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newbie needs help authoring a hd dvd
Hello all,
I’ve been hired to do a HD dvd project, and I have a few questions I hope some of you can help me out with. Here is the deal:
I have the footage, and have it all edited with transitions and whatnot in FCP HD on a half decent iBook. This video will be showcased on a 50 inch plasma which supports 1080i resolution, being played off a mac mini. The entiore video will be around 5-6 minutes, and will need to seamlessly loop forever.
The original clips’ dimensions are 1920 x 1080, and are encoded with the animation compressor. here is my best guess as to what I should do:
render the final sequence from FCP to Quicktime MPEG2? being that this entire video is about 5 minutes long, I could crank up the bitrate so the quality is diesel. burn that to a dvd in such a way so that it loops continuously on a half decent dvd player.
i thought about just making a QT and running off the QT player, but i’m guessing i might have stability problems.
please help with any advice you have, including just hire someone to do this because i am not 1337 enough.
thanks in advance
azn -
5 Replies
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The macmini will not play back HD at all. The internal disc is too slow and the CPU/graphics card can not keep up. Also you can not author a HD DVD on your ibook. I am having problems on a G5 Dual 2.7GHz with 8GB ram. Further more there are no HD DVD players on the market. For now, I would export the 16:9 HD to Uncompressed 8bit SD 16:9, and master a SD DVD from there. If you need the video to loop seamlessly, then export a 30min to 1hour looping video. (the dvd will pause for a few seconds at the end of the loop, and this way you will make the pause less noticeable) You can do this in DVDSP by just duplicating the video on the timeline. Set the encode rate to 6-8Mb/s 2 pass VBR, best motion estimation. Going over 8mb/s may crash even the best SD dvd players. Burn out, and set the whole thing up. When HD DVD players come out, you just need to (in DVDSP 4) reconnect the HD 1080i content with the SD place holders, and redeliver an HD DVD.
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I would try the quicktime solution (or maybe keynote but I think quicktime gives a little better perfomance) and try the H.264 codec. I think it should work. If the full 1080×1920 doesn’t work you can also try 1280×720, still a lot better than DVD.
I used an iBookG4 last autumn to project a theatre piece part of the projections (simple graphical ones) were 1024*768 with an animation codec.
hardware enhancements would be plenty RAM, fast mac mini and if disk speed is a problem an external firwire disk, but with the H.264 codec disk speed should not be the limiting factor I guess.
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It is. I have a 1.42 Mm that I have been designing into a corporate trade show. The Mm with a 7200 Rpm FW drive is running at 4 fps, h.264 1280×720 24fps 2000kb/s. Apple will tell you it’s the graphics card. I have been testing and I can get 720@24 to play from the DVCPROHD codec, probably the best HD solution right now.
Adam
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[QUOTE]I would export the 16:9 HD to Uncompressed 8bit SD 16:9, and master a SD DVD from there. If you need the video to loop seamlessly, then export a 30min to 1hour looping video. (the dvd will pause for a few seconds at the end of the loop, and this way you will make the pause less noticeable) [/QUOTE]
thanks for the help, guys, just a few more uber-noobish questions you all probably know.
what is sd dvd resolution? what exactly is “Uncompressed 8bit sd 16:9”? I am under the impression that FCP HD would do the necessary export/compressing to .m2v, and that sounds kinda like i’m outputting an uncompressed lossless master, and letting some other program do the actual compressing, and looping.
dvdsp? i’m guessing its a pc program. so I encode on a mac, and firewire the finished master for PC to burn?
please clarify this for me if you can, and thanks for holding my hand through this.
please also point me towards any tutorials or general faqs about this stuff.
thanks a bunch!
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[azn] “what is sd dvd resolution?”
This refers to a standard definition DVD, which is half the resolution of high definition video, that being 1080i.
[azn] “what exactly is “Uncompressed 8bit sd 16:9″?”
this refers to the codec you should be using to export your video sequence out of Final Cut Pro for use on your DVD. Export your Quicktime .mov “self contained”, quit FCP and start Compressor and use it to encode your video for the DVD.
[azn] “dvdsp? i’m guessing its a pc program. so I encode on a mac, and firewire the finished master for PC to burn?”
DVD Studio Pro is a mac program. If you don’t have it you can use iDVD which may already be on your powerbook, as this program comes with mac computers.
– Don
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