Of all the recent decisions by Apple and Adobe, ending sales for DVD Studio Pro and Encore has caused more complaints and hardship than just about anything else they’ve done. (Well, OK, excepting the launch of FCP X and the switch to subscription pricing; but I digress.)
Recently, Tony Fleming sent me a letter that represents the feelings of many that I wanted to share with you.
Many, MANY filmmakers, videographers, wedding professionals and others rely on DVDs as a bread-and-butter income generator. Yes, DVDs are standard-def and the world is HD – though Encore also supports Blu-ray, which DVD Studio Pro does not. However, as has been shown time and time again, people will pay FAR more for something they can hold in their hand than something that is simply downloaded. Thumb drives are not yet equivalent to DVDs.
Terminating DVD SP and Encore has caused much lost revenue in our industry; especially as Tony makes clear, there is no Plan B.
While I don’t expect Tony’s comments to change behavior at either Apple or Adobe, perhaps it will spur Roxio to improve their support, or encourage another developer to provide the tools we need to create professional-grade DVDs.
Let me know what you think. But, as Tony eloquently expressed, we are still between a rock and a hard place.
Larry
by Tony Fleming
Firstly, I think it is arrogant and ridiculous for companies like Adobe and Apple to have decided that [optical] discs should be relegated to the stone age when there is currently no viable alternative. The vast majority of the world is not connected to reliable internet – even in this country. I show videos at public events. Am I supposed to show up and hope there is going to be a reliable internet connection that is going to last throughout the playing of the video? Even if I arrive with the video on a portable hard drive, what do I say to people to want to pay for a copy of the video [to take] away with them?
My clients (who run into the hundreds) want to take videos with them on their boats where there is no TV, no cell coverage and certainly no internet that anyone could afford to pay for.
We are encouraged to shoot in 4K and certainly I agree with that and the advantages that Larry has pointed out of being able to perform all kinds of camera movements in post. If the finished video is then saved on a regular DVD, the result is utterly depressing when you see how sorry it looks compared to the original. On the other hand, having battled my way through to being able to burn it to a Blu-ray Disc the result looks really outstanding.
DVD Studio Pro won’t do the job and, in any case, you have to scrounge around to find it. Larry suggested Adobe Encore but when I went on line I find that it, too, has been discontinued. I purchased Roxio Toast and after much hassle finally managed to burn a Blu-ray with excellent results. I had to uninstall it and re-install Toast to get it to work at all and the menu system does not function. Their support is absolutely the worst I have ever come across and, looking at the mass of infuriated comments on the forums, that is undoubtedly the universal opinion.
Streaming may be the way of the future but its availability is strictly limited and [optical] discs are the only alternative I know of. Those discs need to be in much higher resolution than DVD given that we now shoot in 4K. As Steve Jobs said “Blu-ray is a world of hurt” but it doesn’t need to be.
Once again we are just left twirling at the end of a rope while the companies on whom we rely are somewhere over the far horizon.
Humph!
Tony Fleming
View some of Tony’s travelogue videos at: www.flemingyachts.com/venture.html
33 Responses to Abandoning DVDs is Costing Us Money
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Richard Klingensmith says:
January 18, 2016 at 8:21 am
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George Knochel says:
January 18, 2016 at 8:39 am
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Richard Hale says:
January 18, 2016 at 9:03 am
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Mac says:
January 18, 2016 at 3:16 pm
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William Hohauser says:
January 18, 2016 at 5:25 pm
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Norman Pillsbury says:
January 19, 2016 at 10:53 pm
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Clayton Moore says:
January 22, 2016 at 2:38 pm
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Larry says:
January 22, 2016 at 2:48 pm
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Clayton Moore says:
January 23, 2016 at 7:21 am
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Kirk Lohse says:
January 25, 2016 at 5:19 am
← Older Comments Newer Comments →I wish to author and burn DVDs easily and successfully as I did with FCP7 and FC Studio. I would like to make Blu Rays – but no program available is really good.
El Capitan does not support FCP 7 or FC Studio. WHY??? Apple has created a problem that has caused me many hours of frustration. I hope that someone will write a usable program. DVDs have not gone away.
Richard Klingensmit
Bruce, I’ve been doing DVDs for over ten years, using Adobe Encore CS6, then these three consumer products, which have good DVD Authoring built-in with their non-linear editor, along with many DVD templates, and some Blu-ray templates, of which most can be modified to your liking, using your own images and videos on the menus: They can burn both DVD and Blu-ray discs. Each is under or around $100, well worth it when nothing else is out there.
What I do is first use Final Cut Pro X to edit and finish my video movie, usually around one hour long, then make a Master Apple ProRes 422 .mov file. Bring that into Compressor with the output an mpeg-2 for DVD (both video and audio combined). Then import that .mpeg file into one of these three products, adding DVD/Blu-ray Menu Chapters, choosing a template menu, modifying it if needed. Works great for me.
Adobe Premiere Elements 14 — buy the retail box and you can load it on both Mac and PC for one price. Many menu templates at Muvipix.com.
Corel VideoStudio Pro X8.5 – Windows PC only.
Cyberlink PowerDirector 14 – Windows PC only.
DVD Studio Pro in my opinion was/is? a near perfect program. Encore was a bear, difficult but not impossible to use, lots of crashes and no longer works with newer Mac OSs. FCPX’s support for optical burning is minimal yes but with a few additions could become quite satisfactory for most jobs. I love the AVCHD ability to burn a BD playable disc using DVD media. Yes AVCHD’s bitrate possibility is half of BD but the quality is gorgeous and far superior to SD DVD. ROXIO Toast is not currently a viable answer for BD/DVD. Its menu system stinks. Its rendering takes forever. Its support is close to nonexistent. I would encourage them or some other entrepeneur to envision a market that should not be killed and add new new zest to it. M-Disc does have an archival storage solution for DVDs and BDs that no other media (flash-hard drive, the cloud or tape) has. I scan and transfer people’s 8/16mm film to digital, 35mm slides, Analogue Videos as well and DVD/BD is an important part of my business.
Can anyone offer their experience with ProShow from Photodex (Win only).
Is this not a viable software?
Try this program: http://www.dvdstyler.org/en/
It is an open source program. I have used it once to make an emergency disc from pre-compressed components and it did well there. I have not tried to use it like I use DVDSP yet.
I’ve fought this problem for too long. How hard is it to create a minimal application to burn a BD and/or DVD with: a) a way to import a splash screen and add a Play Movie button, b) a way to import a music looping clip of any length, and c) play the movie such that it either returns to the splash screen when done or have the option of continuous play??
We spend thousands of hours filming and editing and at the final step have to fight with old or poorly designed technology or lack of minimal support or all of the above. What’s wrong with this picture?
Someone should make a video highlighting this nightmare. But they couldn’t burn a BR.
People are forgetting it was very important for Apple to walk away from optical drive support (CD/DVD/BR) as soon as possible, because there was no longer room for an optical drive in their hardware. Combine that with the fact that iTunes both rentals and purchase also run counter to physical media of any kind ……. equals from a business standpoint, it made no sense at all for Apple Inc. to continue to support DVD authoring. The numbers and economics of scale clearly showed that in relationship to the direction they were going in, there was no benefit and no money in it for them.
I think Apple felt ……. eh, the market will figure it out sooner or later, meanwhile its no longer their problem.
Clayton:
Apple still provides the external superdrive, even though there was no room for internal optical drives in their computers. Even 3rd-party drives are still available. The issue is not access to the hardware, where there are solutions, but access to authoring software, where both Adobe and Apple abandoned the market. And, on the Mac, there are no good alternatives.
larry
I can remember as far back as 2007 conversations with my fellow Apple employees about DVDSP and that it felt like Apple was loosing interest in it. Honesty I believe that this was another case of the late Steve Jobs trying to single handedly create a trend away from something he personally felt was un-cool. The weird Apple obsession with thinner and thinner clearly supported where Steve was coming from. Now I have two external drives myself and they work better then my built-in Super Drive ever did. Yes a lot of clients still want DVD – so many Government clients still use DVD.
DVD is still used in the legal profession.
Problem is that dumping DVD/BR support ran contrary to the consumer electronics industry. I can only imagine what Steve would say about “4k Blue Ray”.
As for Adobe, who knows weather they felt the numbers no longer made sense. Seems to makes sense that ROXIO pic up the ball and just build on what they have and spin off a fatter and more professionally polished version to run on the Mac.
Bruce I have a solution for you – give me a call at 903-792-3866 extension 114 thank you