HVX To HD DVD - View On Toshiba HD DVD Player

David Saraceno

David Saraceno

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We encoded some 720/24pn footage of Bloomsday, a 40000 plus 10K race here in Spokane.

Shot on a slightly overcast day, but plenty of color. A lot of movement and as we said over 40,000 runners. Mostly shot running through tree lined streets.

Exported the sequence, and dropped it into Compressor and elected a two pass mpeg2 HD preset at 19 mbps second.

Then did a simple first play track on red laser DVD in DVD SP. 8 minutes was about 1.65 Gbs. We set DVD SP to the HD authoring mode.

Then showed it on the new Toshiba HD DVD player tethered to a Samsung 42 inch plasma via HDMI interface.

Our HD DVD disc played right next to a HD feed of a tennis match on a Pioneer Elite 41 inch plasma.

The people watching our footage out of the HD DVD Toshiba to the Samsung plasma thought it looked better than the live HD comcast feed.

FYI. We are buying the Toshiba.


Addendum: we did some titling in LiveType complete with some nice animation for the lower thirds. That was absolutely gorgeous.
 
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Whoa... How did you burn it? Do you have a HD burner? I have the Toshi HD-DVD player (By the way, SD looks incredible through a SD projector) but I can't make hd dvd's until I get a burner.
 
It would seem that a standard burner will work with the right settings in studio pro. Looks like about 20 minutes would fit on a 4.7 GB disk. Not great for features, but for shorts, reels, corporate presentations...
 
Geno said:
Whoa... How did you burn it? Do you have a HD burner? I have the Toshi HD-DVD player (By the way, SD looks incredible through a SD projector) but I can't make hd dvd's until I get a burner.
Click to expand...

The supplied Mac burner will burn a red laser DVD with the HD DVD content.

At 20 or so mbps we get only about 20 minutes.
 
To add to David's comment, you have to encode MPEG-2 HD as the Toshiba will not play back H.264 encode. Note you also must use HDMI. I do not know if it would work with HDMI to DVI adapter to use projector, for example, that takes DVI input but that has resolution up to 1020x1080 (I have an InFocus that does that).

Ned Soltz
 
Yep. Ned is exactly right. No h.264, and from what I've read, no menus.

But we were startled at the quality. It was quantitatively better than SD, and we thought look better the the HD video feed on the Pioneer Elite.

Now if we could trade all this for a good Ermenegildo Zegna suit, we would be happy campers.
 
When are some HD-DVD burners coming out for PCs?

I wonder if Sundane and other fests will be accepting HD-DVD this fall.
 
Just saw a Zegna on sale today at Neiman's, in fact, with peaked lapels in a single-breasted suit (yuch). I would never wear such a thing, even if playing a corpse all laid out. Guess that's why it was reduced from $1800 to $1100. But I would definitely accept the analogy of the HD DVD is to quality as Zegna is to suit. Then spent the rest of the afternoon chasing a duck around a local pond to use him for over/undercranking experiments with the HVX. I needed him to take flight and land with a splash because I wanted to capture duck landing at 60fps but he just wasn't cooperative.

Anyway, look for BlueRay burners I bet by fall.

Ned
 
Well, for one, thing I dressed as a shochet (Jewish ritual slaughterer) and carried a very sharp knife. Motivates ducks every time.

Ned
 
That was everybody having a picnic by the lake... they were wondering what this white dude with a fancy looking camera was doing chasing a duck.
 
nsoltz said:
Just saw a Zegna on sale today at Neiman's, in fact, with peaked lapels in a single-breasted suit (yuch). I would never wear such a thing, even if playing a corpse all laid out. Guess that's why it was reduced from $1800 to $1100. But I would definitely accept the analogy of the HD DVD is to quality as Zegna is to suit. Then spent the rest of the afternoon chasing a duck around a local pond to use him for over/undercranking experiments with the HVX. I needed him to take flight and land with a splash because I wanted to capture duck landing at 60fps but he just wasn't cooperative.

Anyway, look for BlueRay burners I bet by fall.

Ned
Click to expand...

But which to buy? With the two big groups spoiling for a format war, nobody wants to be stuck with the new Betamax. Except for those that actually go on to film transfer, or broadcast, we're stuck until the end of the year without a HD consumer product. Any guesses on when this will be decided, or are we doomed to 5-10 years of HD-DVD vs. BlueRay? At least DVD-R/DVD+R ended in a draw, and most new DVD players will play either.
 
Ned, you better have a hunting license to shoot the duck! :kali: The HVX can be deadly.

I've heard BR & HD-DVD will be doubling the storage within a year which will make the "current" version worth even less. I "assume" they will be backwards compatable???
I don't mind having to upgrade to better gear, but not every year!

Today I bought a new +R -R Dual Layer DVD standalone recorder to get me by until I see how the format wars will settle. It has a 160gig hard drive and HD upconversion when needed.
 
While I'm generally not a big fan of the DivX format, it is one way to create disks with HD content and output it on your TV today. All you need to do is get one of the DivX Home Theatre Profile certified DVD players.

Obviously it's useless for distribution, but if you want to do it today and maybe show it somewhere on an HDTV, it will work.
 
For what's it's worth, the HD DVD we encoded in DVD Studio Pro WOULD NOT WORK on the Samsung Blu-ray player.

It may be that it need h.264 or mpeg4 encoding, but in any case it wouldn't play.
 
Yea I have heard current generation HD DVD and Blue Ray players are having issues with Dual Layer discs, so unless a firmware update can fox them current generation players may be SOL in a year or so. And I have heard most of the high end features promissed with the menus and the like are in fact not working yet at all on current players. These formats seem to have been way too rushed.
 
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