High Def

85GB is a LOT of info... sounds a little too high to me.

Now I didn't try to watch Pleasure on my home DVD player, but for shits and giggles I did try to watch the HD DVD DP provided (Island Fever 3 was a 2 DVD set, 1 on reg DVD and the other on HD) and I couldn't get it to play. I had to use my computer with WMP.

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HD is 1080i 192 hex 1080=2073600pixels
DVD is only 72 hex 480 or 72 hex 576PAL so that is =345600pixels

2073600/345600= 6times(that is a lot better) the info per frame so yes you would need about 7 DVD9 or about 50gigs to do 1080i or 1080p with audio and menus.

Edited by - EL_ on 7/5/2005 6:37:41 PM

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Terminator 2 was the first mainstream DVD to include a WM9 HD disc. A few adult titles have also been released with a second disc containing WM9 HD. I believe that Digital Playground included a WM9 disc with their Island Fever 3 DVD.

Now, if someone tries to tell you that they are selling an HD DVD that you can play on your regular DVD player, they are full of shit.

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Bill says you can (with a powerful enough comp, which I have) and EL_ backs up Oren.

So since I could only watch that HD DVD of Island Fever #3 on my computer, someone just made files only my comp can understand? Because the HD DVD I had was just 1 DVD and contained the movie only.

Edited by - PL on 7/5/2005 9:12:08 PM

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The owner of one of my local stores asked me about this disc after some of his customers had problems with it. When I explained to him that the second disc could only be played on a relatively new PC, he decided to pull the second disc from the rental (unless the customer knows to ask for it) in order to avoid the confusion.

If you rented Island Fever 3, it's possible that your local store did the same thing.

"Pleasure" from Defiance is not a High Def DVD. It is exactly what OREN described. It was shot in HD and then downconverted to SD.

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Maybe my last post wasn't clear.

Oren says a true HD flick is around 50 GB. Are you saying that the second DVD of Island Fever #3 (The HD one) is a 50 GB DVD (or what ever could hold that)?

I don't have the DVD any more, so I can't pop it in the computer and look at it's size.

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Oren
Anarchy

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WOW those numbers are high!

I wonder who will be the first to do a true HD title at those rates!

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Oren
Anarchy

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Blu-Ray and HD-DVD's will both use MPEG-4 compression. This will allow a little over 2 hours of HD to be stored in 25GB. For sake of discussion, let's call that 200MB per minute.

WMV9 uses a much higher level of compression (which is why it requires a good PC to decompress and display it). If you look at the link that I provided earlier to the WMV HD Content Showcase, you will see that they have demo clips. Those demo clips have their lengths, resolutions and size listed. The "Batman Begins" clip is 1080p, 2min 23sec long and is 164 meg. That's about 70 MB per minute. Extrapolate that to 2 hours you have 8.4 GB. You still have room for extras on a dual layer DVD. 720p uses even less space. The clip of "Lewis & Clark" is 720p, 3min 33sec and 212MB. That's about 60.5MB per minute. At that rate a 2 hour movie would take up about 7.2GB.

So, the answer is Yes, there are DVD's containing full length High Definition movies today. They are not what we will be seeing in the future, but you can absolutely watch a 1080i or 720p movie on your big screen HDTV as long as it is connected to a decent PC.

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At least for now....

I have heard of Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs but I don't know if there are players for such media yet. Last I heard about it was it was a concept close to consumer. Now granted I don't keep up on that kind of stuff.

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It will be worse than VHS vs Beta becasue they also have the studios taking sides. So there won't be two versions of every movie, there will be one version of each movie and if people want to be able to watch all movies, they will need 2 players (at least until someone comes up with a player that will handle both formats).

As of about a month ago, it looked like the two camps were going to agree on a common format, but those talks fell apart.

It's a shame, because a format war will keep a lot of people like me, who would otherwise be on the "bleeding edge" of something like this, sitting on the sidelines watching until the dust has settled.

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Anyway, thanks for the info Bill, much appreciated.

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Oren is talking about a container that is avi not compressed wmv file(which will look even better). the compression looks great btw. I would love to play around with the wmv format any one want to send me 80gigs of porn(192 hex 1080@30fps) to play with?

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ANYWAY - yup, Bill got it. I too have hooked up a computer (laptop) to a plasma TV - although slightly smaller at 50 inches. I have also hooked up the computer to a 90 inch rear projection screen (ha! beat that ). Terminator 2 LOOKED F'ING AMAZING! I have a couple of National Geographic HD WM9 discs that just blew me away. And Island Fever 3 was - well, Island Fever 3.

Buttman Comics Presents... Vault of Whores was shot HDV with the Sony Z1. We will be releasing a SD DVD9 and also a WM9 HD DVD in a set.

Oh, and to clarify, discs that have a WM9 movie are considered DVDs too. :)

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We don't have DLT inhouse, so we have to send our harddrives to a service that transfers the data to DLT to go to the replicator. It's a couple hundred bucks, tops. Even allowing that an HD disc is 10(?) times as much data as a DVD9, I never would have guessed there'd be that kind of premium.

Mr.XXX, if you want to get really confused, start asking about the different varieties of HD acquistion!

-TC

Comstock Films:Real Life, Real People, Real Sex

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HD-DVDs ? There aren't any in commercial production yet . Blu Ray discs are out there but in 1.0 spec which will soon be made obsolete when 2.0 comes out as the mass market media format .

Latest news BTW is that Disney has not been swayed by HD-DVDs last minute triple layer (45Gb) prototype disc and has decided to stay in the Blu Ray camp . Seeing as the triple layer was primarily aimed at prizing the little mouse from the BRF that's quite a blow for the DVD-Forum . Oh , and Bill Gates has reiterated that an HD-DVD player will not be added to the initial XBox360 , but that they will consider adding a "next generation player" at a future date . Say bye bye , HD-DVD !

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-TC

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We considered Sony's HDV cameras when looking at an upgrade for our trusty PD100a cameras. Mostly it was the 16:9 and backwards compatablity with DVCAM and MiniDV. and the motion concerns about HDV don't hurt as much for talking head interviews.

But it turns out the Sony cameras don't do a real 24 fps, but use an interpolation of 30i instead. We've developed a telecine process that eliminates pulldown in our film footage, so a camera that offered real 24fps was key.

Back to the question at hand, according to Wiki DV is about 15 gigs/hour (you'd think I'd have these figures memorized), which if true means that HDV is 15 gigs/hour; so a DVD9 would only need the output from a dedicated, CPU driven, professional quality WM9 compressor to be about 45% more efficient then the camera's onboard MPEG2 consumer grade compressor to present an hour of HD resolution footage at the same quality as footage right out of the camera. If WM9 has something like MPEG2's two-pass VBR, I think that would be a snap.

-TC

Comstock Films:Real Life, Real People, Real Sex

Edited by - TonyC on 7/7/2005 7:31:35 PM

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Go back and read my post above that starts with "Oren's talking about Blu-Ray...". It explains how they are able to fit HD Video onto a standard DVD. It's done with a much more efficient compression algorithm (WMV9) than either standard DVD (MPEG-2) or the upcoming HD DVD or Blu Ray (MPEG-4) uses. Therefore, more raw data can be fit into less space after it has been compressed.

Edited by - Bill on 7/7/2005 10:45:39 PM

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Encoding is always a "good, fast, cheap; pick two) situation. In a camera, whether a consumer DVD or HDV camera, or a Digibeta camera, encoding must take place in real time (yes, Digibeta is compressed), which leaves a choice between good or cheap. I leave it to you to speculate whether or not the encoder in a $3.5K camera is as of high a quality as the one they put in their $50K camera.

Once your show is cut from the raw footage, it must be re-encoded. Again, good fast cheap, pick two applies, but unlike the camera encode, there's nothing forcing you to pick fast. Houses that have hard deadlines often have purpose-build blackbox encoders that give them good and fast, but if your not against a hard deadline you can pick good and cheap. Multiple pass analysis of material will usually yeild the best image quality for a given data rate, but each pass take time.

Decoding is a different story. Decoding can only really be fast enough. Either the gear will decode the compressed material as it plays back in real time or it won't.

-TC

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Also - with FinalCut 5 taking native HDV compression now, it makes editing MUCH easier. For me, it was a decision between Final Cut pulling in native HDV footage or Media100 HD EXPORTING simultaneous HD and SD feeds (very tempting indeed). In the end, went with Final Cut 5. At least until Avid has a better solution for using native HDV footage without having to resort to an external box like an Aja.

There's a lot of questions that I honestly don't know the answers to yet, but I'm constantly researching - every step of the way.

As for the 24p, I do indeed LOVE the look of 24p. However, I wanted to shoot in full unmolested 1080i at a combination (depending on the shot and the atmosphere) of either 30 or 60 frames. We used our favorite pre-set within the camera, made slight adjustments to it, and in post will decide whether to add a slight filter if we need to take a tiny bit of edge off.

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I was *this* cost to jumping on the Z1. For interviews on sticks, the MPEG concerns are a non-starter, so all those extra pixels would have been reallly nice, and HD film transfers are surprisingly affordable. We could have gone to HDCAM for the online, with DVPRO100 for work tapes. Still no way to deliver to people's dens (other than WM9), but I think were really not that far off from an HD disc.

But the interpolated 24P was a spanner in the works. We finally found a non-rendered solution to wringing interframes out of our film, and that gives us a very clean line back to a print. It also pays dividends in film transfer costs and DVD compression. I wasn't about to re-introduce interlace with a kludged 24P. Looking toward an HD future, we've done some uprez tests with the video and it's not bad. A real 24P HDV handicam, or better yet, a real HD cam would be better. Hell, as long as we're dreaming, let's shoot the interviews on film too!

-TC

Edited by - TonyC on 7/8/2005 8:34:00 PM

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Also considering this package, but upgrading the lens by $900 on top of the $5100: Sony Z1 at BH for $5100

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DV or HDV 216MBytes/minute

72 hex 486 10-bit 1.7GBytes/minute

128 hex 720 10-bit 4.5GBytes/minute

192 hex 1080 10-bit 10GBytes/minute

192 hex 1020 10-bit RGB 15Gbytes/minute

Also, I watched Collateral last night, which I thought was a perfectly entertaining film and was shot mostly on HD (IIRC Viper and 900). I found a nice article on American Cinamatographer that shed some light on what they were able to do because they shot so much of it on HD, and what they had to do to accomodate HD.

-TC

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