Blu-ray/HD DVD

7 months into our BluRay authoring experience with Adobe Encore and button routing still does not work correctly in the BluRay mode.  We're trying to create a very simple Chapter Selection menu, but no matter what we do, the last button in the menu is always auto selected when you choose the menu and when you want to return to the Chapter Menu, you can't, you always go back to the Main Menu.

We notified the head of the Encore team of this issue on May 28th and also notified him that we had a July 1st deadline for 5 retail BluRay titles.   They were supposed to download the files that day and get to work on it.   Then June 20 we were asked to upload the files again so they could get to work on it.

To date we have no solutions and essentially had to scrap the Chapter Menu on the titles.  Just a word of warning to anyone who wants to plunk down money for Encore CS3.  DVD authoring is fine, but if you intend to do BluRay discs, be prepared to make major concessions to the failings of this software. 

This question comes up a lot- how does one label a DVD-R? I would never use a print on inkjet disc- because they smear with just a droplet of moisture nor stick on labels because they peel and jam. Instead- I'd go for one of three technologies- depending on budget and how professional the labels need to look:

1. Sharpie. This is cheap as dirt and works like a charm for sending to replication houses and for internal backups. But not so much given to clients- looks decidely ghetto for that...
2. LightScribe- this is a type of DVD burner than works with special media and lets you burn a monochrome image directly onto the disc surface. Looks a lot more pro than Sharpie for clients and has no issues with peeling off.

After dusting myself off from Toshiba’s HD DVD implosion earlier this year, I’ve been lucky enough to work on several Blu Ray projects. At first, it wasn’t easy. For me, with several years of web and DVD authoring experience, HD DVD was cheaper and easy to understand. It was just an extension of several proven technologies. However, the Blu Ray spec was completely different. It was new, untested and quite frankly, too expensive to allow independent developers like myself an admission ticket. In our office, Blu Ray was voodoo. We often joked about what to feed the elves that lived inside our authoring station; do we use the blue crystal or the red crystal? However, I am happy to say I’ve come full circle: I realize Blu Ray’s full potential for the future of digital distribution. The surprising irony is how easy Blu Ray’s HDMV authoring is compared to advanced HD DVD

Well we thought we had things starting to go well with Encore after we figured out that the buttons would turn into blobs and figured out a workaround, but alas, more things just don't work.

One of the supposed really cool things about Encore is the ability to build your entire DVD in Flash. This allows you to upload a working version of the DVD in a flash based format for a client review. Well, we've tried this multiple times on both our Mac Pro Quad 3.0 and our new Octo Core 3.2 and all Encore does is build maybe 10% of the project and then it simply hangs. Really disappointing.

Supposedly this issue has to do with Leopard and the latest Quicktime, but the Mac Pro Quad 3.0 is currently running Tiger and it doesn't work there either.

Also, we've discovered that Encore CS3 is incredibly unstable on the new Octo Core 3.2 as well. Crashing at least every 10 minutes if not more.

Looking for a little help here from folks familiar with Encore. Creating a custom menu in Photoshop using one of the stock Encore Menus as a template. Got nice looking icons in the Photoshop file, but they turn into blobs when they get into Encore. See below.

So here's how the menu appears in Photoshop. Notice the icon next to "Original Songs for Projects" is a nice bow and arrow icon and you can see the file naming structure to the right is correct from Encore.

So now look at the button as it appears in the Preview Mode in Encore next to "Original Songs for Artists." It's just a red blob. And yes, it also appears this way on a burned DVD.

So anyone have any thoughts on why my icon turns into a blob?

I'm working on a follow-up to my large-ish article on the landscape following the surrender of HD DVD. In the meantime, here are a few links to my favorite articles so far.

Consumer Reports: Is your Blu-ray player obsolete? Don't answer so fast. Check it out.

TGDaily: Blu-ray players hit 2008 high prices as competition dwindles. You saw this coming, right?

...or so some observers believed in 2006! This was upon the news of the second laptop to include Blu-ray drives, this one from Dell. And why not? When Apple joined the Blu-ray Disc Association in 2005, they said they were committed to promoting the format. Seen anything to back that up since then? Anything?

I think Dell makes better computers than a lot of people think, and you certainly have them to thank for the idea of truly custom configurations and computer sales over the internet, both of which they practiced years before many others did. But their stuff is nothing next to Sony's. The VAIO line is pretty elegant, and introduced thin form factors, wide screens and 1920x1080 res back before the turn of the century.

I had a lot of fun writing the "The Big Dog Gets Off the Porch" article for the newsletter. (Check out my blog post on the topic too.) It took a TON of research, though, and I found a lot of things I just didn't have room to use. It also made me think about some things -- new stuff as well as stuff that's been kicking around forever. So here we go...

This was never about image quality. Sort of.
There were many comparitive issues that factored into the victory, and they never had anything to do with which format looked better. As Joe Kane pointed out in the article, there was a time when Blu-ray was easily demonstrable as having much poorer quality, due largely to seriously nasty MPEG compression.

(Please note: the article I wrote for the main library had a TON of links, and took an acre of work, so I'm not going to repeat any of them here.)

Hello Apple Engineers! Word is Toshiba is dropping HD-DVD. BluRay is the winner by a knockout!

So how about including BluRay authoring support in DVD Studio Pro now? I mean hasn't Apple been on the BluRay side of things since the format was announced? Doesn't Compressor already create files for both HD-DVD and BluRay? Don't BluRay burners for the Mac already exist?

Why am I asking so many questions?

For some reason, despite Compressor supporting BluRay and HD-DVD, despite BluRay burners being available for the Mac, despite Apple supporting the BluRay format (how I'm not sure), we can't author BluRay using Apple products.

So we own Adobe Encore CS3, which of course required us to purchase Adobe Premeire in the process. We own the FastMac internal BluRay burner (excellent) and even own a Panasonic Dual Burner Blu-Ray Replicator (excellent). We've authored 4 BluRay titles to date and will probably author 8 to 20 more before the end of 2008. At some point, I would much rather prefer to work across the Apple Studio Suite rather than having to go from FCP to Compressor to Encore to Toast to the FastMac burner.

Amazon has put together a nice links page to update your HD-DVD and BluRay players. If you don't already know, many machines require firmware updates to be able to play the latest discs, particularly the recordable discs, such as BluRay BD-R discs.

If your machine won't play that latest HD disc, check to see if there's an update for your machine.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_6251772_2?ie=UTF8&doc...

For those of you who followed my blog about the issues with the Primera Bravo II DVD Replicator printer, you know that I purchased a DiscMakers Medley unit to replace it.

http://blogs.creativecow.net/node/330

The New York Times reports that Warner Brothers has now lined up in Blu-Ray DVD corner effectively giving the Sony format about 70% of the high definition DVD market. They'll continue to release movies on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray until May and then switch exclusively over to Blu-Ray. This leaves Universal and Paramount along with Dreamworks as the only major studios backing HD-DVD.

As a production company that had to jump into Blu-Ray production in support of one of our clients, this is welcome news for us. I have to say, if you have not seen Pixar's "Cars" and "Rattatoule" on Blu-Ray disc, you have not seen the true capabilities of Blu-Ray. Jaw dropping is the only way I can describe what these movies look like in HD. Better than what it looked like in the theater.

Full article on the New York Times website.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/technology/05disc.html?ex=1200200400&e...

We purchased a new Primera Bravo II CD/DVD Publisher this week because we're doing a lot more DVD's and Blu-ray discs than ever before. The Bravo II is a robot DVD / CD burner and printer which can handle up to 50 discs in any one burning session, fully unattended. Perfect for our situation. We can burn / print DVD's and we can use it in print-only mode for the Blu-ray discs.

So there's been a lot of talk on the forums lately about Magic Bullet Looks now being available for use in editing systems and I'm even going to try it out shortly myself. But for those of you with Final Cut Studio 2, keep in mind you have probably the most powerful color grading software available for desktop computers in Color just sitting there. Yeah it's not perfect, there are some issues to work around, but I have to admit, even with the issues, the end results are nothing short of stunning.

So we've had a lot of discussions on the Final Cut Pro and Apple Color forums about what can we use to replace the current Broadcast CRT monitors that are EOL? I've not been overly impressed with the current crop of LCD monitors out there. My favorite to date, the Panasonic 1700W and 2600W are both good, but cannot completey replace my Sony CRT Broadcast monitor.

This is Part 2 of a 4 Part series on Starting and Running your own business in the creative industry. In Part 1 of this series, I posed the question, “Are You Ready?” A link to Part 1 is at the end of this article in case you missed it. If you’ve thought long and hard on this and your answer is “Yes,” then let’s proceed with Part 2 of this 4-part trilogy. Here we’ll explore a lot of questions on setting up your company and getting ready to open those doors!

Posted by Martin:

After Effects Links:
A new white page on Color Management in After Effects.

Lightroom Links:
Jack Nack at Adobe has some updated Podcasts.

Hi all. We're entering the wonderful world of Blu-Ray authoring and with it, we've discovered that not all Blu-Ray DVD Players are created equal. To author our discs, we have to use BD-R media, as in Blu Ray Disc Recordable. We're using Sony Discs and to my surprise, my $999 Sony Blu Ray player does NOT support BD-R.

Before I begin my foray into the world of blogging I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to Ron & Tim for their efforts in getting me situated with the Cow. I look forward to the many blogs ahead and hope that some of you may find the information at least useful, and at best challenging.

(Howdy to everyone who came here from any links after April 2007. Rather than edit this to reflect how things have gone since then, I created a new blog entry that you can find here. 

Other than this note, I've left the original entry unchanged when I wrote it. Interesting to see what I was right about, and what I was wrong about. One thing we were ALL wrong about, that the war would go on for another couple of years. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I've not seen one single prediction before January 2008 that Blu-ray, which has looked like the winner for a while, would win as quickly as it did.

With that, take a gander.)

I've heard people say that porn is going to decide who wins the DVD format wars, just like they did with videotape. Maybe it'll be PS3 or Xbox. Okay, worth talking about. But there's somebody out there who has a bigger influence on retail buying behavior than all of them combined, and they've got $100 million that says HD DVD is going to win. Anybody here want to argue merchandising with Wal-Mart?