Celtx reaches "1.0"

Celtx Software is a widely used freeware screenplay formatting/pre-production suite of programs that independent filmmakers might like to have a look at.

It's been around a while but has finally made it to release 1.0 status. I've used it on and off since it was first making a name for itself. It's useful but annoyingly (at least until recent versions) shies away from following industry formats in favour of its own "Our web-aware ways are better" (e.g. for breakdown sheets) approaches which makes it difficult to use if you've been brought up with other systems. It's also built around models that work well on computer screens and not so well when printed out on aper (and even low budget productions get through enough paper to account for entire acres of your average forest).

To this end, they've introduced tighter iPod integration (gee, thanks, just what I was waiting for). I'd have to see if the screenplay formatting and script import/export is as buggy as it used to be. I seem to remember a lot of fighting to get slug lines and dialogue to format properly that I wouldn't have with, say, MS word and a bunch of macros. However it is a very useful tool if you're prepared to abandon some of your Ralph S. Singleton ordained habits. If I have time I'll play around with it and and try a review.

If you have Microsoft Excel, I can also recommend you have a look at the (not free but cheap) filmmaker software package for budgeting and scheduling (areas that Celtx has been weaker on in the past)

Off topic in some ways again, as I prefer the info on this site to refer to what blogger and filmmaker Paul Hamill calls "self reliant film" (from production to distribution). TV broadcast is at the opposite end of that spectrum, but this set of articles from The Guardian is interesting as a call (in line with Ofcom policy) for more TV production to move out of London to engage with the various regions, both to bring money and work to the regions. Therefore, in terms of broadening access to the means of production and distribution (albeit a little higher up the chain) it might be of interest.

Youtube Screening room

Youtube have launched the Youtube Screening Room in order to promote short films to their huge global audience. The idea is to provide a more organised selective page where high quality (i.e. professionally produced) short films can be viewed. It's sort of backwards from what iFilm and Atom films did a few years back, those sites have now moved over to be based around User Generated content, while Youtube seems to be moving more towards producer made creative content.

These films always appear with the permission and involvement of the filmmakers, so be sure to rate, share and leave comments. This is your chance to not only watch great films from all corners of the globe, but also to converse with the filmmakers behind them. from ytscreeningroom.googlepages.com/home

Not that good a chance - I left a comment under the film Our Time Is Up and it got deleted, then the whole film was removed and reposted! Strange. Could it be my comment that it bore an great similarity to film by a friend of mine have annoyed someone?

While the majority of these films have played at international film festivals, occasionally you’ll find films that have never before screened for wide audiences.
from ytscreeningroom.googlepages.com/home

Actually the four films up there at the moment are all professionally produced, and the first film to be featured, the affore mentioned Our Time Is Up is directed by a Hollywood TV writer Rob Pearlstein, stars Kevin Pollack and Jorge Garcia (Hurley from Lost) and was nominated for an Academy Award (the New York Times described it as "an attempt to wring comedy from psychiatrist-couch clichés", it lost to Martin McDonagh's Six Shooter); another film was written by American indie darling Miranda July and stars John C Reilly.

Youtube encourage filmmakers, to propose submissions already online at youtube as long as the film is wholly owned by the filmmaker or distributor, to ytscreeningroom@youtube.com

Off topic.

An excellent video here, found via the Radiohead blog. It comes with a personal recommendation from band members Colin and Jonny. It's a remix of the song Nude from the new Radiohead album that appears to be played entirely with preprogrammed technology. Whether it's "for real" (what ever that could mean in this context) I'm not sure, but the effect is fantastic.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Searchers 2.0

Alex Cox's HDV western, mentioned in an earlier post, will be broadcast in the UK on Monday 16th of June on BBC4 at 10pm. The movie was shot with Sony Z1s in 1080i mode and premiered at the 2007 Venice Film Festival.

Alex Cox has apparently recorded a special "Moviedrome" style intro for the film, as well as for some other classic westerns showing this weekend.

Avid in trouble?

I've no idea if stock price really does mean that a company is in trouble. However this site reports financial woes at Avid. www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/17543/

It's actually old news, but it's picking up. This came on the heals of news that Avid pulled out of NAB (the big US Broadcasting and video trade fair) in order to "focus on other ways of reaching their clients" (Apple also pulled out of NAB this year, though neither had big product launches to promote anyway). Since then Avid slashed the price of the software only version of Media Composer, in order to compete with FCP in the low budget market. (Avid also has the lowest price for student packages, though the educational licence is FAR more restrictive on use than the Apple education price licence, which is basically just the usual retail licence at a discount.)

MacDaily is right that FCP is gaining traction in the higher budget TV and Film world, but it's got nowhere near the dominance that Avid has. Apple has the lowest price and has kitted out Final Cut Suite with a treasure trove of additional software, but still cannot challenge Avid for rock solid media management. There is also the issue that there many film school and self trained Final Cut editors with lots of experience, but only in a capture-cut-'n'-export DV projects are getting work but without the proper training in workflow and data management that's required in a professional environment.

R.I.P. Bo Diddley

Off topic, but still, the otherwise immortal Bo Diddley has passed away.

Red/Che

I've not posted much about the Red One as it seems far above the league of most true independent/no budget filmmakers (after all, Alex Cox made a whole feature for about the cost of three properly kitted out units.) Fitting with this, on the website, a lot of the interviews and promotional material is aimed at/comes from big budget filmmakers (Steven Soderberg, Doug Liman, some other full time Hollywood artists/craftspeople) so rather than a revolution, it seems the camera is more likely to cause something more akin to a cabinet reshuffle.

However it is interesting to note that while the first work is in on Soderberg's Che Guevara Biopic(s) which had it's (their) première at Cannes, very little if any commented on the digital production (e.g. from Salon.com, the New York Times, Village Voice, and the Guardian). Only one review I found, from Variety, even mentions Red, and only to describe the look as "highly promising", a couple of others, another from Variety and this from Cinematical simply mention that it's HD, though cinematical does add "Che doesn't merely look wonderful; it also delivers on the long-promised but rarely delivered potential DV [sic] offers real artists..."

This could be down to Soderberg's publicity department not mentioning it; David Bordwell points out that a lot of the discussion by critics of the digital look of movies like Collateral, Miami Vice or Apocalypto would have been because the publicity packs they received would have pointed it out exhaustively. So this means that either critics really aren't interested in the visual look of a film unless a publicist points it out for them, or the Red cameras really do look as good as the same as film.

Which is great, but so much for the revolution: Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss!

Assistant editors replaced by XML app?

Found this one on the dvinfo.net forums.

www.theassistanteditor.com
the automatic editing app for Final Cut Pro. It throws together a highly competent round cut based on the footage you've logged and captured. This Application shows the power of XML. For lazy editors, it will throw together a round cut based on keywords out oput a XML fil that can be imported into the assistanteditor.app, the exported back to Final Cut Pro. It's not quite as advanced as Avid's Script Sync app, but seems to aim at a similar attitude of speeding up workflow based on prior work done before editing (ie logging, transcripting etc).

Quite who will use it I don't know, it might be good form corporate video editors or some event editors in a hurry, seems ideal for throwing together behind the scenes DVD documentaries, but I can't see real documentaries using it, and, unlike ScriptSync, it looks useless for dramas. To be fair the site does say it's a first cut:

They are not expected to be emotionally compelling nor release grade “finished”. The Assistant Editor behaves as a beginner editor, not a craft professional who knows how to manipulate motion and tell a story across the whole documentary

Though frankly I always thought the first cut was about finding the stiry across the whole documentary.

It does require you to have really good, detailed metadata programmed into FCP so what it does is force you to push your organisation up front. So those threatened assistant editors will find even more of their time taken up with proper logging and data entry.

Ironically in his interview I linked to previously, Walter Murch praised Final Cut for allowing him to pass sequences to assistant editors to they could learn to edit features, here is another feature of FCP that attemtops to cut them out (terrible pun intended)!

Demystifying camera specs,view in online flash

FreshDV has been given permission to host the Panavision/Canon talk I mentioned earlier. The films are lower (but still good) inline flash movies you can easily watch in your browser. Some of the detail if the powerpoint presentations is lost but it's still worth a look

 Watch online here. The first five videos are online, the next two to follow later this week.

DimP - Directly manipulate video.

I don't know what it's for but it looks cool.

Walter Murch on editing, continued.

The final parts of the Walter Murch interview I featured before are now online. Murch continues to discusses his move from film to NLE editing, particularly his early experience with Avid systems, to his decisions to move from the industry standard Avid, to adopt Final Cut Pro for all his films so far since Cold Mountain (his next film, he maintains, will be edited on FCP).

Part 4

Part 5

Open Cut 1.0

Maybe you've heard about the infamous Red One camera. If you fancy getting you hands on some Red One footage to edit, you can enter the opencut editing competition. They're presenting it as an "open source: film project. Basically the winning cut gets to be the official version to the world and the winners will be listed as the official editors. They've released it under the non commercial share-alike attribution version of the creative common's licence, so intheory once you find out everyone who helped make the film you could convievavbly re-edit it and send it out yourself.

Sign up, (registration is $25) and send the organisers a 160GB hard drive and they'll send you back  the footage in 4K HD. You'll need Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 (no other editing system is Red compatible at the moment) and a pretty powerful computer to edit it on.

Best use of Word for Mac ever...

After the heavy material in last week's post, something FUN!

A good example of independent creativity finding an audience via Youtube, it has in one week so far racked up 377,000 views. The band's original video (a rather tired 60's retro Euro-art movie homage), posted by Blue Note Records, their label has has so far garnered the same number of votes over a whole year.

Demystifying Digital Camera Specifications

Found this via Mike curtis' new Pro Video Coalition blog. It's a presentation given by Larry Thorpe of Canon and John Galt of Panavision (the direct link to part one is here) and a lot of the terms regarding digital imaging technology and what this all means. The big sentiment of the talk seems to be to debunk the idea that a camera's pixel resolution equals its imaging resolution.

Beware the download is a monster, It's been broken down into seven chapters, you can get each in 480p. 720p or 1080p but the server doesn't seem to be very fast. It would have been nice if Panavision could have release these clip's on Bittorrent so those interested could grab the movies from peer to peer and watch at their leisure.

It's actually a great primer on image and optics and how video imaging video systems work, so worth the work of getting it down, especially for ANYONE interested in cinematography.

Feature film making in HDV

ALex cox's latest film Searchers 2.0 is a comedy road movie, with nods and references (as usual with Cox) to Hollywood's past, especially westerns. It was filmed in Monument valley, but most interestingly was made in 50i HDV on a sony Z1.

The budget for the film was a measly $175,000 (less than £100,000) but this was a fully professional production, with veteran DOP Steve Fierberg head of the camera department, in a production that was backed by the BBC and low budget legend Roger Corman, and produced Robocop/Starship Troopers producer Jon Davison.

An interview at DV.com with Fierberg and gets the lowdown on why the Z1 was chosen over other more glamorous cams like the JVCs and Canons, and how the Z1 performed (quite well, apparently to the DP's surprise). One useful tip, to judge exposure, Fierberg set the zebra stripes to 105% and then tried to get everything under that, skies were darkened with a polarising filter and the final show was colour corrected in Avid Nitris. Cox also spills some of the beans on the production in an interview on his own website. He also talks about the production on his blog, though there are no links to the relevant articles, so you have to scroll down articles around mid 2006 and ending about 2007 for the relevant entries. One encouraging quote on the film's 2007 Venice Film Festival showing, "The screen is huge, and our film - shot on my funky Z-1 video camera - is in perfect focus, and the film sounds ten times better in the larger space."

Fierberg has also written about the film in the April 2008 edition of American Cinematographer, though the article is not available online.

The BBC will broadcast the movie this June, as it's a BBC co-production, hopefully it will also be available online via the iPlayer.

Another feature shot on the Z1 in 50i was the Irish low budget (€100,000) hit Once.

Blu Ray is not benefiting from the death of HD-DVD

Despite winning the format war, it seems Blue ray is not surging ahead as the new video format of choice. It seems that upconverting DVD players are still seelimg very well, and BLue ray isn't even selling as well as HD DVD did when the format was was still. So it seems SD still has a lot of life left in it, and HD still has a long way to to go. Read the story here

So Blu Ray could in fact still fail as a format if consumers prefer to stick with tried and trusted standard def' DVD until the weight of HD from other sources (mainstream terrestrial broadcast, online video, cable video on demand, satellitesports boradcasts in pubs and the like) finally overwhelms it, by which time blue ray may have withered on the vide, and online HD could be a significant challenge.

Realtime animation.

In don't know if this relly should go in this blog, but thanks to Quba at imagonewmedia for the heads up on this. It creeps me out but it's pretty astonishing all the same.

www.motionportrait.com/about/TIminoriHair.swf

Walter Murch on the History of Editing

A fascinating interview: apparently, film editing was invented in Brighton, and non-linear hard disc based computer editing was in use in 1969!

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

I love the sound of his still image gallery database, a frame selected from every set up taken in the film, and then printed out, while also stored in a database and cross referenced to other edit log notes (you can see this in use in the documentary The Cutting Edge.) Someone needs to add this feature to Final Cut Pro or Avid, and SOON! How about a tool that allows you to output poster frames from QuickTime to iPhoto (soon to be on PC too), where you could then send them off to be printed by your local photo developing company of choice.

Extreme Indie Small Crew Filmmaking.

Two stories here about some low budget feature films with one-person crews. The first is on new animated Sita Sings The Blues, a strange blend of 20's American Blues and Hindu mythology. The 80 minute long film was animated entirely by one artist, also the writer , producer and director Nina Paley. After six years of production, for a budget of $200,000, the film received its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film was made mostly in flash with some hand painted images scanned an animated in After Effects. The project started on a lowly Powerbook Laptop, but was finished (in HD) on a Intel Mac Pro (story via www.wired.com).

While obvious it is a tremendous achievement to design and animated a feature length film on your own. Sita is made with the necessary support of voice actors, a sound designer and a composer. The Lone Filmmaker on the other hand is trying to make a film entirely on his own: writing, acting, directing, costume design, makeup, cinematography, editing, composing. While one can't doubt the commitment and enthusiasm of the filmmaker, Robert Hindle, this seems a pretty cart-before-the-horse project.



Inspired by the video-blogging success of Four Eyed Monsters, the gimmick of a true one man feature is designed to garner attention on Youtube rather than produce a really great film. (also, one would think it advisable to make a normal film first before embarking on this extreme sports filmmaking style project). Four Eyed Monsters started as a film and became a blog about distributing the film. It seems the films that his girlfriend is making about him are the starting point for this project (Some have already hinted at a Lonelygirl15 style fakery). Unfortunately his audience in the regard is dropping off. After getting around 400,000 views for his inaugural video post, his subsequent video views have dropped to around 15,000-30,000 per video.

That said there is a lot of useful info buried in these blogs for those not on such a low budget, low manpower project (like what insurance cover you can get), though it often is swamped out by some rather cringey LG15 style goofing around with his girlfriend.

Previous Single Handed (or as-near-as) productions of note are the very professionally produced Lisa Gerrard documentary Sanctuary and the truly bizarre experimental animation We Are The Strange. by M.Dot.Strange.

The Future of 3D.

It's not news that 3D (or better stereoscopic) film is making a return to cinemas (of course it's been a mainstay of Imax for nearly a decade). However it is hotting up and starting to make roads into the feature film mainstream beyond CG animation projects.

A three good articles to read:

From Variety Online, this interview with James Cameron, who has made a number of 3D films (the two undersea documentaries on HD for Imax and the Terminator2: 3D ride for Universal studios) talks about the challenges and opportunities of 3D (or stereo as he prefers to call it) while he is shooting his first 3D feature film. Cameron is at the very top end of the filmmaking spectrum, commercially and technologically. Almost every feature film he's made from Terminator 2 on has been the biggest budget movie to date. This latest project , Avatar, STARTS with a budget of $195m (and I don't think Cameron has brought a movie in on budget since Aliens!)

Second. two articles on Lower budget production. Also from Variety online: The Mortician (a British film) and Dark Country have single figure million dollar budgets and are thriller/horror films, genres more traditionally have been associated with gimmicks like 3D. An interesting quote from the article: "For 3-D evangelists, this is both good news and bad. Good news: There is growing acceptance of the digital 3-D format. Bad news: The arrival of low-budget 3-D indies could undermine efforts to position 3-D as a premium format that can command higher ticket prices." There is another article here, from Showreel Magazine specifically on the making of Dark Country (which is also using the new RED ONE cameras). Dark Country is interesting as it is specifically the sort of situation Cameron discusses in his article, of low budget character centered drama by a first time director, previously an actor ratherthan someone from aVFX or technical backgroud, that stands is contrast to Cameron's own position as a filmmaker with a huge budget and resources as well as a phenomenal understand of the technical processes of film production.

Free Music from Moby

Moby has released some of his music for free (as in free beer) on his website, or on a special site www. mobygratis.com.  Here's the man imself explaining it...

He actually first did this months ago (here he is promoting it in an older, slightly rougher, self made Youtube clip) but is still promoting it. The sign up is a little fiddly and he has a few stipulations (one one on "no violence" is a little weirds from the man who remixed the James Bond theme and gave music to Heat and the Bourne Trilogy) but I guess he means real acts of violence rather than fictional fight scenes.

No charge as long as the film is non-commercial/independent/not-for-profit, and you'll ave to buy the rights should your film ever actually make any money. These generally seem to be odd pieces of musical noodling (no he's not giving away "Natural Blues") and unfinished bits of tracks. I guess this s an atonement of sorts for letting the entire Play album be licensed to advertisers. But still, it's good of him and part of a growing trend for musicians to allow fans access to their music (see also Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails giving away re-mixable versions of their music).

Daily Motion, another HD video sharing site.

Whoops. this one slipped past me: www.dailymotion.com, a French video sharing site (don't worry the site is in English) is also now offering HD video sharing. You need to get registered as a "MotionMaker" but you do this simply by uploading an original piece of work and labelling as creative content. Once you're approved you get to have 720p video (up to 25fps) and unlimited time and file size uploads (Normal users are limited to 250MB or 20 minutes per movie)

It's easy. I uploaded Lenny's Luck, labeled it "creative content". Within two hours I'd been given MotionMaker status. Very flattering, - the video has since been removed. Based on a quick comparison, I couldn't see any difference between the picture quality of the online file from Vimeo or Daily Motion (both encoded from the same source file), the files are both 1280x720 On2 VP6 with stereo 44.1 MP3 stereo sound at about 840Kb/s; sharpness, brightness, gamma and colour all seemed identical.

Of course Vimeo still offers a couple of other sweeteners that separate it, such as the ability to download the full quality original source file and the option to swap out the movie with a newer updated version (something that's happened to Lenny's Luck a few times!).

Update: Tuesday 8. April 08 - actually after a bit of playing, Dailymotion is beginning to sneak in a couple of extra plusses. Its embedded player is HD capable, whereas with Vimeo you need to go to the Vimeo site to see content in HD, and I'm finding on older hardware (such as my 2 year old iMac PPC G5) that the Dailymotion video plays at a much better frame rate - at 24p, on my G5 Dailymotion is dropping a frame or so a second, whereas on Vimeo 24p plays consistently at about 12fps. However, faster moving material, such as the (dreadful) Wanted trailer that's been hosted in HD drops a LOT more frames on that computer, so your milage may vary.

I still much prefer Vimeo's site design. It definitely gives a feel that the site, and the movie's page is about YOUR movie, wheras Dailymotion has a definite youtube-esque/viral video/"hey there's a ton of other crap you could surf to right now" vibe to it.

2nd Update: Friday 11. April - scratch that frame rate advantage. Dailymotion are now running extremely intrusive animated Flash adverts on the movie pages (Vimeo already ran flash ads on movie pages but farther down the page rather than right next to your film). This means a major performance drop for HD and even some SD material. At least Youtube shares advertising revenue with users if it posts ads on your page (which it only does in agreement with the user) or Vimeo posts ads but leaves your page free of links to other films.

H.264 HD flash demos

Some extraordinary results for flash using the H.264 codec can be seen on this page. Double click the image for it to play in full screen. 

The encoding was done by Fabio Sonnati (his English language blog is here) and he gets a 1280x 720 version of the trailer for  the Sigur Rós concert/tour film Heima into a 500kb/s stream. To put that in context, Youtube's older .flv streams are usually at about 200-250kb/s at 320x240. So at just over twice the bandwidth, Mr Sonnati has managed to cram 12 times the image!

Now there are a few caveats. 

• The Heima footage is very compression friendly: clean, grainless images, largely still frames or slow pans with little fast cutting and almost no fades or dissolves. Faster cutting, grainer footage or more movement (especially hand-held) would look much worse. (I posted before about how to get Youtube or web video in general to look better and Heima it seems follows almost all those rules - it still looks GREAT in HD though.)
  
• This was hand crafted compression. On his blog S. Sonnati explains that he worked very hard and carefully optimised the settings for the footage at hand. This wasn't a pre-baked server side formula as used by Youtube/Vimeo et al.
  
• Despite the above, severe compression artefacts are very clearly visible on the footage, expecially in mid range detail, high frequency/contrasty detail shows up quite clearly but slightly softer textures and backgrounds quite obviously suffer at this extraordinarily low bit rate, and smooth gradients (such as skies and clouds) have noticeable quantizations blocks in them.
  

Still, let me just say that again, 720 HD at 500kb/s. The entire four minute video is only 15MB! 

S. Sonnati reckons "generic" 720p footage  (so a bit more aggressive, but not The Bourne Ultimatum or 24) would look OK at about 1 Mb/s and above (i.e. 2 times the data rate here) for similar results, 1080p would look OK at 2Mb/s and above.

By comparison, FFmpegX recommends 2.5 Mb/s for 720p and 5.8 at 1080p (assuming 24fps) if using all the features, encodes can be a little more efficient than that. Apple trailers in H.264 run at about 5MB for 720p  and 8-10MB for 1080p.

There are more examples at www.lithium.it/fvf/demoH264/demo.html, including a 1.5 Mb/s 1080p version of the Heima trailer, the far more visually aggressive trailer for a Nine Inch Nails concert film (1080p 2Mb/s), as well as some very sedate 720p BBC wildlife footage encoded at slightly higher bit rates. Be warned, you need a fairly powerful computer to watch the footage at their full frame rates (they work OK for me well on an 2Ghz intel core duo iMac with 2GB of ram) and the server they on doesn't really have enough bandwidth and there is a lot of buffering on the higher bandwidth videos.

Open Source Compositing

Blender is well known as a free, open source 3d modelling and animation application that can produce results to rival commercial products such as Maya, Lightwave or 3DS Max. However it also recently had a node based compositing system added. Blender is open source so is not necessarily the most user friendly piece of software to learn and documentation is often literally years behind the actual product.

However this will hopefully be address in the future, and it would be a great addition for low budget film makers who want to do keying and matte work, even if they don't have any need for Blender's 3d creation tools.

Hopefully at some point I'll get a chance to try the compositing side of the app to see what it offers us no-budget-blue-screeners.

Apple Color Tutorials.

There are a series of tutorials for Apple Color (Part of the Final Cut Studio suite) on CreativeCow .net by Walter Biscardi. They are very elementary and really only serve as an introduction. Mr Biscardi has also released a more comprehensive tutorial disc called Stop Staring and Start Grading with Apple Color. It has a rather naff trailer but comes recommended by Paul Harrill in a review at the excellent Self Reliant Film blog.

Useful Color Correction resources.

I'm going to try and post some useful info on colour correction as a sort of follow up to a previous post about low budget colour correction using Apple's Color [sic]. I'll start off with a great video about colour perception from apple that's been posted on Youtube.

Open TV Network and KlickTab

For independent producers looking to distribute their films via Apple's iTunes, there has always been a barrier. Apple's attitude has been something along the lines of "We'll sell the products of the major distributors but independent producers will have to give their's away free."

However it is possible to get podcasts into iTunes, and this company Open TV Network has developed a technology called Klick Tab which allows you to sell video through the iTunes interface. You're NOT selling video through the the iTunes store, so customers need to sign up with Open TV network first, and hand credit card info over to them. Open TV Network then takes a 15% commission from all sales.

Basically it's a way of monetising RSS podcast subscriptions.

More on Blu Ray licencing

Final Cut guru Larry Jordan has posted some information about Blu Ray licences, this time from Bruce Nazarian, the head of the DVD association, a lobby group that promotes the DVD format.

"For example, producers of industrial and non-broadcast content are required to pay a $2,500 licensing fee to author and distribute Blu-Ray [...] Then, each producer is required to pay a $3,000 one-time AACS license fee, plus a per-title fee for EACH replicated Blu-Ray disc. Currently, Sony DADC is quoting that fee at $1,585 per title (per complete Blu-ray disc project)."

This information would seem to apply to mass produced BD-ROM discs going by the information in my previous post on the subject. It should be pointed out that similar licences (using the DVD logo on your packaging, applying Macrovision and CSS copy protection to the discs). However it does seem to discriminate against smaller low volume producers, those who want to manufacture professional products but not by the million.

However, on the digital production buzz podcast, Mr Nazarian said that he understood that if a Blu Ray authored file then gets converted to become a disc image, AACS again becomes mandatory. So you would have to burn each BD-R at a time or pay the licencing fees. This would start to affect wedding video videographers, film students, educational filmmakers and small scale documentarians.

Higher quality Youtube?

[update: It's working again!]

Seems there is a hack to get better quality out of Youtube!

add "&fmt=18" or "&fmt=6" to the end of the URL you of the vid you're watching and see the improvement in quality (tis doesn't work for ALL videos, some obviously haven't been re-encoded yet).

Below is an example, a project by some of my students.

Normal Youtube video is encoded as FLV (OnVP6) 320 × 240, 200 kbps, Audio mono, 22.05 kHz, 61 kbps

The higher quality video is encoded as MP4 (H.264), 480 × 360, 400 kbps, audio is stereo, 44.1 kHz, 118 kbps

So better resolution, better datarate, better codec, better audio.

However at present you can't embed the H.264 versions.

[UPDATE: On Thursday 6th March 2007. The "feature" seemed to have been disable. However by friday it is working again!]

Blu Ray licencing issues...

Ther has been some panic amongst independent media producers I (and I mean truly independent, as in wedding videographers, film students, educational producers, documentarians, etc) about certain licencing issues with Blu Ray. The rumour has been going around that Blu Ray requires AACS (Advance Access Content System, i.e. the copy protection system that Blu Ray uses that's already been cracked several times over) as a mandatory inclusion in order for the discs to play in certified Blu Ray players. The stinger comes that the licence for including AACS on your discs is $1000 per title.

Seems that there was too much worrying too soon. This post from a Mr Brian Standing on the DV Info boards contains communications with a Mr Kappei Morishita, licencing officer of the Blu Ray consortium. He doesn't answer all the questions, but the gist seems to be:

Yes, it will be possible to make and distribute BD-R discs without AACS that are at base compatible with the Blu Ray players in general. HOWEVER at the moment not all Blu Ray players support BD-R but will only play manufactured commercial Blu Ray discs (so called BD-ROM). However this was true of DVD in the first half decade of it's existence. In time, BD-Rs will approach hear universal compatibility, as DVD-R/+Rs do now.

These have to be produced by approved replicator firms, who will only do runs of 10,000 discs or more, at which point, if I'm reading my Morishita's response right, AACS does become mandatory, but for licencing rather than technical reasons.

Blu Ray Discs on a standard DVD?

I found this post on the DVinfo.net forums which explains how to author Blu Ray compatible discs onto standard DVD-Rs. A single layer DVD5 will hold about 29 minutes of 1080 material.

It requires a PC and Nero 8 but the writer claims to have tested it on a number of BD players. responses point out that such discs will NOT work on a PlayStation 3 (which is by far the most common form of Blu Ray player).

Mac users used to have the option of doing this with DVD Studio Pro 4 for HD-DVD compatible DVD-Rs... well I guess they still have that option.

Microsoft Dumps HD-DVD

This doesn't really add anything to the format war story, but might give some a shiver of shadenfreude.

Microsoft was heavily invested in HD-DVD and designed the interactivity layer HDi (which unlike the interactivity layer in Blu Ray is actually complete). Microsoft will stop selling the HD-DVD add-on of the Xbox 360, and presumably will soon release a Blu Ray add on.

Stage6 to shut down.

I found this story via the excellent cinematech.blogspot.com. DivX Inc. the company being the DivX codec is to shut down its video sharing site Stage6. DivX Inc. have made their own announcement on the Stage6 blog but there is a great deal of difficulty getting the link to work right now (possibly the server is overwhelmed with irate Stage6 users) but the link is http://www.stage6.com/blog/108/

Stage6's problem was that it allowed users to set their own parameters (that and needing to install it's own dedicated plug in). That meant uploaders could push the quality settings off the scale in order to preserve as much quality of the original as possible. However viewers would spend most of their time watching a "buffering" logo.

Say what you like about Youtube (or Vimeo, BlipTV or Veoh, etc), the compromises they impose are designed to give the viewers a hassle free experience - "Give me convenience or give me death" as the Dead Kennedy's said...

Stage6 had the potential to be a great service, and I get the feeling that as company in general, DivX are on the side of the angels (well, at least on the side of content creators) but I'm not surprised it's being switched off...

BBC iPlayer getting 1.3 million unique viewers a week...

According to BBC figures quoted in this Guardian Unlimited article. In addition it reports that "iPhone and iPod Touch owners will be able to access iPlayer content within the next few weeks. This will be the first time the broadband TV service has been available beyond PC and Mac computers." This means a move away from WMV for the high quality Windows only download to the H.264 codec (WMV is available on Mac and linux, but not the DRM). This would also make the downloaded videos compatible with AppleTV, even though AppleTV is not mentioned in any of the many articles carrying this story, Ashley Highfield, the BBC's Director of Future Media & Technology, discussed the possibility previously:

"Apple's (long anticipated) move to a rental model, means that we can look to getting BBC iPlayer onto this platform too, as we should be able to use the rental functionality to allow our programmes to be downloaded, free, but retained for a time window, and then erased, as our rightsholders currently insist."

This would make three services that are AppleTV compatible, after iTunes (which is already selling BBC shows) and arthouse movie download service Jaman. The Jaman plug-in is an unsupported hack not an official update (and I've no idea if it's been kiboshed by the recent AppleTV makeover). It's odd that Apple haven't been more welcoming to services like Jaman, since iTunes basically sells iPods as much as it sells music, the more third party services that are supported on AppleTV the more attractive it is as a commodity.

This article from The Register included an addendum which says "the BBC got in touch to say it will always offer a Flash version", presumably in the browser embedded player, but since flash is moving away from the old Sorenson Spark codec to H.264 too, the statement may mean the embedded player will remain SWF based, even if the codec is updated.

This hopefully will mean a significant step forward for H.264 becoming a de facto web standard for online video, since it will be seamlessly supported by Quicktime (installed on all Macs and 60% of PCs) and Flash (installed on 90% of internet connected computers).

HD versus film for TV

This is an old article but an illuminating one. This is a report (in word doc format) from the august British Society of Cinematographers, on a BBC HD day in September 2006, where the message was sent out by Alan Yentob no less, "Drama on Film has got to stop!" (here it is in google HTML format). The reason is, apparently that the MP4 encoders that the BBC will use for HD cannot handle the random grain pattern of film. However (as pointed out in the article) this will also count for pseudo film effects added in post, or in low light situations where gain has to be used for HD. Basically the BBC (in the guise of chief technologist Andy Quested) is decreeing to producers how shows have to look in order not to annoy picky license fee payers who've just bought expensive HD ready TVs and get grumpy about things like a grainy image. So more Hotel Babylon gloss, less Life On Mars grit.

Life on Mars incidentally, and its follow up Ashes to Ashes are both shot on Super16 specifically for aesthetic reasons. (ITV's twinned shows Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach are shot of film and HD respectively for similar reasons). It would be interesting to know how Kudos, the production company behind Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes managed to get that one past the boffins at the Beeb. Has policy changed since again 2006? This document from Kodak (PDF) lists Ashes to Ashes as using stocks from fine grained 50D all the way to grungy and fast 500T ASA stocks. Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes do use a lot of slow motion effects that may have compelled them to use film over HD. Bear in mind that all this time, Dr Who, one of the Beeb's biggest shows is still being shot on 576i SD and deinterlaced in post.