slightly OT: (v)cd pressing

[mattias]

hey,

i'm thinking of releasing a couple of my short films on vcd, so i was wondering if somebody knew the lowest glass master and pressing price there is to be had anywhere in the world. i've found a quote of $350 for 100 copies which is ok but still a little steep, plus i only think i can sell 50. anybody running a record company or so? jukka? ;-)

thanks,
matt

[avortex]

Mattias,
Why don't you make a SVCD? DVD quality at VCD cost.
I can help you if you want. I usually make lots of them in my video bussines.

[mattias]

Why don't you make a SVCD?

good idea, but will they play on all standalone dvd players? i know they won't play on all computers without certain software installed, and that's already a major concern to me.

/matt

[avortex]

The compatibility is perhaps slighty minor compared to VCD, but all the people I know can play them perfectly. An so all the new players can do it.
You can make a little test with all your friend's players.

Remember:

-Mpeg2 at 480*480 (NTSC) or 480*576 (PAL)
-Max. video bitrate of 2500
-max. audio bitrate 224 (44.100 Khz)

If the source is Super8 transferred to video, it will look awesome!
If you finally go this way, I can help you in anything you want. (And if you go for the VCD way, too)

[mattias]

thanks, i'll make a test and start making house calls. ;-)

1022 of the 1987 players listed on vcdhelp support svcd while 1481 of them support vcd (i would have expected pretty much all of them to though). sadly only 300 of them support svcd subtitles, which is a feature i would really like to use. my biggest problem right now is that i don't have a g4 or a superdrive, so i can't export to mpeg-2 nor play it, but i'll try to see what i can do with my unix laptop, or i might ask you to help me. ;-)

anyway, nobody knows where to press those cd's?

/matt

[digvid]

Mattias -

Hmmm...if you only want subtitles in one language, I wonder if there is a way to burn the subtitle into the actual mpeg file. That way it would just be a part of the image itself, and you would not have to rely on someone's player to support subtitles. Of course, then you could not turn off the subtitles if you wanted to. Just a thought.

What mpeg encoder do you plan to use? This is critical for producing a good-looking VCD or SVCD. A good one in my opinion is the Tsunami MPEG Encoder (TMPGEnc) available at http://www.tmpgenc.net.

Also, if you really get into this and want to squeeze the maximum quality out of your SVCD, let me know and I can give you some tips as well. There are certain things you can do to dramatically increase the effective bitrate. For instance, you can shrink your video by about 3% and add a black border around the edges. This border doesn't show up when you play this on TV because it is hidden by the overscan area. However, the bits that would have been used to represent the part of the image in the overscan area are reallocated to give more detail to the part that you can actually see. This may be more extreme than what you want to get into...if so, just disregard this post!

- Jeff D.

[jukkasil]

hey,

i'm thinking of releasing a couple of my short films on vcd, so i was wondering if somebody knew the lowest glass master and pressing price there is to be had anywhere in the world. i've found a quote of $350 for 100 copies which is ok but still a little steep, plus i only think i can sell 50. anybody running a record company or so? jukka? ;-)

thanks,
matt

We have used this one in Finland, it's very cheap:

http://www.kaustartrading.com/

These pages are in Finnish, but I remember that they are local Swedish speaking people, so I think you can communicate with them with your own language! That company is near of city called Wasa (in the West-Coast of Finland). I remember that 200 pcs. audio cds with 4-color printed covers costed us about 840 Euros (including glass master,the real cds, not cd-r-format) at the beginning of year 2000, when we used their service. They can make also smaller prints than 200 pcs. I think. Anyway cd-rs will be much cheaper with printed covers. Just ask their offer!

Another cheap one here in Finland is DATA-MATE:

http://www.cd-datamate.com/

They are in Helsinki and perhaps can communicate with Swedish too.

We use it here in my working place to print cd-rs. They can even print 20 pcs. in one time. They just made 50 pcs. for us, I'll ask the prices of it from one of my colleague.

[jukkasil]

That DATA-MATE prices for pressed cd-rs:

65 pcs. cd-rs, 3.36 Euros per one cd, means 168 Euros of 50 pcs. cd-rs.

This price is not include cd cover etc. prints cost.