iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Professional Duplicating

Maybe you've organized a school play, and you want to sell copies of the performance to parents as a fundraiser. Maybe you want to send out "new baby" videos to your family circle. Or maybe you've used iDVD to create a video brochure of your small business's products and services.

In each of these cases, burning the DVDs one at a time on your own Mac looks like a time-consuming, expensive hassle. Furthermore, home-burned DVDs involve a laser recording a pattern on an organic dye, which deteriorates over time. On commercial DVDs, the signal is stamped directly into the plastic.

Accordingly, when you want to make more than a handful of copies of your DVD, you might want to consider enlisting the aid of a DVD service bureau. (DVD service bureaus are middlemen between you and the large replication plants, which don't deal directly with the public.)

Technically, these companies offer two different services:

• Duplication. Duplicated discs are copies of your original DVD. Service bureaus use banks of DVD burners, five or 10 at a time, that churn out copy after copy on DVD-Rs (the same kinds of blanks as you used). You pay for materials and labor, usually by the hour. (Discs with less data burn more quickly, producing more discs per hour.) This is the way to go if you need fewer than 100 copies of your disc. (On the other hand, remember that some DVD players don't play DVD-R discs.)

• Replication. Replication is designed for huge numbers of copies, 200 and up. In this process, ...