BluRay/PS3 update

vicmilt wrote on 11/20/2007, 6:23 AM

Hi all -

The story so far - I've completed a movie at an hour and fifteen minutes. Contains mixed media of SD, HDV (Z1) and 16mm film.

Writing DVD dsics at NTSC widescreen - it all looks wonderful, even projected quite large.

The problem comes with making BluRay discs.
Vegas 8e allows you to conform and burn BluRay directly to plain vanilla DVD's. They play in the PS3 under Data>Stream and they look appreciably better (in some ways) than the NTSC widescreen.

But you are limited to about 31 minutes of playable time per disc. What to do?

So I bought a small portable 120Gig HD (Maxtor One-touch). PS3 wouldn't even see it. Called Sony Playstation support (great service BTW) and they informed me that the HD had to be formatted as FAT32. So I downloaded HD software from Seagate (as in the new Maxtor/Seagate alliance) and tried again this AM.

First - I can't write the 8.4 GIG hour and a quater file to the newly formatted HD. I think there's a four gig issue - any help here?

So I put the three pieces onto the HD and while the PS3 sees the HD now, it does not see any viable media.

Any thoughts out there on this whole subject? The final answer will be that as soon as Sony releases the announced 4x BluRay Writer (for under $600 bucks) it will all be sort of moot. But meanwhile, I'd LOVE to be able to take my PS3 to various screenings and show my movie in HiDef.

Now onto the HDV vs SD widescreen issue. Ya know - I'm not absolutely certain about all of this. I was dragged kicking and screaming into HDV 16:9. At first I HATED the widescreen - couldn't really get great tight headshots - too much dead space. But now I've completely changed - I LOVE the 16:9 (see old dogs CAN learn new tricks). But I'll tell ya. That super sharpness is GREAT in certain situations (most) but I've got some old ladies (like in their 90's) in my movie - and that sharpness ain't helping THEM out - for sure. And tiny focus "misses" that you can't really see in the NTSC Widescreen - well they SCREAM at you in HDV Blu-Ray.

So run and gun autofocus is sort of touchy.

Well that's the report from the trenches. I'd love some input on finalizing my movie for display with the current technology, if any of you have any ideas.

best,
v
I had to split the movie into t

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Comments

jerry214 wrote on 12/7/2007, 5:00 AM

I recently was turned onto the JVC Pro HD player, AveLink. It is $360 at B & H, very reasonable. It plays DVDs, mpg files, Divx and WMV files. It also has a network connection so you can put a HD WMV file (8 M max bitrate) on a data DVD or a larger file on your notebook computer. The WMV 1920 X 1080 files look great.

I connect with a crossover cable and run the component out of the box to the projector. We showed it on the big screen at a local theater. The notebook acts as a server to the box.

JJKizak wrote on 12/7/2007, 5:59 AM

I have had this player for a while and it does work most of the time. There are some anomalies, like sometimes it doesn't play certain commercial DVD discs. But I tried to get the update firmware disc several times and each time is was not available. If the update site allowed weapons hundreds of "Avelink" manufacturing people would be dead. Feedback on this site was of the most vicious I have ever encountered. It does play WMV and 1080i M2t files very well.
On dual-layer DVD+R discs it tends to jump the midway partition and garble a bit then recover. If you try to bypass hitting "stop" first on the remote it will hang and you have to turn off and re-start. On the whole the software performance was kind of remindfull of Windows 95.
JJK

4eyes wrote on 12/7/2007, 6:18 AM

I also have an avelink player (AVelPlayer2).
I needed to manually put the reader into highspeed access mode via the setup menu. After that playing the discs worked better.
Mine also only plays HDV Transport Stream at 25MBS, if the HDV is Program Stream the video studders, it only plays PS @ 18MBS.

If you read many of the older posts on their forum watch out for some of the latest firmware updates, many had problems with the hdtv connections along with other problems. I think mine is dated November (can't remember the year). If yours is working properly maybe watch installing some firmware updates ( non reversible).

If you encode HD-Divx at 8MBS using interlaced video (manually assign UFF) the video plays back fine, nice & smooth like the original recording.
I've found that making HD-WMV videos for that unit is very picky without having audio dropouts.
A method I found that works is using Windows Movie Maker 6 (comes with Vista). There is a template already in the program for hd-wmv with a data rate of 7.6MBS. The videos I've made using WMM6 play correctly on my AVelLink Player2, plus they encode much faster than using Vegas. The difference is night & day. WMM6 uses all 4 cores @ 80% when encoding, goes fast.
I got mine for $249.00 about 2 years ago. It's not exactly the same as the JVC. Mine also doesn't play the divx discs with menus.
Haven't used it as much after buying a PS3. They also have a Linux version of their server, that seems to work faster than the windows version.

Overall the JVC unit is supposed to be pretty nice. HD-Divx is impressive on that unit if you encode in interlaced (provided your source is also interlaced). I think 8MBS is the max for hd-divx on that unit. I use other programs to encode the hd-divx & use mp3 audio.