Re: "Tapeless" HD format and delivery

Well, I am a big proponent of using BluRay for this, wherever you're not using an FTP type internet relay process. The dubber/printers are cheap and fast, much better than tape, and the Blu disk can stand alone on a shelf as an archive if they don't want to tie up hard drive space. The media is priced at about what we're paying now for betaSp tape stock, but I think it will keep going down in price.

The fact that you're getting mass deployment of the format in consumer hands means that with Blu-capable drives for computers and stand-alone players, you have an end-to-end HD solution that can go from board room to rec room to news room. I think that in the next ten years this is the closest thing we'll have (and may never have again afterwards) to the old betaSp as a "standard" interchange format. The rest of the market space will remain completely fractured with too many competing formats, IMO.

But Blu is a format you can use to inexpensively distribute HD for things like wedding/events production, commercial production, indie film or industrial production, legal/forensic, etc. that has a chance of being "universally" playable, and doesn't rely on internet and hard drives. Sending out spots on Blu Ray, the station needs less than five hundred bucks to make that happen for them, using either a computer BD reading drive to ingest into their in-house play-out system, or a consumer type player, patched into their systems. Compare that to the cost of an HD tape deck, which may or may not be able to play ebery HD format, and the accountants will say Blu makes the most sense.

The only fly in my soup is that you can't burn Blu natively in FCP/ DVDSP yet; if you want to do it today, you have to go buy Encore for your FCP suite, which is patently ridiculous. Apple should be ashamed at this. I am fervently praying Apple and Sony get their (bleep) together in the next year and get that BluRay functionality happening natively in FCP and DVDSP.

But I don't think the rest of the market is going to wait for them to catch up. This is a huge advantage for Adobe and Sony Vegas.