My DVD Burning Robot!

This week’s big project was creating a DVD of promotional highlight videos to be distributed to the members of a corporate board of directors. The videos were all previously edited projects, so I just had to create a menu and get all of the clips linked up. I used Adobe Encore DVD for authoring the DVD and Adobe Photoshop CS2 to create the DVD menu and the label for the disc. The real fun started when I had to run 50 copies of the finished product!

Check out this awesome little gadget! It’s the Primera Bravo Pro CD/DVD duplicator. The IT department at the company I’m working for bought this a few months ago to handle the media duplication requests that they are always getting dumped with. I have a good relationship with the IT folks, so they let me use the equipment when I need to. My project required 50 DVDs with nicely printed labels – perfect for my first use of the duplicator.

I’d never touched the machine before I showed up with my master disc and JPEG of the label, so I expected to have a few problems getting everything to work. That wasn’t the case. The Primera software was very simple to figure out and I had my job set up and ready to go within 10 minutes. I used the included label software to create a label template from the JPEG and then linked to that template in the duplicating software. With the source DVD in the computer’s disc drive and the quantity set to 50, I hit the burn button.

If you’ve got a geek-streak in you (and I do!) there are few things cooler than robots. This machine is supposed to free me up from swapping discs when making copies, but instead of running off to other tasks, I stood there watching as the robotic picker grabbed fresh discs and popped them into the burners and then printed labels on the copies before dumping them into the catch bin and popping in another batch of fresh discs. When the novelty wore off I finally went back to work, but I love watching this thing go.

I only had 2 problems during the process. The first disc’s label had a small section at the beginning of the print area where the ink wasn’t coming out properly. In my experience, this happens with almost any inkjet printer that doesn’t see everyday use. Running a quick head cleaning diagnostic would have taken care of that (or just plan for one or two discs at the beginning that are for testing.) The second problem was my own fault, I left one of the clear protective discs that come on the spindle with the blank discs in the stack. The robotic arm couldn’t grab it, so the job paused until I cleared this out and restarted the process. The Bravo Pro picked up where it left off.

My finished product impressed everyone. I love my DVD Buring Robot!

The Go-To Guy!