Dvd Set To Be The Next Format
The Age
Tuesday December 9, 1997
SO CONFIDENT is Pacific Mirror Image of DVD's adoption, that the company, in the Melbourne suburb of Braeside, predicts 40 per cent of production within six months will be for the new format.
The company was the first in Australia to press a Region 4 (Australia and the South Pacific) PAL DVD, and possibly the first in the world.
PMI chief executive Simon Hibbins says that the production plant, one of the biggest in Australia, pumps out 150,000 silver platters a day. Production is biased towards CD-ROM replication (80 per cent), with audio CDs accounting for the rest.
But already Hibbins is predicting big things for DVD-ROM and DVD. The company is the first in the world to press a PAL DVD, Hibbins said. Evita is a dual-sided DVD, one of the first of its kind.
Pressing a basic DVD is similar to making a normal CD, except if any pre-master authoring is required. This usually happens when the advanced features of the DVD are used, such as menus, hypermedia, or multiple information tracks.
After that, a metal plate is made for the CD master, which is stored for safekeeping.
Subsequent polymer plates are made from the metal master, which are then used to create the actual clear polymer DVD discs, called green discs. These are bonded to an aluminium disc, which reflects the light from the laser. The DVD is then sent off for screen-printing, packing, and shipping.
In the case of double-sided DVDs, like Evita, two green disks are bonded on either side of an aluminium silver disc.
A quirky side-effect of this process is that color screen printing, de rigeur with music CDs and CD-ROMs in recent years, is impossible as the laser pickup has to scan both sides of the disc.
In this case, identifying information is placed along the inner circumferance of the DVD.
The mastering cost for a CD is about $1000, with reproduction cost of about 75 cents a disc. By comparison, a DVD can cost $50,000 to author and master, with reproduction cost of about $4 a disc. A videotape has no mastering cost as such, and costs about $1.50-$2 a tape. Laser Disc costs about $4000 to master, and $11 a disc to reproduce.
© 1997 The Age
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