Tip Mcpartland
Forum Replies Created
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Paul,
I can offer some insight — the Sony player works very, very well and the BD output is visually identical to your NLE timeline’s output. I burned from a 720P source (JVC HD100 acquisition).
I am using PC however, but I would be shocked it it didn’t work just as well on the Mac. The bundled application works perfectly and is ridiculously easy, although I did not create an elaborate menu system, etc. For simple playback, it’s just a few clicks once you’ve rendered a file to the appropriate format, in my case as I recall it was m2t. $699 at newegg.com.
The only issue would be playback on a consumer BD player — hopefully the BD-R or BD-RE discs will play in the Samsung, which has come down in price, or if you can wait, buy the Sony as it will no doubt be better (due November 13th).
As of now there is no HD-DVD burner, which is too bad as players as more reasonable and format more sorted out. Oddly enough, the HD-DVD blank discs are for sale, for example they are on the shelves at Fry’s Electronics and listed at many on-line stores. You would think that this would indicate a burner was forthcoming, but so far no announcements other than a Japan-only $3,000 appliance.
Tip McPartland
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No, played it back on the internal computer drive (burner) but it went out to the HD-TV I use as a monitor. I don’t have a Samsung player, and probably won’t get one of those. I’ll hold out for the PS3 unless something irresistable comes out sooner.
Do I work for Sony? No, I’m just prone to gushing enthusiasm! But only for something really cool which this is. Those more versed in real authoring may find limitations in the bundled software because is seems very simplistic, but for me that’s just what the doctor ordered.
I have the Toshiba HD-DVD player which feeds a Westy 42″ 1920×1080 LCD. It is so good that I held out for some time for an HD-DVD burner, but for some reason none seems to be on the horizon. Meanwhile, my strategy is to create content for the BD players in the millions of Play Station 3 consoles that will be hitting the shelves in November… or whenever!
Tip
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Man, you seem to know a lot about Vegas! So far no problem with sync, but need to experiment more. The problem I have with capturing in Premiere is that I’m not sure how well it will handle ingesting 35 Mb/sec XDCAM HD. I know there is MainConcept plug-in for this, but I’ve heard that it’s not working terribly well yet, so capturing in Vegas may be a fact of life, with or without a separate sound drive.
Thanks again for another great post.
Tip
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Thanks for your note — much appreciated. I can capture in Premiere to the two arrays, but I wonder if Vegas will find the video and sound in two separate places. I did drag files captured in Premeiere/Cineform to the Vegas timeline and they work fine, even without the Vegas Cineform plug-in. Well, it won’t be the end of the world to capture everything to my big SATA 2 RAID, it will have the drive space for the native 35 Mb/sec XDCAM HD files I hope to be working with as opposed to the 100 Mb/sec Cineform intermediates that I have been editing. Thanks again.
Tip
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I sent the preview to a second monitor and it didn’t look like what I get from Premiere/Cineform. I just captured a minute or so of video as I’ve only had Vegas for a day or two now. My graphics card is a Matrox Parhelia with the HD component output. I’ve got the HD monitor working in Vegas but only in SD after going to my deck as a firewire signaland then out as HD oomponent. very soft SD picture though. Thanks for your post and in avance for for any other help you can give.
Tip
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That is horrible. So you pretty much have to get a Xena to see what you’re doing. Bummer. Thanks for the response!
Tip
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Thanks Eric, I’ll check out Scenarist from time to time, I’ve just ordered the camera, still have to get Vegas, the Blu-Ray burner, and then I need to shoot and cut a long form project that has to be mastered to the 50 GB media! So I’ve got a while before I need the capability, until I have a long form project I can always just master back to the camera and retain the 35 Mb/sec that way.
Again, thank you very much for helping me sort this out.
Tip
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Thanks Ron. I was on the phone the other day with David Newman at Cineform and he said they are basically nowhere with JPEG2000 support, but are members of the Infinity group so someday they will work something out.
The Infinity is very important to me because it fulfills the promise of affordable first-tier HD. That is the Holy Grail that was just not quite found with HDV, I know, I just sold my HD100 and 3.5×13 lens. Although the post issues are still a bit perplexing with the Infinity’s JPEG2000 codec, I have learned about two companies, previously unknown to me, who are working to provide solutions.
MainConcept and Morgan Multimedia who are both pedal to the metal on JPEG2000 products.
I talked to Dirk Peters at the MainConcept California operation, and he was very informative. MainConcept (German with US subsidiary) is the biggest “codec company” in the world with 80 full-time codec engineers. They provide Adobe with all their video codecs, for example. But, the have not yet provided Adobe with a JPEG2000 implementation.
Perhaps this is because of the Morgan Multimedia Premiere plug-in. You can read an alluring reference to this if you go the Adobe Premiere forum and run a search for JPEG2000, which is how I found out about Morgan in the first place. They are motion JPEG specialists with an extensive line of products in this area including a JPEG2000 Windows codec (https://jpeg2000.qarchive.org/) that may be at the heart of the Premiere solution. Unlike MainConcept who charge hundreds for their solution, Morgan sells their Windows implementation for $50.00.
On the other hand, MainConcept’s solution will almost certainly enable editing Infinity footage, but not as native JPEG2000. It is a software encoder that will turn JPEG2000 files into any codec you want, although you have to buy a module for each output codec, for example one would be DVCPRO HD and another uncompressed avi.
Now I’m not sure I’d want DVCPRO HD because I think it’s resolution challenged, but maybe that’s just in its Varicam iteration. But to grab select files off the Revpro drive with the MainConcept software encoder and save them to your hard dive as uncompressed 1920×1080 HD might work very well for me. Better yet would be going to Cineform Prospect, but we’ll have to wait for that.
Hopefully when it is released, there will be in place software support so that Infinity will provide that Holy Grail of affordable first tier HD (okay, you got me, maybe 4:4:4 is first tier now).
Tip
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Aspect HD also interpolates the 4:2:0 HDV into 4:2:2 and enables all your internal processing to take place in this better color space which has double the chroma resolution.
So maybe there is a little more processing time with Cineform due to the doubled chroma resolution and that offsets Cineform’s otherwise timeline friendly intra-frame encoding.
Tip
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I’ve been researching similar issues regarding the Infinity I’m buying. There are two companies that are very interesting in this regard, but very little known. Here they are:
MainConcept. I had a great conversation with their Dirk Peters who told me about their company, German with an American subsidiary. They provide Adobe with ALL their video codecs, but have not yet provided a JPEG2000 codec to them. They have a software encoder that will basically turn JPEG2000 into anything you want, from uncompressed avi to DVCPRO HD and so on. You have to buy the modules you’ll need. But with this, you can take the circle takes from your Infinity footage off the Revpro cartridge, convert them to uncompressed video, and save them to your hard drive array. They will also have some announcements at IBC and area a company to watch.
Morgan Multimedia. They have some kind of JPEG2000 plug-in for Premiere that was mentioned on the Adobe Premiere forum and the also have a range Windows JPEG2000 codecs and other products. They are motion JPEG specialists and as a French company they may have been the provider of the JPEG2000 to Thomson. Dirk at MainConcept said that while MainConcept provides many codecs to Thomson he didn’t think that they provided their implementation of JPEG2000, so to me, two plus two makes Thomson buying from Morgan, both French so a likely alliance.
Between these two companies, the JPEG2000 codec will find its way into an NLE near you soon.
Tip