[Frameworks] combining SD and HD

[Brook Hinton]

FCP Studio 3 does allow limited blu-ray authoring through FCP's "share"
function. You have to be on the latest (or maybe it's second to latest)
version via software update, and of course you need a blu-ray burner. I've
successfully burned screeners and exhibition copies with it. You don't get
menu functions beyond an optional, very basic menu. I've never seen a dvd or
blu-ray meny I didn't hate, including the ones I've had to design for
clients, so it hasn't been an issue for me.

It also allows you to do the lesser-data-rate-blu-ray-on-a-dvd thing.

Not as elegant as a solution that allows tweaking every aspect of the
compression settings but the results are surprisingly "good" (within the
limited "good" available via any temporally compressed medium).

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_7_share_stone.html

Brook



On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Flick Harrison <flick at flickharrison.com>wrote:

> Awesome info David.
>
> I've been making AVCHD archive-masters in toast from my camera original
> SDHC cards, and these will play automatically, beginning to end, in a
> set-top (living room) Blu Ray machine, without menus or breaks between the
> clips. Never watched to see what it does at show end, i.e. might loop or
> just stop and show the BluRay logo.
>
> I shoot them on AVCHD (h264) in a Panasonic HMC-150 (really nice camera!!!)
> and then put the card in my reader, choose "AVCHD archive" in toast and burn
> it to a Blu-Ray disk, though it would probably work with DVD-r disks.
>
> I suppose you could export from FCP in h264 format somehow, then do the
> same thing I've been doing in toast and get a plain-vanilla disk that will
> play without fanfare in a BR machine...
>
> (hmmm - just tried it, no go, AVCHD needs a certain directory structure -
> maybe there's a way to trump one up though)
>
>
> *--*
> ** WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD?*
> http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison
>
> ** FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: *http://www.flickharrison.com
>
> [image: Zero for Conduct - Flick's News]<http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ZeroForConduct/~6/1>
>
> On 2011-06-04, at 06:23 , David Tetzlaff wrote:
>
> I've continued to hunt for that FCS to BluRay hack, with no luck, to the
> point where I'm wondering if I hallucinated the whole thing... or at least
> whether I'm remembering it correctly...
>
> i DID create a BluRay playable disc via this method, and it was much better
> than anything I could get out of Toast... (This was with FCS 2 and Toast 9
> or 10). However it was not a fully authored disc with multiple titles and a
> menu. It had one film on it, and it was pop and play.
>
> What I do remember distinctly, for sure, is that I tried to create this
> entirely in Toast first, using the Toast encoder, and the results were not
> good. The source had a challenging range of video material (some bright,
> some dark, different cutting patterns) and the Toast encoder was OK on some
> of it, and generated nasty artifacts on other parts. I messed with the
> settings,  but the choices were limited. (Perhaps the newer Toast has a more
> capable encoder?)
>
> I am also positive, though, that Toast was the burn engine for the better
> disc, which was obviously NOT encoded in Toast, but Compressor. However,
> DVDSP may not have been involved, even though that;s how I remember it. Now,
> this was before Compressor had 'BluRay' settings, and the issue may have
> been that Toast could not read the HD compressor files unless the headers
> were hacked. In any event it was a fairly simple text edit once you got
> under the hood. If so, the new version of Compressor has probably made all
> this moot.
>
> As such, the one lesson I can draw from the experience is: keep the process
> of encoding conceptually separate from the process os authoring. You will
> probably have several options for turning your working video output file
> into a distribution format (MPEG2, AVCHD whatever) and some of these tools
> will be better than others - or at least you will be able to get better
> results from some within your own limits of fully comprehending how to tweak
> the setting. The encoding tool may not be capable of muxing the compressed
> file and putting it into a valid disc structure. In which case, you need to
> get it into another tool that will do those functions WITHOUT RE-ENCODING
> the damn thing.
>
> This is the main problem with Toast, IMHO. It's set up for a kind of For
> Dummies 'we'll do all the work for you' and it's a bit of a trick to find
> the settings that turn all it's data manipulations OFF, and just use the
> data you've prepared, as is. There's a 're-encode never' option tucked into
> a drop-down in one of the settings tab somewhere as I recall.
>
> This is what the mainstream pros on the Mac side are doing for BR: editing
> in FCP, encoding in Compressor, authoring in Toast or Encore. They're not
> letting Roxio or Adobe rework the AV data, just put the disc together...
>
> I repeat, emphatically, for Apple people, my observation about the utility
> of an HD-DVD player. (I checked, and DL DVDs do work for this...) DVDSP will
> author a disc, with menus, mixed formats whatever, and you can burn it to a
> DL-DVD, and it will play back swimmingly on the HD-DVD player... which you
> can tote around with you and makes for more congenial hook-ups to an HD
> display that connecting a laptop. The limit, of course, is you can't put
> more than 8.4GB on the disc (and once you've burned it, it WON'T play back
> on a conventional DVD unit, like your burner). But, I presume none of us are
> creating features. And besides, H264 can look really good with the right
> encoder and settings. (x264 via MPEG Streamclip may yield better results, or
> the same results with less hassle, than going through Compressor.)
>
> And if you can find an HD-DVD player for cheap at a pawn shop, on Craig's
> list or wherever, it has the benefit of being the best player for
> Standard-Def DVDs you'll ever see. For some reason, the upconverting
> algortihms and/or hardware were visibly better than the ones in BluRay
> players from either Sony or Samsung -- I did A/B tests with the same source
> discs and projector comparing different players a few years ago.
>
> Anyway, I may have been quite wrong about being able to get a 'full
> featured' BluRay disc out of DVDSP somehow. That said, there are things you
> can do in/to Toast to get around the default cheeziness of the menu
> templates to at least some degree.
>
> Aaron F. Ross is correct in observing that the workflow from edited video
> masters to BluRay disc is much more well developed and has more options in
> the Windows environment. (Though few Mac users are 'stuck' in OSX, since we
> have Bootcamp.) PLAYING commercial BluRays from a computer (legally)
> requires an HDCP equipped video card though - which you'll find on many
> Windows desktop PCs, but not on a MacBook Pro (or most PC laptops either).
>
> So here's how we made an actual HD piece that got screened, which I offer
> as as a starting point for describing a successful workflow for HD projects
> (if not necessarily 'best-practices'), developed via trial and error.
>
> Our example, a 30min 'arthouse' narrative short, was shot on 5 different
> cameras: 1) JVC pro 720P HDV, 2) Panasonic HVX 200 DVDC ProHD, 3) Canon
> XG-AI 1080F HDV, 4) Canon HDV 30 'cinema mode' 1080P, 5) a low end DV
> camcorder. Each of the HD cameras had a diffferent native resolution, and
> you can toss in a couple different frame rates there as well. The DV footage
> was used only to illustrate memories, so it didn't have to match the other
> stuff, but all the different HD footage was supposed to represent the same
> more-or-less realistic diegesis.
>
> All this footage got bumped up to 1080P24 ProRes 422 before editing in FCP.
> I wouldn't say this made any of the footage look notably 'better', but it
> certainly didn't look any worse. This made editing easier, since cuts,
> renders etc didn't involved mixing codecs, resolutions etc. And FCP got to
> do it's manipulations without piling on colorspace compressions. Also, it
> generated head-room for the editing process, as all transitions and effects
> got rendered in very high quality. After the film sequence was cut, there
> was lot of (primary) color correction applied to get the footage from the
> different cameras into some resemblence of matching.
>
> The DV got blown-up to fill the 16:9 frame, meaning we actually tossed out
> a chunk of the original vertical resolution information. I was afraid it
> would look awful: fuzz city. But this was footage of a local tribal ritual
> shot in rural Burkina Faso, so it was what we had and that was that. As it
> illiustrated memory in this context, I ramped up the chroma, tossed in some
> a few appropriate and not too obvious motion effects... And in the end it
> looked beautiful and striking... with no visibly annoying artifacting
> whatsoever. (I can't imagine that this would have worked satisfactorily with
> certain other sorts of SD footage: with different lighting, different
> motion, longer takes, different purpose, different aesthetic. This is why I
> say you can't make categorical statements about the perceived quality of
> up-rezed footage. It depends on a host of technical and aesthetic factors.)
>
> So the edited piece goes out to a 1080P master. From this, I make all the
> different distribution versions required by the various venues (who are
> generally out to sea, technologically). So that 1080P ProRes gets dropped
> back to 720P, SD-NTSC, SD-PAL and sent out on SD-DVD, HD-DVD, BluRay, HDV
> tape, Quicktime files in different codecs...
>
> In all of this, with few minor exceptions for the more compressed
> distribution versions, the only limitations in  the image any viewers could
> perceive were those attendant to the original capture of the image - video
> noise and contrast problems from the lighting that couldn't be tweaked out.
> No visible artifacting, despite the fact every frame had probably been
> re-sampled 5 times somewhere along route. We showed it from my HD-DVD player
> on a fairly large screen at one of the smaller houses in the megaplex at
> Universal City in Hollywood, and once off my laptop in the main house at the
> Gene Siskel Center in Chicago. In both cases, the limit factor was the
> quality of the video projector, and the audiences perceived the screening as
> 'professional' quality for a non-commercial indie context and not a single
> complaint about the image was heard... (except from the filmmakers, as WE
> wished variably that we had had better lighting for the guerrilla shoot
> segments, or better quality ca
> meras, or that the projector at Universal had been a little better [it was
> the pre-show machine under normal use, with the features still being shown
> in 35mm].)
>
>
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-- 
____________________________
Brook Hinton
Moving Image and Sound Maker
www.brookhinton.com

Associate Professor / Assistant Chair
Film Program at CCA
California College of the Arts
www.cca.edu/film
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