Why Professional Blu-ray Tools Matter
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Introduction

It’s no secret that Blu-ray has taken longer to catch on than many in the industry had originally predicted or hoped.  Recent indications suggest that this is changing and that now really is the time for the global post production community to get serious about offering Blu-ray services.  Until recently, though, all but the largest post houses have felt excluded from the Blu-ray market due to the high prices of professional authoring tools, the steep learning curves associated with these tools and/or the lengthy production times needed to make a BD with these tools.

The apparent inaccessibility of professional tools led many independent post houses to experiment with “prosumer” Blu-ray solutions like Encore and DVDit Pro HD, only to find that what they thought were Blu-ray compliant streams and compiled projects would often fail to go through replication.  Many studios also quickly uncovered significant feature limitations with these prosumer products - limitations that put smaller studios at a distinct disadvantage when trying to win a slice of the lucrative Blu-ray pie.

NetBlender fills the gap between prosumer tools on one hand and prohibitively expensive and complex tools on the other with its DoStudioTM line of practical, professional Blu-ray production tools.

This paper describes some of the common real-world challenges studios encounter when attempting to build their Blu-ray practice using prosumer tools and how DoStudio helps overcome these challenges.  This paper is organized around the following three categories of challenges with prosumer tools:

  1. Reliability
    • You need to know that your discs will always go through replication and will play on all the players.  Using a professional tool will give you this peace of mind.
  2. Support
    • Blu-ray is still an evolving industry, so you’re going to need a helping hand to guide you at some point - make sure that help will be there when you need it.  Professional tools are backed by the professional, business-class support you need.
  3. Competitiveness
    • If you want to offer professional BD authoring services, you need to be able to deliver world-class titles with all the beauty and interactivity that Blu-ray promises
      • Pop-up Menus
      • PIP
      • BD-50
      • BD Touch
      • More…

Why Blu-ray? Why Now?

Before we dive into the advantages of upgrading to professional tools, let’s first quickly summarize some of the trends that make now the right time for the independent post production community to get serious about Blu-ray.

First, consumers are ready for it.  The number of households with HDTVs is steadily rising and research shows that once someone watches HD content, they find it difficult to “downshift” to standard def. viewing.

Second, access to HD content is on the rise.  Online, over the air and in theaters, people are increasingly watching in HD.  Supply of Blu-ray content is set to grow, too, in part because of the recent lowering of the AACS license fees.  Under the new plan, instead of $3,000 up front, a content provider can choose to pay in $500 annual increments.  The per title and per disc fees have also been lowered.  Add it all up, and your clients will more and more start asking you for DVD and BD services.  You want to be ready to win that business and deliver all the interactivity and visual beauty that the Blu-ray spec promises.

Why Upgrade to Professional Tools

Reliability

Time - it’s the ultimate scarce resource.  You can’t make more of it, so you need to budget it.  Many DoStudio customers have shared stories with us about how their project plan got completely torpedoed by a client who changed their mind mid-way into a project on a title feature that was not supported (or not supported well) by the prosumer tool the studio was using.  Another common one that can kill your plan, and your profit, is a master that fails replication and requires lengthy troubleshooting and rework to fix.  And just because a title makes it through replication doesn’t necessarily mean that it will play on every player.  If all that sounds fairly complicated, that’s because it is…if you choose the wrong tool for the job.
The good news is that NetBlender has created a tool that takes the guesswork out of Blu-ray.  When you upgrade to a professional solution like DoStudio, you are paying for the reliability of results that professional production requires.  We’ve invested heavily over the last 18 months in extensive compatibility testing, both in-house and with partners like BluFocus and CheckDisc Labs in LA, to ensure that DoStudio-authored titles are compliant with all replication requirements and will play on every player.

And, because we are a professional solution, we understand that clients change their minds, so we have one of the broadest feature sets in the industry to accommodate just about anything they might throw at you.  And unlike some of the other guys in the professional space, we’re actually responsive to your feature requests, as the following testimonial shows:

Fonoprint in Bologna Italy required double-layer (BD-50) and also needed DoStudio’s PCM audio file size limit increased for the hit Vasco Rossi 2008 World tour BD. NetBlender sent Fonoprint an advanced-copy of the double-layer functionality and also adjusted the PCM file size limit in order to meet Fonoprint’s needs and keep their project on track.

Support

When its crunch time and you’re stuck, you want to know that there is a group of Blu-ray experts who are committed to your success. That’s what you get with NetBlender.

I really must commend you on the very service-oriented way you run NetBlender. With the online help, the Wikipapers, the forum and all the little really nice tips, tricks and advice. And then the quick response in dealing with our little problem here. This is something other software houses could adopt as well. We work with many other software firms in the US and this kind of service is not common practice. So I am very pleasantly surprised.
~ Mark Dauth, Post Production Supervisor
Magna Mana Production, Frankfurt, Germany

Competitiveness

Beyond its high definition picture quality, Blu-ray’s interactive features, like pop-up menus and picture-in-picture, are a big draw for content owners evaluating different format options.  Other aspects of the format like the ability to hold 50 GB of data and enable Managed Copy are also important.  In order for you to be able to deliver Blu-ray services with all of these capabilities to your clients, you need to be working with a professional tool.  Here’s how one prominent member of the post production creative community, Walter Biscardi, put it:

After almost 12 months of struggling with Adobe’s Encore software for BluRay production, we’ve decided to switch over to NetBlender’s DoStudio authoring software.

The big reason we switched to DoStudio is because we can create BD-J commercial titles. Encore can’t even create a nice BD-R disc. [with Encore] All we could do was create a “Play” button.
~Walter Biscardi
Biscardi Creative Media

Conclusion

DoStudio BD Authoring Edition (DSA) can be purchased for only $2,995 and our end-to-end DoStudio BD Workflow suite (DSW), with integrated AVC Blu-ray encoder, authoring, subtitling, formatting, playback and burning is only $4,995.  With professional tools priced at these levels, there’s simply no reason to put yourself at a competitive disadvantage by using prosumer tools.  When you consider the time you’ll spend trying to make a prosumer tool work for your client’s variable needs and the stress your team will go through by not having access to responsive, expert Blu-ray tech support, it’s just not worth it.