Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
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You need to send black burst from the generator to BOTH the VTR and the Mojo. Doesn’t matter whether you loop it from one to the other or you use two outputs from the generator.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
What we would do is downconvert to NTSC anamorphic and send that through an Alchemist Platinum to create a PAL anamorphic master usable for 16×9 DVD encoding. That is not an inexpensive process.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Just about every piece of software you buy (license) has the same kind of legal boilerplate in those long agreements you have to agree to before the software will install. That’s why Microsoft Windows documentation says it isn’t for use on any system where a malfunction can cause injury or death. Imagine if your car ran on Windows Vista. When you step on the brake, instead of stopping you get a message that says “Brake Failure: Abort/Retry/Fail”
All you can do is try to get the best software and hardware for the work you need to do.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The big problem with doing projects for networks such as Discovery, E! or a few others is that they require all the original footage from the programs they purchase. They then create huge archives of footage, which they then recycle into new productions without further payment. They want tapes to file away on their library shelves for use in future productions. The video world has not yet grasped the concept of archiving huge libraries of footage data that has never touched videotape. This concept now is beginning to catch on in mainstream film production due to the explosion in DI work.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
You just found out that not everything in the world of DVD plays by the rules laid out in the DVD Spec, particularly when it comes to software players. According to correct DVD authoring practice, all you need to do is to point the First Play item to the program material you want to play automatically when the disc is inserted in the player. Whether that happens depends on what is playing the DVD and, to a lesser extent, what software authored the disc.
Unfortunately, it is difficult or impossible to author around a player that does not respond correctly to the programming on the DVD.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The graphics card does not affect the quality of DVD encoding. It might speed up the process if the software you use is written to take advantage of an advanced graphics card. But MPEG-2 encoding crunches on the main CPU.
Our experience with DVDit Pro 6 is that if you just drop a Quicktime movie into it, you will get a mediocre picture encode. Not terrible but not really good looking either. It’s really designed only to encode short pieces like still or motion menus. That is why you need a decent MPEG-2 encoding solution. The encoding process determines the image quality of your entire DVD. Every DVD authoring software is designed to accept MPEG-2 streams. THAT is what plays off the finished DVD. If you feed your system any other kind of file, it is making MPEG-2 under the hood without telling you. The best way to improve the image quality of your discs is to make high quality encodes yourself.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Hello Mildred,
What are you using to encode your video? If you are dropping Quicktime movies into your authoring software, you probably need an encoding solution that can produce better image quality. We have Sorenson Squeeze on one machine, and it produces consistently good looking video.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The BDP-S1 plays BD-R/BD-RE discs authored in standard BDMV format (such as produced by Roxio DVDit ProHD). It does not play .m2t transport streams (which is BDAV format that none of the Blu-ray players support as far as I know).
The software that comes with the Sony Blu-ray burner will do what your want, however playback must be on PC via the Cybervision software player.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I’m not an Encore user, so I can’t address that part of your question. As far as picture quality on Blu-Ray is concerned, you can have excellent picture quality provided that you encode your program using a high quality solution. I have not yet tried Sorenson Squeeze for encoding HD MPEG-2, but I would expect good results. I have had good results with Apple Compressor. Keep your bitrate up in the 20-25Mbit range used by the professional discs.
In any case, test your project by playing it on a large flat screen display, and you will know whether your project will look good on a projector.
For playing a BD-R disc (recordable) you can use the Sony BDP-S1 (with at least version 1.6 firmware), the Playstation 3 or the Panasonic Blu-Ray players.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
As I understand it, Avid does not support media spanned across more than one P2 card while FCP does. You might want to check Avid’s web site for more info on this issue.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City