By David O. Weissman, March 2, 2006
Back in 2001, I reviewed the first economical DVD burner, the Pioneer DVR-A03 (Oct. '01 DV). With a price of just under a thousand dollars, it could make one disc at a time, etching the disc surface at a leisurely 2 x speed. If a demanding customer asked you to make 50 copies, you had to be prepared to sit in front of the drive for days. Fast-forward to 2006. You can now buy a decent 16 x burner for about $100. You can burn a full disc in less than 10 minutes. Add a cheap inkjet disc printer for another $100 and you can make nice-looking labels. So why would you want to fork over almost $4,000 (list) for a fancy duplicating system? One word: automation. With the Primera BravoPro Disc Publisher (www.primera.com), you can copy and print 100 discs from one source, or you can set up multiple jobs from multiple sources and let the whole thing run by itself. Meanwhile, you can get back to DVD authoring, video editing, making sales calls, or whatever else you need to do in your modern multitasking digital studio business.
Video Arts, the postproduction studio where I work, has been looking for an automated system like the BravoPro to speed up our disc copying workflow. Our independent filmmaker customers hope to sell thousands of replicated discs after their films hit the jackpot at Sundance. Before that can happen, they need quick DVD dupes to send to their funders, festivals, and the press. Our corporate clients want copies for training, sales, and marketing. Of course, duplicated discs made on systems like the BravoPro still aren't quite as compatible as replicated discs, so it pays to forewarn your customers. But duplication is much more economical for these kinds of uses.
Hardware, software, and workflow
The BravoPro Disc Publisher integrates two 16 x Plextor CD and DVD burners and an inkjet printer into one sturdy case with a small desktop size. A robotic arm, known as a picker, lifts blank discs out of a 50-disc capacity input bin and places them in the drives for burning. When it's finished, the picker plucks the finished discs out of the drives one at a time, feeds them into the printer, and from there to an output bin. The whole system is controlled by either a Mac or a PC running disc mastering software supplied by Primera. The control computer must be purchased separately, but any fairly new CPU with a USB 2.0 port should be able to do the job.
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I imported the disc face art made in Photoshop into the SureThing CD Labeler software, and centered it on the template. This image generally printed a little better with the BravoPro than with the silkscreen process that was used when this title originally replicated. However, the Rainbow man's face and hands should have printed as almost pure black and white, and the Primera gave these features a more bluish cast than shown here. (Disc image courtesyof Other Cinema Digital.) |
Hooking up the Disc Publisher to your computer and running a job are fairly easy tasks. On a Mac, you use Charismac Discribe to run the system, and on a PC, you use PrimoDVD, one of the oldest disc mastering programs still around. SureThing CD Labeler, which only runs on a PC, is used for designing the disc face art. If you are running a serious business, you've probably invested in something like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, either of which create files that the Primera can print quite handsomely.
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Pictured is the main setup screen in PrimoDVD, the disc mastering software for PC users, filled with detailed information windows. The right-hand side is for job setup. The job status window on the bottom left has seven jobs queued up and ready to go. |
The BravoPro has three methods for creating discs: Disc-to-Disc, Streaming, and Queue. The third method involves setting up the mastering software to run multiple jobs in consecutive order. Queue is referred to by name only with the Mac software, but after consulting the online Help Guide, I learned that you can set up PrimoDVD to do the same thing.
My favorite method is Streaming because it takes the least amount of programming and yields the most complex results. You simply stack a source disc and the desired amount of blanks underneath
. If you want to run multiple jobs, you put another stack on top of (or below) the first stack. As of this writing, the Windows implementation doesn't allow printing on the discs, but Primera says it plans to add this capability in the near future.
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This is the BravoPro unit with the kiosk bin hanging off the bottom. In the mode, both the right hand and left-hand bins can contain blank discs, and the finished product is dropped into the center bin. |
All workflows can make use of the Kiosk mode, where you load up to 50 blank discs in the input bin and another 50 blanks in the output side. The system pulls from both bins to make copies and then drops the finished discs down a central chute for output to a Kiosk bin. You would use this Kiosk mode for two reasons: if you want to make more than 50 discs (and up to 100), or if you want to use the BravoPro in a retail environment where the cover usually stays closed.
Pictured is the main setup screen in Describe, the Mac OS X disc mastering software. A streaming copy process has been programmed to include printing, and then outputting to the kiosk bin hanging off the bottom of the BravoPro. |
In practice, there are two steps to copying a disc with the BravoPro. Before the burning begins, Primera first recommends you cache (copy) the disc image to your computer's hard drive. This yields more reliable copying results. If you work in an authoring house, odds are you've already done that because creating a disc image is part of the DVD authoring process. If what you have to start with is a DVD disc made by a customer, you must put it in a DVD drive and cache the disc's data to a hard drive on the host computer.
Mac and Windows speed tests
I hooked up the BravoPro to four different computers, two PCs and two Macs, to see if I could detect differences in speed or ease of use. I achieved the best results from Windows desktop machines, which cached the source disc's image faster than either a G5 Mac or a PowerBook G4. Using the rear USB 2.0 port on the Windows PCs, caching averaged about 7 minutes with a full disc. On a Mac, and especially on a PowerBook, the wait seemed agonizing. On the 1.5 GHz PowerBook I tested, caching took a whopping 27 minutes. On a desktop G5, I cut that time down to 13 minutes by using the G5's internal DVD drive as the source. According to Primera tech support, the CharisMac Discribe software apparently limits the drive read speed to under 3 x. If you're running a very small job and have little time to spare, you'll need a newer PC. If you're running a medium to large job, your time difference between a Mac and a PC will be less significant.
Once the caching step was out of the way, burning a nearly full 4 GB disc took the same amount of time on all of the computers. For each pair of discs I burned, it took about 9 minutes, plus about a minute or more for each disc to print the label. Speaking of printing, the integrated printer did a pretty nice job, although one of the labels looked a bit washed out. This same label came from a complex piece of art with a lot of fine detail and a full coat of gradated color across the entire disc. Printing that disc took almost 3 minutes.
Conclusion
Overall, I found the BravoPro system to be reliable. I burned a total of 100 discs within 16 different jobs. I lugged the darn thing all over our facility, hooking it up to various Macs and PCs, then took it home in the back of my station wagon and it still performed like a champ. Only one job fizzled out, yielding two bad discs and a mysterious error message. Tech support is available with no-cost assistance by phone during business hours or e-mail 24/7. If something worse goes wrong, you could make use of Primera's one-year warranty. Under this plan, there are no repair costs, other than the price of shipping the unit back to Primera. After the repair is made, Primera ships it back at no cost to the customer.
If you're in the business of authoring DVDs, you'll be producing some amount of discs with every job. Sometimes your deliverable might be thousands of replicated discs, but, at other times, you'll have to crank out 100 or more dupes for a commercial client or an independent filmmaker. That's when having your own automated duplicator becomes a reasonable proposition. Although a good one like the BravoPro doesn't come cheap, it pays for itself after the first thousand discs. A BravoPro is a good buy if you'll be making that many in a year or less.
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