I've just seen Frederic in action, demonstrating LumiereHD, and it looks great. He's bang in the middle of the JVC booth and getting crowds to watch his presentations.

Graeme

<<<-- Originally posted by Paul St. Denis : Campressor now lets you output a 1280x720 mpeg2 elementary stream, I am going to see if I can put this through VLC to produce a transport stream, I'll let you know what happens. -->>>

Are you sure about this???

I just played with it and it seems that it will accept the 1280x720 file but it will only output as a SD file (720x480)...

If you know how to do it let me know cause I would love to try it out...

Carlos, I posted too soon on this one, if you pick MPEG-2 as the encoder and then "automatic" under "Video Format" the summary shows the width and height to be "100% of source", but the output is still 720x480 (720x404 for 16:9).
Even if we could raise the resolution, the maximun bitrate is still 9 Mbps, far too low for decent HD encoding.
Sorry about the mislead.

Has anyone learned about Apple's new codec H.264?
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/04/19/videocodec/index.php?redirect=1082466803000

How does the output of the 1280*720 material look at MPEG2 ?
I heard this is a new feature that Apple put in, that is supposed to give much better DVD quality for HD material without having to downconvert first. Anyone tried it?

Paul,

I am testing the new MPEG encoder from Apple via compressor.

I chose the 60min High Quality Encode Widescreen preset. It's taking 6:30 hours on a Dual G5! for a 17 minute film...

It better be good. 56 min to go

Yes I'm trying the same thing on a 5 minute piece and it's reporting a 1 1/2 hour processing time, ..as you say, better be good!
So far my experiences with trying variable bit rate encodes have not been good and I've been sticking to the old constant bit rate which seemed more reliable, but maybe they've improved it.

Did it finish ;)

Hows it look at what bitrate ?
-Les

Went to NAB trying to figure out a solution to edit existing JVC HD footage, but with timecode, and initially for an SD distibution, that could later be turned into an HD solution if necessary.

Using products from various developers we were able to figure out a solution to keep the resolution and add 30F Non Drop Timecode, by moving it over the new Panasonic DVCPRO HD format through an AJA convertor box. This way we could make a timecoded Digibeta for SD mastering. The thing is this solution isn't exactly what one would call inexpensive, though it would work.

Actually all my research has led me to the conclusion, that for any high end production/editing environment it is better to wait for for a HDV that includes timecode, as Sony has promissed.

The finished result looked very good, a lot of the detail from the HD has been preserved in the downconvert to SD, very few artifacts as I had expected.
I will definitely use this setting again. I believe the bitrate was 6.8, which is pretty high, but it seems to play back without a hitch.

Cheers

The quality was excellent for me as well.

6.5 hours for a 17 minute piece seems excessive however.

Hmm I tried the same compression from within FCP and it only took 20 minutes, very strange!

Paul,

Based on Apple's feedback, one of the things that could slow down the encoding is a mismatched frame rate.

How long was your piece?

Frederic

5 minutes, I think maybe there's a bug in Compressor.

Matching frame rate improved encoding speed considerably. (29.97 fps)