Using DVD's for weddings?

Are you using DVD's to give to clients? I'm using CDs currently for

products that need to be archived such but am thinking of

switching. Are you finding that clients are open to DVD solutions?

 

Also, what DVD burners have you heard great things about?

I'm planning to offer slide show playable on DVD media as an optional product. It is especially efficient when client wants to present it to larger group.

 

I personally like LG DVD burners. I had no problems with them so far and they work very well with NERO.

We provide all "keepers" fully corrected and ready to print in Tiff form from DVDs. We're

currently using Delkin eFILM Archival Gold DVDs burned at no more than 4X. A CD-ROM

with all the same images downsized in Jpg form for smaller prints and internet

compression is also provided. Use a program called "Picture the Batch" to do that

downsizing in a matter of 10 unsupervised minutes. For the larger wedding packages we

do a DVD slide show with music (the client buys) using 100 -150 of their wedding images

they can play on their TV. iPhoto and iDVD is how we put it together.

 

25% of our clients are now buying the shoot day and DVD/CD-ROM package and paying a

premium for the movie. That has been more profitable than doing a whole package in

terms of work time spent verses income.

 

I'd like to get a DVD burner that burns multiple DVDs at once ... IF they are archival and

not considerably slower than other single burn units.

"I'd like to get a DVD burner that burns multiple DVDs at once ... IF they are archival and not considerably slower than other single burn units."

 

this is my bottleneck in production too. I make three copies to dvd, one for them, one for the binder on the bookshelf, and one for out-of-the-office saftey.

 

A friend of mine has one at their work. It cost $2500 CND and does 50 dupes. Or, was it ten at a time but you can order 50 run? Don't know but I doubt these things will come down in price, just like dual layer dvd's, for movie piracy issue.

 

But Don, sorry for going off topic, I do nearly the same as Marc, but I surrender the RAW files too. These are what I consider the negatives and I doubt it will be very long before every windows user out there will be able to open them and play without expensive software like today. I then make three of four common sizes in JPGs, for printing and emailing, from the corrected raw's. Along the way through editing i flag or rate my fave raws and play with those, ie conversion to b&w or crop or remove telephone poles from the back of heads.

 

A great internal dvd burner is the pioneer series, the 108 or 109. They are cheap from the wholesalers and have one of the best reps in terms of stability and reliabilty. Both burn and read dual layer too btw.

About you mentioning that it was a pain to burn 3 copies every time, I think Nero can burn to several drives at once. You need several recorders, obviously.

HPs 640E (external) comes with a very short cable that you can daisy chain to another like it and record more than one DVD at once. I haven't done it, but the capability is there.

Conni

Thanks Pierre and Conni. I'll check into it right now and hopefully I can hook up a couple more pioneers.

There are basically 2 types of DVD Picture shows software generators.

 

1 - generates DVD standard format to run on NTSC (or PAL) standard resolution tv, on a tv top type (or desk top type) DVD players. This kind of DVD Picture show would be limitted in picture quality by the DVD standard that matched television standard.

For NTSC the pixel resolution is mere 720 x 480, or so. For PAL system there is nearly 100 lines more of horizontal resolution.

Newer HDDVD format technology is emarging with capability of 1000 lines.

 

When you make beautiful pictures with current DSRL DVD, even 6 MPixel gives you 3000 x 2000 pixels. Converting these quality pictures into DVD Picture show, means loosing a lot of picture quality. (say 720 x 480 used versus available 3000 by 2000) - DVD only uses about 1/4 of available pixels. HDTV is better, but will also loose about 1/2 of pixels or more.

 

2. - DVD Picture show for playing on computer screen. This type of DVD Picture Show will not play on any stand alone (tv top) DVD player, since it requires computer to dynamically render best quality pictures, limitted only by the resolution of your computer/video adapter/monitor. This type software dynamically renders each picture at the PC monitor max resolution, e.g. 1600 x 1200 or better, revealing more picture beauty that is possible with the standard DVD format as described above (1). One of inexpensive digital picture shows is from: www.digitalphotoslideshow.com.

 

Method 1 always drastically reduces quality of you pictures, so displaying them on a TV will not bring full glory that the photogtapher deserves.

 

Method 2, althogh less convenient since it requires a computer to play, gives much better justice to your great photos.

 

When connecting a wide screen HDTV to your laptop computer output provides much better presentation, though still reduced quality to the HDTV standard.

 

If you provide DVD Picture Shows to your customers, (the TV standard method 1), make sure you explain the technoology, and reason why the TV picture show can look poor.

CDROM2Go has tower DVD burners in various configurations.

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They have some 16X speed 5 DVD recorders for a good price. I agree with Marc to do a slow burn at 4X speed.

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I have ordered from them before and have gotten great service.

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<a href="http://www.cdrom2go.com/product-buy.asp?D=EQ&S=S0196&C=EQDD&N=1">CDROM2Go DVD burners</a>

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I too like the LG with Nero,have only begun playing with it using Photostory 3 (free download from MS)it has all the bells and whistles

You can use Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder which is very powerful and very popular now, many friends and I like it very much. It's very easy to create a customized DVD slideshow with photos and videos, and to add music, transitions, and cool pan/zoom effects and make beautiful DVD menus. Also, you can create .mp4, .wmv, .avi, .3gp movies from videos in other formats for our iPod, Zune and 3GP Cell Phones, Youtube .etc.

 

To be important, it has great photo and video editing function that can meet all our needs. For example, you can perfect your photos with attractive frames, special mask effects, and rich Cliparts, Wordarts or Text. And it is easy to crop music to sync with slideshow. You can use the video edit function to trim the video, add the caption and frame to the video, and change the original audio with your favorite music, etc.

 

You can download it free here

http://www.photo-to-dvd.com/dvd-slideshow-builder.php?sid=8

 

And a specific tutorial is here

http://www.photo2vcd.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1452

 

Some useful information such as tips to make slideshow awesome is here:

http://www.photo-to-dvd.com/other/popular-way-to-hold-memory.html