Michael Slowe
Forum Replies Created
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I’m not sure whether small sensors make it worse or not, they may well do so, but the standard photographic principles still apply. Similarly with depth of field. Less depth the wider the aperture and less depth the longer the focal length of the lens (referred to as ‘zoom’ in these modern times).
Michael Slowe
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This is not just small sensors it’s a standard photographic principle. We learnt this at our mother’s knee, always try and expose with an aperture around f5.6 or f4. That’s why Sony have given us two ND filters, if you need more (must be a hell of a bright light) then fit them.
Michael Slowe
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There you are Gary, your answer from a better looking human being than me! This region business can land you in quite a lot of trouble so it’s wise to check carefully. Mind you, with my own produced DVD’s I find that they play everywhere, even in awkward USA with their odd NTSC system! Region though is something different again and I’m not qualified to pontifcate on that.
Michael Slowe
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You appear to have been given pretty good advice but I’ll throw in a bit more if I may.
Firstly, I’m finding that Studio Pro tends to be set at default for NTSC so, as you’re in the UK as I am, be sure to choose the PAL option. I have to do this every time.
Secondly, many people, including me, consider BitVice to be a superior encoding software to Compressor. All I do is drag my exported ProRes QT .mov file into BitVice and I get my m2v and ac3 files that I then import into Studio Pro as others have explained. BitVice gives you the opportunity of choosing an average bit rate with a double pass encode and my results are first rate with the latest BitVice version. If you are shooting and editing in HD as I am the downscale for DVD in BitVice is really very good.
As to the file that you burn, that will be a .img and you can archive that and re use it whenever you need more DVD’s. If I need BD’s I merely drag my HD ProRes .mov into Titanium Toast Pro 11 and do the encode and burn to Blu-Ray there. I archive the ProRes file as well as the SD .img.
Michael Slowe
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I’ve sometimes been asked for DCCAM tape by a broadcaster and when transmitted the quality looked great. Don’t forget that the compression for broadcast is considerable anyway.
Michael Slowe
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I keep a Tiffen UV filter over all my lenses as a matter of course whenever I shoot and this means that you can only damage a filter rather than the front element of a lens. It’s easy to wipe a filter if you keep lens cleaning wipes handy.
Michael Slowe
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Jeff, I think you’ll find you are wrong, DV (SD?) interlaced is also upper field first. When I’m encoding for DVD in BitVice I set upper field first for my media, whether it’s SD or HD – shot 1920 X 1080i by the way.
Michael Slowe
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David, you’ve raised some interesting points here. First of all your workflow, HD to SD. You refer to a number of downscale options with the comment that you haven’t found a good software conversion. Well, I use BitVice for all my DVD encoding and find that it does a brilliant downscale and it’s not done with hardware. Very likely of course a good piece of kit from AJA would convert even better, I haven’t tried.
As to distribution of productions that we shoot in HD, I agree, it’s frustrating that people don’t want them on BD. This is crazy because even if they play DVD’s generally these are going to look better with the modern ‘upscaling’ BD players. So they might as well get BD players. You predict the death of DVD’s, well they all say this but then it has to be files on drives for distribution, what a pain that will be.
Michael Slowe
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Careful guys, Sony will appoint him CEO and we’ll lose him!
Michael Slowe
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Ben that’s bad luck and bad selling by your retailer. Surely they must know what works with what and it’s their job to source the right kit. Here in the UK I’d like to think that would never happen ( I may be wrong though!!).
Michael Slowe