Creating a DVD that displays in Hi Def on a Blu-Ray player

[Kaushik Parmar]

Originally Posted by Steve Mullen

Looks like Sony is going to keep HDV alive in the Prosumer space.

The new $4000 Sony HDR-FX1000 HDV camcorder features 3 x 1/3-inch CMOS sensors. The lens is non-removable. The lens has three control rings: focus, zoom, and iris. There are also three built-in ND filters (1/4, 1/16, and 1/64). The camcorder includes a 3.2-inch LCD with a resolution of 921,000 pixels.

Wonder if they will ALSO release a non-tape $4000 camcorder using AVCHD.

Steve,

Have you gone through my slideshows clips? see: http://www.vimeo.com/1639491
http://www.vimeo.com/1636736

Kaushik

[Larry Horwitz]

Originally Posted by Kaushik Parmar

Larry,

I have checked "MySlideShow" software, and I would like to tell you this is nowhere near to PowerDirector 7, it is normal slideshow creator. I must say PowerDirector rules in slideshow part! As you said you liked my two clips, it came out excellent!

If you have not explore PD7' slideshow features I would recommend you to see them!

Kaushik

It is true Kaushik that MySlideShow Gold does not create anywhere near the range of special effects of Power Director 7, and is not a good alternative in this comparison. However, it generates direct output to projectors or monitors without requiring any encoding, and our photography club chose it to use for displaying digital photos on our club projection system since it preserves as much detail as possible from 4-12 megapixel images when shown on our projection system at 1920 by 1080 HD resolution. With PD7 and other video editing programs which support slideshows, the output slideshow is a DVD, HD DVD, AVCHD, or BluRay disk encoded as a video / movie with the added encoding artifacts. I suggested it mostly for this reason. It also has the nice ability to take a set of photos and build a self-contained executatble program which can be emailed or delivered on a CD to someone who does not have any hi def equipment but who does have a computer and monitor. It will play at the computer's maximum screen resolution, again with noform of encoding / compression other than the original JPEG, preventing the effects of applying mpeg2 or mpeg4 encoding on top of JPEG. For our photography club members, this is the way people bring their photo results into the photo class room as well. I thought you might find it interesting. Also, at $29 it is less than half the price of ProShow Gold from Photodex, a program which it closely resembles which sells for $69 and many photographers also like to use for slideshows.

Thanks for checking it out.
Larry

[Kaushik Parmar]

Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz

It is true Kaushik that MySlideShow Gold does not create anywhere near the range of special effects of Power Director 7, and is not a good alternative in this comparison. However, it generates direct output to projectors or monitors without requiring any encoding, and our photography club chose it to use for displaying digital photos on our club projection system since it preserves as much detail as possible from 4-12 megapixel images when shown on our projection system at 1920 by 1080 HD resolution. With PD7 and other video editing programs which support slideshows, the output slideshow is a DVD, HD DVD, AVCHD, or BluRay disk encoded as a video / movie with the added encoding artifacts. I suggested it mostly for this reason. It also has the nice ability to take a set of photos and build a self-contained executatble program which can be emailed or delivered on a CD to someone who does not have any hi def equipment but who does have a computer and monitor. It will play at the computer's maximum screen resolution, again with noform of encoding / compression other than the original JPEG, preventing the effects of applying mpeg2 or mpeg4 encoding on top of JPEG. For our photography club members, this is the way people bring their photo results into the photo class room as well. I thought you might find it interesting. Also, at $29 it is less than half the price of ProShow Gold from Photodex, a program which it closely resembles which sells for $69 and many photographers also like to use for slideshows.

Thanks for checking it out.
Larry

Larry,

PD7 is superior in all, I made 720p MPEG2 and I am very happy with the output! PD7 is a indeed revolution in terms of slideshow, if you noticed my both slides, you must have felt grip, means you would love to see it again & again! It is very much soothing to our eyes. And everybody loves to see their pictures in motion with some innovative effect and with background some music!

Full marks to CyberLink team for this innovative slideshow features!

Kaushik

[Larry Horwitz]

Originally Posted by Ron Evans

Hi Larry
There should be three icons on the desktop for the converter. AVCHD2HQ, AVCHDPRV, and HQ codec setup. Under the setup its possible to set for standard or fine conversion and alter the parameters though standard is the one I use. One can also set whether the conversion is to ITU601 or from RGB ( 0-255 to IRE 0 to 100). If you drag a file over the preview icon it will play in a preview window, Opening the AVCHD2HQ will allow you to set whether the sound conversion is to 2 channel or 5.1. When you make this selection another box will open allowing you to choose the directory for the converted file. I make sure the directory for the converted file is on another hard drive from the source file, much faster. Once this is set dragging a file over the ICON will use these set parameters until you change them. The problem with defaults for Sony and Edius etc is that they are all on the boot drive and so this poor drive has to keep swapping back and for as well as manage all the access that Windows wants!!!! Don't use the boot drive for any of the video source or destination. For me a PC needs 4 drives for nice clean video performance. boot, temp and preview, and two for storage.

Ron

Thanks Ron. By the time I read this post I had deleted the trial of Edius fro my system. The user interface is extremely well done, but my prior complaints still stand.

For whatever it is worth, I took mixed HD content from 3 of my HD cameras, HDV from an HV-20, AVCHD from an HF100, and MJPEG from my tiny Canon TX-1 and mixed all three on the same timeline of Nero Vision. Despite the fact that all 3 are of different resolutions (1920, 1440, 1280 by 720 for the MJPEG) they were beautifully preserved in the final AVCHD disk. Yes, they did require transcoding, but the fact that this little gem did the job at all blew me away!

Larry

[Larry Horwitz]

Originally Posted by Steve Mullen

Last night I got Vegas 9 Plat up and running. Very nice for $85.

BUT

Sony seems to have designed its export options to force one to buy DVD ARCH 5.

1) AVCHD uses AC3 or stereo PCM. Sony does not support AC3! And, if you have made a 5.1 soundtrack -- a really neat feature of Vegas -- you are forced to burn a multi-channel LPCM track. Unfortunately, this track cannot be sent via SPdif to your home theater receiver as the bandwidth is way too large.

2) BD also uses AC3 or stereo PCM. Sony does not support AC3! And, if you have made a 5.1 soundtrack you are forced to burn a multi-channel LPCM track. Unfortunately, this track cannot be sent via SPdif to your home theater receiver as the bandwidth is way too large.

So you can make SD DVD with AC3, but not HD DVDs. Which makes the claims of AC3 support very misleading if you work in HD.

3) We all know that AVCHD is DVD-+R and not BD. But, the AVCHD settings are under BD, not DVD. So the co-inventor of AVCHD has an NLE that has no direct burn-to-AVCHD function! And, the main inventor of BD -- won't burn a BD with an AC3 track.

4) We also know BD supports up to 40Mbps yet Sony limits AVC to 20Mbps and MPEG-2 to 25Mbps. Why is Sony limiting our quality?

The solution -- which I posted on the Sony site -- is to buy Ulead MovieFactory which has clear choices for AVCHD and BD and HD DVD. Now you can do anything you want. And, in the past, I've found if you import a "correct" file -- it does not recompress. Although, you might want to export uncompressed from Vegas and let MF do the encoding since you have more control.

This does not portend good things for AVCHD users in Vegas 9 Pro, whenever it will be released. Sony has ALWAYS been slow to provide the tools needed, and left me and my new FX-1 with no Sony software tools literally for years after I bought it a few weeks after it was introduced in 2003. It is incredible how much hubris they demonstrate...

In fact, the very absence of pro tols is what started me on the path of Ulead, Cyberlink, etc., all of whom offered reasonable HDV solutions as well as AVCHD solutions long before Sony or the other "pro" programs.