Consumer BluRay production

Blu-ray. It 'won' the war, they're in HMV, and people actually have blu-ray players - or PS3s - in their home. The big thing that the video industry (excluding the major production and picture houses) have been waiting for is the capability to make consumer BD-R video discs with the same ease and functionality they're used to with DVD-R. The main reason it hasn't happened as quickly as the masses demanded is down to the players being able to read the BD-R and BD-RE disc format as anything other than data - the Blu-ray association basically waited to release the code for the firmware to allow this, keeping the premium on blu ray production higher for as long as possible.

This is all changing now as most new set top players are listing BD-R and BD-RE as compatible formats (Alongside AVCHD on DVD-DL, but thats another matter altogether) enabling discs produced with pro software such as Encore and Sonic DVDit to work just like the blu-rays produced by the big production houses. Well, nearly...to have the highest specification blu-ray disc, with all the features, you're looking at many thousands of $$$ for the enterprise level software (Sony BluPrint for example ) various licenses and replication fees (Outlined here and here) But I'm not really concerned with that level of production here, the links here and at the bottom will explain that area of the industry much better.

What I'm concerned about is the thousands of people who've been investing in HD cameras, workflow and monitoring with no route to deliver these beautiful projects on anything but the web or down-converted SD DVD. The time has come for this delivery to be a reality on optical disc format, and its much easier than you might expect. The workflow is nearly the same (especially with Encore) and the burners are no more expensive than DVD-RWs when they were first released. The major concern for people should be ensuring the colour monitoring is accurate as the HD TVs are much less forgiving than SD. Also the format you export to needs to be a legal BD format otherwise you'll introduce another step of compression. The best option for newcomers to this area would be to let your software do the transcode for you. The final thing to consider is when delivering Blu-ray discs to clients make sure the player they're using is compatible with the type of disc you've produced.

For much more detailed information on this feel free to have a read of the following articles, but the long story short: You can burn your own HD Blu-ray discs and watch em with relative ease.

http://www.discmakers.com/community/resources/Edge/2008/dvdvsbluray.asp
http://digitalcontentproducer.com/workflow/bluray_blues/
http://www.eventdv.net/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=38059
http://www.dv.com/features/features_item.php?articleId=196602808
http://www.blu-raydisc.info/
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/blurayauthoring

Upgrading your colour monitoring - An Intro

Colour monitoring and grading is big business, especially when you start talking about TV, film and DVD/BD production - but where to start? When to start? Is it important for you? Hopefully this and the follow up posts will help answer a few of those questions...

The extent to which you should improve your setup is defined, on one side, by the accuracy and level of broadcast-safe colour required for your final productions and on the other is your own personal aims for the quality of the finished product. For instance, if your projects will only ever be exported to the web then video monitoring isn’t a huge issue as you’ll be seeing the same pixel arrangement and bad colour calibration on every computer monitor, but if you do invest in the quality then it will still be appreciated and noticed by the viewer. This becomes more of a creative decision to grade and monitor your edit properly. When you enter the realm of film, DVD production or TV Broadcast it becomes much more critical that your colours are monitored by a proper production panel to ensure they fall within the 'safe' requirements of the broadcast world and the best consistency with the vast number of different TV screens and cinema systems out there.

There are a number of different levels you can consider for your video monitoring; the basic method would be using a low-cost standalone HDMI card . This gives you a precise HDMI colour space and will send a proper HD video signal into the monitor. This would be coupled with Sony’s entry level LMD production monitor, the 2030W, which has composite, component and HDMI inputs as standard. Up from this you can look at HDSDI, the standard professional I/O connection for HD, which will give you the best quality monitoring for any HD video but increases the cost considerably. The route to go down here really depends on the scope of your final productions delivery and the quality required for colour grading and compositing.

At this point the decisions really do require proper consultation if you're not clued up on the differences between the levels and quality of kit available for production monitoring. I'll follow up this post with some more technical information on this biz soon, but for now, thats your intro. If you'd like to talk further about this please contact me via broadcast at jigsaw 24 . com

RAID GEEK ALERT

y = no. of chassis

z = number of discs in RAID after parity taken away

a = capacity of disc

b = percentage loss when formatting volume

((((y*2)-1)*z)*a)-b) = usable capacity

Or, if its a basic raid

(Total TB pre format - 1) * size of disks - 10% = Usable Capacity


With thanks to Sammy Aindow...

Can't launch color? Open GL error ?

Then you've got a video card sending a desktop signal. If its blackmagic:

When launching Color, you might see the error Unable to initialize OpenGL. Make sure Video Desktop is disabled.

Color is attempting to use the DeckLink card or Multibridge as if it were a regular graphics card and then reports the OpenGL error because it is not designed for that purpose.

To solve the problem, go in to the System Preferences and then DeckLink and then choose the option to Disable the Desktop after a restart. Restart your Mac and you will be able to launch Color

If its AJA:

Go to your AJA control panel, go to the output tab and ensure that your default output is set to black or test signal - not extended desktop

Can't mount your D/R800 Sonnet RAID?

If you've got past reinstalling the ATTO drives and config software, can see all your drives and RAID group in the RAID tab of the config tool, try right clicking on the RAID group and selecting AUTO MAP.

The RAID should now be seen in disk utility where you can mount and partition it.