turbo.264 HD to power (or assist) the encode? That would be awesome.

While it's hardly DVD SP, I wouldn't call it a "joke".

Apple - Final Cut Studio - Compressor 3.5 - Streamlined Encoding & Delivery

Watch the "burning a disc" movie on the page above. Looks like compressor has become iDVD. Templates, chapters you can add yourself (unlike Toast) and the ability to customize the templates.

No, you can't add pop up menus or BD Live content, but it's a huge step up from Toast or what Apple offered before, which was nothing.

I just gotta figure out if any of my old licenses qualify me for upgrade pricing...

There's a lot there to refute. The notion that DVD is dead is truly mind blowing. DVD was, and still is the fastest and best selling medium in history at more than $27 BILLION in revenue this year. That beats the Movie box office and television revenues combined. Most of the studios that thought on-line sales [VOD, streaming or downloading] would supplant their DVD sales have lost a ton of money. The question that they should have asked is not whether the Internet would play a significant role but WHEN. The majority of media [moving images] is still distributed and paid for via DVD and television.

A primary reason for the availability of HD content online is because it has been too difficult and costly for enough producers to distribute HD any other way. With channels like NETFLIX, U-verse and VIOS that is changing. But these distribution channels are not streaming or downloading HD from the Internet, they are using VPN's [managed networks] to deliver HD content via IP. Although there is a strong adoption rate for IPTV it is still five to ten years away from being able to supplant DVD/Blu Ray sales.

There is a lot of gas left in the tank for shinny disks, I know most of you won't believe this, which is fine with me because I'm making a killing producing content and selling it on DVD's.

For those smaller producers on the fence about Blu-Ray, its a bit of a chicken and egg proposition, do you wiat for your customer to ask for it or do you start selling them on it. I have yet to have a single customer who has seen their projects on Blu-Ray complain about the additional expense. Once they see it they want it. However, we produce 100% in XDCAM HD so its very easy for us to master for Blu-Ray and me to preach about it.

If the majority of your production is still SD or HDV then this issue is very different for you than it is for me. I just wanted to pipe-up regarding the notion that "DVD" sales are declining. The major contributing factor to softer DVD sales is DVD RENTALS, not the Internet.

I have made exactly one BluRay for movie purposes. However, I went BluRay over a year ago for the DATA capacity. The ability to walk away from tapes end-to-end was worth the few hundred bucks. I can now master my hour long shows, put the master, several web versions, my subtitles/caption file, the necessary codecs, and other ancillary material on a single 25GB BluRay for $2.65.

Honestly, I don't know what the hold up is for anyone shooting tapeless. Where do you keep your masters? On your live RAID system? Or run them off to HDV tapes?

Buying into BluRay for data storage only is worth the investment, even if you never deliver a single one for a customer. Where else are you going to store 25GB of data for the price of a tub of popcorn?

Actually, a large tub of popcorn is $7.00 at the movies now.
Would $7.00 buy a dual layer?
-C

Hollywood demand is keeping these scarce. I buy 10 every quarter or so. My last purchase was 10 @ 29.95 each for TDK's.

[Edit]

Looks like $18.19 each for Verbatims now: http://www.thenerds.net/VERBATIM.10P...5649-2&affid=3

and Amazon has the same for $19.82 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002A4PKCW/...0&linkCode=asn

TAPE SUCKS!
My workflow is:

Download the SxS cards using Clip browser. The BPAV's are capture directly to an offline RAID 5.

Convert the BPAV's to Quicktimes for FCP and store them on a fiber channel SAN that is shared between all editors.

After editorial, render a MASTER that is stored on another (online esata) RAID 5.

I backup all BPAV's, project files and anything else that required significant human intervention to create to LTO3.

So we have online (realtime) storage, two levels of near line (non-realtime) stotage and data tape. Sounds expensive but it really isn't. Each removable drive and tape holds a lot of projects. Once the project is complete I delete the .MOV's, I don't back up any .MOV's. if I ever need them in the future, which happens time-to-time, I restore from the archived BPAV.

I never want to go back to tape.

Maybe so, but the vast majority of my clients still want plain old DVD's and I don't see that changing soon. Just because we see the shift coming often times the general public takes some time to see it and more importantly it takes corporate infrastructure time to adjust.

Why Apple doesn't allow us, the content producers, the option to professionally author our own BluRays without having to run a windows app or buy Adobe's studio is beyond me. The compressor option is amateur in it's implementation and sometimes we need the ability to do more. It's frustrating.

It would be like limiting Logic Studio to exporting only mp3's for web delivery and leaving out the ability to export wav's or aiff's for other types of delivery. It's backwards and stupid.

Sure, disc may be on the way out but it's not out, not by a long shot. Till it's dead why pretend that it's already gone?

I think the majority of professionals and consumers will have abandoned Blu-Ray in two years ... if they haven't abandoned it already. But you're right about Hollywood, they'll still be trying to push Blu-Ray 10 years from now.

When I see inexpensive devices like the Western Digital HD Media Player, it's pretty obvious what's coming down the pipe at all levels of the industry.

Sure and everyone will be driving electric cars by the end of the year.

It took 50 years to go from black and white to color, an additional 10 years to go from analog to digital and it has already been over 20 years since HD was introduced and it still has yet to become the standard for TV today.

It takes a long time for the infrastructure/value chains to be in place that allow a new technology to become a standard. I know standards committees like to think they make it all happen, but they don't. It has more to do with economics than technology.

The WD HD player is cute and it can serve an important role in displaying HD in the right application. But I'd be willing to bet that WD has sold less than .01% of those units compared to Blu-Ray players. You can't get a movie on a USB drive from Netflix, but you can get an increasing number of movies on Blu-Ray.

I'm not an advocate for Blu-Ray nor am I suggesting that everyone should go out and buy a BR-Burner, but if we're going to discuss these types of issues wouldn't it be prudent if we also evaluated it from a business perspective?

I love the WDHD player, I have four of them, along with two Apple TV's and assortment of other web enabled devices, all designed to help me play HD on the customers big beautiful 52" plasma's. But the best, maybe not the cheapest or easiest, consumer device for playing HD is a Blu-Ray player.

Also regarding the WDHD player, I spent somewhere around $45 for a 64GB USB drive and I believe the smallest WD-Passport USB hard drive is around $75, both of which you have to continually load and unload data from if you want to continually change content. Not exactly efficient or cost effective. Again it depends on the application.