Notes On Video

Man, the bad news just seems to keep on trickling in. CNET reports that Sony has released in Australia the BWU-100A, a Blu-ray drive for desktop computers that does everything BUT play back commercial movies released in the Blu-ray format. Evidently it has something to do with copy protection issues. I don't necessarily blame Sony for this, but it just seems like there's one piece of bad news after another.

Ouch! Apple announced new Mac-Pro desktop machines, but no Blu-ray support. Guess we'll have to wait at least until January for any hope of that. High-Def Digest reviewed the same titles from Warner released on HD DVD and Bu-ray discs and found the Blu-ray versions wanting; notably issues with aspect ratio, compression not as good, slow navigation, and Warner dropped the Dolby Digital-Plus track off of the Blu-ray release. Admittedly they were comparing a Toshiba HD DVD player (Toshiba developed the standard) with a Samsung player that is known to have some issues, but this is kind of troubling. Meanwhile, analysts predict that "the battle between two hyped formats for high-definition DVD will confuse shoppers and turn many of them off the whole technology." I don't think anyone needed a crystal ball to come up with that prediction, but it's making me feel kind of blah again about Hi-Def discs...

Looks like others are speculating about Apple adding Blu-ray support. I'm still excited about this, but I'm thinking that Apple probably won't release support until the new year.

I've been making copies of DVD's the last few days, and it's a slow and tedious process. It takes about 20 minutes to duplicate the DVD (which is about 3/4 full, I think.) The problem is that I wander off to do something else so I have to keep remembering to come back and switch the discs. So I saw this thing; the Pico DVD/CD Duplicator - it's a low cost DVD/CD duplicator that has a little robot arm to load and unload the discs. The amazing part is that it's under $1,000; $699 to be exact. I guess the downside is that it doesn't print the labels; which also takes a lot of time. Hmm..maybe I should just get them mass produced; but it's not really cost effective when you want less than 100 discs.

Canon has announced a nice little HD Camcorder, the HV 20 which feature a 1/2.7-inch CMOS that captures 2,048 x 1,536 stills, 10x optical zoom, opticial stabilization, a 2.7-inch LCD display, and miniSD slot for storing photos. If I wasn't salivating over Sony's recent disk-based camera announcement, I might want to get one!

I've been sitting out the HD Disc wars ( Blu-ray and HD DVD ) since a) if you can't buy any hardware, then why worry, and ii) with two competing formats, it looks like a party I want to stay away from. But then yesterday I was having lunch with a friend and I was telling him about the video I'd just finished and I was talking about how it would look better in HD because it was shot in HD rather than in the NTSC it had been downsampled to. And then I had this moment of realization; the HD Disc format I was going to go with would be determined by Apple; since that's the hardware I use for video editing. Well for some reason, suddenly I got all excited about the idea of creating an HD disc and was wondering which format (if any) Apple was planning to support. If I had to guess, it would be Blu-ray, since it's Sony and Apple and Sony have a bit of a thing going from way back. So today I did a bit of research; okay, I typed Blu-ray into a search engine and clicked on th...

Canon has announced two prosumer HDV camcorders; the XH G1 and XH A1 (MSRP $6999 and $3999, respectively). Wow! And the interesting thing; at that price neither accepts interchangeable lenses! Not being in the market for that kind of expensive camera at the moment, I can't really get excited. Canon has a habit of coming out with really cool semi-pro video cameras about a year or so after Sony, and by that time, I've already made my buying decision. Bad luck for me I guess - and I'm very happy with the Sony - but it's still a little annoying that they couldn't get in the game a little sooner.

Holy C$%^!!! Less than a week after I saw the Sony XDCAM HD cameras, Sony has announced a couple of low-end HD camcorders that record to DVD or hard drive. These are at the high-end of the consumer line (they have a micro-phone in, which the current HDR-HDC3 does not.) Questions I have; how will they work with Final Cut Pro (will they?) and how big is the hard drive on the HDR-SR1 and what's the quality difference between the HDR-SR1 and the HDR-UX1 . A posting on CDRinfo suggests that the DVD is 10MBPs and the Hard Drive is 12MBPs, so the Hard Drive should have higher quality video (though at larger file sizes.) I'd love to go tapeless, though I see a problem with making backups etc. Particularly with the hard drive model; would I save the stuff off to DVD's or just buy lots of hard disk space? Update: Looks like the Hard Drive model has a 30GB drive.

Last week I went to a seminar that Apple and Sony put on for XDCAM HD , which is Sony's Pro-HD system that uses optical drive technology to record video. There's more to it than that, but for me, the idea of doing away with tape is appealing. A really neat feature; connect the camera to your computer (using FireWire 800) and then using a Sony supplied plug-in for Final Cut Pro, it will show you icon's for all the clip segments on the disc. You can choose parts of those segments to then transfer (capture) to the computer, and then use for editing. Pretty damn neat; but, the cheapest camera is $15,999. Just as well, I only bought my tape based HD camcorder last year, and I can't afford a camera that expensive!

Apple announced an update to Shake 4.1 . They also dropped the price from $2999 to $499. That's a significant price drop (and don't forget Shake had been $5K prior to that!) I guess I'd be excited if it wasn't for the fact that I haven't even broken the seal on Motion . I don't really need Shake as it's more for 2D/3D compositing (so I guess I have to learn Maya before I can really have a use for Shake !

I have a copy of DVD Studio Pro , and have never bothered to use it! Weird, I know, but it's always seemed very intimidating, and iDVD is so fun and easy to use (and for most quick projects does 90% of what you want anyway) that I just haven't felt the need. But I'm starting to feel that I should at least consider exploring using it. Adventures in HD editing and compressing are leading me to wonder if using Compressor separately to create the MPEG2 file for the DVD might be able to produce better results than by using iDVD 's off-the-shelf default settings. I had a lot of problems with iDVD 5 compressing HD video to an NTSC Anamorphic DVD (lots of jitter when the camera was panning). I upgraded to iDVD 6 , and the quality has improved 100% with almost no jitter, but there's still some flickering of horizontal lines going on that I don't like and am wondering if I can eliminate or minimize even more. My first experiment was to try exporting from Final Cur Pro...

Apple and Sony are doing a seminar series on Mobile editing with Final Cut Studio and Sony's XDCAM HD System : Experts from Apple and Sony will show you how Final Cut Studio, MacBook Pro, and the XDCAM HD system combine for the ultimate tapeless HD workflow. See these powerful tools in action. Ask questions. And learn how Sony put this solution to the test shooting the Iditarod sled dog race. I'm planning to going to the session in Boston, even though I have no plans to use XDCAM. Figure I might learn some stuff on HD...

I've had a lot of trouble capturing video from my Sony HDR-HC1. I thought it was because Final Cut Pro HD didn't recognize the camera. I just upgraded to iLife 6 to get the new version of iDVD (to solve another problem) and discovered that iMovie HD did work with the camera - mostly. Then I tried Final Cut Pro HD again, and it worked! After a fashion. Seems there's a problem in the FireWire cable; because if I movie it slightly then the connection is broken. Which could explain why I was having troubles to begin with. Yet, I didn't have problems with my other camera and the same cable....so it could be a problem with the camera's jack... The pain of video editing!