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Videoon 11/9/2007
OT: HD DVD/BluRay wars
Is it really true that HD-DVD players cost as much to manufacture as BD players? The technology is different. The main difference in the technology is in the way the disks are produced, not in the way the player is created. Both use blue lasers, which is the most expensive component of the player. The two players are, technically, not dramatically different even though the disk formats are quite different.
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Videoon 11/9/2007
OT: HD DVD/BluRay wars
With the recent drop in HD-DVD player prices, it seems that Blu-Rays fate is sealed. You didn't really read what I wrote, did you. Despite the dramatic drop in HD DVD player prices, it has had no real impact on the sales of HD DVDs. In fact, it seems the only HD DVD that has received any real bump from this is the Planet Earth disk set, and I'd be surprised if that is long lived. About the eproductwars site, Im not sure about the quality of their info. Well, if you are looking into most things the way you were looking into this, I guess the Blu-Ray camp should go out celebrating right now, since your vision is clearly rather blurred (as is demonstrated later in your post as well). The title of the page is "... fought on Amazon.com". Where do you think they get their sales numbers? Oh, yes, they are sales number, sales as in paid for and shipped to the customer. Not shipped from the disk-pressing factory, which seems to be the numbers released from Paramount about the Transformer "sales". Fictional is a good word. I wonder if the 5 free HD-DVDs you get with a Toshiba player are factored into the "sales" figures? No, they do not, and neither does the five free Blu-Ray disks you get with every Blu-Ray player, nor does the Spiderman 3 disk shipped with every new Playstation these days. Interestingly Spiderman 3 still sold very well, even out-sold the much anticipated Tansformers HD DVD in 5 days. 130 000 Blu-Ray Spiderman 3 in a week where Sony is giving it away for free. Not bad at all. For the record, official sales data for first week of Transformers is 115 000 (not 190 000 as Paramount said) and for the first five days of Spiderman 3 the official number is 130 000. Finally, as a writable format Blu-Ray is a complete disaster So you are quoting a review for a product that was outdated 18 months ago as an example of Blu-Ray burners doing badly. Well, if you are that informed I assume your favorite Movie format is the Circuit City DIVX format http://hometheater.about.com/library/weekly/aa062199.htm. Seriously dude, there are a lot of Blu-Ray burners on the market today, from 1x to 4x, and they work very well. There is one HD DVD burner on the market today. It was just released. It is a total failure. I'd go so far as to say it is defect as designed. So, please enlighten me, what did HD DVD have going for it again? Poor sales despite of Toshiba dumping (and I thought that was illegal) their player. No real burnable format yet, probably not for at least another 18 months, if ever. Quite poor media sales despite the fact that they are giving away players for less than it costs to make them.
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Videoon 11/9/2007
OT: HD DVD/BluRay wars
Interesting comments from a Sony executive. I am not quite sure I agree with him. If you go by the numbers on http://www.eproductwars.com/dvd/ it does appear that the Blu-Ray format is doing a lot better than the HD DVD format, despite the fact that Toshiba has been, in reality, giving away HD DVD players lately. The two most interesting happenings right now is the bump that HD DVD got from the release of Transformers, a bump that appears to be very short lived, and also not even close to what the HD DVD camp would have hoped for. From the latest numbers it appears that Spiderman 3 is more of a success than is Transformers, and this doesn't bode well for HD DVD. Another trend that is interesting to look at is how the same movie is doing in the two different formats, 300 is an example. Last time I checked the sales figures of 300, the Blu-Ray edition was out-selling the HD DVD edition about 2-1. It does seem like the family situation was improved slightly for HD DVD with dumping of the HD DVD players last weekend. The HD DVD version of Planet Earth got a bump recently and jumped very high on the HD DVD list, even better than Transformers it seems. Currently Blu-Ray has 11 titles among the top 200 items at Amazon while HD DVD has 4. The interesting moves will happen in December and January this year, and I think we will have a de-facto winner early next year. The first thing is the holiday season sales. How will the two formats do there, and what wil the camps do in the promotions department. There are rumors, but it is hard to know. After Christmas it seems probable that Time Warner will evaluate their High Def situation, and at some stage they will probably come down on one side of the fence. At that time the war should be over. As you know, Toshiba is the only company currently producing HD DVD players, and they are currently selling them for significantly below cost. An HD DVD player is as expensive to create as is a Blu-Ray player. How long will Toshiba be able to bleed like this? Unlike Sony this isn't a loss-leader for them, they do not have related products on which to make up the lost $$s (as opposed to Sony who makes money on games). Finally, as a writable format HD DVD is a complete disaster, with the recently released burner being a serious failure. I really don't see how Toshiba/Microsoft can win this.
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Scriptingon 11/9/2007
Newbie debug mechanism...
Download visual studio. The Express Edition will work fine, and it is free.
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Videoon 11/4/2007
OT: Blink3times - HDDVD
The reason brand matters is that some brands are harder to read for a DVD player than others. This means that the player is not able to read enough data off the disk fast enough to keep up with the encoded bit rate. If you have bad media it is therefore often possible to make non-stutter video at lower bit rates. Getting TY or Verbatim media is the better solution though.
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Videoon 11/3/2007
OT: Blink3times - HDDVD
Try to lower the bitrate and see if that helps. Should not be an issue, but remember, the DVD was never created for these high bitrates, so there may be reading issues etc.
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Videoon 11/1/2007
OT: Looks are deceiving
I am going to disagree a little with Spot, I don't think Potts is Vegas. He's got talent. But the real Vegas is Connie Talbot, the little one, a couple of minor flaws and missing a few teeth, but we just love her still, and she will probably be perfect when she grows up fully:
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Videoon 11/1/2007
OT: a warning to anyone with WD MY BOOK HD's
Formatting takes a while and is not required. Assuming your drive is on E: convert /fs:NTFS E: will do the trick, and you can even do that with data on the disk, the data will not be lost.
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Videoon 10/31/2007
OT - protecting DVD discs from duplication
I would hate to have to wait a week for a duping service. Is there any software or hardware that will allow me to protect my stuff from my editing suite right here? In reality, no, you can't. Simple answer. There will be duplication services out there that will offer you an amount of protection, but that will only be economical when you print quite a few of your DVDs, and also, they can't really protect you if a moderately competent computer user wants to copy your stuff. If a PC can read the data on your disk, there is a way to copy it. If the PC can't read the data on your disk the user can not see your movie. The most common way of doing copy protection these days is to use root kits, and quite frankly, you shouldn't. I, and most other computer users with some knowledge, consider them virii of a sort, and a lot of companies have run into trouble (including Sony) putting that kind of virus-style software on their disks. The simple fact of the matter is that if you give someone a disk with your stuff on it, they can copy it. There is no way around it. Simple as that. Even the dumbest of computer users can copy commercial DVDs with copy protection with two clicks. If you don't want them to copy it, you can't give them a disk.
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Videoon 10/30/2007
Burning U.S. DVD for Amsterdam
You will be fine if the DVD player they have over there is newer than about 10 years. All European DVD players support playing NTSC disks. If you take your laptop with you, your best bet would be bringing a VGA to DVI adapter, since it is highly likely you will be connecting to a DVI equipped TV. I don't think you have to worry at all, but if all goes pear-shaped, you can find a cheap DVD player in any electronics store that will play NTSC DVDs. I have't checked prices in Holland, but they are probably the same as everywhere, that is, very, very inexpensive.
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Videoon 10/28/2007
Vegas, AVCHD, and that sorry thing called DVD Arch
Ulead/Corel didn't do this in a short time, it has taken them at least a year to get the avc/h264 down better. Yes, it has taken them a while to get the AVC encoding and stuff better, but it has taken everybody a while to get the AVC encoding better. Once you have the AVC coding down, authoring AVC or BD disks really isn't all that hard. It is just a question of putting the correct files in the correct directories on the disk, more or less. No magic. DVDA is very powerful, MF is desiged for simple use but has many advanced features that aren't documented (video related encoding). The usability of DVD simply isn't up there, I am sorry, but these days, DVDA falls far short of most software out there, even simple consumer stuff like DVDMF has stuff that really should be available in DVDA, not only on the bleeding edge, but in simple DVD authoring. I have made an AVCHD disk now with menus that contains both avc & mpeg2 highdefintion, burnt to a dvd in avchd mode. How did you make this one?
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Videoon 10/28/2007
Vegas, AVCHD, and that sorry thing called DVD Arch
Irrespective of earlier discussions... As I said before... I don't really care who wins this format war just so long as we get cheap and effective hi-def burning abilities I agree, and given that both formats now have this capability - the AVCHD disk I created with DVD Movie Factory worked on every Blu-Ray player they had at Circuit City, menus and all, and the quality was superb - the software makers like Sony have to get their act together. I am astonished that Sony is trailing toy makers like Ulead on this one. I mean, if you want world domination you really have to get your troops to march in some sort of lock step, or at least in the same direction.
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Videoon 10/24/2007
are we all happy v8a's?
Still no 32 bit HD render, but hopefully that'll be fixed in the next one.
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Videoon 10/23/2007
USB or FireWire?
USB doesn't allow that, and I've never gotten USB to work well even just streaming video from the cam to the PC (except for a still picture camera) Just for the record, there is no reason this will not work. Panasonic camcorders allow full DV capture over USB, including camcorder control. Unless you have a Panasonic you should stay with Firewire though. I don't know of any other camcorders that do this.
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Videoon 10/22/2007
V8a - Bizarre 3D Track Motion behaviour
3D track motion and HDV 32 bit rendering seem to be the two things that are seriously screwed up in Vegas 8. I can not make anything happen with either of these in a moderately complicated time line.
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Videoon 10/15/2007
OT: Some PC news
I disagree with his analogy, it is just childish. Europe also gave us capitalism, humanism and whatever you could think of in ways of 'isms, the only 'isms invented in the US is probably consumerism and turn-a-blind-eye-to-the-demolishing-of-dremocracy-ism. I do agree with his conclusion though. Europe is more about protectionism than about capitalism in general, but not really in this particular case.
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Videoon 10/15/2007
H.264 Rendering HELP!!!
Can you exaplain what your problem was? You can do this from Vegas, so I am not quite sure why you had to do it in Quicktime. Also, in my opinion, the mp4 encoder shipped with Vegas created much better quality output than the one shipped with Quicktime Pro.
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Videoon 10/14/2007
Problem with 32 bit rendering - Digital Juice
Well, step one completed. Changed the revealer to an image sequence. Didn't really help, Vegas crashes when it starts rendering the image sequence. But it does give me a hint, since the revealer is running on top of another Juce product, an HD background. So, the background is the problem when you try to run something with an alpha channel on top of it. I'll now replace the HD background with an image sequence and see what happens.... Yup, that worked. So the problem seems to be when I have a Digital Juice JB HD background and run a DJ revealer on top of this one in 32 bit, that makes Vegas crash, but of course, not all the time :-) Only in some projects, but at least consistently in those projects. Currently it works fine, PNG sequences is the way to go with DJ. I can't seem to be able to render to uncompressed AVI, but...
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Videoon 10/14/2007
Problem with 32 bit rendering - Digital Juice
Yeah, I am a little afraid that it might be the .mov clips. I will try to export them as avis or image sequences and see if that changes things.
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Videoon 10/13/2007
File Formats For Vegas-5
Where do you get your video from?
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Videoon 10/12/2007
Ot: Your Recommendations on camera
People love to draw conclusions from theory. I agree with you, they draw conclusions on the HDV encoding and also, as you can see from a poster above, about the CCD (the Canon HV20 uses CMOS, not CCD) sensor. Their conclusions are mostly inaccurate in my experience. I have owned the HV20 for a few months now, and if you learn the little ins and outs of this camcorder, the dang thing is fantastic. I got one in addition to my Sony TRV 900 which is a 3CCD CD camcorder, and I have no problem seeing the difference in color quality between this one and the one-chip Canon. If I shoot for DVD I shoot with the Canon. It's colors blows the 3 chip Sony away, IMHO. There are good technical and theoretical reasons for this (I don't know enough about it to comment), but for less than $1K, the HV 20 is probably, with a significant margin, the best buy in camcorders today. Again, IMHO. The rolling shutter problem may be an issue for some. The lack of LANC is an issue for many, but there are ways around it, though these are awkward.
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Videoon 10/12/2007
H.264 Rendering HELP!!!
It does generate a standard H.264 file fully playable in Quicktime. The quality of the H.264 file will depend entirely on what settings you use for rendering, it can be pretty bad, and it can be amazing. What quality do you want? You have to select the appropriate resolution and bitrate for your video, the end result will be good.
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Videoon 10/11/2007
H.264 Rendering HELP!!!
File -> Render As... Type: Main Concept AVC/AAC
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Videoon 10/11/2007
The new HD format is here.. it looks bloody good!
farss This is an interesting little device, but how does it differ from the PS3? Apart from the fact that it is twice the price? A few more formats perhaps?
Terje
Offline, Member since 7/7/2007