Brian Smith Posted July 13, 2007 Share Posted July 13, 2007 http://www.dvdtown.com/news/standalone-hd-dvd-player-below-200/4594 Now if they would just release the damn burner already I'd be a happy camper. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Nelson Posted July 13, 2007 Share Posted July 13, 2007 Are you going to buy this one or do you have a different hd player already? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Smith Posted July 13, 2007 Author Share Posted July 13, 2007 i already have the player...but only for entertainment...i need the burner to give high definition animations to my clients and it's killing me that it's taking so long. all i can say is that at least it seems that toshiba doesn't release a product until it's ready...unlike hmm say the ps3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nils Norgren Posted July 13, 2007 Share Posted July 13, 2007 We have been burning HD-DVDs for a while now, we use DVD studio pro to build the disk, burn regular DVD-R (the media for a 3 min movie is small enough) and they play fine looping on most of the hd-DVD players we have purchased for clients. The one glitch is menus, those are not working reliably yet, the disks need to auto-play, and we set them to loop. -Nils Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chad Warner Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 Nils- Are you burning 1080 hd or 720 hd? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chad Warner Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 Also, just clicked on the link that Brian provided, and now it's under $100.... http://www.dvdtown.com/news/toshiba-offers-99-hd-dvd-player/4597 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nils Norgren Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 Nils- Are you burning 1080 hd or 720 hd? We are working at 720p 24fps -Nils Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nils Norgren Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 I think that before the HD format thing shakes out everyone will be using variations of devices like Apple TV, we have one of these, and we compress our HD uncompressed movies for this device, walk over to the big screen and select it in the list, select the movie, and play! The clips are beautiful, smooth HD clip , no burning, no formating, just copy through the network (via iTunes) and play. This is the future of HD viewing in my opinion. -Nils Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 I guess if you can get a player for under $200 the decision on whether to go HD-DVD or Blue Ray gets a little easier. If it's up to the consumer we will more than likely go with the cheaper option. The real problem is the studios, since most seem to be going Blue Ray which is much more expensive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Smith Posted July 16, 2007 Author Share Posted July 16, 2007 We have been burning HD-DVDs for a while now, we use DVD studio pro to build the disk, burn regular DVD-R (the media for a 3 min movie is small enough) and they play fine looping on most of the hd-DVD players we have purchased for clients. The one glitch is menus, those are not working reliably yet, the disks need to auto-play, and we set them to loop. -Nils Holy crap...I would never have thought to do that. And we've been waiting all this time. #&^$&^#$*^@# Thanks Nil...you made my month Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Smith Posted July 16, 2007 Author Share Posted July 16, 2007 I guess if you can get a player for under $200 the decision on whether to go HD-DVD or Blue Ray gets a little easier. If it's up to the consumer we will more than likely go with the cheaper option. The real problem is the studios, since most seem to be going Blue Ray which is much more expensive. As Chad said, they are $100 now. As far as the movie studios, don't forget the fact that Universal, which is Blu-ray exclusive, has more movies in their library than all the Blu-ray exclusive studios combined. It should be no surprise that there are currently more HD-DVD titles available than Blu-ray. Besides this, Fox/MGM haven't released a Blu-ray title for several months, which may be due in part to how HD-DVD is coming along. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 We have been burning HD-DVDs for a while now, we use DVD studio pro to build the disk, burn regular DVD-R (the media for a 3 min movie is small enough) and they play fine looping on most of the hd-DVD players we have purchased for clients. The one glitch is menus, those are not working reliably yet, the disks need to auto-play, and we set them to loop. -Nils I've been thinking about doing some HD promotional animation video for our office, I've got Max and Vray and Premiere Pro 2, what kind of HD-DVD authoring software do I need? Also can you give us some info on the kind of software you’re using to render with and what the render times are like? I'd imagine that your not doing this for every client, and your probably charge a lot more for that kind of output than you would for ordinary NTSC resolution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 I've got Max and Vray and Premiere Pro 2 you will need to upgrade to Premiere Pro CS3 to author at a HD-DVD resolution. we haven't upgraded production studio, but i believe Encore is now integrated fully into premiere, and you should be able to author a HD-DVD or Blue-Ray with that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chad Warner Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 Actually, from what I just read, Encore CS3 doesn't support hd-dvd, only blu-ray, which only makes the hd-dvd/blu-ray debate even more of a pain in the arse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 hmmm.... that is rather frustrating. i was excited to upgrade, now i am disappointed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nils Norgren Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 I've been thinking about doing some HD promotional animation video for our office, I've got Max and Vray and Premiere Pro 2, what kind of HD-DVD authoring software do I need? Also can you give us some info on the kind of software you’re using to render with and what the render times are like? I'd imagine that your not doing this for every client, and your probably charge a lot more for that kind of output than you would for ordinary NTSC resolution. We render everything at 1280x720 24 fps, the fact that there are less fps and the HD res is not the large size(1920x1080) helps. Good frame render are in the neighborhood of 15min a frame all the way up to an hour a frame. We composite all the animations in AE or Shake, then we edit in Final Cut Pro, we send the finished movie through Compressor, which makes a HD Mpeg 2 file, that comes into DVD studio pro, which we set the build settings to HD-DVD, we then build the movie on a regular recordable DVD (4.2 gig size). There are rumors on the web that these (DVD studio pro) HD-DVDs will not play on this player or that, but we have not come across that problem. HD delivery is finally becoming a little more approachable, our first HD project was 3 or 4 years ago and we had to compress special Mpeg Transport streams, which we had 5k worth of compression software that was specialized for that purpose, then upload through FTP to a special HD player called "HDFrend" which cost 3k. It was all a nightmare, but those days are thankfully gone. -Nils Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 Are you doing architectural work or do you work in film, I ask because most of our customers don't have a clue about animation and they probably would never even think to ask if HD could be done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nils Norgren Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 Are you doing architectural work or do you work in film, I ask because most of our customers don't have a clue about animation and they probably would never even think to ask if HD could be done. We do almost exclusively Architectural work, we try to inform our clients about different playback options when we are negotiating scope. One of our recent projects involved 3 65" displays in a marketing center for a project in NYC, the movie primarily played on the center screen but on specific scenes it went to 3 screens. This required synced HD players (hard drive based) that were playing 3 seperate movies. go to our website http://www.neoscape.com go to "the work", "motion", and look at "Platinum". Our website is four years old, so the movies are all rather small, when we re-design it we will factor in much larger movie specs. Sorry for the small size. -Nils Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 Sorry for the small size. We render everything at 1280x720 24 fps, the fact that there are less fps and the HD res is not the large size(1920x1080) helps. I know we've discussed these elsewhere, but its nice to keep this info together. The only things missing here is PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio) and interlaced vs. progressive. Normally, the 720 line count would be progressive and the 1080 would be interlaced (fields) right? I'm sure there is a 1080p, but you usually see 1080i. 720p probably looks as good or better than 1080i. Also, in rendering we tend to work with square pixels, PAR 1, but film is usually done with PAR 1.2 or some other ratio. That's good in that you can get a seemingly bigger picture with the same rendertime. What PAR are you using at NeoScape for the 1280x720 standard you mention? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 Is the need for an HD-DVD player (which is still a bit of a specialty item, though not for much longer) a problem? X.264, MKV and VLC would be a free cross-platform approach for 720p and 1080p (with a sufficiently powerful playback computer) and a laptop hooked up to an HD monitor can be used for playback - is anybody seeing that used in arch vis? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chad Warner Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 Is the need for an HD-DVD player (which is still a bit of a specialty item, though not for much longer) a problem? X.264, MKV and VLC would be a free cross-platform approach for 720p and 1080p (with a sufficiently powerful playback computer) and a laptop hooked up to an HD monitor can be used for playback - is anybody seeing that used in arch vis? I think that's what Nils was getting at with the use of the AppleTV. My only concern about that setup is that it's more money on the front end for the client (computers are generally more than DVD players) and then you'd still have to output to a medium that can be mass-duplicated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nils Norgren Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 Normally, the 720 line count would be progressive and the 1080 would be interlaced (fields) right? I'm sure there is a 1080p, but you usually see 1080i. 720p probably looks as good or better than 1080i. Also, in rendering we tend to work with square pixels, PAR 1, but film is usually done with PAR 1.2 or some other ratio. That's good in that you can get a seemingly bigger picture with the same rendertime. What PAR are you using at NeoScape for the 1280x720 standard you mention? Hi Ernest, To your first question we always render everything progressive, using the rational "If it is good enough for Film studios it is good enough for me" (one caveat: film has Motion blur to make up for the lack of frames) The idea of higher frame rates really helps when you want a smooth moving video for things like sports. Film is always 24 fps progressive, the nice thing about 720p is that it is the smallest frame size with the fewest number of frames, so (theoretically) you can have higher relative image quality within the throughput threshold, and you are rendering HD but not 60 frames of 1920x1080 frames which would take many times longer. As for Pixel aspect ratio, this is a holdover from the old NTSC standards (and PAL for that matter). Basically there is a fixed number of horizontal lines that the engineers could push down the wire and out a cathode ray tube back in the days of the birth of TV. One thing that was used to get a higher quality image was to squeeze more lines (pixels) in sideways (vertical lines). This is where "Non-square pixels" came from. This squeezing meant that in the old days if you made a 726x486 image (common video format for NTSC systems) in photoshop and created a circle, you could pump it out the video card and on your TV you would see an egg. When coming up with the DVD standard they co-oped the Pixel aspect ratio to make a full resolution mpeg that was 720x480 16 by 9, I don't know exactly how it happened but when you wan to make a "letter boxed" dvd you need to render things out to 720x480 with a PAR of 1.2, if you are going 4x3 then you use a PAR of .9. In the end all of the HD standards use Square pixels, finally doing away with all mention of PAR which is good because it was a pain in the backside. Film is always square pixels, except for very special circumstances where they use a "Cinemascope" lens which squeezes a wide picture on to a 35mm frame, which is then projected through a special lens that un-squeezes the image. This is where "anamorphic" lens flare settings come from, a lens flare is round, if it is shot through one of these lenses, and the projector widenes the image back out the lens flare gets all streched. Cheers, -Nils Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 In the end all of the HD standards use Square pixels There's the money shot! That's the part I didn't know. I've not authored any animation to HD formats, so I've been dealing with Premiere assuming a 1.2 PAR to encode MPEG2 (it lets you chose for MPEG1), so I was thinking this forced PAR was still with us. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Dollus Posted July 18, 2007 Share Posted July 18, 2007 Was anyone here at NAB and happened to catch the 2k and 4k digital equipment? Read about red digital cinema and their $17,500 2k/4k camera. They raised over $3 million in pre-orders. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nils Norgren Posted July 19, 2007 Share Posted July 19, 2007 Was anyone here at NAB and happened to catch the 2k and 4k digital equipment? Read about red digital cinema and their $17,500 2k/4k camera. They raised over $3 million in pre-orders. I have been following the "Red" camera for a few years, I liken it to a hardware version of Maxwell, for the money it is unbelievable, however it still isn't out, it is missing some major components when it does come out, like audio. An entire package to use the camera will cost in the 25-50k range with lenses, batteries, supporting gear, and an audio package with timecode for sync. When it does come out it will be awesome if it does everything they say, I know that they had working cameras at NAB this year, but they only recently came out of their "Engineering delay". I expect that in 2 years all the kinks will be worked out and these cameras will be available, until then we are stuck using cameras like the Varicam or Cinealta, which are both great cameras. -Nils Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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