Creating Commercially Replicatable BluRays on a budget - Step 1

So many of you have read of our failings with Adobe Encore trying to create BluRay discs.  Today we start a new chapter in BluRay authoring by transferring all our needs to NetBlender's "DoStudio."  

NetBlender has instituted a really neat month to month licensing option that's approx. $250 per month to use the software.  This is truly a month to month deal.  So I can activate it for September for $250 and then sign up again in December.  There's no extra fees, nothing.   They have several plans for 6 months, 12 months or you can outright purchase the software if you want.   But in my case, we plan to produce maybe 10 BluRays all of 2009.   Probably in batches of 3 or 4, so I might spend $1,000 total next year in the licensing fees, which is significantly less than $8,000 for the permanent license.  So to start out, I can just go $250 per month which is easily charged back to the client per job.

The only caveat to this software is that it requires a Window machine, and we're a full blown Mac shop here.  So I did what I swore I would never do..... purchased an HP Workstation loaded with Vista.  Of course, the sad thing for me is this is a fully loaded workstation for less than $1,700 and I know that if I created a fully loaded Mac Pro it'd be around $5,000 or more.  So that's one good thing, I guess!  

One really neat little gadget I added on is a 160GB "pocket drive" that slips into the bottom of the HP machine.  We'll use this to transfer the large MPEG-2 files and graphics files from our Macs to the HP.  Neat idea to essentially put a portable drive that slips in like a USB stick. 

So that's Step 1 - get an HP Workstation!   I went by NetBlender's recommendations and picked up the following machine:

- HP Home & Home Office Store in-box envelope 

I'll give you folks regular updates as we move forward with this new BluRay authoring tool!