OK, so there are 2 ways to distribute your HD movie:

1. On tape - D-VHS or camera itself (latter is bad idea, you don't want to kill the cam's heads too soon, so use your camera for recording only)

2. On a PC (Mac- or IBM-compatible).

Let us know how do YOU distribute your HD movies!

D-VHS gives superior image quality...and its so much better to see HD on a HDTV rather than a monitor. Especially the flat screen LCDs with all of their motion artifacts like ghosting. (I love looking at my apple LCD, but it just can't compare to watching it on an HDTV). Video is not very good on any flat screen LCD, and many people these days have a flat LCD as their PC monitor.

Now, we at home actually use our PC as an HTPC and hook it up to a HD front projector and it looks great. But, for distribution, I definitely would not count on having other people set their computer up properly to play HD.

Far far too many people have lower end computers that will show jerky HD on the PC. We tried that once and shot a wedding in HD (rich client). And gave him 100 copies to play on WMP9 files. He said over 50% of his guests couldn't play it on their PC...all had configuration problems. So we ended up just making a few copes on D-VHS for him instead. Mass market PCs aren't ready for HD yet. Take a look at HD T2...they had to bundle it with a DVD because they knew too many people would have problems with it. If you look at www.avsforum.com. Even hard core HTPC fans can barely play it smoothly on their PCs. We can play it fine on our HTPC, but that is after alot of tweaking and we have a very high end system.

Stick with DVHS for distribution, better picture and less headache.

But how about multi-channel sound?

Say, you have a 5.1-channel Premiere Pro project.

It exports nicely in Dolby Digital as .ac3 file etc., but how do you get it on D-VHS tape?

I'm going to suck it up and get that aspect thingy. I'm going ask their support that same question :o).

Lisa, got my copy of Vega and I must say I am very impressed with it. I have not seen a need to demux the clips like others have talked about. I simply rename the files and they just drop right in. I will put together a short piece tonight and post it on the web.

Mike

Mike, what about *exporting back* from Vegas to D-VHS: how is it done with HD video accompanied by the 5.1 Dolby soundtrack?

Do you have Vegas+DVD version?

<<<-- Originally posted by Alex Raskin : Mike, what about *exporting back* from Vegas to D-VHS: how is it done with HD video accompanied by the 5.1 Dolby soundtrack?

Do you have Vegas+DVD version? -->>>

I just got Vegas+DVD yesterday so far so good I played with the demo with SD file last week so I got a pretty good start on how it works. It is slower working with native format m2t files from the camera than if you convert to AVI’s however AVI file are huge so you better have a real big hard drive (300Gb+) if you’re going that route.

From what I am seeing you will need a very powerful PC to cut clips if you’re doing anything with multiply video tracks. I am using a 3.0 Ghz P4 w/1 gb ram and its fairly slow rendering if your doing things like picture in picture. I am working on an example I will post later tonight. Simple transitions are no problem at all, Vegas renders them quickly and smooth. I don't have a D-VHS deck perhaps I may look into one soon. I have been playing around encoding with WMP9 because of Microsoft compression should allow a full 2 hours on a standard DVD. WMP9 does support 5.1 sound but I am ways away from trying that out.

Mike

wmp9 is great, except you cannot use it as a distribution platform at this time: it imposes too many requirements on the pc that plays it.

So we are back to D-VHS format.

I understand that you don't have a deck, but you do have a HD1/10 camera, correct? This should be the same.

It still would be very interesting to see whether Vegas is able to output multiplexed video+5.1 Dolby TS file back to tape (whatever the device).

Mike, if Vegas doesn't have a direct m2t TS file output, then just output in MPEG2.

Then use Womble to change that file into m2t.

<<<-- Then use Womble to change that file into m2t. -->>>

Alex, I just downloaded it and I'll give it a try.

Mike

The Hollywood guys do it on DVD, which while not HD is the best mass distribution we have at the present time.

If it's a project for a client, consider including a DVHS deck in your quote. For about $300, it would feed HD to the company HD TV or to a good quality projector.

Just a thought.

Cheers

<<<-- Originally posted by Alex Raskin : Mike, if Vegas doesn't have a direct m2t TS file output, then just output in MPEG2.

Then use Womble to change that file into m2t. -->>>

Alex,
I used Womble to convert it to an m2t file and it downloaded to the camera fine. Great tip! I don't have much need because I don't want to use the tape transport in the camera but for JVC 30K D-VHS deck uses it’s a great tip. There may be one in my future. My house is wire with Cat5 so I can move files all over the place without much problem. The thing that’s keeping me from the JVC-30K deal is it as just component out so I need an RGB transcoder ($300 ouch) to connect to my projector.

Thanks again!
Mike

WM9 seems to be the best route for distribution. Much better compression scheme than MPEG2. The entire Landmark Theater chain is installing Digital Cinema Projection that supports WM9. This will be great news for Independent Filmmakers regardless of what format they aquire in.

Jay

Lisa, I've been following your posts for a short while. And I've been messing with m2t files for a bit. (Go see my recent post over at the "Open DV Discussion Forum" under the topic "Realtime WM9 encoder cards".)

I notice in your post that you say "far, far too many" have lower-end PCs that can't keep up with the data rates required to play HD smoothly. I don't mean to come down on you, but really, the only ones who can play HD on their PCs are either the ones in our business or the geeks who sit around tweaking their systems. That's what, maybe 20% or less of the market? From my own experimentation at attempting to play back the WM9 I've encoded, the best I can play smoothly is ~6.5 Mbps speed. This is on a 2.4 GHz system with 750 MB RDRAM (~$500).

Now, if I go out and buy a $500 "gamers" graphics card with hardware video acceleration, I can be assured of watching T2 fine (as could probably someone with a 2.0 CPU). But, remember, the majority of our clients are still on dial up. A $100 AGP card is stretching it for them.

Just curious, what rate did you encode your WM9 at? And what are the specs of your home system? Do tell.

Fine, you had a rich client who would pay for the 100 DVDs you made. That's fine. But from what I've seen from dealing with this all, I would've known going into it that only a small percentage of the 100 are going to be able to play. Just don't know if I could go ahead and take the cash myself. Not to be on you. Business is business. Each has to make up his/her own mind regarding the ethics of it.
Regards,
Dave

Dave, you don't need an expensive graphics card. 3D gaming cards of the ultra high-end do little to accelerate 2D over lesser cards. I'm not saying get an ISA Trident, but my $65 Radeon 8500 128mb works quite well. As would most any DX7,8 or 9 card.
Sometimes compressed video will play better when it is in a larger file size. eg. WM9 10Mbps vs. 6.5Mbps. The 6.5Mbps is far more compressed then the 10Mbps so it needs MORE CPU power to uncompress as it plays. The 10Mbps or higher is not a challenge for even the meekest of modern graphics cards.
Check to make sure you are fully defraged and your drives are all in DMA mode. Your system should handle that video easily. Hell my Duron 1gig 512mb plays WM9 6.5Mbps files with only a few hic-ups.
If you make the file size large it will stress your HD's. If you make it small it will stress your CPU. Amount of ram and video card only have to be average for playback.
Ken

<<<-- Originally posted by Mike Eby : Alex,
I used Womble to convert it to an m2t file and it downloaded to the camera fine. -->>>

Mike, sorry I'm not sure what exactly did you convert to m2t using Womble.

My question was this:

- Can you encode video + 5.1-channel Dolby sound in mpeg2 and then into TS?

From your reply, I understand that you did succeed making a TS (m2t), but from what source? Was your mpg 5.1-channel sound or just stereo?

Alex,
Sorry I was unclear what I did… I encoded an MPEG2 file of edited clips from the MainConsept codex built into Vegas. Then converted the MPEG2 stream to a Transport stream using Womble, then used the DV capture utility that came with the camera to reload it back into the camera. As you said this should also work on D-VHS as this it the method JVC recommends to transfer to and from D-VHS to the camera. This sounds like a PITA but its really not that bad.

Edit:
Ok I understand your question I have to try to encode DD 5.1 then move it back into the camera. This makes sence now. I will have to see how to encode DD in Vegas.

Mike

Mike, looking forward to your results with a 5.1-channel Dolby mpg file transferred to TS.

This is where I fail as Womble does not like my 5.1-channel audio stream.

Just to clarify, this is what I do:

- In Premiere Pro, I have a video project with 5.1-channel sound track.

- I can encode this project from Prem Pro using the bundled MainConcept MPEG2 encoder (just like you do, I guess). Note that there are 2 streams engaged in the encoding:
1. video - handled by the MainConcept MPEG2 Video encoder
2. audio - handled by SurCode 5.1 Dolby encoder (because MainConvept's Audio encoder can only handle Stereo, not 5,1-channel sound.)
These 2 streams are Multiplexed on-the-fly in Premiere using the MPEG2 Multiplexer (MainConcept or Adobe's code, not sure.)

- Result: PPro seems to complete the task just fine and produces the resulting .mpg apparently with both video (this I checked, it's there) and multiplexed 5.1-channel audio (can't check that).

- Next step is to convert that Program Stream .mpg into Transport Stream .m2t. For that, I use Womble.

- BUT! Woble does not accept the audio part of that .mpg! If I exclude audio stream, Womble accepts mpg for m2t output. If I include audio stream, Womble refuses to output. (Note: Womble accepts similarly encoded STEREO stream just fine, its only problem is with my Dolby-encoded stream...)

- Thus I concluded that either Premire Pro's way of multiplexing the audio into .mpg is non-standard, OR Womble is not even equipped to understand more than 2-channel sound.

- If former is true, you can see whether Womble accepts Vegas's 5.1 multiplexed sound.

- If latter is true, then Vegas' encoded mpg file will fail in Womble the same as PPro's one. I cannot do the comparison myself as I do not have Vegas.

Once you have TS file (m2t), transferring it back onto the tape is no problem at all using the Camcorder's bundled "HD capture/export" utility.

I never even tried to export back to the camera - instead, I always export to D-VHS DH30000 recorder using the cam's utility, and it woks just fine (on video+stereo audio, that is).

My point is this: say you have a surround-sound movie. The current way to play/distribute it is via D-VHS tapes.

The players do support both Dolby surround sound, and HD playback, so if you manage to get such movie onto the tape, playback is no problem then.

I stumbled at the point of mpg into m2t conversion, when mpg has a 5.1 Dolby sound in it.

Let's see what YOUR results will show! If we figure this one out, we get a solution to distribute HD movie with theatrical sound using TODAY's technology.

(Sidenote: let's not discuss WMP9 here, I have no problem encoding in it and love the results, but there's no standalone players that support such playback right now, so let's focus on D-VHS, OK?)

in response to Dave Largent's crique of my post...


"Lisa, I've been following your posts for a short while. And I've been messing with m2t files for a bit. (Go see my recent post over at the "Open DV Discussion Forum" under the topic "Realtime WM9 encoder cards".)
I notice in your post that you say "far, far too many" have lower-end PCs that can't keep up with the data rates required to play HD smoothly. I don't mean to come down on you, but really, the only ones who can play HD on their PCs are either the ones in our business or the geeks who sit around tweaking their systems. That's what, maybe 20% or less of the market? "

I'm confused...that was exactly my point...that many do not have a high end computer to make WMP in HD work.


"But, remember, the majority
of our clients are still on dial up. A $100 AGP card is stretching it for them. "

Umm, where do you live? I live in Silicon Valley. My clients are IBM, apple, HP, Cisco, ebay execs. I live a few blocks from NVIDIA (you know the people that make AGP graphic cards)and Creative Labs...

" Fine, you had a rich client who would pay for the 100 DVDs you made. That's fine. But from what I've seen from dealing with this all, I would've known going into it that only a small percentage of the 100 are going to be able to play."

I guess I should have prefeced that with "I live in silicon valley". We live in a very different world that most of the country. Hmm...he was guessing that since most of the attendees work in computers (almost everyone out here works in computers...you wouldn't understand unless you lived out here), that they could play the HD files. But he was wrong...they all had problems playing HD on WMP9.

" Just don't know if I could go ahead and take the cash myself. Not to be on you. Business is business. Each has to make up his/her own mind regarding the ethics of it."

I don't see how you can question my ethics. You haven't a clue where I live...Silicon Valley is covered with computer people. You may call them "geeks" , but these "geeks" are all multimillionaire entrepreneurs out here and I call them clients.

Having said that, the point of my comment was that I don't think WMP9 HD is a viable mass distribution format. I agree with Alex Raskin who says,

"let's not discuss WMP9 here, I have no problem encoding in it and love the results, but there's no standalone players that support such playback right now, so let's focus on D-VHS, OK?"

Ken, a couple days ago I was looking into this exact thing you mentioned regarding the affect of the encoding bit rate on video playback. My experience has been the opposite of what you stated. I found that as the bit rate goes up -- and the file size gets bigger -- it becomes increasingly more difficult to get smooth playback. Below is what I found. First column is file type. Second column is notes on image quality of a captured jpeg. Third column is notes on how well the file plays in Windows Media Player 9.

Original m2t___not done___video fine, audio stutters
Uncompressed avi___normal, sharp stills___video and audio stutter on playback
0.5Mbps WMV9___pixilated___plays fine
1Mbps___smoothed___plays fine
3Mbps___sharpness appearing___plays fine
5Mbps___not quite good enough___plays fine
6Mbps___okay___plays fine
7Mbps___good enough___slight video stuttering, audio fine
9Mbps___slight improvement vs. 7Mbps___increased video stutter
15Mbps___?? very slightly sharper___mostly still shots now, but some motion
20Mbps___ no improvement___all stills (no motion), audio fine

Just thought I'd pass it along.

Alex, the standalone WMV9 players will be here soon and that'll be it for D-VHS. And the one I've linked to here is not the only one I am aware of.
http://www.gamerscircle.net/index.php?p=1130&c=1

Wow, that makes so much sense. All this work on blue-ray technology just to perserve the 10 year old out-dated Mpeg2 compression scheme, and here is a superior system that can use existing hardware technology and manufacturing.

Every person I know who has seen WM9, agrees it looks better than Mpeg2. I'm not talking about crippled playback on a mediocre PC, but a clean demo at 60 fps and a bitrate of less than 10Mbs.

Let's get on with this and cut the apron strings.

Jay

Yah, Jay. Those stills I mentioned in my above post, the ones encoded above 7 Mbps, were not that much different in appearance from the uncompressed AVIs.
Encoding to WM9 does take some time, though. Check this out.
For comparison purposes, on my machine, a simple color correct to 1 minute of footage takes 9 minutes to render. Here we go. To decompress 1 minute of M2T (~170 MB) to avi (~7250 MB) takes 4 minutes. Note here that it blows up 43X its original size! Now, to encode that 7250 MB AVI to WM9 at a video bit rate of 7 Mbps takes 58 minutes! And the resultant WM9 file size is 80 MB which is about half the original MPEG2 size, and about 1% the size of the decompressed AVI -- with not much loss in image quality.
Regarding Blu ray, Sony released one of these player/recorders in Japan in April. Only $3800. The nice thing about the coming WM9 standalones is that they're going to cost only 10% of that Blu-ray Sony. *And* they'll be backwards compatible so that they'll be able to play current MPEG2 encoded DVDs. What these
WM9 standalones are is "the next generation DVD players".

Thanks for the details Dave. It appears your bottle neck is your HD's. It is obvious your cpu can handle heavy compression yet you have problems when there is little or no compression but large file size. Again are you defraged? All drives are in DMA mode? Are you running a HD RAID?
Ken

Ken,
Thanks for trying to help. To answer your questions. No,
I'm not defraged, but I will soon. No RAID set up. Do you think RAID would help? Regarding DMA, I don't know if my 160GB 7200rpm drive is in that or not. How to tell? Perhaps you could explain the significance of DMA, as I know nothing about it.

Has anyone had any experiences they can share regarding outputting their HD to DV/SD for distribution on DVD?

How does the final DVD compare to a professional film which you would see on DVD?

This may be restating an earlier question I raised, but is it better to edit in HD and downconvert to SD for DVD distribution, or take the original HD footage, downconvert and edit as SD instead, with the idea that you may return later and create an HD version?

Brian

Glad to help Dave.
Rule 1: Defrag all the time! Nothing will degrade your performance faster. Defrag your C:Windows partition and your data partition(s) often. You will also have much better performance if they are seperate drives on seperate IDE channels.
RAID is almost a necessity if you use uncompressed often, although a tidy defraged 7200rpm may be able to handle 1 stream. If you do RAID, leave your C: Windows on a seperate HD.

DMA is a HD mode that will allow much greater data transfer rates. To check if enabled (I'm assuming XP here)
System/Device Manager/IDE ATA ATAPI Controllers/Primary Channel/(right click)Properties/Advanced settings/ - Change Transfer Modes- to DMA if available for device 0 and 1
Do the same with Secondary IDE channel.
Ken