Best Blank DVD Media for Pro Quality Recording?

[jdmoor]

I need to reorder blank media I use to create my Client's DVDs.  I do weddings, corporate and other event type productions.   I've used various name brand media, but many times over the years I've always noticed on *some* burned DVDs a stutter or even a freeze when played.  Since my source and Premiere Pro (CS4) edited files all play perfectly on my computer, as do the Encore previews, I've contributed any problems to the DVD media.  When there is a problem (guessing 5% of the time) it occurs on more than one player, but almost never at the exact same time code.

Anyway, does anyone one have an opinion on blank DVD Media Name Brands you prefer that give a professional result?

TIA,

jd

[moonplace]

Hi,

I did have sometimes the same problems.

In my case it was not the blank media on which I burned who causes the problem, but the burner I used.

I have two burners, one Philips and one Sony, and burning with Philips caused a certain stutter or freezing playing the disk, the Sony I have gave no problems (although it can happen that a bad disk occur). I presume that the way players handles with small problems in the burning process also depend on the burning process itself.

So in my case it was the burner. In my (hobby) work I do theater recordings for professional producers and burn about 150 disks every production (with the help of a burning tower with Pioneer burners in it) with no probelms at all. The first mother disk I burn from Encore direct to a Sony (and sometimes Philips) burner as described.

I only use quality disks as HP, Verbatim, Philips etc. with no problem at all.

I did once use cheap disks, but in that case there was a pretty amount of problems.

Good Luck

Chris

[the_wine_snob]

Per my reply out in the Encore>Encore forum: Verbatim & Taiyo Yuden. I have had 100% success with thousands of these.

Good luck,

Hunt

[John T Smith]

Also, for more control of the burn process (ie-the SLOWEST setting possible to give the burn a better chance of being good) I always tell Encore to create an ISO and then I use the free IMGBURN for the actual burn process

I don't have the link where I am, but I think I have it listed on my Adobe Notes page

http://www.pacifier.com/~jtsmith/ADOBE.HTM

[the_wine_snob]

Hi John. I guess that it took a gentle "nudge" in the main forum for us to stop by here. Though I had recently posted to the Lounge, I have to admit that I do not check it, as I should - until the nudge.

Hey, with all of my Irish Lottery winnings, maybe I can redecorate BOTH Lounges!!! [Note: this is an OT reference to another thread, that really got off-topic in the Video Lounge. Don't worry, other than John's pity comments, you have not missed much.]

Hunt

PS - I am just glad that someone is posting to the DVD Lounge.

[lordsmurf]

I'll go ahead and assume you've encoding fully to the DVD-Video MPEG specs, and have not gone over the max bitrate. That would also cause similar lock-up and freeze errors on some DVD players.

I see some common problems (and some common myths) being discussed here.

Shopping by "brand name" is probably the first problem. Most brands buy their discs from secondary bulk disc manufacturers, such as Ritek and CMC, or even cheap Chinese operations. The quality on these can range quite a bit, and most discs are not very reliable. Even well-respected brand names like JVC, TDK, Maxell and Panasonic have been known to peddle crap under their labels.

Brands like HP, Memorex, TDK -- even  generic brands like Staples or Office Depot! --- they're often caught using the same discs from Ritek or CMC. For example, to say HP is better than TDK would be an impossible statement -- the discs are the same (CMC Magnetics discs). Their unreliable nature is how some of these myths catch on. A person has a good experience with a few hundred HP discs, and a bad one with a single spindle of TDK discs. But when the discs are the same, a few months later, that situation could be entirely reversed!

The best recordable disc for a professional videographer to use is a Verbatim DVD-R made in Taiwan or India (not UAE). Verbatim's metal AZO has a high reflectivity, DVD-R is the most compatible format, and the Mitsubishi discs have great quality control. Taiyo Yuden makes a good second choice. For a list of reliable places to buy these media, see http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/buy-blank-discs.htm

Burners wear out over time, and some burners were just not made very good. LG and Philips drives are most commonly associated with these kinds of problems, especially the laptop drives.

Burning at the slowest possible speed is also a myth, and a mistake. Burners and discs are attuned to certain speeds. On a 16x disc, for example, you'd never want to burn slower than 8x or 12x off a computer. A 1x or 2x burn would probably be worse than a 16x or 18x burn on the same disc -- assuming the burner even lets you go that low. Most modern burners have gotten smart about this, preventing you from doing it.

Good burning software -- namely ImgBurn -- is also a good idea.

For more information on this topic, see the blank DVD media guides and information at:

- http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm

- http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/media

- http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/blank-media-19.html

Do some reading there, to learn all the in's and out's of blank discs, burning, and having a good experience. As a video or photo professional, ths information is incredibly important. Nothing pisses off a customer more than a disc that does not work. They get easily aggravated sometimes, and it's best to avoid that problem altogether!

Good luck on your future projects.

[neil wilkes]

LordSmurf wrote:

I'll go ahead and assume you've encoding fully to the DVD-Video MPEG specs, and have not gone over the max bitrate. That would also cause similar lock-up and freeze errors on some DVD players.

Depends by what you think of as "maximum  bitrate" really.

Although the DVD-Video specs tell us we have an absolute maximum of 10.08mbps - 9.8Mbps in the real world with overheads - this applies strictly to replicated (pressed) media only and not to written (duplicated) discs.

In matter of fact no DVD plaer is actualy required to play any written discs whatsoever - these are *not* DVD-Video discs (and this is why they are not legally allowed to carry the DVD-Video logo either) but DVD-ROM discs finalized as DVD-Video.

The reason for this is that written media has greatly reduced reflectivity compared to silvers because it is a dye & not a press.

Some players will choke on anything above 7Mbps, others will go a lot higher - depending on various factors.

None will do as well as pressed discs do.

Verbatim are superb, as are Taiyo Yuden.

Ritek G4 used to be the bees knees, but ever since they went to G5 and newer, avoid.

[lordsmurf]

Ritek has always been an unreliable media. RITEKG01 DVD-R, G02, G03, G04, G05, etc -- the discs choked more often in players and readers, the reflectivity of them was terrible, compared to TY or Verbatim/MCC/MKM discs. Even TY doesn't seem to have as good a reflectivity as the Verbatim media does.

The Ritek discs, including the G04 you mention, were well-known for bad spots, often with visibly damaged dyes. The dark purple organics just weren't very good. G03 had some decent quality control for a short while there, but G04 was getting bad reviews from the earliest runs. I have some of the earliest test batches, the purple-topped ones that cloned the look of Pioneer DVD-R, and those are the only ones that ever worked reliably. I often think those were cherry-picked for reviewers, some Grade A extra high-QC samples. The bulk-bought spindles were always pretty dismal, much higher coaster count than competing manufacturers of the time: Prodisc, TDK, Verbatim/MCC, Pioneer/PVC, MBI, Maxell.

There are players out there which fail, even on presses, if the bitrate is too high -- sometimes even if it's within DVD-Video specs. At very least, we have to be sure that our data is being written to a disc properly, and that includes adhering to the DVD-Video encoding and authoring specs. If you stray too far from thoses, then it won't matter if your DVD-Video is on a DVD press, a DVD-R burn or a pancake -- the machine will refuse to play it. And DVD-Video is a content structure, not a disc type. A DVD-R is a DVD-R, not a DVD-ROM. DVD+R can be booktyped to the DVD-ROM part spec, but not DVD-R. It also doesn't carry the DVD-Video logo because it's not being presented as a "DVD-Video recordable", but simply by its DVD-R spec, which is good DVD-Video, DVD-Audio and DVD-ROM content structures.

Given that the DVD Forum oversees DVD-R/DVD-RW, I'm under the impression that recordable media compatilibity has more or less been forced in the past number of years. It's the RW Alliance's DVD+R/DVD+RW that's left to fend for itself, not being part of the DVD Forum or the various official DVD book specs.

Anyway ..... I think this got way more complicated than the original post asked for.

[neil wilkes]

Some interesting points.

I have to admit that I never had trouble with G04 Riteks, and stopped using them when the manufacture started to look a little odd visually.

The edges went very rough at one point & I do seem to recall something about patchy dye as well - but honstly was/am under the impression that was the G05 (although I may well be wrong)

As far as spec differences go, every DVD-R or DVD+R disc I have written reports as DVD-ROM when examined.

I could not agree more about the data needing to be correctly written though. This is an issue that comes up again & again. Not all burn apps are created equal, and I have seen discs where the BUP & IFO files are rammed so tightly together (without the padding) that they are causing problems.

It's also far too common seeing files written to disc in the wrong order.

Player requirements have not really changed - written support is strictly optional, never has been mandated. It would be a stupid manufacturer that did not go for this though. Dito the +R/RW format too. I prefer +R for RW & DL projects by a long way - -R DL support is patchy at best even now. It's still annoying though when you hit a player that is okay with +R but will not see layer 1 on a +R DL disc even though it has no trouble with Layer 0.

Good discussion though.

[lordsmurf]

The biggest problem with DVD+R DL layer changes is when the disc is not burned with the DVD-ROM booktype. The machine expects a single layer only, when it sees the DVD+R type. Sometimes the layer breaks just aren't well placed either. Ideally, you want to split the content 50/50 as best you can.

DVD-R DL is an oddity, as far as I'm concerned. I don't know why they still bother. From what I've heard and read, it's mostly because there's a following in Japan, and I believe all current DVD-R DL are TY discs. That would make sense.

G01 and G02 were pretty bad (comparable to Princo, at the time), G03 was decent, and G04 is where the problem started again. By G05, their short-term good reputation had already been pissed away again.

Nero is the most common culprit of not gapping IFO and BUP correctly. The best burning application right now has to be ImgBurn. It's freeware, and it works. I don't understand why paid developers get this so wrong, in their commercial software. It's gotten to the point where I don't even try to burn with the bundled burning features from companies like Adobe, Sony or Ulead/Corel. I don't have time to analyze if they did it right this version or not, or if a recent update/upgrade broke it again (as has been the case in the past, Nero for example). ImgBurn just works.

[neil wilkes]

LordSmurf wrote:

The biggest problem with DVD+R DL layer changes is when the disc is not burned with the DVD-ROM booktype. The machine expects a single layer only, when it sees the DVD+R type. Sometimes the layer breaks just aren't well placed either. Ideally, you want to split the content 50/50 as best you can.

DVD-R DL is an oddity, as far as I'm concerned. I don't know why they still bother. From what I've heard and read, it's mostly because there's a following in Japan, and I believe all current DVD-R DL are TY discs. That would make sense

You don't always want to split 50-50. Not all the time.

Suppose you could get the main component on 75/25 splits, with no break in main timeline?

Forcing 50-50 splits is a PITA.....

Also Verbatim still make DVD-R DL, and I don't really know why they bother either. Probably because + formats are DVD Alliance, and - formats are DVD Forum (the spec designers) and the whole point of the + alliance crowd was simply to avoid paying anyone any roytalties.

The exact same reason there are so mnany different video formats too - GREED.

[excited_Genie16B8]

I'm coming in late here, but I just wanted to say that while TY and Verbatim are both excellent, the best burns I have are using Falcon Pro media.  Burned on an Optiarc-7200 at 4x, my Falcon disks have fewer errors than not only the other two brands, but also the pressed Hollywood disks I own.  Not one in about 500 burns so far has come back with issues.

[lordsmurf]

From what I've read, Falcon media (FTI, made in United Arab Emirates) is based on Mitsubishi (Verbatim) specs, among others, but not as good. It's very similar to Moser Baer (MBI) media out of India.

While FTI uses words like "Professional" and "A Grade", it's all just marketing -- it doesn't mean anything. I could label a turd "Professional" but it's still just a turd. Several second-rate companies of guilty of this, including Ritek and MAM-A. By no coincidence, their media is all bark and no bite, by most accounts.

It's duplication grade media. Don't use it for masters or anything you can't easily re-burn and replace.