Home Movies

[Aaron]

Me and a friend are considering investing in a Blu-Ray drive to burn home movies (or whatever else) for people. Is this too risky or could we make a profit? I have a Blu-Ray player and I think it would be worth it. Or should we consider HD-DVD? What is your opinion?

[Blue]

I'm not familiar with entrepreneurial skills are, so can't comment on if you can make a profit from such a venture. As for generically the price of Blu-ray blanks are not cheap.
I assume you are thinking of burning home movies onto either Blu-ray or HD-DVD. If burning standard definition onto these media why? DVD can do that now and very cheaply.
The availability of Domestic High Definition camera's etc is limited although improving, so i would suggest anyone that can afford those toys would have a HD burner if they wanted.

As for the difference between HD-DVD and Blu-ray? I would suggest looking around this site, Blu-ray association's web site and the HD-DVD official web site. Wait 3 months if you are unsure as HD-DVD will have been out for about a year and Blu-ray for about 9 months. Already Blu-ray is starting to steam roll HD-DVD and they are still getting everything sorted. Can anyone honestly think on the hardware side that

Toshiba
NEC
Sanyo
Onkyo
and a few others
can take on the might of
Mitsibishi
Panasonic
Philips
Samsung
Pioneer
Samsung
Sharp
Yamaha
and others

Movie Studios
HD-DVD
Unversal

Blu-ray
Sony (Columbia Tristar, Sony Pictures etc)
MGM
Fox
Disney

Warner and Paramount support both formats

IT market
HD-DVD
30GB
Toshiba,
Microsoft
Intel

Blu-ray
50GB
Apple
Sun
Dell

HP can't make their mind up what they are doing.

There is only room for one format, it doesn't take much brain power to work out the result.

I would suggest that a Blu-ray burner to make money out of is risky at best. HD-DVD well how long is it going to last, is the question? So if you want to make money out of it you had better do it quickly.

[Behemoko]

If you're going to resort to illegal resources, Blu-Ray has more potential buyers, sooo..

[DaveFi]

Originally Posted by Behemoko

If you're going to resort to illegal resources, Blu-Ray has more potential buyers, sooo..

What? Why would you even think that the OP was asking about that? He clearly is asking about editing home movies. We do not talk about piracy here.

Are there any consumer dual layer BD burners even available yet? If not I would think you'd want to wait for that. Personally I'd think there was next to zero market at for this currently and wouldn't bother unless I had a big editing business involving many formats, not just one.

[Deane Johnson]

Everything DaveFi says, plus you need to consider source material. If the "home movies" are from SD, you won't gain anything. If they are from old film, the resolution of 8mm and Super 8 doesn't need high def.

I have been doing some of this with my own "home movies". I've started shooting with a Sony HC1 1080i camera, editing them, then transcoding them down to SD for regular DVDs until Blu-ray becomes more universal.

I can tell you editing high def is a resource hog like you've never seen. I use Canopus Edius 4 professional software for the editing. There are some lower cost editing programs available now, but I have no experience with them. High def 1080i uses about 30 gig of hard drive space per hour.

I think the bottom line is what DaveFi pointed out. There is no market for the product at this time.

[Aaron]

I know that Blu-Ray is obviously better than HD-DVD, but my city's is mostly "lower-class" so HD-DVD might be more appealing to them, as far as I know I am the only person (out of 10,000) with a Blu-Ray device.

In response to "Behemoko"-I don't pirate movies.

Thanks for your help.

[Maximus]

You will have problems finding a HD DVD burner and HD DVD-R media, as they currently do not exist. BD has a very wide range in both crucial departments.

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by Maxpower1987

You will have problems finding a HD DVD burner and HD DVD-R media, as they currently do not exist. BD has a very wide range in both crucial departments.

Ohh, thanks. I've seen computers with HD-DVD drives, but they must not have been HD-DVD writers. That helps!