Client issue with DVD

[Bill Davis]

This got me thinking…

Why isn’t there a standard label format that can help alert the playback folks as to what a DVD contains?

Seems to me it would be pretty helpful.

I fiddled around with the idea and in 5 minutes knocked this off.

I’m positive it’s incomplete and leaves out a lot, but wouldn’t SOMETHING like this make life a whole lot easier for all of us?

Or not?

[Greg Ball]

Chris, the video was shot edited in HD then downconverted to SD wide screen DVD.
I do not know the native resolution of the 50″ Samsung Plasma they used. Can you tell me more about the 3:2 pulldown issues? Is that something done in compressor? Or is that something done on the Plasma screen? Like I said it plays nicely on my LCDTVs and also on a Plasma screen with an upconverting DVD player.

[Bob Zelin]

I have not read every line of this long thread, but I would like to address the question “what should Greg do?”.

Greg should do everthing in his power to “right” this situation, and to find out what is going on – ESPECIALLY if it is not his fault. Having the AV company 1 hour away from his place is no excuse. I live in Orlando, Florida, and I do work in Tampa and St. Pete (90 minutes away), and Miami (4 hours away). And I have certainly been in situations where these clients have occationally called and say “hey, the thing you just did for us isn’t working anymore”. And you know what I do – I GO THERE. Thats right, I have driven for 4 HOURS TO MIAMI cursing every mile of the way, just to make sure that it is not my fault, and that I dont’ ruin my reputation – or to correct a stupid mistake that I have made.

Certainly, the AV company may be at fault. I have certainly been in this situation. I have had clients send tapes to local TV stations, where their tapes are rejected. I go to the client to see what is wrong, and if there is nothing wrong, I go to the TV station TO CONFRONT THEM. Now, you went to see your DVD, and it looked bad on their equipment. You should have gone back with YOUR DVD PLAYER to test it on their 50″ monitor. You should have run to a local WalMart, etc. near them, and bought a new $39 DVD player, and tested it AT THE AV company, to show that both your DVD player, and the NEW ONE from WalMart was ok, but their player was “screwed up”. And maybe it would have been your fault. But at least you would have known.

Anyone on these forums that orders equipment from any of the manufacturers you see advertised here (Sony, AJA, Blackmagic, Cal Digit, G-Tech, etc) expects to have WORKING EQUIPMENT delivered to them. But sometimes it arrives broken. These companies surely say “this guy is a moron, we test all the equipment before it ships to any new customer” – but things DO GO WRONG, and it is the responsibilty of these manufacturers to make sure that the customer has working equipment.

With that in mind, it is your responsibility to provide a working DVD to your customer, and if it’s the AV companies fault (because they are the morons) – then it is your responsibiity to show both your client, the AV company, and yourself, that THEY are in the wrong, and that your stuff works perfectly.

Followup with my clients is commonplace.

Bob Zelin

[Bruce Rawlings]

I agree with Bob’s approach. DVD should be a done thing but there always seems to be gremlin near at hand. For conferences and live public presentations we always use tape for playout. If the client is going off somewhere and waiting for the last minute DVD to arrive by courier we always give them a player that we know works with our DVD production workflow. We also use the quality control of testing on 3 different DVD players plus Mac and PC machines to check compatibility. I cannot understand why the client did not shout loudly at the time. I would though definitely demonstrate the DVD working correctly on other equipment to clear your reputation.

[Rich Rubasch]

Bob is right here again. Here’s a quick experience we recently had.

We usually have an upconverting DVD player in the conference room feeding a 32 inch Dell HD LCD TV. When the DVD player finally died we substituted in an older industrial Denon player that is a solid player, but not an upconverter. Event he component outputs to the LCD were pretty crunchy and revealed lots of noise. Composite was nearly unwatchable. We got a new upconverting player and send the HDMI out to the monitor and DVDs look much better.

It is possible that the AV company used a non upconverting player and using composite outputs…YUCK!

One more thought…if I had known that the plasma screen on site was going to be a 50 inch model, and as long as I was posting in HD anyway, I would have used Toast 9 to burn a simple Blu-Ray disc and provided a brand spanking new Blu-Ray player to the client to hook up to the monitor. Or I would have inquired to see if the AV company had Blu-Ray players. Your video would have looked great.

One last thing…can I assume that the DVD was authored as anamorphic widescreen video? 50 inches is a lot of upscaling to do, and different DVD players handle it better than others. Without an upconverting DVD player you can’t expect much.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Chris Blair]

I agree…to a point. We’ve done DVD’s for trade shows in Las Vegas, Orlando, etc. But we’re in Indiana…1000 miles away from both places. In those cases it’s impossible to go to the site and fix the problem. As I said in an earlier post, we give clients explicit instructions for reliable configuration and playback, tell them to test it well in advance, and tell them to call our cell numbers anytime day or night.

But we’ve had occasions where the AV companies simply declare that they have bad DVDs (we give clients two copies of everything), and they refuse to do anything to try to correct it…even after the client calls us in a panic. We’ve had instances where the AV company talks to us and refuses to admit there’s something wrong with the setup.

In each of these cases the problem was some setting either on the TV monitor or the DVD player….things like having the widescreen settings set incorrectly, having the black level set incorrectly on the DVD player, and our favorite, an AV company playing the DVD from a computer hooked up via VGA to the plasma monitor. They had the software DVD player “zoomed in” on the computer so everything was pixelated and blurry.

But you’re right that you HAVE to figure out the problem, communicate it to your client, and figure out ways to avoid in the future.

But I’ll give you an example of a similar situation that’s nearly impossible to fix. We do a ton of encoding for the web and we’ve gotten very good at it. We provide ready to use web video (typically flash), hand it off to either web designers or the on demand video companies, and they consistently screw it up. We call them and literally walk them through step by step how to get it to work, (with instructions often IDENTICAL to the web streaming companies own instructions on their websites)…and the streaming companies and the web designers STILL screw it up. We’ve called the clients and offerred to get their video posted and working for the same fee they’re being charged by the streaming company or their web designers. They consistently decline the offer! We’ve even offerred to do it for free for one very large client because they do so much other work with us. They STILL declined…saying they’d rather leave it in the hands of the “web” people.

This defies logic! We’re offerring to solve a clients’ ongoing problem for the same fee as they’re paying now, and they say “no.” So in this case, the client continues to “wonder” if we know what we’re doing, even though we’ve sat them down in our facility and shown them the 3 minutes worth of steps to uploading, then shown them the video working beautifully as it’s stored on the streaming companies server.

The streaming company tells them our videos aren’t encoded properly. So we set up a trial account with the streaming company and then loaded the videos through their service and again played them for the client. Yet the client STILL believes there’s something wrong with the videos. So we then tracked down the person that actually loaded the videos for them to the streaming server (an IT guy in their company). Turns out, he’s skipping the step of adding a SWF player, which you MUST do in order for the videos to play properly from this service. We inform the client of the problem, but the IT guy tells the marketing people you DON’T need a SWF player, and that we don’t know what we’re talking about.

So here’s a case of us sitting the client down, showing them the steps to get something to work, not once, but twice, and proving that it works. Yet…they’re still skeptical of what we’re doing.

The moral to the story is you have to do everything possible to make it right for the client….with the key words being…”everything possible.”

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Bill Davis]

I agree you need to do anything and everything you can.

I’m a video producer primarily, so I see my job as to shoot the stuff properly in the first place.
But when clients have wanted material delivered for the web, my solution is a deliverable that consists of the following.

A hard drive that contains:
The original NTSC DV clips, if they’re “full frame” and NOT for compositing.
The original NTSC DV clips of each web snippit shot against greenscreen if they ARE for compositing.
NTSC DV clips of each web snippit in full DV rez composited with the client supplied backgrounds.
Compressed files to their specs as to raster size, CODEC and frame rate in FLV format.
Compressed files to their specs as to raster size, CODEC and frame rate in SWF format.

Hopefully, they can just use the swf files and that’s it.
But if they’re a Flash version behind, they can typically take the FLV files, update them in Flash to whatever new version/codec they like, and re-render the swf files.

Or if there’s something more complex going on, they can go back to the DV clips and do their own damn encoding if that’s what it takes to get the job done.

The client communications is that I supply their WEB people with not JUST the work they’ve ordered, but ALL the work files they might need to re-encode or fix anything.

Usually, that moves the problem from my shop to theirs.

But I agree, it’s getting nothing but harder to keep up with universal output formats, codecs and encoding schemes in a world where there’s 100 decisions in every encoding job that can make something incompatible for the one delivery system it HAS to work on.

[Mike Cohen]

I too can relate these experiences:

1. I offer the client a DV res AVI or a FLV file in their preferred format. Rather, they ask for a WMV file from which they make their own FLV. Looks horrible. I even told them it looks horrible. Again, this is an IT guy who wants to do it his way. Not a lot you can do.

2. I offer the client the above, they ask for a DVD so they can “rip” the video for their website.

3. Last year we did a 16:9 DV project to DVD for use on a hotel tv system. I prayed that the hotel DVD player was setup correctly to format the 16:9 video correctly – it was correct but I did not know this until I checked into the hotel room.

These threads are great because they confirm that these issues are common, if not the norm.

Mike Cohen

[Zane Barker]

The video was shot and edited in HD, why now show it in HD?

Get a Apple TV and load the video on it and loan or rent it to your client (include a HDMI cable with it). All you have to do is encode the video for the apple TV and load it on there.

I have had good success converting 1080i60 into the highest quality that the Apple TV will play 720p24 (the Apple TV will only play 720p video if it is 24fps)

Now keep in mind that the Apple TV cannot loop a video, so if they need the video to repeat then you will need to create a video file that contains the same video several times so they can let it play for a while before staring it over.

The only time I have seen an Apple TV put out bad video is if the file was encoded poorly, or if the TV does a poor job of scaling the image.

Plus most other people at this trade show will probably be playing SD DVDs onto a HD display, if your client is showing actual HD video their product will stand out that much more.

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Mark Suszko]

I wasn’t going to add anything more, said it all before now. But we’re in danger of getting irrelevant here for Greg when we start to get too exotic in the recommendations. When the client orders a DVD, by jimbo, that’s what you better deliver. Not to say you can’t offer the added value of additional copies on various media and platforms, heck, I’ve done that myself a time or two. And at $30 retail for a cheap player, it may make sense to ship one out with the dub now and then where you can’t be there in person to shepherd the project the last mile. But just don’t tell the guy to make one very different thing when the deliverable is another.

I ran an SD dvd on my FCP system friday to check it, and the viewer blew the picture up to fill my cinemadisplay. Looked probably as bad as Greg’s clients said his did at the show. Very blocky. Re-setting the DVD controls to “actual size” made the pic smaller but very clear and sharp.

My final word (maybe) in my view is, yeah, you have to go back to the client and, for free, do whatever it takes to track down the problem and hopefully, restore your honor. Chances are good the AV guys screwed up but you may not be able to prove it conclusively. But even if the troubleshooting/ fact-finding mission shows the error was in your authoring, you need to be up-front about it, take your lumps, and then look forward, show you have a plan that will prevent this from ever happening again.

Quick old corporate joke:

Exec for IBM commits the company to a $3million dollar project that totally fails. He gets a notice to come see the Big Guy first thing in the morning. Guy figure’s he’s not going to see that office for very long at all, but the Big Boss just keeps asking detailed questions about the process, what was learned, what could or should have been done differently. Finally, the boss says:

“That will be all”.

(Troubled exec): “…B-but, um…. I don’t..”

(Boss): “What?”

(exec): “I thought… well, aren’t you going to fire me now?”

(Boss): “FIRE you!?!?! I just spent three million bucks to TRAIN you! Go earn it back!!!