Well it’s been a while.

I kind of want to drift away from Blu-ray postings since the industry has kind of slowed down. I get less and less emails about Blu-ray these days and traffic is down. So I’m probably just going to post little projects and things I’m working on.

So first on the list is a time lapse video I did over the last 2 weeks. It can be viewed here:

I took 7 different time lapses using my Nikon D7000 camera. I generally used aperture priority so that the sunset would get a decent exposure. Manual ISO and manual focus were set with a +2 and -2 exposure bracket. Most of the ones taken during the day had a 5 second gap with a 300 picture limit (900 total with bracketing). The ones of the sun setting with the lake and the sun rise were done at 20 seconds and I had them go longer, about 600 pictures (1800 total with bracketing). I had 3 batteries and 2 64GB SD cards, though I only used 1 SD card. I pretty much went through all the batteries, though I swapped them probably a little early because I didn’t want them to die in the middle of the shoot.

I made one HUGE mistake though, and it’s called Auto White Balance. This caused a horrible flickering. I tried everything to get rid of it, but I just couldn’t.

Here’s my post workflow for those interested:

Import to Adobe LightRoom
Auto WB/Auto Tone
Save Metadata
Open in LRTimeLapse
Deflicker (The prerelease version has a select every third option, this is key with HDR time lapse videos)
Save MetaData
In LightRoom, read MetaData
Export JPGs
In PhotoMatix Check Align by Matching Features with Perspective Correction. I had Crop aligned images on, but it should probably be off. AE stabilization will probably work better this way
Turn on Reduce Noise
Turn on Reduce Chromatic Aberrations
Turn on Reduce Ghosting Artifacts
Create HDR JPGs
In Adobe After Effects, create large comp size of HDR JPGs at 23.976 FPS
Apply GBDeflicker
Apply Warp Stabilization (CS5.5 effect ONLY). Choose No Motion in the settings. This compensates for the shaky tripod from the wind.
Create new 1080P Comp with larger comp in it
Add vignette effect
Render all
In Apple Final Cut, edit final timeline

NOTES ON WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENT:
Always shoot manual WB!!!
Disengage lens to keep aperture the same
Cropping/resizing from Lightroom and use LRTimeLapse to keyframe will result in 2x-3x faster HDRing. Probably worth it. Also, rendering/Stabilizing in AE will then be faster.
Played with the color a little more to get a good transition
Shot RAW if I had enough storage space, which I didn’t.
Lastly, I’d really like to get a dolly, though they aren’t real cheap.

As some of you have noticed, BDJForum.com has been down for a while, and doesn’t appear to be coming back up anytime soon. Luckily for us, we have a new forum that has just launched at BluAuthoring.com. Head over there and start posting anything and everything you have to help get that community started!

NetBlender had a webinar on HDMV authoring for 3D and 2D yesterday that I watched and was a little interesting. We only use Scenarist so a lot of it doesn’t apply to me, but their where a few cool things.

I was most surprised that their new IG editor can import and export Scenarist Designer PSD and XML files. This means a couple things. First, it gives Scenarist menu designers a new tool to use to design menus. If you don’t like Scnearists designing process, this is a good option. It also means you can design once, and author in two different authoring tools. Lastly, it also means you can now use my HDMV Flash viewer with DoStudio HDMV menus. Just export the XML Scenarist.Designer file and you should be good to go.

You can watch the webinar on their community portal here: http://netblender.ning.com/video/introduction-to-hdmv-authoring

Here’s an interesting article I found about the PS3. Apparently, only HDMV will be supported for 3D titles.

http://www.hometechtell.com/hometechnologytell/comment/PlayStation-3-unable-to-handle-bd-java-3D-menus-subtitles-simultaneously/

I personally prefer HDMV from a both a user and creation side, but that’s just me. Anyone have any thoughts?

It looks like Sonic is bringing Scenarist into the 3D world. Version 5.5 has been announced and you can read all about it here:

http://www.sonic.com/about/press/news/2010/09/sonic-streamlines-hollywood-blu-ray-3d-production.aspx

Of course I’m still waiting for a 64-bit OS X version of Scenarist Designer that works with CS5 and Snow Leopard.

UPDATE:
I didn’t feel like this deserved a post of it’s own, but CinemaCraft is teasing BD 3D to launch next Wednesday. This comes as a very welcome surprise to me because I had heard rumors CinemaCraft was working on 3D. Here’s their site with a countdown timer:

http://www.cinemacraftusa.com/

Well all this 3D stuff is starting to come out, and NetBlender is there with their newest products. Their MVC encoder is now available for purchase, and I hear their 2.0 beta is in full swing and should be released soon. Here is a press release on the new encoder if you want to read more:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/07/prweb4274454.htm

BluFocus is hosting an event at DTS on 3D Blu-ray authoring on August 3rd. It’s free, but apperantly is filling up fast. Here’s a link with more info on it if anyone is interested in going. I’d like to go, but I’ve been swamped with work (and jury duty) and so I just don’t think I can make it. Should be informative though:

http://www.blufocus.com/3d-focus/part2.cfm

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. Guess I’ve gotten in a rut or something.

Anyways, some of the stories I didn’t mention at CES was all the 3D excitement about new players and the PS3’s ability to have a firmware upgrade to support 3D. What does that all mean for us menu designers/encoders/authors? That’s a good question, one I don’t know the answer to.

However BluFocus will be hosting a 3D webinar explaining the workflow. Interestingly the software they will be using isn’t anything we use (CinemaCraft and Scenarist) so I’m very interested to see what their solution is. I haven’t heard a single thing from CinemaCraft or Sonic regarding 3D being implemented into their software, though I would guess it’s on the way. Maybe at NAB we’ll hear something. Of course 3D TVs and 3D Blu-ray players aren’t really even out yet, so we’ll see.

So if you are interested in learning how we are all going to have to do 3D at some point, sign up for the webinar. It’s on March 4th.

UPDATE (March 11, 2010):

I was actually very impressed with this webinar. I was expecting just BluFocus and NetBlender to give a sales pitch on their products and it was full of 3D information from THX, Sensio, TDVision, Netblender, Sonic (I was shocked by this), Sony, Trailerpark, Nvidia, XpanD, RealD, and lastly BluFocus. I was a little disappointed  CinemaCraft wasn’t there. I can honestly say I have a much better understanding of where 3D and Blu-ray sits at the moment.

If you missed it, check out this link and you can download the presentations from each company: http://mesalliance.org/home/3d-focus-presentations/

They sent an email last week saying they would have video of it as well at some point, so I’m not sure if there is more to come or not.

CinemaCraft and NetBlender have teamed up to provide a new software bundle known as CC-HDe/a. I’m guessing the “/a” stands for authoring. Anyways, it’s an interesting solution for people looking at getting some great encodes. We actually have an HDe and it’s a pretty impressive piece of software, though there are some things that just drive me crazy about it (i.e. no QuickTime reference files!)

They don’t really mention price but they say a comparable solution (which would of course be Scenarist + HDe) would cost over $100k, while there’s saves you 50%. So retail is probably around $50k. Sounds about right to me.

It’ll be interesting to see what this does for each company, but realistically I don’t see CinemaCraft selling many extra units because of this. NetBlender will probably get a few more sales because people who are already spending so much on an encoder can add an authoring tool for not much more, in addition to their Blu-print or Scenarist workstations.

You can read the press release here.

I found this on LinkedIn, and it’s pretty cool if you have an iPhone. I’ve never been real good at bit budgets so this is a great tool to have handy. Best of all, it’s free! And it works for DVD or Blu-ray. Here’s what the creator, Andy Evans from The Pavement in London, had to say about it:

I wanted to share with you all our DVD & Blu-ray Bit Budget iPhone App that just went live on the Apps Store.

It’s the first version and therefore free to download.

The DVD bit is pretty straightforward, but those of you who have worked with Blu-ray know it’s not that easy to calculate your video data rates when the disc includes any of the Dolby or DTS lossless formats as the data size taken by them is determined by factors including what’s needed to represent what’s going on. For example, a drama based feature will probably need less data to reproduce it compared to a high energy rock concert. We have accounted for this in several ways in our calculator. Firstly, we have given two preset data rates named HD Audio – Feature and HD Audio Music that we have derived from working on quite a few music and film projects. We believe these will give you a pretty good estimation on the safe side. The other two ways are to either include the actual data size taken up by your already encoded Dolby or DTS lossless formats, or enter a custom data rate that you know.

I look forward to any feedback that you have as on how we can improve upon it.

You can find the Bit Budget Pro here:
http://itunes.apple.com/app/bit-budget-pro/id339764858?mt=8

Kind regards,

Andy

Hey Andy, need a menu designer?

This sounds interesting, I’ll probably be watching it if I’m not too busy Monday morning.

Learn the tips and tricks of authoring BDs with DoStudio in a Final Cut Pro and Adobe Creative Suite environment from expert video post production professional Steve Johnson of Duplitech.
Who: Sponsored by NetBlender and Duplitech
What: Complimentary Blu-ray Authoring Webinar
When: October 20, 2009 1:30 PM Eastern, 10:30 AM Pacific
Why: Because offering professional Blu-ray authoring services shouldn’t cost a fortune (or require a degree in Java programming)

Register:  http://www.netblender.com/main/free-webinar-practical-affordable-full-featured-blu-ray-solutions

Deal-of-the-day site woot.com has a Pioneer BDP-121 Blu-Ray Player for sale at $134.99 + $5 shipping. They tend to sell out quick so if you want one you better pull the trigger.

I’m not really sure how good of a deal this is, but it seems pretty reasonable to me and it’s a profile 2.0 player, so that’s nice.

Adobe has made an interesting announcement this week. While they will be offering Flash on several new devices with Flash 10.1, the iPhone is not supported. However in what seems to be their solution to this problem, they are going to allow Flash to iPhone apps directly from Flash CS5. This isn’t going to be a SWF inside a an IPA or something like that, it will be a natively compiled app. In fact it seems there are already several in the App Store already, and people didn’t even know it. This has brought me to my plead with Adobe to offer BD-J compiling with Flash in the same way.

Is this even possible? I don’t know, but I think it just might be after reading some of Adobe’s explanation that talks about Just In Time (JIT) compilation versus Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation and Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM). The LLVM is apparently converting the Action Script 3 code to the iPhone’s native ARM assembly. According to the LLVM site the compiler supports X86, X86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC-64, ARM, Thumb, SPARC, Alpha, CellSPU, PIC16 MIPS, MSP430, SystemZ, and XCore processors. What I’m worried about is that it says it works with C and C++ and we all know that BD-J is Java, so I don’t know where that leaves us. I was trying to figure out what processors Blu-ray players use and that sort of thing, but it’s all a little beyond me. Does anyone else have any insight to this?

All I’m saying is this: How nice would it be to be able to use an existing tool, like Flash, that has been around forever to design and author all the BD-J code? I’m still not excited about On-Q and Sonic’s BD-J solutions are sloppy. If Adobe was serious about Blu-ray, they could add this in and integrate it with Encore (and hopefully Scenarist and Blu-print) and you may start seeing some actual BD-J games/applications that are worth using. I think it would also make Encore a serious competitor in the Blu-ray authoring world.

I’m not sure if anyone from Adobe would ever read this (though I do have a few hits from San Jose over the last month, so maybe they do) but if you do, PLEASE consider this. I know there isn’t as much as a market for this, but I think you could easily include this as an extra bundle. Even if it was $10k, I think I could convince my company to invest in it if it was well done.

Anyone have any other thoughts?

Personally I’ve never asked this question as I leave it to the authors and replicators to do their magic, but if you’ve ever wondered what the actual process is once you have your BDMCF image created, this article might be for you. The article is written by NetBlender, but it seems to be good information for all other authoring packages.

You can read it here.

I got an email from NetBlender earlier this week that describes a new promo they are running that can save you a little money. Their description of the deal is:

Customers that license DoStudio Workflow Suite between now and November 20, 2009 will receive one complimentary Title Insertion for BD Touch Premium.  BD Touch Premium lets consumers download bonus content from the BD to their iPhone and iPod Touch!  Normally, there is a $1,500 per title insertion fee to activate BD Touch Premium.  They will also receive a complimentary iPod Touch.

More info can be found here.