[Nelson Goforth]

Excellent information, Daniel. I’ll print and save for my next project (and probably try a test as well). I’d noticed the Blu-ray settings in Compressor, but didn’t know to use those to send out to Encore.

Of course, the AAC audio encoding did work, but I had the feeling that there was a better way of importing – giving Encore less work to do.

The maximum length of any of the pieces I was importing was 10 minutes (a short film) so I didn’t notice that it was taking a long time, but what is the advantage of importing h264 (as most of my pieces were) over ProRes if both are going to take a lot of effort (ProRes to transcode, H.264 to ‘create meta-data’) and time to do? Is there a noticeable difference in quality?

And once I had my project laid out in Encore I went ahead and transcoded all of the files so that the application wouldn’t have to do it on each burn. If I import in H.264/AC3 will that no longer be necessary?

Thank you,
Nelson

Red Camera Rental & Indy Features, Denver Colorado.
rockymountain4k.com * 303.506.2456

[Nelson Goforth]

I’m pretty new to Encore, but have been trying to work through some of its arcana on a small (and unimportant) project just understand how the bits work.

Along the way I ran into occasional problems with files that, yes, you’d think Encore would just flag (one that wasn’t 1920×1080 somehow, another that I’d forgotten to switch the audio encoding from PCM to AAC) before spending a lot of time trying to turn them into a BR.

The best luck I’ve had is exporting via Quicktime, setting the video to h.264, audio as AAC, size to 1920×1080. But I’d also managed to import ProRes 422(HQ) files with no problem (before I read a bit and settled on h264/AAC).

It may be that you are asking Encore to do work best left to other applications, and it’s taking a lot of time to do it. What file formats are importing to Encore, and what is the actual length (in time) of the file?

Red Camera Rental & Indy Features, Denver Colorado.
rockymountain4k.com * 303.506.2456

[Nelson Goforth]

Macs don’t play Blu-ray – I think it has to do with Jobs’ feeling that physical media is dead and he wouldn’t pay the license fee, but who knows.

If you think he’s wrong, try posting a BR question on a forum (outside here) and the first five responses will be that BR is dead. Obviously they are not really correct, but that is a perception.

There IS a way to do it, but it’s simpler just to test on a Blu-ray player.

Red Camera Rental & Indy Features, Denver Colorado.
rockymountain4k.com * 303.506.2456

[Nelson Goforth]

First suggestion: get one Blu-ray re-writeable disk to test to. It’s more expensive than a regular disc, but great for testing. The ordinary discs are not something to waste, but not all that expensive, either. I’m using Philips discs, at just over $1/disc ($35/25 for printables), The BR-RE (re-writeable is under $10).

Two: put the ‘encode’ part on overnight and don’t sit and watch it. If it doesn’t encode in 10 hours then there may be a problem, but my suggestion is just let it go until it fails.

Three: supposedly Toast will burn the disk image. I have not tried this, and am only burning individual disks out of Encore. Toast is not worth the $80 for me right now.

Four: Do you need the menus, et al? I submitted a couple films to festivals just burning the ONE file right out of Final Cut. It only works (I think) for a single file, but it works pretty well. In FCP find the Export menu item, then “Share…” and follow the prompts for a BR disc. No Encore, no Toast, no nothing and it worked like a charm for me.

For my latest project I’m doing the full menu thing, but it’s mostly for fun and I’m not stressing – the festival already has my ‘easy Blu-ray disk’ (see last paragraph) with one button to click and 5 seconds of black ‘leader’.

Nelson

Red Camera Rental & Indy Features, Denver Colorado.
rockymountain4k.com * 303.506.2456

[Nelson Goforth]

Thanks Michael. As near as I can judge (using the applet at https://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~brettel/TESTS/Gamma/Gamma.html and one other online resource) the gamma on both my computer monitors is 2.2. Not certain about the broadcast monitor – I don’t have a test pattern to do a set up right now.

So my issue may be that my broadcast monitor is mis-adjusted. I’ll get a camera and set up to color bars.

Red Camera Rental & Indy Features, Denver Colorado.
rockymountain4k.com * 303.506.2456

[Nelson Goforth]

Thank you, Roman. Of course I was judging the correction on the broadcast monitor, since that will be the final display format, but was interested in how to get the best display for distribution via the internet, where the film will be judged (this is part of a competition). So using a correction in QT7 would do little good, as I can’t control the various users’ monitors or software.

I was concerned about the difference in color between FCP and Quicktime, but had forgotten about the different gammas. I spent a lot of time on color for a film last year, but the correction was to black and white, so there was no color shift, only a different contrast.

I’ll look into the LUT solution in Color – I have not tried that and will have to do some reading. It sounds like using the gamma correction in Compressor will be the way to go when having to deliver for two different end uses.

Red Camera Rental & Indy Features, Denver Colorado.
rockymountain4k.com * 303.506.2456

[Nelson Goforth]

I’ve got much the same problem, but not just with h.264.

I edited the movie in FCP and graded in Color, using a Panasonic 1710 through a Blackmagic 3D Extreme card. My computer monitor is the basic Apple 27″. Final use of the project will be for projection, but I need to show it first on computer monitors. The colors I’m seeing in FCP on the Apple monitor are about the same as on the Panasonic, just darker overall because of the difference in gamma.

First I exported a version for Vimeo via Compressor, as an h.264 mp4 Quicktime. I noticed that the colors were more desaturated than what I was seeing on my computer monitor. I assumed this was because of the h.264 compression, so did a straight Quicktime output from FCP (File::Export::Quicktime Movie…) to compare. Both exports looked the same in terms of color and gamma, though the QT movie is 422HQ.

Here is a screen shot of the three outputs (can’t include the broadcast monitor, of course)

So I’m baffled as to the color/saturation difference, and can find nothing in the settings to help. Any ideas?

Red Camera Rental & Indy Features, Denver Colorado.
rockymountain4k.com * 303.506.2456

[Nelson Goforth]

Just following up. This won’t help you much as these cameras are out of your price range, but… I just like to follow up on stuff.

The Canon 1D Mark IV (came out about a year-and-a-half ago) can do amazing stuff in very low light. Top ISO is 102,400. That is not a typo. It can do really good video at ISO6400; for an example look at Vincent Laforet’s “Nocturne” –https://vimeo.com/7152063

I had the opportunity to gaff a job with Mr Laforet some months ago. He was happy with the 6400 footage, but said that he could see a little noise in the full resolution footage. He said that at 3200, though, it was noiseless.

Our new FS-100 seems to give much the same level of picture. I haven’t shot any low-light stuff with it yet, but my partner, Rich Lerner, said he was shooting at ISO8000 (approximately – no ISO settings on this camera, only ‘gain’) and got solid, velvety blacks.

Nelson Goforth

Red Camera Rental & Indy Features, Denver Colorado.
rockymountain4k.com * 303.506.2456

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[Nelson Goforth]

Thanks again. The difference between computer monitors and broadcast is the initial reason I bought a Panasonic LH-1710 – clients on set wanted to see an accurate color rendering for material I was processing from our Red camera. We already had one to be the output of the camera, but I got another to monitor the Red Rocket card as I was doing a ‘one-light’ correction on set. The computer monitor looked good, but when seen on a broadcast monitor (at the same settings) had a washed-out, low-gamma appearance – so had to step up and get the Panasonic.

Nelson

Red Camera Rental & Indy Features, Denver Colorado.
rockymountain4k.com * 303.506.2456

[Nelson Goforth]

David, Thanks for the reply.

I understand about the monitoring issues for FCX. I’d just noted in one early post in the thread that the concern was that, with FCX, there was no way to go out to monitors and scopes.

My question was, since the picture from the broadcast cameras is already tightly controlled by engineers, can’t the image be trusted through the edit without the need for further critical monitoring? Of course I guess that lots of stuff is being added and manipulated in the edit… and engineers are not people to be going on ‘trust’.

Nelson