demo reel - what medium?

[ecin]

i've been working on an hour long DJ/VJ demo that i want to give away to people for their listening and/or viewing pleasure. in a perfect world i'd like to be able to hand them one disc that is an audio disc and a video disc. the only way i know of doing this now is by making an audio/data disc via mixed mode burning for computer multimedia applications or listening on a CD player. is this the only way to burn a mixed mode CD? is it possible to burn audio on half and then make the other half VCD? i'm guessing the answers is "NO".

any other way of accomplishing this? i suppose i could give away 2 discs, 1 being the DJ mix and the other the VJ mix on VCD or DVD. speaking of, whats the cheapest way to burn small runs of DVD's? my guess is buying a DVD burner. any companies do runs of 100?

in my opinion the "Compact Disc" player should be axed and all disc players should become DVD/MP3/CD/VCD players.

[holly]

I would stay so far away from a media CD-rom. You are creating a disc that probably won't work for most people right now, and will be obsolete in less than 3 years because of computer/os upgrades, new codecs, et al.

You can't get professional DVDs in smaller runs than 1000. Well, you can, but you'll still pay for the thousand.... I charge $15 per home-burned DVD. Buying your own burner is about $400, so you can see when this would become viable. Aw, get a burner. Take the plunge. There's a whole nightmare of dvd authoring and incompatability just waiting for you!:p

A suggestion: Put the video on DVD with the soundtrack. Add a *bonus* CD of just the music. It's two discs but you cover every option, and an additional CD is cheap and reliable. Plan to make about 1/4th to 1/3rd of your kits in VHS. I know, I know..., but people (not us) are married to old technology, plus ntsc vhs travels to Europe with no problems while dvds are deliberately un-international.

[elbows]

I completely agree with Hollys advice, except maybe the last paragraph. Whilst there is a lot of equipment in europe that can handle ntsc, there are plenty that cant, so you have to still assume that an average European cant read NTSC videos properly.

DVD's that we author ourselves have no problems being international. You just make sure you author the disc with no region code or all region codes or whatever. I dont actually know what my stand alone recorder does about region code, I'll have to check it out, but certainly I have full control with PC based authoring.

You can probably get an internal DVD recorder for PC in the states for $200 or less now. For making your own demo DVD's I would recommend a computer based recorder because you have greater control over how you author the menu's etc, and you can get 4X recorders now so you can do a full disc in about 15 mins. Stand alone recorders are easier and you dont have to worry about encoding your footage to MPEG2 in the nicest way, but they will be a much sloweer option when it comes to duplication, unless you can afford a stack of them :)

Regarding compatibility yes it is still a pig at the moment, dvd-r works with a wider range of older dvd players and dvdroms, but this issue will die out slowly as people buy the latest players (and wow they are cheap these days!)

[ecin]

i suppose i'll go the DVD/VHS route and throw in some CD's for the hell of it. thanx for the input

[vjrei]

About the demo duration.

A demo itself shouln't be longer than 5 minutes. My demos are as long as one song. The duration you are doing is actually a production itself.

Your demo is a "teaste" of your work.

I was planing to make a 45 minutes reel to sell it in the stores, just to produce about 5 of them to see what happen, sell them for $20 may be.

Now, the most popular media for demos are DVDs, VHS and a 320 x 240 Quictime in Sorenson or Motion JPEG B, may be Cinepack.

I usually have a master in DVD and if some one needs a VHS I just record from the DVD itself to de VCR, but I have always at list 2 CD-Roms ready with a Quicktime demo.

The audio allways in 44.1 stereo and I add a PDF file with my resume.