To encode and serve Dishing the DVD service bureaus - Statistical Data Included

Emedia Professional, July, 1999 by Jan Ozer

For many organizations, the concept of delivering videos on DVD has an undeniable appeal. No more grainy, quarter-screen videos for your sales staff, kiosks, trade shows, or training--you want the real deal: broadcast-quality video in all its full-screen splendor. Add the thought of totally hands-off operation on a DVD player (even the vice president of sales can't screw this up) and Mac and Windows compatibility, and you've got an extraordinarily potent video delivery medium.

Of course, getting from point A to point DVD hasn't been for the meek or faint-of-heart. Until very recently, the cost of buying your own DVD authoring station--not to mention the $17,000 DVD-Recorder--was astronomical. Though authoring station prices are dropping rapidly, as are DVD-Recorders (Thank you, Pioneer!), don't forget the costs of the analog equipment necessary to create optimal-quality DVD-Video (like D-1 and Digital Betacam decks costing $150,000 and $40,000, respectively).

And though today's DVD authoring stations are much easier to learn than previous systems, there's still a learning curve. Besides, do you really want your initial, much ballyhooed, highly scrutinized DVD experiment to hinge on the skills of a total amateur?

Our advice? For your first one or two (or twenty) DVD projects, consider using a third-party DVD service bureau.

SERVICE WITH A SMILE

"Won't that cost me a fortune?" we hear you thinking. Well, actually, no. In fact, for the 12-video, six-menu, one slide show test project developed for this article, our lowest bid was $1,275--cheap enough to bury in the miscellaneous category of your next trade show budget. Significantly, only one bureau strayed over the $2,000 mark.

Prices are cheap for several reasons. First, many of these companies purchased the expensive analog equipment for the MPEG-1 service bureau market four to five years ago, and have already amortized the costs. Since the equipment is paid for, there's no reason to jack prices.

Second, prices were set for the murderous competition among second-tier movie studios releasing their assets on DVD (most first-tier studios have their own authoring capabilities). Since movies were the only DVD content for several years, pricing was very aggressive.

Now that most of the movie backlog is already on DVD, most service bureaus are targeting the corporate market to expand their business. This means the six service bureaus reviewed here--and countless others around the nation--are eager for your business and priced accordingly.

OUR PLAYERS, AND THE PACES WE PUT THEM THROUGH

There are dozens of DVD service bureaus listed on the Internet that we could have solicited for this "experiment." We approached 14--including companies we've reviewed before and those involved in Online Inc.'s DVD PRO conference series--and seven agreed to participate. One dropped out at the last minute, leaving us with six: Crash Digital, Digital Outpost, Dynamic Media, IBM Interactive Design Studios, Marin Digital, and Rainmaker Digital Pictures.

We focused on five metrics: project price and turnaround time, media quality, DVD authoring experience, equipment capabilities, and DVD documentation and general submission guidelines (which we always find helpful, especially for first-time submissions). Our findings in all five categories are shown in the features table presented here and discussed in the individual reviews that follow.

To test quality, we created the aforementioned test project with 12 videos, six menus, and one slide show. Project requirements were simple--no subtitles, foreign languages, multiangle videos, or other complications.

We sent each vendor a Betacam SP tape and CD-ROM containing menus and images and a WAV file for the slide show. We sent a simple flowchart and specific navigation, presentation, and encoding instructions in a memo transmitted with the assets.

The actual video content was a challenging mix of videos from a trade show, trips abroad, family shots, and other sources, all originally filmed with a consumer-quality DV camera and dubbed to Betacam SP. By design, video content for our project was much worse than most corporate content and broke all the rules of filming for digital encoding--not a tripod, microphone, or external lighting in sight. Encoding clean, high-quality video is a walk in the park, but we wanted to give our competing compressionists nightmares.

For testing purposes, our contestants delivered the projects to us on DVD-R. (Incidentally, all offer output to mastering-ready DLT.) We performed most of our quality tests on a Sony Pentium III Digital Studio PC equipped with a Creative Labs PC-DVD Dxr2 5X DVD-ROM and Cambridge Soundworks' Desktop Theater sound system.

We played the rifles on the DVD-ROM drive using Quadrant International's Software Cinemaster DVD player, which produced excellent results on our Pentium III. To test DVD player compatibility, we ran all titles on Pioneer's DVD-V7200 player.

As shown in the Table on page 28, quality testing incorporated three concepts--audio quality, video quality, and compliance with the stated requirements of the story. We also noted any outright errors made by the service bureau.