Section 22.11. Professional Duplicating


22.11. Professional Duplicating

Maybe you've organized a school play, and you want to sell copies of the performance to parents as a fundraiser. Maybe you want to send out "new baby" videos to your family circle. Or maybe you've used iDVD to create a video brochure of your small business's products and services.

In each of these cases, burning the DVDs one at a time on your own Mac looks more and more like a time-consuming , expensive hassle. Accordingly, when you want to make more than a handful of copies of your DVD, you might want to consider enlisting the aid of a DVD service bureau . (DVD service bureaus are middlemen between you and the large replication plants, which don't deal directly with the public.)

Technically, these companies offer two different services:

  • Duplication . Duplicated discs are copies of your original DVD. Service bureaus use banks of DVD burners, five or ten at a time, that churn out copy after copy on DVD-Rs (the same kinds of blanks as you used).

    You pay for materials and labor, usually by the hour. (Discs with less data burn quicker, producing more discs per hour .) This is the way to go if you need fewer than 100 copies of your disc. (On the other hand, remember that some DVD players don't play DVD-R discs.)

  • Replication . Replication is designed for huge numbers of copies: 200 and up. In this process, the company actually presses the DVDs just the way Hollywood movie studios do itand the results play back in virtually every DVD player.

    Replicated discs are produced in factories. When replicated, the data from your master DVD-R is placed on a pressed 4.7 GB "DVD-5" disca standard DVDs, not a DVD-R.

    Expect to pay about a dollar per disc for a run of 1,000 discs. Smaller runs will cost more per disc, larger runs less, but $1,000 is about the least you'll pay for a replication job.


Note: DVD service bureaus often call themselves replicators, even though they offer both duplication and replication.



iLife 05. The Missing Manual
iLife 05: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596100361
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 314
Authors: David Pogue

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