What DVD burners do you use?

[daddog]

Once you finish things up in X3 what hardware burners do you guys use? I am looking for something at the professional level. Is there such a 'thing' or would I just stick with the Plextor, Sony, Liteon burners you would purchase with a computer?

Thanks in advance!

[Black Lab]

What are you burning? The usual family stuff, the odd wedding video for a friend, or will you be taking on a professional jobs?

[Ron P.]

Once more question that comes to mind when thinking professional, are you going to be producing mass quantities? If so you would be looking at a duplicator system, a tower-like external box that houses several burners. These can get quite pricey, into the thousands of dollars for them.

[Black Lab]

That's what I was getting at Ron. Have some patience!

[skier-hughes]

the professional burners still use the same burners

I have pioneer in my editing pc along with an LG blu ray, and 14 pioneers in the duplicators.

[daddog]

Professional. Probably 3 or 4 a week.

[DVDDoug]

I don't have any facts or research to back this up, but I have the impression that burners are getting better. I don't think drive quality is a big issue anymore. I used to always read that Plextor was the best, now I sometimes read that other brands are the best... I have a couple of Plextors in my main audio/video computer, and another cheap drive (Maybe LG or LIGHT-ON... I can't remember...) in a computer that I don't use much for burning, and I don't even know what's in my laptop, which I don't use much for burning either.

I do get a "bad burn" once in awhile, and I usually chalk that up to a bad blank disc... I've had more trouble with dual-layer discs than single-layer discs. I once had a had a spindle of (single layer) discs and about half were turning-out bad... When I realized what was happening, I threw-away the remaining discs and bought another spindle.

One thing I do is test every burned disc with Nero DiscSpeed (FREE!!!). It draws a graph of disc reading speed, and an anomaly will show-up if there is a read error, or if the drive has to slow-down or re-read some data. ImgBurn has a similar optional feature. If you were doing massive duplication, it wouldn't be practical to visually check a graph for every disc, but for a few discs a week or a few a day, it works.

[daddog]

Thanks Doug.

I will download and use the Nero diskspeed you suggested.