CATEGORY: CD/DVD/Blu-ray

Doctor Who . . . and me?

Actor Peter Davison, The 5th “Doctor” with David Ryan

So it was about a year ago that I arrived at work and opened a new email that said,

“Are you the David Ryan who was on assignment with the Doctor Who team in 1983 that produced The Awakening story?”

I smiled.  With the age of the internet, I knew it was just a matter of time before they found me.

Let me digress.

Back in the 80’s, when I was working at the Denver PBS affiliate, KRMA-TV, I produced a documentary on the then exponentially growing popularity in America of the campy BBC TV sci-fi series, Doctor Who, which at the time was being aired primarily by PBS stations.  Aficionados of the series will recall that actor Tom Baker played the Doctor at that time.

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Could you use an authored Blu-ray disc?

Ok, sure, I know, for most of my network of clients and contacts, Blu-ray disc replication is out of the question because of the huge costs involved, anywhere from 5 to 10 times the cost of DVD replication.

That’s why most of my clients who shoot and edit in HD end up choosing to release their programs utilizing the anamorphic widescreen standard DVD format.

Still, if your final need is just a few discs, say under 100, then there still is a cost-effective way for us to create you a Blu-ray disc master and copies.

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CBR vs. VBR digital encoding . . . and what it means to you

What it boils down to is that there are different qualities of digital encoding . . . even when going to the same end product like a video DVD.  

Let’s say a client wants to transfer a digital betacam videotape to DVD.  At Video Labs, we have three routes we can follow. 

The least expensive option is to play back the videotape and encode the signal directly into our Pioneer DVD recorder. 

We have three of these Pioneer DVD recorders.  Even though they are not made anymore, they continue to be workhorses fo us.  We like them for a number of reasons, including: they can take component and SDI in, can handle both NTSC and PAL signals, and offer some basic authoring capability.  (And as a side note, an added bonus is that when encoding  SD captioned tapes, these DVD recorders don’t strip the line 21 captioning information in the vertical interval, thereby making for an easy way to carry over captions from a tape to a DVD.  Read more about this in my article: “The Challenges of Subtitles and Captions in DVDs“ ) 

A more expenisve solution for encoding a video would be to digitize the footage into our Final Cut Pro and then use Compressor to create a MPEG2 video and AC-3 audio file, and then create a DVD in DVD Studio Pro, Adobe Encore or Sonic Scenarist. 

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What’s the difference between “shrinkwrap” and “overwrap”?

In my price quotes for media replication orders, you’ll often see I often mention ”shrinkwrap” or “overwrap.”  They can mistakenly be thought to be one in the same, but there is a difference between the two.

Shrinkwrap is made of polymer plastic film and is of the consistency of the material that comes with your drycleaning. 

It has the property of shrinking when heat is applied.

Overwrap is what I refer to as the “crinkly” wrap (made of polypropylene) that comes with audio CDs and many retail DVDs. 

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