Here’s another technical question that came in recently.

Sourabh asks:

I am a huge fan of your newsletters. I see you mention in quite a few newsletters burning an AVCHD disc (on a standard DVD) using FCP 7 that will give greater quality than a SD DVD. Could you please go over the process?

Larry replies: Thanks for writing!

This is a new feature in Final Cut Studio (3). Both Compressor and Final Cut Pro 7 can now create Blu-ray Discs. This means that it is now possible to put HD content onto what looks like a traditional DVD.

However, although the physical shape of the disc is the same, there are actually three flavors of DVD:

1. Traditional DVD. This is the ONLY format that DVD Studio Pro creates. All DVDs created by DVD SP are standard definition (SD) video. Yes, I know that DVD SP creates HD DVDs, however, that format died in the marketplace two years ago. If you are creating a disc only for yourself, you can use this format. However, there are no players on the market today that can play this type of disc. For this reason, use DVD SP to only create SD discs.

2. Blu-ray Disc. This is the new HD video format that you see promoted in all the stores. It requires compressing your video to meet the specs of this format and, for Macintosh folks, also requires that you purchase a separate Blu-ray Disc burner for your system. No burners shipped by Apple support this format. Also, keep in mind that as of today, no Macintosh can play a Blu-ray Disc natively on their system.

3. AVCHD Disc. This is a hybrid format. It records Blu-ray compatible video on a standard DVD disc. The benefit of this is that your current DVD burner can create this disc using standard DVD media. The disadvantage to this is that because a standard DVD only holds about 4 GB of media, while a Blu-ray Disc holds at least 6 times more, you can only get about 20-30 minutes of material on a disc. Also, because AVCHD discs require a lower data rate, it could be argued that the video quality is close to Blu-ray, but not quite equal to it. Still, the benefits of using AVCHD for short projects are great. This format also requires a Blu-ray player to be able to play the disc.

There are essentially four ways to create an AVCHD disc:

1. From within Final Cut Pro.
2. From within Compressor.
3. Using Roxio Toast 10.
4. Using Adobe Encore CS4 or later, which is part of Adobe Production Premium.

Let’s look at each of these.

The benefit to using Final Cut Pro is that it is easy. Select the sequence, or clips, you want to burn to a DVD in the Browser. Choose File > Share. Then, from the pop-up menu, select Blu-ray Disc. A side menu appears allowing you to set various parameters. You can also use this approach to create an AVCHD disc – keep in mind that you are limited to a project length of 20-30 minutes.

The disadvantage to using Final Cut is that menus are only templates and it is really designed for putting one movie on a disc. You can’t author a title or design menus the way we can in DVD SP, for example.

Bruce Nazarian has told me that the compression settings Apple uses to create Blu-ray Discs are actually very good — the image quality looks excellent.

The advantage to using Compressor is that you can adjust your compression settings; for example adding watermarks or resizing your video. However, the end result is the same as Final Cut Pro – menus are templates designed more for creating review copies of projects, not a commercial-grade Disc.

Roxio Toast 10 provides more flexibility, but the menus are still templates. You can easily add more movies. You can create your own menu graphics. But, in the end, the look and feel of the Disc is driven by the templates. Branching menus, scripting, stories, and other advanced features in DVD SP are not available.

Roxio Toast is the best choice when you want to provide a variety of different movies on a disc, using a single menu. Think demo reels.

Adobe Encore is the only application currently on the Mac that provides full authoring capability for Blu-ray Discs.

Based on what I’ve learned and in talking with others, the workflow that I would suggest when using Adobe Encore is to edit your project in Final Cut Pro. Export it as a high-quality, self-contained QuickTime movie. Compress it in Compressor as a Blu-ray file. Import the compressed file into Adobe Encore and create your HD title.

As alternatives, you can edit in Premiere and compress in Encore — it all depends upon which programs you are most familiar with.

If your project is short, create an AVCHD Disc. If you have more than 30 minutes of material, create a Blu-ray Disc. In both cases, you’ll need a Blu-ray Player to view the resulting files.

It snowed four inches today in Dundee, Scotland, at the start of my first UK seminar. Still, we had close to 100 people brave the weather to turn our for our seminar. In spite of the weather, we still came very close to running out of seats! It was great to visit with all these students and professionals interested in learning more about Final Cut Studio.

While our Glasgow seminar is completely sold out, there are still a few seats left for our London event next Friday. Click here to learn more.

During the seminar today, one student asked me “what’s the best way to make a cheap camera look like film?” I smiled and said, “Buy an expensive camera.” Though the film-look plugins from Graeme Nattress can make video look amazing (www.nattress.com), there’s nothing like using a great lens to improve the look of your video.

As an example of this, SurfLounge (JH Fleming) sent me the following link. Vincent Laforet has been at the forefrount of experimenting with raw video images shot on still cameras. However, take a look at what a magnificent lens can do by viewing this link – it may take a bit to download, but the time is worth it. Click here.

Here, by the way, is a photo of the camera set-up he is using. An amazing rig.

Last night on the Digital Production BuZZ, we had a fascinating interview with James Salkind. Since this was Christmas evening, you may have been distracted and not able to listen. In which case, you missed a treat.

James was the post-production supervisor for the recent DVD release of the Smashing Pumpkins DVD titled: “If All Goes Wrong.”

James was given over 600 hours of material in multiple high-def video formats to edit a two hour documentary; from high-quality multi-camera concert footage to material shot on cell phones. And he used Final Cut Studio to put it all together.

While we frequently have interviews with editors on The BuZZ, we rarely have interviews that get this specific and detailed. And I wanted to share it with you here, because a lot of his thoughts may be helpful to you.

Click here to listen to his interview. (TRT: 17:21 11.1 MB)

Click here to see what’s on the entire show.

Click here to see what’s on the next show. (A look forward to 2009 is planned for New Year’s Day.)

I enjoyed doing this interview. Let me know if you found it interesting yourself.

I’ve attended, and spoken at, HDFest the last two times it visited LA. Its a great place to see what’s happening in the Indy world of HD. Marisa, the Festival Coordinator, reminds me that HDFest is returning to LA this week, so I asked her to send me some information that I could pass on to you. Here is what she wrote.

- – -

HDFEST will be held December 5th-7th at Dolby Laboratories’ Larry Umlang Presentation Theatre II located at 3601 W Alameda Avenue. The HDFEST Los Angeles event will screen a truly diverse selection of short films and features over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Most projects will be making both their Los Angeles premieres and their first presentations in high-definition resolution. Films included were shot with a variety of HD cameras including the Red One camera, Panasonic Varicam and Sony HDW-F900.

Among HDFEST festival highlights are the following presentations: The Los Angeles premiere and High-Definition premiere of the feature length comedy Remarkable Power, directed by Brandon Beckner and starring Kevin Nealon and Tom Arnold. Remarkable Power is about a late night talk show host who masterminds an elaborate scheme to save his canceled show and avenge his wife’s affair, The High-Definition Premiere of Kill Kill Faster Faster written, directed and produced by Gareth Maxwell Roberts and starring Gil Bellows and Esai Morales. (www.killkillfasterfaster.com) a High-Definition Screening of the Feature Comedy Route 30 directed by John Putch and starring Dana Delany, David DeLuise, and Curtis Armstrong (www.route30.com) and a groundbreaking showcase focusing exclusively on High-Definition Animation.

This glorious showcase of animation features a wide variety of styles and techniques from innovative animators originating from around the world. Many directors will be in attendance to discuss their work.

The weekend event will also include the annual HDFEST Deffie Award Ceremony. The Deffies recognize achievements in independent high-definition filmmaking. Tickets are available for $10; festival full-access passes are $50 and admit user to all screenings and social gatherings Friday through Sunday. The complete festival schedule and ticketing information can be found at http://www.hdfest.com/hdfestla.html

Tickets are available for advance purchase online and are also available the day of the event at the HDFEST box office at Dolby Laboratories. Contact admin@hdfest.com with any questions

You may have already noticed, but YouTube is now displaying all its videos in 16×9 format.

4×3 material is now displayed as pillar-boxed, and 16×9 material which was formerly displayed as letter-boxed is now both letter-boxed and pillar-boxed.

Thanks to Steve Martin for calling this to my attention.

(By the way, if you know the new image dimensions for submitting videos to YouTube, please let me know and I’ll share them here.)

Jan Crittenden-Livingston is the business line manager for Panasonic’s professional cameras.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview her at DV Expo 2008 about Panasonic’s move to tapeless media (the P2 card) and the impact that had on the company.

More importantly, though, I finally had the chance to talk with her about the need for editors to change the way they archive their video assets as we move from video tape to sold state and hard disk-based video recording. Archiving is becoming more and more critical, yet all too often is overlooked in the initial budgeting and editing process.

In this interview, Jan talks about possible archiving methods and talks about where Panasonic is headed in the next year.

(TRT: 14:55 7.0 MB)

You can hear the entire show here:

http://www.digitalproductionbuzz.com/Archives/LiveThatExpo.php?day1date=2008-11-05

Select Show #2.

To say that the whole Blu-ray Disc situation is a mess does not begin to describe the chaos in which the independent producer is caught.

We can shoot HD.

We can edit HD.

We can output HD.

But when it comes to distributing HD, we have a series of unpleasant choices:

1. Down-converting our HD materials to SD and distributing on an SD DVD.
2. Burning each DVD individually, which is fine for small runs, and disaster for large runs.
3. Paying exorbitant license fees, containing highly-restrictive policies, to get our High-Def DVDs replicated in large quantities.

Blu-ray Discs are not guaranteed to succeed. In fact, if current policies continue, it will make much more sense for independent producers to avoid them all-together and concentrate on distributing their high-def materials on-line using digital downloads. It is inexcusable to require license fees which can exceed $4,500 for your first title — EXCLUDING manufacturing costs — from small producers seeking to help grow the Blu-ray format.

Bruce Nazarian, president of the DVD Association, has been trying to get the Blu-ray Association to realize that excessive fees, restrictive policies, and an unbending attitude will destroy the Blu-ray format before it even gets started.

If you are interested in supporting their efforts – and I encourage you to do so – please visit the DVD Association website and sign their petition to get the folks at Blu-ray to realize that if the current situation does not change, they will find themselves riding a dead horse.

Website: www.dvda.org

Survey: www.dvda.org/survey/

Petition: www.dvda.org/petition/

Thanks.

I’ve been traveling around the country for the last two months, talking about the impact of tapeless and high-definition video on video editors.

Generally, I begin each session by talking about how “the world is moving to high-definition video” — except, after thinking and talking about this for a while, I no longer believe this is the best way to describe the environment that we are in. A better phrase is that video has become completely divergent. There is now a complete disconnect between how we capture our images (shooting) with how we distribute our images (viewing).

Here are three examples that illustrate our conundrum:

• High-definition video (HD) is all the rage in North America, but Europe seems quite happy with 16:9 standard-definition PAL.
• US networks can’t agree on one high-end distribution format for video, instead we have three: 720p (ABC, Fox, ESPN), 1080i (CBS, NBC, PBS), and the Digital Cinema standard.
• We shoot on HD yet distribute on mobile devices, such as cell phones or iPods.

Yes, the camera manufacturers would like us all to buy new cameras – and the easiest way to get us to do that is to convince us that everything needs the vastly improved clarity of a high-defintion image.

But that misses the bigger point.

What is unique about the times we are in today, I think, is that the format that we use to shoot our images has almost nothing to do with the way we distribute them. There is now a total disconnect between acquisition and distribution.

Some of the most popular ways of distributing a video — YouTube, Google Video, cell phones, iPods — have images which are FAR smaller than even standard definition video.

Adding to the confusion, when we create our video, we now need to convert it into a myriad of different formats, sizes, and resolution for distribution.

Here’s what I think this means for the future:

• How the video is compressed, it’s “codec,” and its scanning (progressive vs interlaced), is more important than image size
• The ease of converting your video from one format to another is more important than image size
• Planning how you intend to distribute your video needs to be done before you shoot
• The image size you shoot is increasingly less important as your final output size decreases

The world is a different place today than ten years ago when our choices were essentially limited to broadcast, cable, and DVD. Today, we need to work backwards: pick our distribution format, then pick the format you want to edit, then pick the format you want to shoot.

And there seems to be a complete disconnect between each of those three stages.

Let me know what you think.

Jody Eldred sent me the following links a few days ago, with these comments:

Look what a guy just shot with the Canon EOS 5D digital SLR still camera. It shoots full-res, 1920×1080 1080P/30 high definition video. 21 megapixels. 12 minutes of record time on a 4GB card. Records RAW images. Its amazing what F1.2 lenses can do. $2,700 retail.

Depending upon your perspective, this camera is either terrifying, exhilarating, or just plain “out there.” But, take a look and decide for yourself. The images are stunning!

http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=2086

There’s a behind-the-scenes piece you can view here:

http://vincentlaforet.smugmug.com/gallery/6021407_xEg87/1/#378608891_Jd2CT-XL-LB

Let me know what you think.

Looking back on the old days of shooting standard-definition video… Life was easy, we only had two video formats — NTSC and PAL. Everything worked. No one complained.  (OK, so maybe there’s a rose-colored-glasses effect involved here. Stay with me.)

In today’s world of high-definition, depending upon how you count, we have over 400 different flavors of  HD — most of them incompatible with each other.  That’s about 399 too many, from my perspective.  

This was reinforced yesterday with a series of emails with “Fred.”  He wrote:

I’m on a project where the producer has hired two shooters, me and another guy. I have a Sony V1-U and will shoot Sony HDV 1080i. The other guy has an Canon XL2 with Canon-flavored HDV and will shoot HDV 720p… Is this just insane or is there a work around? This producer doesn’t want to recognize he has a post problem.

I immediately wrote him back saying:

This is beyond insane – this is about to be a crisis. At a minimum, your image sizes must match – or one camera will always look soft.

Fred wrote back this morning with an update:

Thanks Larry, I used the old “lets make a test” to force some reality on these people and voila, the Canon got dropped and another Sony HDV was inserted into the mix… We now have a chance at something we can edit. Problem was the other camera man was content to tell everyone it could work because he was afraid he was going to lose his job. I’m loaning him my second camera and he is now happy.

Sheesh!

There are several lessons here:

1. Not all HDV is the same — TEST YOUR WORKFLOW before production begins, HD formats can not be mixed and matched as easily as SD formats.

2. Not all producers are fully clued in technically!  (For instance, the Canon XL-2 doesn’t shoot HDV, its an SD camera!)

3. Not all things can be fixed later in post.

4. 1080i is not necessarily better than 720p. In fact, both have distinct advantages. The key is to shoot all your video at the same size for the same project.

All’s well that end’s well — but I thought you’d like the story.