Should I offer a Blu-ray DVD?

[Greg Clark]

and at what extra cost?
I wonder if I am opening a can of worms by offering to put the stage show on Blu-ray. Obviously I would have to charge more but how much more is one of my questions.
My second question is that I don't have the large tower to burn large numbers of Blu-ray disks as I do for regular DVD's.
Any advice to help me with my quandry would be greatly appreciated.

Clarity I meant a BD disk not a DVD.

[Harm Millaard]

Personally I would NEVER offer a Blu Ray DVD. I may consider a Blu Ray DISK, but not a DVD.

What you should charge for that BRD depends on your market and competition, but my gut feeling is around three times that of a SD DVD. Your media are about 5-6 times as expensive, there is no extra work, just different. Your inserts and printing is the same, etc.

If you exchange the DVD burners you have for BR burners, you are ready to go.
You may consider a larger tower and a more powerfull PSU. I currently have 17 disks internally AND 2 BR burners, all in the same tower, so space should not be a problem with a good case.

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by Greg Clark

I wonder if I am opening a can of worms by offering to put the stage show on Blu-ray.

You could be. Do you edit HD now? If you do and it works well for you then it shouldn't be that tough. If your workflow is downsampling HDV to DV in the camera and using a DV workflow, you might need to beef up your computer and storage. There could be some teething pains and depending upon how you shoot (interlaced or progressive) you might need to figure out what to do with interlaced fields in your source projects. You might want to invest in an intermediate format for editing. There are things to consider but it certainly can be done.

Originally Posted by Greg Clark

Obviously I would have to charge more but how much more is one of my questions.

That really depends. For my retail projects, I'll charge between US$10-15 more. That's mostly to cover the higher BD media cost, but the price delta between BD and DVD media is narrowing. The price is also higher because the experience in HD is better than SD.

You're going to have to suss that out on your own in order to get it right. Remember, pricing should be based upon value, not resolution.

Originally Posted by Greg Clark

My second question is that I don't have the large tower to burn large numbers of Blu-ray disks as I do for regular DVD's.

Will you do the same volume of BDs as DVDs? Figure out the ratio of one to the other and I think your options get clearer. If you will do the same number of DVDs as BDs, then you'll probably want another tower.

[Taky Cheung]

I offer my wedding clients to upgrade to BluRay between $400 to $600 depends on the hours they have in the contract. It comes with 1 BD disk. Additional BD is $100 each on paper. But I always offer them at $50.

[Greg Clark]

I now record and edit completely in an HD environment.
There is such a variety on what to charge depending on who you are recording for.

I am most interested in the extra cost I should charge to offer BD disks for a stage event such as a dance show or theatre production.

A Blu-ray tower with 8 bays is very costly, so for now I would have to burn the BD from my computer one by one.

[Harm Millaard]

Greg,

If you have two or three 5.25" slots free, just populate them with BR burners. That is not too expensive. Then use Nero to burn using multiple burners, that will save you quite some time when you need multiple copies. This shows how handy it can be to have a large tower for multiple disks and burners.

[Taky Cheung]

I ditched Nero for a long time. The free ImgBurn rocks. I can also run multiple instance of ImgBurn and burn 3 DVDs at the same time.

[Jon Geddes]

Here are some tips:

Blu-ray encoding to h264 takes a VERY long time. Almost 10 times longer than mpeg2. Expect 3 hours of footage to take approx. 30+ hours to encode (depends on how fast your system is of course). This is what might kill your productivity. I would highly recommend investing in a hardware h264 encoder such as the Matrox CompressHD which can do it faster than realtime. It's very affordable and well worth the purchase if you consider how much more productive you will be in the time saved.

Before offering blu-ray to your clients, you should test it out on a project to make sure you can actually do it. You want to make sure your software and burner are all working as they should without any errors.

Make sure you also get a BD-RE disc to test your projects out on before delivering them to your clients. If you will be using Adobe Encore to author the disc, the software preview doesn't work very well, so the only way to really test it is to burn it.

Wow your viewers with impressive motion menus.

Deliver your discs in the new Blu-ray cases. It makes for a much more professional presentation. You can get Nexpak Blu-ray cases from Tapeandmedia.com

Don't charge too much extra for them. Most production companies are doing them standard now at no additional cost, so if you spring an extra $400 price for it on your client... they probably won't recommend you to other people if you are lucky enough to keep them as a client.

[Alec Moreno]

Anything you can do to hand your customers a better looking video is worth it. The average Joe can burn a Blu-ray disc on a Sony stand-alone recorder for under $300, as long as they have a compatible camera...and we need to stay at least one step ahead of him/her. The only two reasons I can think of to not go Blu-ray is if it will expose flaws in your work, or if it will put too much of a strain on you (financially or time-wise).

Alec Moreno
http://www.1Day1ShotProductions.com

[Ron Evans]

Originally Posted by Jon Geddes

Here are some tips:

Blu-ray encoding to h264 takes a VERY long time. Almost 10 times longer than mpeg2. Expect 3 hours of footage to take approx. 30+ hours to encode (depends on how fast your system is of course).

There is no need to use H264 if you are only going to put about 2 1/2 hours or so on then I would stay with MPEG 2, essentially a VBR version of HDV( I use max 30mbps,average 23mbps, min 18 mbps). Encode times are very fast. Render from Vegas of HDV to compatible Bluray takes less than realtime and the files can be used in DVD Architect 5.0 including any markers that will used as chapter markers automatically and used to make menus, buttons or text.
I use the same authoring for Bluray and SD versions by just changing properties.
If you really need the time then it will need hardware encoding like the Grass Valley Firecoder Blu that will do it in about 1/2 realtime from the Edius timeline.

Ron Evans

[Robert M Wright]

Originally Posted by Jon Geddes

Here are some tips:

Blu-ray encoding to h264 takes a VERY long time. Almost 10 times longer than mpeg2. Expect 3 hours of footage to take approx. 30+ hours to encode (depends on how fast your system is of course). This is what might kill your productivity. I would highly recommend investing in a hardware h264 encoder such as the Matrox CompressHD which can do it faster than realtime. It's very affordable and well worth the purchase if you consider how much more productive you will be in the time saved.

You don't have to encode using h264 for a BluRay disk. You can use MPEG-2 for the BluRay version as well and, with the extra capacity of a BluRay disk, the quality of the HD MPEG-2 version for BluRay can be very close to the quality of the SD MPEG-2 version for DVD.

[Taky Cheung]

One issue to notice is BluRay menus. Unlike DVD, it doesn't have root menu and title menu. There is only 1 Top menu. Then use Popup Menu to replace the title menu. It's tricky to do in Encore CS4 but I managed it. Just finished a second BluRay disc with Popup menu. =)

[Tim Polster]

Originally Posted by Jon Geddes

Blu-ray encoding to h264 takes a VERY long time. Almost 10 times longer than mpeg2. Expect 3 hours of footage to take approx. 30+ hours to encode (depends on how fast your system is of course).

Jon, I don't know what platform or software you are running, but my experience with h.264 has not been as you describe.

Using Edius 5 and making an AVC (h.264) file from the timeline it takes ~1 1/2x to 2x project length. This is with a 9450 quad core.

[Martyn Hull]

Originally Posted by Robert M Wright

You don't have to encode using h264 for a BluRay disk. You can use MPEG-2 for the BluRay version as well and, with the extra capacity of a BluRay disk, the quality of the HD MPEG-2 version for BluRay can be very close to the quality of the SD MPEG-2 version for DVD.

Robert are you saying hd mpeg2 BLU RAY is only close to the quality of sd mpeg 2 DVD,i am a bit confused and probobly missing your point, certainly MPEG2 BDs i make are vastly superior to DVD.

[Jon Geddes]

Originally Posted by Tim Polster

Jon, I don't know what platform or software you are running, but my experience with h.264 has not been as you describe.

Using Edius 5 and making an AVC (h.264) file from the timeline it takes ~1 1/2x to 2x project length. This is with a 9450 quad core.

Render times will vary depending on your system of course. The times I gave were using a Dual Opteron 270 w/ 3GB RAM and Premiere CS3. Obviously if you are using a program that efficiently makes use of all 2, 4, or 8 cores of your system, and you have a fast processor, your times will be better. Also, the times I listed are for multipass encoding which take much longer but improve quality.