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Presentation Blu-ray vs. DVD
My organization is preparing a presentation of about a dozen films.
5 of which are in High Definition, the rest are in standard definition.
We have an HD projector but are not certain the best way to display all of these films in one fluid presentation meant to play through with a brief intermission.We can burn a blu-ray disc but I’m not sure if the software we have to do that (Toast) allows us to burn one disc with HD and SD content to play fluidly. Not to mention the HD content would be 16:9 and the SD would be 4:3
Our other option is to compress everything, even the HD, to MPEG-2 and use DVD studio pro to create one dvd that though not in HD, would still be unconverted in the blu-ray player.
My initial reaction is to go with DVD because though the quality on some pieces would not be as high, it would produce a fluid performance.
Thanks for any suggestions.
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3 Replies
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I think you want everything to look as much “of a piece” as possible for something like this. So your options seem to be, down-rez the HD and make everything look similar in SD, or try to uprez the SD to match the HD stuff.
It is always easier to step down from higher rez to lower, and have it look good, than to uprez SD footage to HD and risk seeing it get blocky or soft. There’s also expense for fancy high quality encoders or at least a time cost in uprezzing with whatever software you use.
So an all-SD presentation will look smooth, and if the player and projector are good, they will improve the look a bit more. If you mix and match, the SD stuff will look obviously less good in comparison to the HD stuff, and this puts an artificial weight of importance on the HD material over the SD material. A weighting that may not align with the real imporantace of each component presentation.
Is there some way to prioritize based on the video content, i.e. out of the 12 videos, which one or ones are most vital to closing whatever deal you’re trying to close? Is there a majority of those in one format or the other? I’d say, align everything to that, then. If the HD content is for stuff that’s just newer, made with newer technology, but not necessarily any more important, that should not be the driving force.
One other consideration is, making it seamless and reliable makes a bigger impact on the audience than having a few brilliant pieces within an overall higgledy-piggledy assortment, with a few interruptions and hiccups interspersed in it. You want to look like everything is well under control, and a mixed-media presentation with interruptions, no matter how small, detracts from the “buttoned-down” vibe.
Just my own opinion.
“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”
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A very good point, thank you.
We are likely going to burn everything to a DVD in SD quality but use a blu ray player (technically a playstaion 3, oddly enough) to upconvert on playback to match with the HD projector. We could do that or run the HD stuff off of the PS3’s hard drive.
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Hey Sam, Mac or PC? On a Mac you could just encode to H264 HD clips ( I would use 720P 1280 x 720 frame size) and drop them all into a Keynote presentation and feed the projector right off the laptop. Will look spectacular.
And if, by chance, your SD material is anamorphic widescreen SD, it will upconvert quite nicely with a KONA 3 card. Pretty good actually.
Forget a BluRay disc…clunksvile. Everything right off a Mac laptop straight to the projector.
Now if you want to hand out some DVDs after the show, then make some SD DVDs of the original, but don’t project it that way!
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media
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