Leading format in the US? Blueray or HD Dvd?

[Max Kovalsky]

As far as sales of commercial titles, last quarter showed a tie with Blu-ray at 51% and HD DVD at 49%. As far as corporate communications, screeners and other types of one-offs, Blu-ray so far has a clear advantage – the near 100% compatibility of BD-R media (given it’s properly authored as HDMV). We’ve been burning 25GB discs for almost a year now, so BD has been the way to go for smaller jobs. This will probably shift as HD DVD burners start to hit the US market. Our facility, by the way, will soon be among the first in the US to acquire an HD DVD burner.

Max
—
Author
New York
Area4.tv

[Max Kovalsky]

Then of course Walmart and BestBuy stores had $100 HD DVD player sale yesterday (I’m sure at a premium subsidy from Microsoft). Stores got around 50 players each and were all sold out within 15 minutes. We’ll see what kind of numbers the HD DVD group will publish in the upcoming days.

Max
—
Author
New York
Area4.tv

[Andreas Sweden]

Thank you for that info Max.
Sorry for the misspelling of Blu-ray 🙂
My production company is looking to get into the HD-format, we only produce documentaries for DVD but now we are looking to make quite an investement on buying new cameras and equipment to stand out on the shelves and hopefully cater the HD-market and thet way have our DVDs selected before the competition when people have the choice of HD.

As far as the authoring of the HD discs is the format decided when compressing from the editing program or when burning in the DVD authoring software?

[Max Kovalsky]

I believe the authoring tools for both formats are decided, but not the formats themselves. Compression standard on the mid to high end is Sonic’s Cinevision, which can compress for both formats. The tool is priced at $80K. Authoring for Blu-ray is done either with Sony’s Blu-print or Sonic’s Scenarist HDMV (which is what we’re using), both are at $50K. For HD DVD, you need to hand-write the code. Scenarist HD DVD ACA ($50K) and DoStudio ($250/month and our choice here) can both help you with muxing your streams. Word of warning: learning curve for both compression and authoring is very steep.

Max
—
Author
New York
Area4.tv

[Bill Stephan]

As far as the Hollywood movie discs are concerned, if you filter out the stores that carry only a dozen or so discs in each format, all the big sellers devote two to three times as much shelf space to Blu-ray as to HD-DVD. This is in Central New Jersey and midtown Manhattan.

For authoring small prjects for corporate customers, again Blu-ray wins because there has been working burners and recordable media on the market for awhile now.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City

[Eric Pautsch]

Also to add an update here. Sonic has recently lowered the pricing for both their BD-HDMV and HD DVD (AC) tools to the sub $30,000 area with Cinevision included.

[Max Kovalsky]

Eric, I wish this was true. You may be right in that the prices are moving towards 30’s, but that’s for each individual component.

Max
—
Author
New York
Area4.tv

[Eric Pautsch]

Sorry..just telling you what I paid. Although Cinevision is stripped down and only offers MPEG2. Had to pay more to get the VC-1 option.