| Current music: | C.O.G. - "I Think Therefore I Rock" |
Interesting / frustrating April 1
Last night's rehearsal was great from a musical perspective, but a fizzle from an Lab Girl point of view... our first audition failed to show up (or maybe she got lost, electrocuted, or devoured on the way to the Secret Lab...) We'll give her one more chance and then move on to our other contenders. Also conspicuously delinquent was Filbert, who was supposed to stop by and record a voice part for a new Luke Ski comedy song cameo, but ended up falling asleep at home. Filbert's been workin' too hard IRL!
At least we sounded good in rehearsal, not bad at all for not having played in a few weeks. I also started re-picking up the 2nd guitar parts for 'Born in the South,' something I'd done a long time ago and had vowed to get back to, having picked the guitar back up recently for 'I Think Therefore I Rock.'
Aside from that, last night I got my trial version of Ulead DVD Movie Factory 6 Plus to make a nice looking HD '3x DVD' disc for me, on an old DVD-RW blank! After having been informed by their tech support that this would not be possible without buying the full version and applying an add-on pack, I went ahead and just tried setting up an HD-DVD project, using an mpeg file imported straight from one of my cameras, but offering a normal DVD-R when it came time to burn. Success! The disc played back beautifully, preserving all the detail of the original camera footage, which is normally sacrificed in my current production pipeline (C.O.G.-TV is shot in 1440x1080i HD, but actually posted in 960x480p.) This means I now have the ability to take vacation footage, etc. straight from the camera and make an HD-DVD disc that will play on any HD-DVD player. You get about 30 minutes on a DVD-5 and about an hour on a DVD-9 blank using 1440x1080i mpeg-2, which is what my cameras put out. The format accomodates several different codecs, which would allow more time on a disc, but currently mpeg2 is what I have to work with (although - I really need to look into h264, which the player is capable of decoding and would allow more content on a disc.) The format also accomodates 1920x1080i, which I'm not even going to mess with. (Why don't they allow 1280x720p? That's a format I could see myself actually producing in.)
As I said, I currently edit in 960x480p. This is like normal 720x480 SD, but with extra pixels on the 'wings' to make it 16:9, instead of anamorphically stretching the pixels like DVD does (which looks horrible IMO.) So we use an intermediate resolution, if you will (but still not even as detailed as HD 1280x720p, which is what most HD television shows are done in.) For the hell of it, I tried taking a scene from the last episode of C.O.G.-TV and burning that on an HD disc. Mpeg2 encoding took a LONG time - 12 minutes or so for a 2 minute clip (their built in encoder must not be that efficient.) But the results were promising - noticeably better than a DVD encode of the same scene. It looked a lot more like what it looks like on the computer. Next thing I'm going to try will be increasing the vertical rez. If I go up to 540 pixels in height, for instance, that'll be exactly half of 1080, and should yield a nicer looking image due to the integer math of the resize. It'll also make the aspect ratio of the pixels square, which is desirable to me as well. I'll take a scene from the last episode and re-transfer the camera mpegs to 960x540, then re-render the scene and make an HD disc of it. If that works fairly painlessly, I'll try it at 1280x720p as well. Let's see just how much quality I can get before my standard workflow becomes too much like molasses...
Anyway, bottom line is that the Ulead software works, and works quite well with my current setup, accomplishing something you seemingly can't even do with Blu-Ray (unless you shell out $300 for the burner and $10 per blank!) I think I'll give Ulead my money. Excellent.
The best thing that happened yesterday remains a surprise visit I received at work by my old friend Morgus the Magnificent. He'd been across the street at the Cox TV studio (no doubt castigating those "idiots at the station") and stopped by my office to say hello. Unexpectedly, he came bearing a parchment - a rare and genuine 'University of Morgus' diploma. Morgus told me, "I will reward you with this certificate if you are able to answer a philosophical question. Here it is: 'Brothers and sisters I have none, but..." I quickly jumped in, "but this man's father is my father's son. A venerable old chestnut!" Morgus chuckled and handed the diploma over, muttering "I can't put anything over on YOU, Pinkerton!"
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doctorpinkerton) wrote,
