Blu-ray authoring becoming affordable
Just one and a half years after Blu-ray won the high definition format wars, authoring and reproducing content has finally become affordable. Blank media now costs as little as $2.67 per single layer 25 GB blank, and Blu-ray burners cost as little as $160. While that isn’t dirt cheap like DVD blanks and DVD burners, it has essentially crossed into the mainstream. Blu-ray set-top box players now cost as little as $164 which is affordable and there’s a sufficiently large user base with PlayStation 3 consoles to make Blu-ray home movies or school recitals a reasonable possibility. The price of the burners will likely settle below $100 and blanks will settle below $1 per blank within the next few years, but the prices are good enough to spur mainstream adoption.
On the video production and authoring front, you could use any current video editing suite to encode H.264 video optimized for Blu-ray, or you can even drag and drop an AVCHD video from your SDHC flash card into a standard data BD blank. Ideally, the video source would be from a camera like the Canon 5D Mark II 1080P, but a consumer 1080P AVCHD or 1080i HDV camcorder should work OK when there’s sufficient light. A Canon 500D (Rebel T1i) should provide some decent 1080P output at 20 FPS if you don’t mind an exaggerated low frame rate film look, but you always have the option of using 720P.
Now the question remains whether this is even worth the effort when it’s so easy to just look at a 2 Mbps video on YouTube or give someone an 8 Mbps AVI or MKV file on a flash drive or blank DVD. That’s a tough question to answer because people seem to prefer convenience over quality. But as native 1080P LCDs get more common in homes, I think people will begin to appreciate the higher bit rates afforded by Blu-ray and distributing $2 blanks is still the most economical way of distributing high definition content. A 16 GB SDHC flash card costs $27 which is totally impractical to give away compared to a $2.67 25 GB blank BD disk. Moreover, optical media is a bit more permanent than flash media, and it’s a great way to back up all your home movies and pictures.