Ask questions to BD authoring and compression insider "2themax"

[PaulGo]

1920x1080 camera resolution seems low for a big screen "movie". Is the resolution of film equivalent to that or is it higher? The reason I ask this I remember when Indian Jones and Star Wars (I think) was restored it was saved at a higher resolution that 1920x1080.

[kurtlingle]

Originally Posted by 2themax

.... BD-J is a whole other world. I personally enjoy the challenge. Compatibility across players has definitely been the biggest problem. It is getting better with more BD-J releases hitting the market and recommended practices being set forth by the BDA.....

2themax - thanks for joining us here - we hope you feel welcome!

My question is about BDJ. I'm a Java J2EE developer so I'm wondering if you actually are coding in Java or do you use tools to do the code for you? Or do you oversee developers who code?

If they/ code do they use an IDE like Eclipse?

I've always wondered what it's like to work with BDJ.

Thanks!

[2themax]

Originally Posted by hollywoodguy

Thank you so much for this quote. This is what I have always found lacking in many titles that have very low ABR's, such as Alexander Revisited or Troy Director's Cut. A title like Die Hard I, which is very soft to begin with and also severely suffers from what I would call "The Eighties" still had a tremendous depth to it that I found very satifiying. On the other side of the coin you have a title like Alexander, which was very clean and also technically sharp (digital captures looked terrific, for instance), but watching it in motion was really unsatifying. At times it had a creepy video look. I wouldn't even know how to rate that as a reviewer, since it looks, in a way, "perfect," but also "wrong" at the same time. Do these impressions gel with your professional opinion?

Yes they do. As encoders get better, we'll be able to lower bitrates and keep the depth. But for now, when I'm allowed to give my opinion, I always push for high bitrate video and lossless sound as top priorities.

[2themax]

Originally Posted by PaulGo

1920x1080 camera resolution seems low for a big screen "movie". Is the resolution of film equivalent to that or is it higher? The reason I ask this I remember when Indian Jones and Star Wars (I think) was restored it was saved at a higher resolution that 1920x1080.

Film resolution is much higher. 4K seems to be an arguable match to film resolution, but even higher is in the works. 2K is more standard at this point.

[FourToedStatue]

Originally Posted by 2themax

That's what I was thinking of. I believe something similar was also used on Superman Returns.

I read somewhere that the limited edition PCM Supermam returns would eventually replace the lossy ones out right now. Did those plans get scrapped?

[2themax]

Originally Posted by kurtlingle

2themax - thanks for joining us here - we hope you feel welcome!

My question is about BDJ. I'm a Java J2EE developer so I'm wondering if you actually are coding in Java or do you use tools to do the code for you? Or do you oversee developers who code?

If they/ code do they use an IDE like Eclipse?

I've always wondered what it's like to work with BDJ.

Thanks!

Thanks for the welcome.

I'm actually doing the coding myself and am writing the code in Java directly. Things aren't are developed enough yet in the industry to rely on someone else's tools to interpret. The coding is done in Eclipse with specific plugins for BD-J.

[2themax]

Originally Posted by JackBauer24

I read somewhere that the limited edition PCM Supermam returns would eventually replace the lossy ones out right now. Did those plans get scrapped?

I don't know any specifics about it myself. I would assume that the original production run has not sold through at retail yet. I have read reports on the AVS forum that the new PCM version was in a few BB stores. Let's hope that continues as the title is restocked.

[pokerface]

Welcome! Thanks for taking your time to help us out. I am sure we all appreciate learning from your posts.

[patrick99]

Originally Posted by 2themax

Yes they do. As encoders get better, we'll be able to lower bitrates and keep the depth. But for now, when I'm allowed to give my opinion, I always push for high bitrate video and lossless sound as top priorities.

I think many of us here are very glad to hear that.

[plee]

2themax,

Curious on what kind of PC you guys typically use for authoring? I've been using DVDit Pro HD and come across some annoying bugs, do you guys face the same problems with support from the software companies or are they more responsive since your doing real movies

[2themax]

Originally Posted by plee

2themax,

Curious on what kind of PC you guys typically use for authoring? I've been using DVDit Pro HD and come across some annoying bugs, do you guys face the same problems with support from the software companies or are they more responsive since your doing real movies

We use all HP Workstations, XW9300s and XW8400s, for authoring and video compression. There are also a few Mac Pros for audio encoding.

We face problems too, but given the hundreds of thousands spent just on the software and the additional thousands on support, they tend to listen and fix things quickly .

[blindcat87]

2themax,

I would like to ask you if it might be possible to get a request from the visually impaired community to the title authoring community?

It concerns TV season sets and other multititle sets with episodic content on a single disc. Since TV BD is still just beginning to appear, I figure it is a good time to try to get this request in and hope.

When authoring episodic titles, it makes things very difficult for viewers who cannot read or have trouble reading menus when the title requires action to watch each separate episode on a disc. I know that studios and authors want people to know about all of the great content available for each episode and that seems to be the main reason they want to make you go into the episode submenus to get to the episode. I don't blame them, but with the multitude of ways in which a menu and submenus can be set up, this becomes a nightmare for visually impaired viewers.

The default option for all titles like this should be 'play all episodes', this means that I don't have to remember if I need to go into a sub menu to find the episodes on a particular title, and then remember when the episode ends if the menu goes back to the episode submenu or the main menu, and then have to remember if the title autoadvances the selection to the next episode or if I need to navigate up, down, left, or right to get to the next episode. It gets really frustrating, especially when other titles allow me to load up the disc, hit select as soon as the menu comes up and then sit back and watch the three or four episodes on the disc hassle free.

Right now, off the top of my head, Fox and Paramount are the biggest culprits of this. This post was actually inspired by me getting the first 4 DVDs of Star Trek: TNG Season 1 from Netflix. I haven't bought any of the TV BD sets on my list yet, but one of the top on my list is Prison Break Season 1, and with Fox's track record, I am a little leery of buying it.

One more small thing disc authors could do is to make sure that, when a title is put into a computer drive, the name of the title is displayed as the disc name. Again, this is something that has been a hassle for me on DVD that I hope to see end on BD. I braille label my movies since it is a real strain for me to read even the clearest title on a movie cover, and the easiest way for me to make sure I am labelling the right title from a stack is to put it into my DVD drive, open Windows explorer and let my text to speech read the name of the disc in drive D. It is really frustrating to hear 'DVD Video' or 'DVD Volume' instead of the movie or series title. I recently labelled the Bones Season 2 set I got, and since I am paranoid and wanted to be sure the discs were all in the right order, I started putting them in the drive one at a time and found that they were all titled 'Bones', no S1 or D1 for season and disc, just 'Bones'. Not too helpful. I could just put them all in the player, but that doesn't help with movies I am not too familiar with or when I am not sure of episode orders and such, plus it is actually more time consuming to do it that way. This is not really a big thing, but I figure it is not too hard to change the way this gets done.

I don't really get angry or anything, I realize that visually impaired viewers are not the group that first come to mind when doing disc authoring, I just get frustrated and keep thinking maybe I should write a letter and bring this to someone's attention. Well, the forum gives me the perfect opportunity, so thus this post.

Thanks,

Chris

[FourToedStatue]

Hi 2themax,


Concerning tv shows on blu ray, is completely up to the studio how many episodes are on a disc? Smallville took advantage of this by having less discs than the HD DVD counterpart and as far as I can tell the picture quality did not suffer for it.

[patrick99]

Originally Posted by 2themax

Yes they do. As encoders get better, we'll be able to lower bitrates and keep the depth. But for now, when I'm allowed to give my opinion, I always push for high bitrate video and lossless sound as top priorities.

A question that has been the subject of some controversy here lately is the question of at what point the length of a movie begins to raise a possible need to use more than one BD50 disc. Paidgeek has said that LoA will fit on one disc with no compromise in PQ or AQ. There was a recent heated discussion here about whether the LOTR EE's would benefit in terms of PQ and AQ from being spread over two discs each. It would seem this issue would be presented in every case with any TV series.

Are there any insights you can offer us from your perspective on this subject?

Many thanks once again for your participation here.

[plee]

Originally Posted by 2themax

We use all HP Workstations, XW9300s and XW8400s, for authoring and video compression. There are also a few Mac Pros for audio encoding.

We face problems too, but given the hundreds of thousands spent just on the software and the additional thousands on support, they tend to listen and fix things quickly .

^


What is the typical time frame for a project?

[2themax]

Originally Posted by blindcat87

2themax,

I would like to ask you if it might be possible to get a request from the visually impaired community to the title authoring community?

It concerns TV season sets and other multititle sets with episodic content on a single disc. Since TV BD is still just beginning to appear, I figure it is a good time to try to get this request in and hope.

When authoring episodic titles, it makes things very difficult for viewers who cannot read or have trouble reading menus when the title requires action to watch each separate episode on a disc. I know that studios and authors want people to know about all of the great content available for each episode and that seems to be the main reason they want to make you go into the episode submenus to get to the episode. I don't blame them, but with the multitude of ways in which a menu and submenus can be set up, this becomes a nightmare for visually impaired viewers.

The default option for all titles like this should be 'play all episodes', this means that I don't have to remember if I need to go into a sub menu to find the episodes on a particular title, and then remember when the episode ends if the menu goes back to the episode submenu or the main menu, and then have to remember if the title autoadvances the selection to the next episode or if I need to navigate up, down, left, or right to get to the next episode. It gets really frustrating, especially when other titles allow me to load up the disc, hit select as soon as the menu comes up and then sit back and watch the three or four episodes on the disc hassle free.

Right now, off the top of my head, Fox and Paramount are the biggest culprits of this. This post was actually inspired by me getting the first 4 DVDs of Star Trek: TNG Season 1 from Netflix. I haven't bought any of the TV BD sets on my list yet, but one of the top on my list is Prison Break Season 1, and with Fox's track record, I am a little leery of buying it.

One more small thing disc authors could do is to make sure that, when a title is put into a computer drive, the name of the title is displayed as the disc name. Again, this is something that has been a hassle for me on DVD that I hope to see end on BD. I braille label my movies since it is a real strain for me to read even the clearest title on a movie cover, and the easiest way for me to make sure I am labelling the right title from a stack is to put it into my DVD drive, open Windows explorer and let my text to speech read the name of the disc in drive D. It is really frustrating to hear 'DVD Video' or 'DVD Volume' instead of the movie or series title. I recently labelled the Bones Season 2 set I got, and since I am paranoid and wanted to be sure the discs were all in the right order, I started putting them in the drive one at a time and found that they were all titled 'Bones', no S1 or D1 for season and disc, just 'Bones'. Not too helpful. I could just put them all in the player, but that doesn't help with movies I am not too familiar with or when I am not sure of episode orders and such, plus it is actually more time consuming to do it that way. This is not really a big thing, but I figure it is not too hard to change the way this gets done.

I don't really get angry or anything, I realize that visually impaired viewers are not the group that first come to mind when doing disc authoring, I just get frustrated and keep thinking maybe I should write a letter and bring this to someone's attention. Well, the forum gives me the perfect opportunity, so thus this post.

Thanks,

Chris

Chris,

Going forward, I think Blu-ray will actually help in your situation. It supports the use of metadata stored on the disc that can allow a player to display chapter names or even the user to search for an actor by scene. It's a fairly comprehensive list if implemented correctly. It of course relies heavily on the authoring house and player manufactures supporting it. But, it has already begun. You may have seen that the PS3 will, on some titles, display the name and a thumbnail of the movie in the drive. That right there is the beginning of what I hope is a more widely used Blu-ray feature that rarely ever gets mentioned.

[2themax]

Originally Posted by JackBauer24

Hi 2themax,


Concerning tv shows on blu ray, is completely up to the studio how many episodes are on a disc? Smallville took advantage of this by having less discs than the HD DVD counterpart and as far as I can tell the picture quality did not suffer for it.

In general, yes it is up to the studio. They are also looking at a replication budget in deciding how many discs or if it's a single or dual layer disc. If we think their decision is going to effect the overall quality of the disc, we'll let them know. But ultimately, it's their decision.

[DaViD Boulet]

welcome!

I'm wondering if you can point to why studios like Disney, Fox, Sony, and MGM provide lossless-quality audio (in whatever form) on BD but studios like WB fail to provide it even for the majority of their titles.

Those of us who enjoyed laserdisc know that lossless audio improves fidelity even when the source material is generally what folks would consider "limited quality", such as optical mono soundtracks or old mag stems from the B&W era. I'm astonished at how much more open and natural the PCM of It's A Wonderful Life sounds, for instance, on laserdisc versus the lossy Dolby on DVD. When I see Warner continue the practice of lossy audio on BD, it does not bode well for the HT community.

Can WB be "taught" that lossy really does matter and that it's a feature that should be considered standard regardless of how well or poorly their techs deem the quality of the source-material to be encoded?

[2themax]

Originally Posted by patrick99

A question that has been the subject of some controversy here lately is the question of at what point the length of a movie begins to raise a possible need to use more than one BD50 disc. Paidgeek has said that LoA will fit on one disc with no compromise in PQ or AQ. There was a recent heated discussion here about whether the LOTR EE's would benefit in terms of PQ and AQ from being spread over two discs each. It would seem this issue would be presented in every case with any TV series.

Are there any insights you can offer us from your perspective on this subject?

Many thanks once again for your participation here.

How about I offer some numbers. We'll assume a few things first. Each title would be on BD50, there would be 3 Dolby Digital 5.1 @ 640kbps tracks, 1 Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track, and no extras on the disc with the feature. Also, LOA would be a 16bit audio track and LOTR would be at 24bit.

LOA:
- ABR: 24-25Mbps
- PBR: 40Mbps

LOTR EE (ROTK):
- ABR: 18-19Mbps
- PBR: 39Mbps

If you drop each to a single lossless track, it'll jump about 2Mbps on the ABR and the PBR on LOTR would jump to 40Mbps.

Granted, this is all speculation. Each studio may have completely different thoughts on what the disc should contain. For instance, New Line would more than likely do DTS-MA on LOTR. My opinion, LOA is fine as it is and LOTR should be split across 2 BD50s. With that split though, I'd add PIP and 7.1 lossless to the feature.

[2themax]

Originally Posted by plee

^


What is the typical time frame for a project?

There's a huge variation in project times. Something very simple may only take a week, whereas a full BD-J project could run out to a month or more and even farther if you're breaking new ground.