Maximum DVD Master Quality For Replication

[Peter Dunphy]

Just came across this excellent piece of advice:

“An .img file would have a 1:1 relationship to a glass master, which would have a 1:1 relationship to a pressed disk. If you’re doing the authoring and encoding, it’s up to you, not the replication house, to manage bitrate. Don’t put any more in than you want on a pressed DVD.”

For safety, I will ask the replication house to encode and author this particular big video project I’ve done.

Peter Dunphy

2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5

[Peter Dunphy]

For safety, I will ask the replication house to encode and author this particular big video project I’ve done. I have DVD Studio Pro but just want to play absolutely safe with this video.

How does this sound…

I plan to ask the replication house to encode and author the video, in addition to running off the discs. I will ask for their specs and delivery specs. Then, based on the specs, I will bring my self-contained Quicktime movie (the QT file that can be exported directly from the FCP timeline) on an external hard drive to them, and let them copy it onto their computer.

I will also give them a Quicktime file of a video I want to play in the background of the main menu. I will give them details of what kind of buttons I want and what the buttons should say, and the transition into the movie beginning once the viewer presses play.

…it would be nice to have created the menu and do the encoding and authoring myself, but since the video project I’ve finished is very important, it’s best to have the replication house ‘take charge’ of it I feel. Also, it’s like a security, so if there are any problems with the finished DVDs, I can’t be blamed for not encoding properly, because I was not responsible for it.

BTW I’ve seen DVDs this replication house have produced and they look good quality.

What do you think?

Peter Dunphy

2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5

[Stephen De vere]

Peter,

I made the mistake of trusting my first chosen replicator to do a good job of the authoring and encoding – wasted nearly 3 months trying to get them to produce a useable result, and have ended up having to start again from scratch with another company while still facing a full invoice for the unuseable job done by the first company. Email if you want to know who they are.

Re. the first replicating house:
The authoring/encoding they always get done by a sub-contractor whose encoding was with something built in to an Avid suite – pretty good quality but the operator would not or could not produce a result that did not have some motion rendering ‘judder’ and also slight scaling of the whole picture.

The same authorer made many mistakes in the authoring – after the fifth approval disc was still wrong I had to give up. Basically he was an enthusiast/amateur startup getting away with it with mostly clearly un-discerning corporate type clients.

There seem to be a lot of small not very good outfits around. I am beginning to believe they are in fact the majority out there after having a similar disaster experience with getting professional help with the finishing/grading and laying off to digbeta (that time I re-graded myself and have postponed the mastering to tape).

SO don’t assume any one firm know all about replicating, authoring and encoding. These are 3 quite different skills. First I would get the replication firm that you believe should be good, to run you off a short test of their mpeg2 encoding. I have found this to be easily the most difficult stage to get a good result from. After my hellish experience with the first firm I got encoding tests done by 3 other companies for free (none refused to do a free test).

The best result was using Cinemacraft 8-pass software-only encode and only costing £250 for 50mins of SD from uncompressed Quicktime on a USB2 drive. Eyeframe.co.uk London (Soho). They have just won awards for authoring Son of Rambow (but check whether they actually did the encoding too). If I had had time to shop around for Cinemacraft SP encoding I might have got even cheaper. This software is so good (they said) that they almost never bother going to the max bitrate (when there’s space to do allow) because it doesn’t improve the result noticeably. Now I understand more why big hollywood release DVD bit rates are relatively low but still look so good.

The other two tests I had done were both from hardware encoder cards. One was a (now discintinued) Sony Vizaro realtime card and almost as good as the Cinemacraft but cost more than twice the price per minute of the Cinemacraft rate. The other was Matrox Axio LE hardware, assisting encoding via Prem Pro, and decidedly prosumer looking. My own results using Compressor rated about third in the bunch at best, if I could have fixed the bad problems it produced with one or two individual shots.

My authoring house is delivering master DDP with CSS on a DVD-R to the replicator.