Content area
Full Text
Over the past several years, the video duplication community has had differing opinions as to the viability of both the audience for, and the financial benefits of, DVD replication. As DVD home-player sales begin to show promise, some see DVD as "the future is here now" while the others look to the bottom line and see VHS, with its world domination, as the once and future king (at least for quite a while). One thing is clear: digital anything is shaking things up, as the following three duplication and replication companies report. Dip vio Pi Do SF Video, San Francisco, (with plants in Los Angeles, New York, and Florida), is a mass duplicator from all master formats to all standards, in realtime or high-speed, offering Macrovision copy protection (New York facility only).
"We're heavily into VHS-high speed, we can do 150,000 to 180,000 a day-and audio cassettes, and we've gotten into the CD world," Steve Feinberg, President of SF Video (www.sfvideo.com) offers. "With DVD, there's lots of standards; there's too many standards. I think the DVD-9, which is double-sided but you don't have to flip it over, will probably be what wins out, especially for the DVD-ROM environment."
SF Video's source equipment includes Sony Betacam, Digital Betacam, D-2, one-inch and, notes Feinberg, "some clients are still bringing in 3I4-inch, and some of the smaller producers bring in SuperVHS. DV is coming on strong, and so we have the Panasonic DVCPRO, too."
A large part of Feinberg's business is infomercials, and he reports he's noticed a trend, both nationally and locally, of production moving to digital video.
"If you're trying to sell say, `The Ultimate Slicer,' you only have so much money to spend on a cost-per-order basis. I believe that DVCPRO, which...