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Thoughts on editing with HD video captured from Blu-ray?
I’m due to be producing and editing a project to make a cinema commercial for a TV channel. The commercial is due to include movie clips (the channel shows nothing but movies).
The plan is to produce the commercial in SD and then send a DigiBeta out to be transferred to 35mm for cinema use. I have pointed out that SD video transferred to 35mm always looks very soft and we should be doing the whole thing in HD, but there is no budget to source HD masters of the movies; the channel only runs in SD at the moment, so we only have access to their SD masters.
It’s been suggested that a much cheaper source of HD movie clips would be commercial Blu-ray discs. At first thought it sounds feasible – the quality obviously won’t be as good as an HD master tape, but it should still be of subjectively higher resolution than an SD DigiBeta, and therefore the final product should transfer better to 35mm – shouldn’t it?
Do any of our resident experts have an opinion? Are there any technical gotchas I should be aware of? The workflow would be along the lines of:
Blu-ray transferred to HD tape (probably HDCAM)
HD tape captured and edited in FCP
Final edit output to HDCAM for transfer to 35mm. -
5 Replies
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It sounds like you would like to try to copy commercial Blu-ray discs and try to edit that footage.
That not legal!
You are going to need to acquire your assets legally.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Board of Directors
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
Assume that it’s been fully cleared with the copyright holders. This is simply a quality issue, not a rights issue.
I was hoping to get some opinions on the quality, but I guess it’s easy enough just to try it and see what happens.
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Assumming you have the clearance then you you would need to gather your assets in the best quality thats available. If that happens to be Blu Ray then you’ve answered your question.
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[Gareth Randall] “Assume that it’s been fully cleared with the copyright holders. This is simply a quality issue, not a rights issue.
I was hoping to get some opinions on the quality, but I guess it’s easy enough just to try it and see what happens.”
If you do get clearance, I’m not sure you’re going to be able to digitize anyway. I’m not sure if it’s still the case but it used to be that if you tried to digitize from a commercial DVD, the signal would not record. Or it was a very distorted image. It was all part of the copy protection.
As for quality, yes this would be vastly superior to starting out with SD version.
Now if this station plays nothing but movies, they really should be receiving EPK’s from the movie companies. I would think you could get those in HD by now. Or if you got a good DigiBeta copy of the EPK, then you could easily upconvert the footage to HD using an AJA Kona 3.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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As has already been said, you probably won’t be able to copy/digitise the blu-ray discs because of the HDCP layer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCP
-Simmie
6 MacPros – Kona 3 & Kona LH
1 G5s – Kona LH
xbox360, Wii, PSP, PS3
https://www.speak.co.uk
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