[Greg Ball]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your detailed response. There are a few things you said I wanted to clarify. In hindsight, sure I could have called them to get their standards, but I did let the AV Company know that I was providing a wide screen SD DVD video. I suggested they use a DVD player that up converts. I did this in writing. Between you and I, they didn’t use an up-converting DVD player, and I’m not into finger pointing myself so I wouldn’t mention this to the client.

I’ve produced shows for conventions and trade shows, and have never run into a problem before.

I also tested my DVD on several DVD players and screens. It NEVER looked like it did on the AV company’s Plasma. Of course I checked my levels on waveforms and vector scopes. I’ve also checked my DVD on a crappy old DVD recorder hooked to an LCD and it played fine.

As to what’s part of my job, I feel that my job is to produce a good product, not to oversee the AV company’s set up of their monitor. I gave my client about 25 extra hours of editing free of charge because I knew they had budget limitations. The deadline for the project was extremely tight, and I didn’t have the time to run back and forth to the AV company, about an hour away from my office.

Watching and checking the video on my home 46″ LCDTV showed that indeed the picture quality was fine. I also played it on my 30 inch Cinema display and on a CRT monitor hooked to a standard DVD player. All looked good.

When I went to the AV company they didn’t have the test DVD they used at the trade show, they played others including a Disney animated DVD and boat racing DVD (which looks like the type of DVD you see in booths at NAB for demonstration purposes..

I would agree with you that the monitor probably had been set up wrong, it probably is usually set for HD viewing in some way that distorts a normal SD signal. That’s my only explanation.

My question still is what do I say to my client?

[Greg Ball]

I should also add that the AV company played several DVDs of commercials which looked fine. There was some minor pixelation. Thye also played a Disney DVD, but those look great everywhere!

[Greg Ball]

When I went to the AV company, they were playing my DVD on a newer Samsung 50″ Plasma. I think ther were just using some big industrial DVD Player that they use for shows. The switched to another DVD player with the same results. Neither was an upconverting DVD player. First they were using a composite connection then they went with a component connection.

In my home set-up I have a 46″ Samsung LCDTV with HDMi from an upconverting DVD player. That looks fine for an SD DVD.

I’ve also tried it on my Samsung 24″ LCDTV with a standard DVD Recorder/player (no upconvert) and it also looks good.

The result on their Plasma screen was that my DVD looked like a low resolution wmv file on youtube when it played. All of my text was blocky and ghosting and any fine lines vibrated violently. The first part is an intro by the CEO who wears wire framed glasses. There were pixels in his frames. Of course the CEO always needs to look good! Then the next shot was a slow zoom in from a wide shot of the front receptionist desk. She looked like I was trying to hide her face like they do on the show cops. Blocky face.

The problem is the client’s trade show involved playing the DVD on multiple plasma screens around their booth. So I don’t think HDMI will work or will it. Do plasma’s have the capability of looping HDMI Signals?

[Greg Ball]

Thanks to all of you for your feedback. To answer some of your questions/comments:

Rafael: I do see minor pixelation on my 46″ LCD like in the fine lines of an object (thin eye glass frames or picture frames in the background) I attributed that to just SD Video playing on an LCD TV. The weird thing is I tried setting field dominance in compressor to Progressive and it looks somewhat better. Why would that be?

Richard: the presets in Compressor I’m using are:
90 minutes best setting

SD DVD
29.97
16:9
Field Dominance: Bottom First (I’ve also tried Progressive)
Frame controls: on
Resize filter: Better Linear filter
Deinterlace: Best Motion Compensated

two pass VBR best
6.2 average bit rate
7.7 Max bit rate
Motion Estimation: Best

Walter: I don’t have DVD Pro HD and I have a Kona LHe card. What if I were to output a quicktime file and bring it to another shop? Would that work? I also have BitVice Lite, but it doesn’t seem to offer any quality adjustments.

Pepo: The encoded video out of compressor looks fine. I have toast 6.03. Would you drop the file m2v from compressor into that? or would you drop a self contained quicktime file?

Wayne: I think Blu Ray is out of the question. The client didn’t buy Plasma screens, they rented them. How would I create a blu ray out of FCP? BTW the shop I use locally charges $750 to create a blu ray.

Is there some way I can create a file on my FCP system that I can bring to another shop either on Disk or on a hard drive for them to layoff better? Any suggestions?

Thanks to all of you. Happy New Year.

[Greg Ball]

Sorry for being so vague. Format is SD 8 bit uncompressed. There are no specific delivery restrictions that I’m aware of. I’m trying to offer them a means of getting them the file quickly over the weekend. Of course I’m aware that the file needs to be compressed for email. But I know I’ve been sent clips as either QT or MPG files and I’ve been able to download them and edit the video as high quality. Thanks Andy.

[Greg Ball]

Adding to it means they want to edit it, by supering titles. (They’ve asked me to remove all text from the original).
I don’t think h264 will be the best for them for this purpose. I also don’t want to upgrade yousendit to a monthly $8.99 fee for this one video. Any thoughts/

[Greg Ball]

I don’t think so. These are just video files dragged to the time line that have those thumbnails. I believe it would be a cache issue as John stated. Thanks

[Greg Ball]

Thanks John, I’ll give that a try. Happy Holidays.

[Greg Ball]

Mike, can I ask you why you use regular DV but render out using Pro Res HQ?

Isn’t DV much lower quality than your original EX-1 footage?

[Greg Ball]

You may want to look at this

https://www.videouniversity.com/wedbvid.htm

https://www.videouniversity.com/wedbook.htm

We don’t shoot weddings, we do corporate video. However I can tell you that we tried it once and it’s a royal pain. Don’t forget that everything happens live, and you can’t call for take two. My suggestion would be to shoot a few weddings for free or at cost to get experience and create a demo reel.

You demo reel if done well will help you get more business. The same holds true for events.

Good luck.