A major film studio is saving tens of thousands dollars in film trailer distribution costs by using standard DVDs and a special software program called DVDxDV Pro.

DVDxDV Pro is Macintosh-based program that converts standard DVDs to broadcast-ready video. The quality was good enough to convince an unnamed major movie studio to endorse the use of the software.

Distributing film trailers and film clips for a movie is usually a very expensive undertaking. Hundreds of copies of tapes need to be made and sent out to media outlets around the country. Because DVDs are so much cheaper and easier to replicate, it can save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year by sending out DVDs instead of tapes. With DVDxDV, the process of converting the video requires no extra equipment other than a Mac with a DVD drive.

"We evaluated many different solutions and DVDxDV Pro trumped them all," says Alex Arko of Media Men, a company that creates and distributes the film trailers for the studio. "We compared the video that was extracted from the DVD using DVDxDV Pro with the original 10-bit uncompressed capture from Digibeta and were hard-pressed to tell any difference whatsoever. It looked far superior to the industry-standard Beta SP tape and is exactly the same on every single disk." DVDxDV Pro converts the video from a standard DVD and creates a high quality QuickTime video file. Once in Apple's QuickTime format, the video is ready to use in high-end applications, such as, Apple's Final Cut Pro, or in Avid's Media Composer. DVDxDV comes in two different versions, a consumer version and a professional version. The consumer version, DVDxDV, sells for $25 while the professional version, DVDxDV Pro, is available for $80. Both versions are available for purchase at the DVDxDV Web site (www.dvdxdv.com).

From eMEDIALIVE