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FAQ Section How long does it take to burn a CD-R? The time it takes to burn a CD-R depends on 2 things; the speed you are burning at and how much information you are burning. CD drives can currently burn at up to 52X. Assuming you are burning a full disc, 700MB, at the maximum speed your burn time will be approximately two and a half minutes. However if you prefer to record at the slower speed of 16X it will take three and a half to four minutes. What types of CD printers are available? There are three main types of CD printing currently available. Ink jet, thermal, and silkscreen. How long does it take to print a CD with an ink jet printer? The time it takes to print onto a CD depends on three things, the resolution, the coverage and the image. A high quality photograph covering 100% of the CD will take longer than a small single colour logo which only covers 25% of the disc. How many discs can I print with one ink cartridge? Again, it will depend on what kind of images you are printing and how much of the same color they use. Typically, you can get around 150-300 discs per cartridge. The higher the resolution, the more ink that is used per disc. How much information can you fit onto a DVD? This question is not as simple as it would seem to be. With a CD, you have 650 MB or 700 MB and that would fit 74 minutes and 80 minutes respectively. With a DVD, you are dealing with 4.7 GB of information, or roughly 7 CDs worth of space. The major difference comes in when discussing how much video or audio can you put onto a disc. With DVD, you can no longer measure the video and audio in terms of length as you could in the CD world. With DVD, you are compressing the video and audio before it goes onto the disc. The more or less you compress, the more or less available space you have on the disc. For video files, assuming you are encoding into MPEG-2 format, a good rule of thumb is a 2-hour movie will fit onto a 4.7 GB disc. For audio files, it will vary depending on how many channels you are encoding. If you are only using stereo two-track, you can fit about 6 hours worth of audio onto a 4.7 GB disc. If your audio is in 5.1 surround sound, you can fit about 2 hours of audio onto a disc Will my audio quality suffer by recording at fast speeds? To answer this question, there are several factors that need to be addressed. First, is the CD burner you are using of professional standard? There are many brands of CD burners on the market, but there are a limited few that would be considered a quality recorder. These professional standard recorders include Plextor, Teac, and Sanyo to name a few. The next factor to look at is what is the quality of the CD-R media you are using? As with recorders, there are some good manufacturers and there are some bad manufacturers. I recommend Taiyo Yuden as the best quality piece of media on the market. Some other notable brands include Mitsui and Verbatim. Assuming you are using a professional recorder with professional media, there should not be a noticeable difference in your audio quality. Some have claimed to hear audible differences between discs burned at lower speeds and those burned. Many times, this is due to poor quality media, a low-end recorder, or both. If you have a pair of the greatest ears, along with a tweaked out room, you may hear a difference between recording speeds. The question to ask is not do you hear a difference, but will your listeners? Even people with good stereo systems cannot match an acoustically pleasing mixing room, not to mention a pair of good ears is hard to come by. For all practical purposes, there will be no audible difference between 1X and 16X recorded CD-Rs. What is the difference between "Authoring" and "General Purpose" media? The original Pioneer DVD recorders used authoring media; this can be given to a plant to be used as a master for replication. DVD recording became mainstream when a less expensive DVD recorder was introduced by Pioneer for general use. It uses a 650 nm laser, just like a CD recorder, so it is less expensive to manufacture. The authoring recorders used a 635 nm laser. You can't put authoring media in a general purpose drive. And if you send a general purpose disc to a replication plant, it will have to be transferred to DLT tape before it can be replicated. What is the difference between track-at-once and disc-at-once? Track-at-once is when the CD burner writes the disc one track at a time. This creates a gap in between tracks. This is caused due to the laser turning on and off during the process. This feature is best used when you know you need gaps in between the tracks. These gaps are 2 seconds in length. Disc-at-once means you write the entire disc at one time. The laser does not turn on and off for multiple tracks. You will still have multiple tracks, but the space between the tracks will be as long or as short as you make them to be within your recording software. If you have tracks that flow into each other, you will want to write disc-at-once. What is finalizing and what does it do? When you burn a CD-R, you have a choice to either burn the disc as an open session or a closed session. As an open session, you are able to add to the disc at a later time. However, open session discs cannot be played on an audio CD player. For playable audio, you need to close the disc, a process that is called "Finalizing." Once closed or finalized, you cannot add any more information to the disc. When you finalize, you are creating the TOC (table of contents) within the lead in. The lead out is also created, thus closing the disc. You are also finalizing the disc when you use disc-at-once recording. The history of the Compact Disc Philips and Sony announced the launch of the CD in 1982. The various formats for CD are enshrined in the "book standard", the first of these being the Red Book, which defined the basic attributes of the CD together with all the encoding for digital audio. All the additional standards subsequently developed are based around the Red Book standard. Book standards for other CD formats are: Blue Book - Enhanced Music CD or CD Extra Green Book - CD-i or CD Interactive Orange Book - CD/R and Photo CD Purple Book - Double Density CD (DDCD) with a capacity of 1.3Gbytes Scarlet Book - Proposal by Sony and Philips for SACD (Super Audio CD) White Book - Video CD Yellow Book - CD Rom Manufacturing Process CD manufacturing (or pressing) is a multi part process. Firstly the data (audio movies etc) that is be on the disc requires pre mastering, from this a glass master is produced, and from that a stamper disc (a mirror image of the glass master) is made. The stamper is used to produce the very thin metal layer that is visible through the polycarbonate layer of the disc, this layer contains the data of the disc. The metal layer is then sandwiched between the polycarbonate layer and a thin lacquer layer that is coated on to the disc, which protects the metal layer from damage. The finished disc can then be printed and packaged ready for dispatch. This process is fine for those requiring many hundred or thousands of discs who in what is likely to be a 2 week production time frame. For such quantities (typically a 1000 or more) the process is also very cost effective. However, for shorter runs or more immediate requirements this process is not practical. For those with an "on demand" requirement the CD-R or DVD-R and a duplicator will meet their requirements Many companies need to produce information that changes or is updated on a regular basis. This information not only needs to be produced in relatively small numbers (ie tens or hundreds) but also is required to look professional and to present the image of the company. This can all be achieved by either purchasing a combined CD or DVD duplicator and integral printer or using the services of a CD duplication service bureau (A service that is offered by Media Matters Technology). With the costs of DVDs and in particular CDs coming down and down, there are considerable advantages to producing your own discs in house; the process is simple to operate, it removes the problem for companies that are selling a software product on disc from having to hold stock; updates and changes can be easily accomplished (no stock means no waste when changes are due), and the discs can even be customised to individual customers. |
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