How long does packaging & making the disc take?

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civicgsir

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After reading over on another thread about this years SEMA "Best in Show" being added to the line up too, i began to wonder, how long does it take to burn the discs & package them?

how many will be in the first run? 1-2 million??
how long does it take to get 1-2 million copies to market?
 
It will cost a few days to insert the car, as they already have the model for it. Burning discs and packaging doesn't cost a lot of time really. Think of mass production and like 10 dvd's per second or something.
 
Dev_Zero
It will cost a few days to insert the car, as they already have the model for it.
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Best of show at SEMA will most likely be something that noone but the people who worked on it will have seen, so I highly doubt they'll have it modelled already... That, and they'll have to drive it, as I also doubt Kaz will just put a highly modded car in the game - Then let its handling be a guestimate based on the stock version...

Then again - I might be wrong...
 
Dev_Zero
The best of show is the HPA Motorsports R32, it doesn't look any different from the normal R32.
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it gets best of SHOW & it doesn't look any different than the stock model & yet it's @ a car show about modifying cars. :dunce: :banghead:


edit: after taking a look at HPA's site i found some pics of the car.

heres a pic of what Sony picked as "Best of Show" SEMA 2004:

rolling%20thunder%20001%20(19).jpg
 
It does do 0-60 in 3.2 seconds and the 1/4th mile in 11.4... But that's what the tuning option in GT is for... We can make the car do that ourselves..
 
Dev_Zero
It does do 0-60 in 3.2 seconds and the 1/4th mile in 11.4... But that's what the tuning option in GT is for... We can make the car do that ourselves..
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i know, no kidding.
i think the idea behind having the "Best in Show" from the SEMA show, is the fact that it is a unique LOOKING/performing car.
if it's the paint scheme, graphics, or body kit....whatever, it should at least look different than a stock model. although, i'm sure it will be way more powerful than the R32 in the game, even with the tune shop.
 
Adding a vehicle doesn't take that long. The number of "one month" was from scratch.. in this case, it's probably a modified version of a car that's already in the game, so all they have to do is make alterations based on those modifications. Which will probably take only a week or two. And I think all the other cars are probably already in the game, so the car team won't have much to do except this, while the rest of the teams work on their little bits.

Pressing the discs can take as little as one week, which still gives us three weeks before the game MUST go gold to meet it's Japanese release date. Plenty of time.
 
Jedi2016
Adding a vehicle doesn't take that long. The number of "one month" was from scratch.. in this case, it's probably a modified version of a car that's already in the game, so all they have to do is make alterations based on those modifications. Which will probably take only a week or two. And I think all the other cars are probably already in the game, so the car team won't have much to do except this, while the rest of the teams work on their little bits.

Pressing the discs can take as little as one week, which still gives us three weeks before the game MUST go gold to meet it's Japanese release date. Plenty of time.
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Nope, they don't do that. I read in an interview, many people think that they jsut take a skyline and tweak the physics so they can brand it another car. What they actually do, is make it from scratch just like every other car. If the formula's come out similar, then so be it. But they do not just 'alter' an existing car's physics and call it it's own.
 
to answer the original question, a DvD takes about 15 mins to burn in a factory, add 3 mins for the colour cover of the Disc. So its really around 20mins a Disc. Its a lot longer then a normal CD.

Basically, to supply a 200,000 base copy (standard for most games at launch in a country) it takes around 10 to 15 days of factory time. For a big launch like GT4 which is many country simultanously *NTSC*, i'm not surprised if its looking at around 2 months of manifacture (around 250,000 copies per country).
 
RedOak
to answer the original question, a DvD takes about 15 mins to burn in a factory, add 3 mins for the colour cover of the Disc. So its really around 20mins a Disc. Its a lot longer then a normal CD.
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The actually "burn" the DVDs ?... I thought they pressed them as with a CD ?...
 
Flerbizky
The actually "burn" the DVDs ?... I thought they pressed them as with a CD ?...
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You're quite right.. DVDs are pressed, not burned. While 15 minutes may be the maximum burn speed of a DVD, they can be pressed in seconds. Which is the only way to explain how a game can be on the shelf (in the millions) less than ten days after going gold.
 
Jedi2016
You're quite right.. DVDs are pressed, not burned. While 15 minutes may be the maximum burn speed of a DVD, they can be pressed in seconds. Which is the only way to explain how a game can be on the shelf (in the millions) less than ten days after going gold.
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Well well well - Looks like RedOak got some explaining to do then...

I'll have to quote the Duke on this one :
Bad information is bad, mmmkay? If you don't know the answer, don't give the answer.
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SOrry 'bout the confusion, i use the term burn, but they are in fact pressed. Old habits die hard it seems... But it takes a lot longer then a few seconds to press a DvD. I know how it works, i've seen the machines in action. 20 minutes is a good estimate for a working Disc, ready for packaging. Of course, it depends on the content on the disc. The 20minutes estimate is for a full 4gig+ of information stored, while the average game on Ps2 only uses about 2gig of space.

My co. for exemple, uses up to six manifacturings to 'press' their disc, since they do multi platforms and multi regions. THis helps in the distribution of material. But they can afford the time because it is after all, only one product, where Sony for exemple, can have up to 100 products being produced at the same time in the same factory, meaning the time to packaging is greater.
 
Looks like you're behind the times.. Panasonic's latest printer/stamper has a speed of 4 seconds per disc:

http://www.pc-w.com/PRESSROOM/Panasonic/pan_NR022701.htm

That was the first article I found that listed overall cycle times for a single disc. I did find several references to recent improvements in curing (final step, I believe, the "hardening" of the disc before it goes to the printer to get the pretty pictures put on it) that was down to 1.5 seconds. Which would fit about right with the 4-5 second overall cycle time per disc. Even a very slow system could produce several discs per minute.

But at a four-second rate, a single machine could spit out over twenty thousand discs in one day. Give it over to several manufacturers, each no doubt having multiple stampers, in the U.S., Japan, Europe, and it's easy to see that they'll have no problems hitting the mark even if the game goes gold only ten days before release.
 
Sony can pay me £5 a disc if they want, I'm sure my DVDRW can beat theres @ 14 mins a disc :lol: Hell I'll do em 30 copies for free aslong as they let me keep one ;)

Edit: Plus they'll stamp a load at once.
 
RedOak
SOrry 'bout the confusion, i use the term burn, but they are in fact pressed. Old habits die hard it seems... But it takes a lot longer then a few seconds to press a DvD. I know how it works, i've seen the machines in action. 20 minutes is a good estimate for a working Disc, ready for packaging. Of course, it depends on the content on the disc. The 20minutes estimate is for a full 4gig+ of information stored, while the average game on Ps2 only uses about 2gig of space.

My co. for exemple, uses up to six manifacturings to 'press' their disc, since they do multi platforms and multi regions. THis helps in the distribution of material. But they can afford the time because it is after all, only one product, where Sony for exemple, can have up to 100 products being produced at the same time in the same factory, meaning the time to packaging is greater.
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Isn't GT4 on a Duel Layer? I wonder if It'll take up all the 9+ gigs of storage,I certainly hope so.
 
indeed i'm dumb, i made a mistake in terms it seems, we are talking replication, and i had duplication in my head. Sorry 'bout the confusion.
 
Doom3 went from gold to shipping out the pre-orders in about two and a half days....pretty crazy if you think about it.
 
Well in terms of mass replication, its usually an assembly-line kind of machine, sometimes assisted by human-makemistake-employees. Robotic arm takes the disc from the 'mold' and bring it to the package line, then another arm takes the disc and punchs it in the disc case, which explains why sometimes they are a ***** to remove (disc) when you first open the case.

Am i right this time? ;)
 
Hehe. Quite. That would certainly explain a few things.. why so often on new DVDs, I swear I'm going to kill someone if I have to take the thing back because the disc snapped when I was trying to force the case to set it's captive disc free.

Why can't Hollywood use the type of cases that PS2 games use? With that lovely "push to release" feature that quickly (and painlessly) pops the disc loose instantly. Hollywood tries to do things like that, but they fail every time. They should relabel them to "Push to Do Nothing" or "Push to Begin Battle for Disc Extraction"
 
So when a vender says: "they are on backorder", or "we are waiting on the factory to make them"
they are pretty much full of it?

cause, if they can shoot out at least 20k+ games per day,
then it doesn't seem to be a backorder issue, more of an, I didn't order enough issue?
 
RedOak
Well in terms of mass replication, its usually an assembly-line kind of machine, sometimes assisted by human-makemistake-employees. Robotic arm takes the disc from the 'mold' and bring it to the package line, then another arm takes the disc and punchs it in the disc case, which explains why sometimes they are a ***** to remove (disc) when you first open the case.

Am i right this time? ;)
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It's actually pretty trick, the way it happens. Picture a gigantic machine that takes up a helluva a lot of warehouse space. Plastic pellets get dumped into a hopper at one end, and spindles of completed DVDs/CDs come out the other. Not as many of these machines in the world as one would think. Then pallets of product travel over to the screen printing/packaging dept., where other machines (or severely underpaid people) move it through that step. The whole robotic arm deal is quite slow, and used by smaller duplication houses (like mine) where blank DVDs/CDs are burned. That's where you see the 10-15 minute burn times. I own a company that has one of the smaller robotic-arm, 10-at-a-time burners, and while it cost $18K, it's how the majority of smaller run DVD/CD duplication happens in the world. Anyone who needs any LEGAL discs buned, let me know. :)
 
Well, there's a bit of an answer today.

Need for Speed: Underground 2 has officially gone gold, as of today. It's on schedule to hit it's street date, which is ONE WEEK away.

That should tell you something about the capability of high-volume disc production. Which means it could be another two and a half weeks before GT4 goes gold for the Japanese market, and up to a month before it goes gold for the U.S. All while maintaining the schedule.
 

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