Once again, I have to apologize for allowing myself to get distracted and not get the disks/posters made for Treasure Hunt. I did get the poster artist to reformat the height/width to fit the promised size, so that tiny incremental progress has been made. I looked into disk duplication long ago, found the prices to my liking, then, apparently, failed to keep record of my research. So I started the process over again only this time learning that making commercial-quality DVDs or Blurays is a two step process. First is ‘authoring’ the master, which is the creation of the menus, formatting the files properly and creating the final digital file that’s set up for reading as a DVD or Bluray. Then the file is replicated on the various disks. For a couple of bucks a piece, at volume.
Not exactly sure how I so thoroughly managed to drop that ball, but there it is. Now knowing about this two steps, I do some research and find out that authoring is really expensive, particularly for just a handful of disks. Around $500 each (DVD and Bluray; actually, Bluray is a bit more expensive). That threw a substantial monkey wrench into the work – if I went with paid authoring I’d have blown through almost all the funds I raised!
OK, so now I start to research how to author the masters myself. Preliminary indications are this is feasible, but I’m not getting a huge warm-and-fuzzy that the free Linux versions are going to be painless. Now I need a Bluray burner (my computer has a DVD burner built in), disks, the cases for the disks and ways to produce the art for the covers. I hate to say this, but it’ll most likely take me another couple of weeks to get all this done. I rather hoped to put the production onto someone experienced, but it seems it once again falls back on me to power through the learning curve.
