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.