Need to find a more efficiant solution to building DVD's

Mike Harvey

Mike Harvey

Veteran
Here is my situation. I freelance shooting the coaches' video of matches for an MLS team with my HMC150. They need the DVD by the next morning. Right now my work flow is go home, convert everything, and run the DVD to them early the next morning. However, converting about 1h 45m of footage and burning it to DVD is taking me 4-5 hours. Granted, most of that is just the computer rendering, but I'm looking for something more efficient. Since with traffic and the place I park it takes me 30-45 minutes just to get out of the parking garage after the match, and since the place I have to drop it off is only a couple of miles from me and I pass it on my way home, I'd rather find a way to spend that 45 minutes that I would normally be using sitting in my car waiting to get out of the garage sitting at my camera location building the DVD and just drop it off on the way home. Any thoughts?

The only solutions I can come up with is to buy one of those Pinnacle Dazzle USB capture devices or something similar and hope they don't look like crap ($50-$80). The logic being to do a live capture during the game out of the composite out of the HMC150 and just spend the 30-45 minutes burning the DVD on my laptop.

OR... Buy a DVD recorder ($200) and some sort of little monitor ($???) and record straight to DVD. The problem is this becomes cumbersome to carry around and takes up a bit more space that I have to share with either the ESPN or FSN camera, or when carried locally the half time show crew.

OR... buy one of those portable DVD recorders ($300). Problem is that's getting to be expensive, and I've heard mixed results with the DVD's from those things.

OR... buy a Matrox MXO2 mini ($600 w/both expresscard and PCIe), and capture to my laptop. Probably the best looking and most efficient, but most expensive.

OR... just keep doing what I'm currently doing, which isn't a big deal it's just not very efficient.

Anyone have any thoughts? For what it's worth, I edit in Premiere on a PC
 
What about having the coach purchase a WDTV by western digital. You could dump your card to a portable hard drive and hand it off to them at the end of the shoot. You could then still do your dvd burning but not have to rushed for time.This would allow them to view your footage instantly the next day and then have a hard copy on DVD later.
 
How about capturing live to your laptop in mpeg 2 and feed this straight onto a dvd. no transcoding.
 
Here's a generally unhelpful response -- but it may be something you want to keep in the back of your head before making any investments.

Next month Premiere CS5 (and new Adobe Media Encoder) is either being announced or released -- I haven't yet figured out exactly which. I suspect it's going to be a refreshing "game changer" in editing for a range of reasons including full 64 bit multi core utilization and a new "engine" that may not require rendering in the editing process. So, in addition to making your life easier in general editing and post production terms -- it may also dramatically reduce your encoding times and help with the problem you describe.

Again, this isn't a helpful response, but it may be something you want to keep in mind if you're allocating investments.

Like you, I'm sure, I've heard more than one horror stories about DVD recorders. It's possible that the same money spent on a better video card with Premiere CS5 could solve this and other problems.
 
Hello Mike,

Question: Do they have to have DVD? Could they use the SDHC cards directly to their TV. If you don't edit the footage, just hand them the card. You could do a capture to the Panny viewer on your laptop before the handoff so you could edit and publish as needed. Capture to the viewer is a pretty quick process. There are several ways for them to view the footage straight from the card(s).

Grant
 
Grant and Matt, unfortunately they do require a DVD for the time being. In the future I'd like to discuss with them how I can best accomplish for them what it is they want accomplished... but for now I was hired through the Seahawks (they share some facilities and owners) to simply record the match and burn it to DVD for them.

AG, that actually is helpful, and I'm aware that the the announcement is two weeks away so depending on when the actual release date is, I may just wait until then since I would rather spend the money on the video card. But, the CS5 launch may not be the same as the CS5 release.

Like I said, the current way I'm doing things isn't a big deal, since I just start encoding and go to bed and burn the DVD early the morning, and they're only 5 minutes away. I'm just trying to be more efficient with my time without having to spend a ton of money.
 
Smifis said:
How about capturing live to your laptop in mpeg 2 and feed this straight onto a dvd. no transcoding.
Click to expand...

Not to thread hijack, but what is the process for doing this? What method out of HMC150 and into say a Mac Book Pro? What hardware is needed?

Regards,

G.
Encoder
 
ProAmateur said:
Not to thread hijack, but what is the process for doing this? What method out of HMC150 and into say a Mac Book Pro? What hardware is needed?

Regards,

G.
Encoder
Click to expand...

Since the HMC150 doesn't have a Firewire out, you would need to use either a cheap analog capture device. Most of these are USB and have Composite or S-Video in. for a little more ($150), Black Magic Design makes a Component device specifically for Macs that also encodes to H.264 that would probably look a lot better. Otherwise, you need to get something like a Matrox MXO2 Mini, but your Macbook needs to have an expresscard slot. If your Macbook does have an expresscard slot, you can also use the Aja Io Express. But those both are expensive... the Matrox is $450, the Aja is nearly $850.
 
Playing the original footage from SD card, though a $99 WDTV, is by far the best solution to this scenario - the coach just doesn't realize it yet.
 
AVCHD SD card to DVD SD quality

AVCHD SD card to DVD SD quality

Mike, Do they have to have HD DVD, sometimes I shoot games for High School coaches. I have a Sony HDD/DVD recorder/burner. I also have my Panasonic $99 Costco HD/DVD player which accepts SD cards and plays AVCHD from those cards. I can burn a SD DVD right from the Panasonic HD player to SD DVD in real time. Thats about 90 min and I am done after I get home...
 
GrahamH said:
Playing the original footage from SD card, though a $99 WDTV, is by far the best solution to this scenario - the coach just doesn't realize it yet.
Click to expand...

I don't disagree with you, but right now they just want it on DVD. And given that 1) we're an expansion team entering our second year 2) the season just started last Thursday 3) the players union and the league just sign the CBA last week... I'm assuming they've had bigger things on their priority list than this. :)

They also do other things with it that I believe require that it be distributed on DVD if I remember right, so it needs to be on DVD at some point. Plus, I'm just a freelancer partly going through a third party for this gig, so I'm just doing what I'm told. :)
 
lkwson said:
Mike, Do they have to have HD DVD, sometimes I shoot games for High School coaches. I have a Sony HDD/DVD recorder/burner. I also have my Panasonic $99 Costco HD/DVD player which accepts SD cards and plays AVCHD from those cards. I can burn a SD DVD right from the Panasonic HD player to SD DVD in real time. Thats about 90 min and I am done after I get home...
Click to expand...

No, they want it as a normal SD DVD. Ideally I would like something more portable than bringing two DVD decks and a small monitor, otherwise it's easier just to hit encode when I get home and go to bed.

It's sounding like what I'm doing now is just the easiest route to go for the time being. Not as efficient, but not exactly a big deal either.
 
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Could you leave it encoding while you are driving? you would save 45minutes, or is your laptop not good enough for this job?
 
Sounds like your best option for right now is a laptop and one of those Dazzle things that can capture to MPEG-2 as you're shooting. No rendering required...just burn the DVD.

The CS5 update (whenever it comes) should have a newer version of On Location that will interface better with HD camcorders.
 
You might try to edit with Edius Neo Booster. It can handle AVCHD natively. So you only need to transcode the edited timline, which will probably save some time. With Neo Booster you are also able to transcode and burn the DVD automaticly, so you might save some time here too, especially if you let run your system over night and pick up the finished DVD or Bluray in the morning.

The most convinient way (quite expensive though) would be to record directly to a nanoflash. With a nanoflash you can record MPEG II for DVD on a CF card, so no further transcoding is necessary. Given that option, you might burn the DVD on your Laptop while driving to the client... I know that this is the most expensive way, but depending on what your other jobs are, a nanoflash might also be the key to produce 4:2:2 recordings for broadcast purposes.
 
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AGMedia said:
Here's a generally unhelpful response -- but it may be something you want to keep in the back of your head before making any investments.

Next month Premiere CS5 (and new Adobe Media Encoder) is either being announced or released -- I haven't yet figured out exactly which. I suspect it's going to be a refreshing "game changer" in editing for a range of reasons including full 64 bit multi core utilization and a new "engine" that may not require rendering in the editing process. So, in addition to making your life easier in general editing and post production terms -- it may also dramatically reduce your encoding times and help with the problem you describe.

Again, this isn't a helpful response, but it may be something you want to keep in mind if you're allocating investments.

Like you, I'm sure, I've heard more than one horror stories about DVD recorders. It's possible that the same money spent on a better video card with Premiere CS5 could solve this and other problems.
Click to expand...

Nice idea, but from my memory watching the mercury playback video for CS5 that the improvement gains they show are more along the lines of 50-ish%, and nowhere close to the several hundred percent you'd need to change your 4-5 hour render into a 45-minute render.

I think in your original post you explored all the obvious possibilities very thoroughly, and I also would vouch for the WD-TV if there's any way you could make that happen.

I'm trying to think thru a more streamlined render workflow, but the fact is you have ~2 hours of footage you need burned in 45 minutes - that's more than double real-time for not just the transcoding, but the process of burning, too (which in and of itself can be 15 minutes on a laptop). Given that, I really want to say a standalone DVD recorder is your most practical option. I just can't see any amount of laptop processing power being sufficient to convert your footage fast enough.
 
TigerFX said:
Nice idea, but from my memory watching the mercury playback video for CS5 that the improvement gains they show are more along the lines of 50-ish%, and nowhere close to the several hundred percent you'd need to change your 4-5 hour render into a 45-minute render.
Click to expand...


I just sat through some nearly hour long briefing from some Adobe guy in some online presentation posted in the news section of this forum.

Release date for CS5 has not been set, but is projected to be in the summer or fall of 2010.

The "Mercury Engine" relates to playback in Premiere that may not require rendering during the editing process. Actual rendering of the finished work is done by the new Adobe Media Encoder -- and they produced a chart from NVIDIA that reflected something in the range of an 80% faster AME render with one of their approved NVIDIA video cards.

So -- relating to Obi Wan's original issue -- if he has one of the approved NVIDIA cards -- an 80% or so improvement on render time from Adobe Media Encoder may be relevant to his objective.

Of course -- those glowing good news charts were produced by NVIDIA. Interpret that fact as you wish.

Unfortunately -- the CS5 release date hasn't been set -- and we're looking at summer or fall of 2010. So, uh... he may want to be reviewing DVD recorders.
 
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