DVD Repication or duplication?

I've posted this at the cow also. I am looking for somewhere in the Los Angeles area that can do a run of about 150 DVD's. Any recommendations? Also would it be best to just burn one, in DVD SP4 and make copies of that, or take a hard drive to the dupe house and have them make a glass master of the whole project. Program length will be about 80-90 minutes. Any suggestions on the best and most cost effective way to approach this?

With a replication you will get the best quality for your DVD,

if your just wanting 150 copies, go with a simple duplication.
you really dont break the cost ratio of replication until about a 1000 copies.

Most houses will want a copy of your DVD, unfortunately DVD SP is not a standard in most duplication houses,

so chances are they wont be able to read your file,
however they can do the authoring for you, but it will cost you.


if you want to bump your copies up to 300, DiscMakers our of Burbank will do a replication for a little under a grand. Good Luck beating that. Most places wont give you a duplication for that cost.

Hope this helps you out.

Thanks James, So what you're saying is, if I burn a copy in DVDSP4 I can take that and just get copies made or dulpicated and they will retain all my chapter markers and menus etc. but the quality wont be quite as good as doing replication?

Quality obviously is going to be just as good, that's what it's called duplication. Quality is determined by the encoding stage, not the manufacturing step.

What won't be as good is the compatibility rate. This is, a replicated disc will play in nearly all DVD players, while a duplicated disc has a compatiblity rate of about 70-80 per cent. It's getting better as the installed base of players is updated with newer, more tolerant players. So it is possible that compatibility figures are a bit better today. Still, even for the best case scenario, a 10 per cent of rejection is not acceptable for a commercial production.

As for DVD SP not being a standard, that's not even true or false. It's just completely irrelevant. DVD SP produces a disk image, a DVD-R disc or a DLT tape that any duplicator or replicactor can use. In fact, the replicator or duplicator can't tell which application you used, and they don't care, as long as everything's in order.

Traditionally, a DLT tape was the only professional way of delivering a master to a replicator, but today more and more replicators are accepting recordable media as a source for replication.



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

yes, frank

if you bring them a dvd they will duplicate it with no problems,

Aldolfo:
"As for DVD SP not being a standard, that's not even true or false. It's just completely irrelevant."

i was stating that it is not standard, because i believe he was asking to take his "project" file to the duplication house, where it would be unusable.

however you do make an excellent point on the percentage of duplication failure.
i thank you for that.

J

Thanks guys.