| Current music: | Richard Strauss - Blue Danube Waltz |
Fun with cheap HD
What a beautiful day. Good day to ride the bike into work... (and whew, I need to do that more often.)
Well, last night I got to test my new toy, the amazing $55 Toshiba HD-A2, and wow, these HD discs really do live up to the hype. Attached to my XGA projector, the picture was nice... but hooked digitally to my JVC LCD screen, the picture was flat out amazing! I feel as if I already got my money's worth, even if the outlets that be pull all HD DVD products and I never get to buy any more discs for the thing (which won't be the case at all, if my previous experiences with Laserdisc have anything to say about it.) 'Blade Runner' was great, but '2001: A Space Odyssey' was absolutely stunning, best transfer I've ever seen of any film. They must have used 70mm negatives... you can see so much detail - every bit of wording in the spacecraft instrumentation is sharp and readable. Wow... it's like getting a personal perfect master print of the film in 35mm quality. (Downsides: The Toshiba's upconverting from standard DVD was acceptable, but not as good as my Philips. And the Toshiba refuses to read PAL discs at all, while the hacked Philips will not only do PAL and region 2 discs, but will also even play divx encoded files off a DVD-R.)
I did pop the top of the new Toshiba to see whether they had used a computer DVD ROM drive, and confirmed that they had - but it was factory hacked; the standard ATAPI interface had been bypassed, and it was modified to the extent that it could never be removed and interfaced to a standard computer. Ahh well.
And now for my next trick... making my own discs for the HD DVD player without getting an HD DVD burner. I've been reading up on a format dubbed 3x DVD, which is writable with a few different packages including Ulead DVD MovieFactory 6. This format consists of mpeg, h264 or VC-1 video on a standard DVD-R blank. With a dual layer blank you can do 85 minutes or so of video. Since I've been shooting my C.O.G. stuff in HD and posting in anamorphic SD, this now makes me want to experiment with true HD, and now I can...
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doctorpinkerton) wrote,
