BluRay needs for Vegas

[Myron Hobizal]

Yes for HD content delivery to your customers, you need to burn them a Blu-ray disc. It’s the standard. An external burner will work. One with e-SATA interface on it, since USB2.0 is really slow. Although you would need e-SATA port on your computer too. You can use DVD Architect to create the blu-ray content and burn to disc. Blu-ray discs are currently 25GB and 50GB sizes. Your 1TB drive should be fine for editing, although I would definitely get an external backup drive and routinely backup your content.

[Dave Haynie]

USB 2.0 is just dandy for most Blu-ray needs. A USB 2.0 high speed link runs at 480Mb/s. The peak rate on a 1x Blu-ray disc is about 40Mb/s. So USB 2.0 is good enough for up to about a 10x-12x Blu-ray drive, after that, you want USB 3.0 or eSATA (there is some overhead on USB 2.0, or any serial bus, for protocol, so you don’t get the full 480Mb/s for data).

I mention this primarily because most PCs have USB 2.0 ports. eSATA is much less common. I see USB 2.0 BD-R burners on NewEgg up to.. 12x. Lots of SATA, no boxed eSATA drive. You will pay at least twice as much for the external drive, which is kind of a rip-off, but maybe a safer bet if you’re not comfortable messing around with hardware.

-Dave

[Enrique Orozco]

If you don´t want to “burn” a bluray disc, you can also produce your HD content as mp4 or wmv HD files and give your clients the option of see the HD content on TV through a multimedia player like WD TV…and you can even produce a full BluRay ISO image (with DVD architect, without a burner) that is playable on TV with players like the DuneHD…

my 2 cents…

Enrique Orozco R.
iDEA DigitalVideoStudio

[Dave Haynie]

You can skip Blu-ray, with an ample supply of 32GB Flash dongles or little HDDs, sometimes, but not always. Given that a BD burner runs $100 and a BD-R disc about $1.50, this is not a valid long-term solution if you’re making HD for mainstream clients. Most people how ask for it will have a BD player.

But otherwise, yes, HD on other media will work, though most PCs without BD players can’t play a BD compilation, much less a BD ISO. An .mp4 file will play on most PCs these days, including those running Linux and MacOS. If your HD is a full length production, though (which I’ve kind of assumed here.. if it were not, you’d probably just put an .mp4 file on a DVD, if they couldn’t handle Blu-ray), FAT32 is not much of an option. That pretty much means NTFS, which is read-only on Linux and more recent versions of MacOS, but can’t be read at all on most other devices.

The DuneHD is based on Linux, so it can actually access a full Blu-ray ISO on ext3 or NTFS file systems. But this the exception, not the rule. You need a much higher level of computer expertise to be able to deal with these kind of players, and they’re extremely rare compared to Blu-ray players, at the moment. And of course, today, you can buy 3-4 fairly nice Blu-ray players for the price of the Dune HD (depending on whether you buy “Base” or “Prime”).

Another option is certainly online, as well, but here in invariably take a quality hit. I have often distributed higher quality MP4 files, and occasionally ISOs, from my own web site to clients. But of course, they have to know what to do with them (you can make it pretty easy for them by putting it up on a web page.. everyone knows how to do a web download, lots of internet users don’t have a clue about how to log into an ftp server). And you need your own site with plenty of storage. Going to YouTube, Vimeo, or one of the others, you compromise on quality (well, Vimeo will keep your original around for awhile, but will they accept a 15-20Mb/s encoded video? YouTube actually will take 20Mb/s .mp4, but they don’t store it).

I should also point out that, in the fairly early days of DVD, I offered the option of including a DVD player in the package for any wedding shoot (I was doing that kind of work more often, back then). I would certainly do the same for Blu-ray today, if it came up (only shot three weddings last year, and no, it didn’t come up). It’s an easy way to ensure there’s Just No Problem.

-Dave

[Myron Hobizal]

BR burners can now be bought <$100 and generic 25GB BDR at $1/ea. Just burn both a DVD and BDR to give them. I wouldn’t mess with giving them files on flash media or other formats. That’s asking for trouble, as you will have people come back to you asking you how they can play the file. Worse yet, their media player won’t recognize the flash drive or the bitrate would be too high for the media player.