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Client issue with DVD
I’ve posted a similar question on the FCP forum, but I thought I could really use some help in dealing with my client.
I created a widescreen DVD that was shot on a Sony Ex1 Camera The client complained about the DVD being pixelated badly when it was played in their trade show booth on a 50″ plasma screen.
It looked fine (for Sd video) on my 46″ Samsung LCDTV and on various other LCDTVs.
I went to the AV company who rented the client the Plasma Screen and DVD player, played the same DVD and as they said the video looked like crap. It looked like a low rez YouTube video! I was shocked! All of my text including lower thirds where blocky and ghosting, barely legible. The AV company then played some of their Test DVDs and they looked okay. Very confusing. I will tell you that first they used composite connections then switched it to component cables, both using a standard DVD player
Well yesterday, I took my DVD to Circuit city and played it on their 50″ plasma screen hooked up to a blue ray player, and it looked fine (for SD Video) No pixelation, all text looked fine! What a relief!
Obviously the problem lies with the AV company’s set-up. My question is how would you explain this to the client who works closely with the AV company? I’m sure the AV company spent the better part of the trade show pointing fingers at me. They showed the client their test DVDs which looked okay.
I’m sure the client will ask me why the other test DVDs look good on their plasma. I really don’t have a answer. How would you deal with this issue? How should I explain this without falling into the pointing the finger at the AV company issue? Thanks so much and happy new year to all.
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25 Replies
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The first thing I would do to troubleshoot would be to get the stats on the AV company’s test disks to see what they were and how they were encoded, and compare them to what you’re burning. All this should happen without any sturm and drang, no finger-pointing, just a trouble-shooting mission. Though if things are as you say I suspect the Av company messed you over and is playing dumb now. They might not have known it though, so don’t get into blame games you can’t prove yet. Because at this point it looks like you both share the blame, you for not checking this out earlier, and them for not trying harder to troubleshoot it.
In hindsight, you or the project’s producer might have called the AV company to get this standards info, and sent test disks over to try out on their system before show time. OTOH, one should expect a standard DVD to play the same everywhere, unless otherwise specified, without needing any special handling. Now that level of pre-production hand-holding I’m talking about is not always possible, especially if you are not the producer in charge and the show is at a distance from the place you’re working. Like two states over. This is where religious adherence to broadcast standards protects you. If everything is NTSC/FCC/SMPTE legal, you’re never to blame.
You played it at Circuit City on a blu-ray player, which upconverts SD to fake an HD look… that’s probably not a fair comparison, unless the AV company also used an identical BD capable player. You said your product was SD, so the proper test is on an SD machine. I am going to assume your video levels were checked against a scope and waveform monitor during production, at least the virtual ones in FCP, before the product went out, and the DVD was rendered at the proper screen resolution. Your software should retain the last settings you used, so write them down for comparison purposes. I also check against a glass CRT monitor, not just an LCD for final QC, because the CRT points out problems LCD’s can’t.
Bring your own SD DVD player to the AV company and hook it up to the same screen for a test using various cables. If it looks great, try it next with their DVD player, hopefully the same one they used, and compare. This will still not be definitive since settings on the screen may have been changed since the event. If you can get the model number for the set, download a PDF of the manual and go thru it for a clue about the various settings and hookups. If I had to guess, and took you at your word that it plays fine at Circuit City or wherever, I’d guess the monitor had been set up wrong, it probably is usually set for HD viewing in some way that distorts a normal SD signal… But like I said, the fault has to be shared since it should be part of your job to check these things out with testing.
Other possibilities: You didn’t catch a wrong setting when rendering, because final cut is able to play back so many different things well, and you didn’t notice because you didn’t test it over several different players. I always test important DVD’s on at least three consumer/prosumer players and a PC and a mac. Then again, I’m a paranoid about these things. It helped me a few weeks ago when a client kept telling me part of a DVD I’d made wasn’t working on their computer. I knew it did, because of the multi-platform testing I’d done, and eventually they admitted it was a user problem on their end, and we solved it. Used to have similar problems with stereo/2-track audio videotapes watched by clients that had their VCR or TV audio channels set wrong. They complained audio was missing or had bad levels. In those cases, I had to often go over and re-wire their system properly, or walk them thru settings on their remotes, to prove it to them the tapes were really fine and their setup was hosed. For the ones that were repeat offenders, we just made all their stuff mono and never had further troubles:-)
Also, not every AV rental company is equally skilled and equipped, and it could well be that the operator that day messed up, used settings from a previous job that were not proper, and the evidence got lost by the time you could look into it.
You may well never know the whole truth. However, as I said, if your product meets all broadcast standards, you can point to that as cover with some assurance the problem is not on your end. Best you can do now is troubleshoot and look to the future.
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If you do this, I’d burn an identical program on a couple of other brands of media (Sony, Maxell, etc.). I’ve had issues with some older standalone players having problems playing certain brands of media.
Good Luck,
BruceBruce Bennett
Bennett Marketing & Media Production, LLC -
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your detailed response. There are a few things you said I wanted to clarify. In hindsight, sure I could have called them to get their standards, but I did let the AV Company know that I was providing a wide screen SD DVD video. I suggested they use a DVD player that up converts. I did this in writing. Between you and I, they didn’t use an up-converting DVD player, and I’m not into finger pointing myself so I wouldn’t mention this to the client.
I’ve produced shows for conventions and trade shows, and have never run into a problem before.
I also tested my DVD on several DVD players and screens. It NEVER looked like it did on the AV company’s Plasma. Of course I checked my levels on waveforms and vector scopes. I’ve also checked my DVD on a crappy old DVD recorder hooked to an LCD and it played fine.
As to what’s part of my job, I feel that my job is to produce a good product, not to oversee the AV company’s set up of their monitor. I gave my client about 25 extra hours of editing free of charge because I knew they had budget limitations. The deadline for the project was extremely tight, and I didn’t have the time to run back and forth to the AV company, about an hour away from my office.
Watching and checking the video on my home 46″ LCDTV showed that indeed the picture quality was fine. I also played it on my 30 inch Cinema display and on a CRT monitor hooked to a standard DVD player. All looked good.
When I went to the AV company they didn’t have the test DVD they used at the trade show, they played others including a Disney animated DVD and boat racing DVD (which looks like the type of DVD you see in booths at NAB for demonstration purposes..
I would agree with you that the monitor probably had been set up wrong, it probably is usually set for HD viewing in some way that distorts a normal SD signal. That’s my only explanation.
My question still is what do I say to my client?
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One hour away across town? I’m betting the next time you’ll take the 2 hours to go check the setup, and bill it.
All you can tell the client is you made it right, and have proof it is right from your end, but you can’t prove a negative, there’s no way without replicating the exact setup to know ultimately who’s fault it was at the trade show. I would like to think that I would have given them my cel and have them call me the second anything went wrong, if they were in the same town as me, and I would have driven over like Gene Hackman with my own player, and a spare disk, and seen it and tried some changes in the setup. They would have seen me standing by my product and that may be worth something in an argument of “he said/she said”. But what I see here is that the projection people didn’t talk to you right away, and you didn’t talk to them before the show. Each aprty probably trusted the client to manage this job, and the client probably expected one or both of you to handle it. There was a valley where responsibilities didn’t overlap properly.
If you want them to use you again, you’re going to have to get a mutual commitment to a higher level of overall responsibility, morover, better defined responsibility, and they need to pay you more for that as well. There is no good or magic answer to this bad situation. I think that’s what I take away from the incident, that there was a gap in who “owned” the success of the overall project, end-to-end. One point of contact for everything.
I have had plenty of times in my life where I’ve killed myself to put out a perfect product on time and on budget and handed it off to the next person or persons in the chain, only to have a failure somewhere once it was out of my hands. Very frustrating. If you don’t want that to happen, the thing I see to do is get overall control of the project and cover everything end-to-end, all the way to delivery: then you only have yourself to blame and nobody else.
I tend to prefer that: take all the responsibility, take all the blame as well as the kudos. I can’t always get it though, some projects are just too big and you NEED to partner with others to succeed. Then your interpersonal skills matter as much as your techincal ones.
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Hi Mark, perhaps you’re misunderstanding me. Although the AV company is an hour away they didn’t receive the DVD from the client until they were on site at the trade show in another state. Since I had checked my DVD on multiple set-ups and all looked fine, why would I travel to the AV company to check their set-up?
There was no room for additional billing for my time, as I already agreed to a final price with the client, and I ate about 25 hours of additional editing to keep the client happy.
Maybe I’m just dumb, but I don’t see how it’s my issue if the Plasma Screen doesn’t play the video correctly. As I stated earlier the AV company was using a Standard DVD player hooked up via a composite cable.
What are you supposed to do when you send out multiple DVDs to multiple clients? Travel to each and every office and check their set-up to avoid complaints? That’s not realistic. I don’t mean to be arguing with you Mark, I also don’t mean to appear defensive so please forgive me as I respect your opinion.
As I said before, I’ve produced hundreds of convention and trade show videos that are edited and completed at the last minute and sent fedex to the client on site at a hotel in another state. That’s the nature of the business. I can’t fly out there and check the video on site, but I can go through all the checks and tests I do locally. There is NEVER one person with sole ownership on projects like this unless the same company shooting and editing the video is staging the event or providing the playback equipment.
Thanks for your suggestions Mark.
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Bottom line is that if they put in a test DVD and it worked fine, then it’s something about your DVD. If the setup was whack, their test DVDs would’ve also looked bad.
It’s probably pretty subtle, but there must be some difference between what you had and what they had. If nothing else, you’ll need that info figured out at least when you talk with your client.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Tim,
You’re right, unfortunately no matter what happens, the Producer is always at fault (and almost always catches the blame from the client).
Thus my “brand of disc” used with an “incompatible player” theory. Usually when this happens, the discs are simply not recognized by the stand alone player. (And it still does happen today because some hotels/rental companies will not update their DVD players until they die).
One way to know for sure is to make a copy of the “suspect DVD” onto a couple of entirely different brand of media.Bruce
Bruce Bennett
Bennett Marketing & Media Production, LLC -
My experience with convention center AV companies ranges from button pushers who don’t know how to troubleshoot to world class know-how, usually somewhere in the middle. There are a few pretty big AV rental companies who are known for not maintaining their gear nor training their operators. I have had a few run-ins with these groups. I distinctly recall a few projectionists who referred to any tape format, from U-Matic to mini DV as “Beta tapes.”
Luckily all of my clients have switched to reliable vendors.
There is no way to anticipate the un-anticipatable.
I too will vouch that trade-show videos are usually done at the last minute, often I hand-deliver these to the booths. On one occasion someone came to find me to say they could not play the video. I went over to the booth and saw that they were trying to play the DVD through a computer by double-clicking the VOB files. This could work, however I told them to use windows media player, and it worked fine. Again, knowing the capabilities of who you are dealing with helps.
Mike Cohen
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Some questions:
1. you say you shot using the EX1, did you shoot SD? Or was this originated and edited in HD, then downconverted to a standard definition, wide-screen DVD?
2. Do you know the native pixel resolution of the 50″ plasma TV used by the A/V company?
Some Plasma TV’s use 1366 x 768, some use 1024 x 768, and some use true HD pixel resolutions of 1920×1080. There may be other pixel resolutions, but those are the three that I found amoung the 25 or so models offerred on B&H Photo’w website
If the DVD was a standard definition widescreen DVD and the 50″ plasma used had a native resolution of 1920×1080, that’s some serious up-rezzing going on to convert it to fill the screen.
But that said, I’ve seen this done dozens of times and the video usually looks a little soft, but otherwise fine. Just slight pixelation, and surely no ghosting as you mention. It looks the same as an SD TV signal from cable.
My bet is that it has something to do with field interpolation and progressive frame issues. Many Plasma TV’s and DVD players have settings for how to display video in terms of frames and fields. If this is set wrong, it COULD cause an issue. Another area to examine would be 3:2 pulldown settings. If this is set wrong, it could cause an issue.
But that said…usually the default factory settings on both DVD players and Plasm TV’s make it nearly impossible to screw up how they playback DVD’s. But if you get to messing with them and don’t know what you’re doing or don’t know the specs of the video on the DVD, I’ve seen it occasionally cause a problem.
But I agree with you…. you cannot be responsible for ensuring a DVD plays back correctly when you’ve tested it on multiple DVD/TV setups prior to delivery and use in another state.
We give clients written instructions for how to ensure reliable, high-quality playback of the DVD’s we provide them and we ALWAYS tell them verbally and in writing to test it well in advance of their show, presentation etc. We give them our cell phone numbers to troubleshoot in case the AV people can’t figure it out.
Yet on more than one occasion, we’ve had similar scenarios. In EVERY case, it was operator error on the part of the people that setup and operated the DVD/TV combination. Usually they were too arrogant to call us for assistance.
What we do after the fact is take the questionable DVD and sit down and test it to figure out what went wrong. That way, we can tell our client…”here’s what happened and why.” We try not to get into blaming people, but most clients figure out where the error occurred simply from an explanation. We also get the problem DVD and SHOW the client (either at their place or ours), that the DVD does in fact play correctly on many other combinations of DVD/LCD, Plasmas etc.
There are occasions where testing and figuring out the issue isn’t possible because we don’t have access to the exact equipment. In this case, we again show the client that the DVD plays fine on multiple combinations.
I think that’s about all you can do from the client standpoint. And if you figure out what the issue was, be sure to WRITE IT DOWN so that you can note the possiblity on the next DVD project you do.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’ve read the responses thus far, and though the technical advice seems sound, the “business” advice is not as clear.
When you want to keep a client, and another professional (whom the client trusts) has thrown you under the bus, what is the best response?
I’ve heard a lawyer say that if mud is thrown at you and you try to brush it off, you only make yourself look worse. But if you wait, the mud dries, and you can just flick it off.
My advice would be to tell the client that it is very important to you to understand exactly what went wrong, and you’d appreciate the cooperation of the AV company to investigate what happened. It isn’t a question of fault — it’s a matter of finding out how to make something work.
Bob C
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