Anyone deliver on USB Drives?

[John Wiley]

Chris, within Australia I believe Officeworks makes custom USB sticks. I don't know if you can include a logo/graphic or just text though. You have to order in bulk but if you're delivering that way for every single wedding then that shouldn't be a problem.

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Peter Riding

I'm dubious as to how practical it is to deliver in several different formats in the real world.

I say that because in my NLE of choice - which is Sony Vegas Pro 11 - I have to do a separate render for eaxh format and that can take a very long time. Maybe its different in other NLE's?

Most of my shows are 60-80 minutes long. The video content is from Canon 5DII's and Panasonic TM900's (at 1080p 50p PAL land). I also include what may be several dozen stills covering aspects of the day that were not video'd. I don't use any special effects or fancy transitions but there are transitions between each still. Many of the video clips are cropped a bit to improve composition, or rotated slightly to line up with prominent vertical or horizontal features in the shots. Very little if any stabilsation used as nearly everything is shot on legs.

I render separately for BluRay, for SD DVD, and for computer optimised. Each render can take 24 hours no sweat. And thats on Windows 7 64 machines with i7 processors and lots of RAM. One Pass not two pass. I tend to render on a laptop and just leave it running; reason is if there's power outage I won't loose the work in progress.

Much as I'd like to supply clients with 3 different formats as a matter of course, thats not a commitment I want to make. Too risky if a backlog builds up.

There is something seriously amiss with your setup or workflow if it takes 24 hours to render a 60 minute DVD on an i7 PC.

[James Bishop]

We've been providing all our couples with USB sticks for a year now. We split the completed video into 3 or 4 separate videos (so each one is less than 4GB, so they will each fit onto the drive).

:)

[Jeff Harper]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

There is something seriously amiss with your setup or workflow if it takes 24 hours to render a 60 minute DVD on an i7 PC.

I'll agree with Nigel Peter. It takes me about 30 minutes to render a 90 minute project to SD from 1080p or 720 60p, with color correction and color/appearance FX in use.

For Bluray render it will take a lot longer, I forget how long, but it's real time or less, like about 60-90 minutes.

I would kill myself if I had 24 hour render and had a mistake and had to redo it.

Once I'm done editing, it takes me between 2 and 4 hours to get my DVDs rendered and burned; then a couple of hours more for the bluray discs, they take forever.

[Chris Harding]

On my i7 with a 1920x1080 source and pretty much standard titles and some cutins and cutaway clips on a second track takes around 1/3rd real-time. That is with Sony Vegas so it's much the same as Jeff.

However if you have added plugins or complicated FX then the render times will take much longer. NeatVideo is one plugin that will increase render times drastically!!! It still shouldn't take 24 hours.

I don't ever have clips that long..my weddings are split into events so I never render any clip more than 20 minutes! That way the DVD is simple to chapter and if there is an error I don't have to re-render a 100 minutes of video...at the most 20 minutes.

Chris

[Taky Cheung]

After all these talk, I decided to try it out to export the entire wedding to Flash using Encore. It works!!! It can be delivered online or playback locally preserving the DVD navigation and viewing experience. Yay!

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/wedding-...ml#post1709566

Since it is all Flash, it won't work on ipad.

[Peter Riding]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

There is something seriously amiss with your setup or workflow if it takes 24 hours to render a 60 minute DVD on an i7 PC.

Ah but what would it be!

I am giving Vegas an aweful lot to chew through. It is using the native files from 5DII's and Panny TM900's (which are 1920x1080 50p in my case), none transcoded. The TM900 clips are often cropped and levelled with horizontal etc as they are often from locked down minimally monitored B cams. I make good use of MultiCam editing mode in Vegas so there may be several dozen live clips in the final 60 min project. Fortunately there is seldom much colour editing to do as the cams are all a good match with each other, and no noise reduction as they all perform well in low light n.b. I would only use the 5DII's and fast lenses in very low light.

The still images are PNG's converted from JPEGs in Photoshop, and were originally max size RAWs from the 5DII's converted in Capture One Pro; in landscape format these are 3840 x 2560 and in portrait format 3840 x 2160 (but with each of the two sides transparent - if you see what I mean). I find this PNG suits me best for compositing. I make a lot of use of stills and the size is a good compromise where panning and zooming is required (not much). I add a track level Curve in Vegas to the still image tracks to reduce the contrast slightly.

I usually create 5 or 6 projects then bring these together as one Nested project.

My main desktop has an i7 950 and 12gb RAM. My main latop is an i7 of a slightly lesser status and 8gb RAM. The render times on both are similar.

The desktop runs hot and I need to replace the thermal compound. I'll probably do a clean reinstall of Windows when I get the chance as currently its an upgrade of 7 64 bit over Vista 64 bit.

I'm at a loss as to how to reduce the render times. I'm somewhat reassured that its similar on both machines and that some other users get comparable times. Hard to find solid feedback as so many posters on the net only create 10 min Youtube clips of skateboarding etc and don't seriously get involved in lengthy DVD and BluRay creation for paying clients. Oh well.

Pete

[Nigel Barker]

Maybe it's a Vegas thing then because no other NLE I have used could take anywhere near to 24 hours to render a one hour DVD. We now use Premiere Pro & Encore but I do recall when we used FCP that rendering lots of still photographs did take a while but nothing approaching 24 hours. I would have evolved a workflow that would take 24 hours as I would be too concerned about a making a mistake & having to re-do it perhaps several times over. Rendering individual chapters & then bring them together when you assemble the DVD makes far more sense as if you need to change something it's only one small segment not the whole project. Encore is really great with the ability to generate from the same project a DVD a Blu-ray or as Taky just pointed out a Flash online version.

By way of comparison on our 3-year old dual CPU Mac Pros an SD DVD renders in 3x real time while a Blu-ray renders almost in real time on the system with a CUDA graphics card providing hardware acceleration (2-3x real time without). Interestingly it takes longer to render a 1280x720 H.264 MPEG file for Vimeo than a full HD 1920x1080 Blu-ray.

[Victor Boyko]

Originally Posted by Jim Merchant

Victor,

I offer the wedding on USB flash drive (as MP4 files), and because of the 4GB limit I break it up into chapters. Although you can convert the drive to NTFS, I like to tell them that they can play the HD video through their Playstation 3 or X Box system and these only work with FAT32.

Ah. I see. Do you work in Encore? I assume you mean that Encore breaks up chapters automatically while breaking up the file size? Or are you doing it manually somehow?

[Tim Polster]

About formatting in NTFS - I am not for sure becuase I don't use Apple products but I don't think NTFS is Apple friendly. You might want to make sure before you deliver a product on an NTFS drive to an Apple owner.

[Chris Harding]

Hi Guys

I think that sticking with a FAT32 is probably safer in the long run. I don't have the 4GB limit as my weddings are done in individual clips anyway so each MP4 clip would be under the limit anyway.

I just feel (whether they are watching a DVD or a bunch of MP4's) that providing a bunch of sequential clips gives the viewer a break ..I personally would hate to have to sit through 100 minutes of wedding video but being able to watch nothing longer than 15 odd minutes is a lot easier on your system as when you watch the next clip your brain "resets" as each clip has a short title....when you watch TV the same applies too..the commercials break up the monotony of continuous video.

If they watch the USB on a computer they would be presented with a list of files that are intelligently named (and as Nigel pointed out, call them 01 Groom Prep and 02 Bride Prep so they are in sequence too) I just think that would be a more "friendly" approach to the bride and she can also show her friends just part of the wedding.

Chris

[Taky Cheung]

The way I use Encore to export to the entire DVD authoring to a local / online Flash playback will detain the DVD viewing experience with menu navigation structure, subtitle, animated thumbnail, chapter mark.. stuff like that. It generates an index.html that the couple or any audience can view the entire wedding within a browser or go full screen. They can jump to any particular chapter. I think that works better than just copying and pasting individual clips. The encoding all break down at each chapter mark to an individual .f4v or .flv file. Thus, no worry going over the 4GB limit per clip.

The only down size is it won't play on an ipad.

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Tim Polster

About formatting in NTFS - I am not for sure becuase I don't use Apple products but I don't think NTFS is Apple friendly. You might want to make sure before you deliver a product on an NTFS drive to an Apple owner.

Mac OS X has included read-only support for NTFS since 10.3 (Panther) back in 2003.

[James Strange]

Originally Posted by Taky Cheung

The way I use Encore to export to the entire DVD authoring to a local / online Flash playback will detain the DVD viewing experience with menu navigation structure, subtitle, animated thumbnail, chapter mark.. stuff like that. It generates an index.html that the couple or any audience can view the entire wedding within a browser or go full screen. They can jump to any particular chapter. I think that works better than just copying and pasting individual clips. The encoding all break down at each chapter mark to an individual .f4v or .flv file. Thus, no worry going over the 4GB limit per clip.

The only down size is it won't play on an ipad.

They might not play on the defaukt ioad video player, but imuse a diferent app for video, AVPLAYERHD, not tried flv on it. But it plays everything ive thrown at it (even high bit rate 1080p mp4)

Worth trying?

[Taky Cheung]

Encore exported FLV or F4V that played within a Flash player embeded within a browser. It's quite certain any computer browser have the Flash plug-in (except 64-bit browser and ipad).

It's all self contained and no need to have extra software to view the wedding video content with navigation structure.