need to make Blu-ray for big screen screening ASAP

[Jeremy Garchow]

Rent a KiPro.

[Nick Meyers]

i have often played a file off a Macpro,
but there is a lot that can go wrong.
you need a long time to tweak and get it right, find all the potential pitfalls.
by “a lot of time” i don’t mean 2 hours,
i mean a full day at least

dropframes are possible.
the better your graphics card, the better your playback.

having minimum amount of stuff on your desktop can help, esp if you are going the “second desktop” approach
make sure the computer or the display is not set to go to sleep EVER.

for presentation niceties, have a black image you can set your desktop to.
(remember the QT file will close it self on completion)

setting the refresh rate of the display is important.
i got best play-back of my 24fps file on a projector that offered a 96khs option.
i only ever saw that on a very expensive projector.

presenting the QT file to the projector as a second desktop can seem like a neat idea,
but having an I/O card in the Mac Pro, and giving a genuine VIDEO signal to the projector is a much better image.
and seems to not be so dependent on the refresh rate.

we had a Kona card and i found using the very simple AJA TV app to be reliable.
(maybe less taxing on the system that FCP?)
Blackmagic have a similar app.

nick

[Don Walker]

I recently showed my indie film (94 min) through a 18K lumen Christie Projector. Made a BR disc and ran it through a Walmart bought Sony BD player, connected through a component cable. (RCA to BNC converters are needed) I then started a 2009 MBP (esata express 34 card Sonnet F2 Raid array) playing a ProRes FCP movie, through the mini DVI output as a backup, connected to the DVI input of the projector. I started playback on the laptop about 5 seconds after the BluRay. Neither playback device hiccuped durning the 3 showings of the movie.

don walker
Texarkana, Texas

John 3:16

[Johnny Smith]

Don how did it look??
i got a killer Christie CP2000-X
and a cheap samsung blu-ray.

I’ll try to find a post house in Hollywood on Monday to make a blu-ray.
Mac Pro will be a backup plan.

[Johnny Smith]

Also when i take the ProRes422 master to the post house should I make an uncompressed quicktime file or will that take forever? If not which codec should I use for amazing quality? I can’t render for more than 10 hours due to schedule.

Wonder how important compression settings are for Christie.

( Warren, I might be in touch on Monday if I don’t find a post house ).

[Eric Pautsch]

If you need a good post facility to do a BD, Id go with this guy in Santa Monica. Will do it in faster than real time on the rig he’s working on. It’ll beat the pants off of anything done with crap like Toast or Encore….and Im not shilling for this guy either. 🙂

https://www.hdpostconsulting.com/welcome.html

[Warren Eig]

Jimmy,

It’s one of the services I provide. I don’t encode in Encore. I just use it for authoring one offs.

Good luck with you post house search.

Warren Eig
O 310-470-0905

email: warren@babyboompictures.com
website: https://www.babyboompictures.com

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https://www.babyboompictures.com/BabyBoomPictures/KnitWits_Movie.html
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[Al Bergstein]

I just produced blu ray versions of a production last night. With a Blu Ray player in your Mac Pro, output the files in Compressor for BR. Then use Toast to burn them, as Apple hasn’t negotiated a deal with Sony for BR yet. That would at least get you a BR disk for the showing. Burn two to make sure that the player on the other end can read them. I’ve had problems where a computer BR player could not play my Mac created BR disk, but a Sony consumer player could play it.

TEST it out before the show.

DON’T use DVD Studio Pro to make the beautiful chapter based DVD because it apparently can’t. (or is there something I don’t understand about DVD SP?) I wasted hours once finding this out. You can make great SD DVDs but it won’t translate to BR at all.

It should work just fine, but given your deadline, find someone locally who can get this done right.

Which brings up a different related question. What are people using to do one DVD menu of the same footage, only output in two different formats? Example: If he wants to spend hours fine tuning a DVD with chapter markers for both SD and BR burning, what are you folks using to do this? Just taking it to a 3rd party? My take on this is that I have to go off of FCP and even Apple because I can’t find a professional tool that will do it… Toast is entirely too consumer oriented in it’s templates.

Alf