How much does it cost?

[-Sandro-]

Hello i'd like to know how much costs to a major to make a blu ray. Let's say we have a 35mm negative. How long does it take to scan every frame and what are the costs? I read that for Seinfeld Sony spent millions, but what exactly costs so much: the frame scanning or the re-editing in hd from the start since was saved in sd video as final master? For a recent movie on 35mm is the cost reduced since they only have to transfer to digital video the final printed film? This makes me guess that every movie ever made and printed already on film would be cheap to transfer on blu ray. I'm interested mainly in some '90s tv shows shot both on 16 and 35mm because they are the most doubtful product to be released, (if the company still has the projects of the editing) if the transfer costs so much this means that the release has to have a lot of powerful interested buyers otherwise we will NEVER see the show in on blu cause the cost wouldn't justify the earnings! In the same time it makes me think that they had to do the same processes to edit the sd version for tv airing and dvd release so the costs should be the 'same', it still came from film and they had to do the film scanning after all. Anyway what did they do with seinfeld? So i can have an idea.

[Stoudman]

I would imagine since Blu-rays are produced and work in the same fashion as DVDs, in fact being more efficient than DVDs, that it's the editing process that takes so much time, effort, and money. Cleaning up the picture to give it the best quality for the high definition format is probably the one thing that costs the most, because in terms of creating blu-rays and transferring data to them, the process is about as cheap as the process with DVDs.

EDIT:

In response to your question about TV on blu, I doubt it will be economically sound for any company to bring the older shows, especially ones filmed in 4:3 for television to blu anytime soon. We're just now seeing tons of the more rare TV titles brought to DVD, because only now has it become economically sound to do so. Companies can now deliver DVD sets of TV shows at prices that the consumer will gladly pay...but if they put all that money into editing the TV shows to clean them up and deliver a high def picture on blu, not only would it take a lot of time, effort, and money, but subsequently the price for the blu-ray edition would be so high you wouldn't even want to pay it. I'm fairly sure that the companies involved KNOW that, which is why you're still seeing far more TV to DVD releases than to blu-ray. Unless it was recently made and shot FOR high definition telivisions, chances are they aren't going to make any attempt to bring it to blu anytime soon. It took 5-10 years for DVD to get this far with TV shows, expect a similar time frame for blu.

[Clark Kent]

I have heard for a modern feature film, it costs a major studio anywhere from $250,000 to $400,000 to bring it out on Blu-ray. Of course a major studio release might entail some extra costs that the independent studios do not have like extensive use of BD-Java, BD-Live, and other extras. A small independent release could be done on the cheap for around $100,000 or maybe even less.

The real problem with many shows from the 90's is that the only current existing masters were edited on sd videotape, which is significantly inferior in picture quality to Blu-ray. HD masters really do not exist yet for them and the studio would have to create them from scratch, which as you surmised would cost a large amount of money.

[-Sandro-]

That's what I thought for tv shows, well at least there's a little hope they'll be released eventually even if I don't why the cost would go down in 5-10 years.

For a recent movie I guess they'll just make a digital transfer one time and create different masters for each market, that's why they are already ready for pay tv, blu-ray and dvd at the same time.