Showing posts with label DVD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DVD. Show all posts

June 18, 2013

January 19, 2010

Blu-ray DVD authoring with Adobe Encore

Adobe's Dave Helmly of DAV's TechTable has a tutorial on the basics of Blu-ray DVD authoring with Adobe Encore, which is embedded below.

He previously covered Blu-ray Playback Problems on his blog. There's also an Adobe guide on Authoring Blu-ray Discs with Adobe Encore in an Apple Final Cut Workflow and Ken Stone's Burn Blu-ray playable discs on a Mac SuperDrive that shows you how to burn high definition video onto standard DVD-R discs that playback in a Blu-ray player.

August 19, 2009

Compressor’s BluRay Disc Open XML template format + free Swish Pan FCP transition [updated]

Andy Mees noted that Compressor’s BluRay Disc Open XML template format revealed... by Apple in a PDF guide to Compressor 3.5 in the Final Cut Studio 2009 bundle. For background see Jan Ozer on Blu-ray Creation with the New Apple Final Cut Studio at Millimeter, and Burn Blu-ray playable standard DVD-R discs on a Mac SuperDrive by Ken Stone.



Andy also has a free Swish Pan transition as well as other filters and resources for Final Cut.

Update: via lafcpug, Apple has released free add-ons for the new Final Cut Studio, Compressor Droplets, Color Looks (90 of them!), and 700 MB of Alpha Transitions.

December 18, 2008

Blu-Ray's "bag of hurt"

Karl Soule of Adobe explains one reason why Blu-Ray replication cannot be done today from an Encore disc or disc image -- a $3500 licensing fee for the 1st title and $1500 thereafter. See What's Wrong with the Blu-Ray Market Today? Part 1: Duplication vs. Replication, and AACS.

The good news is that Encore work can be duplicated in mass "onto store-bought burnable BD-ROM media... and the content will still play in most (but not all) Blu-Ray players."

Update: Final Cut User has some additional observations and a State of the Technology overview of Blu-Ray.

Update (01/09): The NYT looks at CES and Blu-ray’s Fuzzy Future.

And on the FCP-L, Philip Hodgetts explains a bit more:

"I'd say it's not going to happen on OS X - playback or authoring - because the entire internal OS has to have encrypted memory paths throughout the computer. None of this is in OS X and none is (apparently) planned for Snow Leopard. This internal encrypted memory path is reportedly one of the reasons that Vista's performance was significantly slower than XP. It's not so much stubborness on the part of Job but rather a disinclination to 'pollute' the elegance of OS X.
... [and] if Blu-ray won the disc war, then downloads would succeed!"

Update (1/20/2009): CrunchGear gives Nine (questionable) reasons why Blu-ray will succeed.

September 8, 2008

RealDVD legally copies DVDs +Amazon video

TechCrunch reports on RealDVD, which lets users legally copy DVDs to their hard drives, but with DRM intact. It lets you authorize five computers for a movie -- but its $49.99 for the first license and $19.99 for an additional four licenses!

Read more at TechCrunch...


And over at NewTeeVee there's a quick look at Amazon video compared to Hulu, iTunes, and Netflix: Hands on with Amazon Video on Demand.

Beet.TV seems excited about this with a "Real" interview in Bombshell from RealNetworks: Rip Save Burn Unlimited Hollywood Movies with $30 Program.

September 1, 2008

Open Encore DVD projects cross platform

As you may know, Adobe Encore DVD projects are officially not cross platform.

But, from the aether, there's an unsupported trick to open a Win/Mac project in OS X /Windows. If you delete the file “ProjectMedia.acx” from the project folder before opening the project it'll open, but then you'll need to locate asset files and transcode all over again.

May 12, 2008

Get movie files off a DVD

There a bunch of ways to get movie files off a DVD (mostly covered earlier), and they all use conversion unless you can use the VOB files directly. VOB files can be used directly if they aren't encrypted at the DVD replication factory; sometimes you can just import them into an app like Adobe Premiere (rename them to .MPG first) or Avid Liquid. On the Mac, you'd need Final Cut or Apple's QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component.

You can also convert the DVD file into some more common format like QuickTime using free apps like these:
MPEG Streamclip (Mac/Win)
HandBrake (Mac/Win)
FFmpegX (Mac)
Super (Win)
MediaCoder (Win)
Premiere Elements trial (Win)

Update: Some people prefer professional apps like Cinematize (Mac/Win) and TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress.

February 23, 2008

Blu-ray Blues - 7,085 of them -1

The Fini blog has The Blu•ray Blues -- because the "first project licensing alone will cost $7,085. That's in addition to the actual costs of replication/duplication and packaging that we're already used to paying." AACS copy protection was optional on HD DVD but mandatory on Blu-Ray replication.

Also, "Apparently some Bluray players want to see a copy protection folder, even if it is empty and some authoring apps don't put those folders on their burns."

But wait, there's more... at Fini and at PC Magazine's Who Will Pay Next-Gen DVD License Fees?

Update: from ZDNet, "in the news today was some information about JavaFX and the Blu-ray specification. It turns out that the Profile 2.0 spec for Blu-ray adds a networking ability so you could start building things on the players creating an interesting living room development model. What makes it interesting for Sun is that JavaFX is part of the Blu-ray spec so if you get networking support and JavaFX support some creative Java types could go to town."

November 18, 2007

Convert video from Mac to PC to DVD, for free

LifeHacker has a nice roundup in Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters, via FreshDV. Unfortunately it's not always sufficient to point someone to a roundup, unless you're looking for revenge.

Even if you're intimidated by your boss and are afraid to determine ahead of time the nature of their capabilities, you still might find out anyway in a crunch when the boss plays Mara to your Buddha. I have a friend who was asked to develop a presentation (in Apple Keynote) and send a DVD overseas. Of course it would be easier to send a QuickTime file but the boss is the boss, and he's pretty certain he can play a DVD disc.

Our problem is now the busy boss wants to download a file but doesn't know if he has a DVD burner or the ability to encode MPEG-2 or burn DVD-Video. You can do all this with a Mac but the boss uses Windows, and in Windows there no guarantee that the DVD burner can burn DVD-Video.

Now is when you turn to Open Source and freeware to make sure the boss can reach his imagined goal -- and you start to appreciate the niceties built into your Apple and Adobe tools. Using a search engine to find solutions brings up a variety of pay utilities that are often worse than the free stuff. You'd do better looking through these websites that have already collected and organized utilities and "guides" to show you how to do video tasks with free tools: Afterdawn.com, Doom9.org, MBbass.org, Digital Digest, and Videohelp.com.

In this case, we're lucky to find solution #1 on LifeHacker, in Hack Attack: Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD. This article recommends DVD Flick and shows you how to use it too. This seems like a great Windows tool since you can import Windows Media or QuickTime files, convert between NTSC and PAL, transcode to MPEG (with FFMPEG), and burn a DVD or ISO image all in one step. An alternative is Avi2Dvd (freeware), but it has a distracting UI. I haven't fully tested either utility myself, but DVD Flick seemed to work fine.

Burning a DVD this way may be leaving too much to fate, or to a boss with delicate sensibilities. It would be even safer to deliver solution #2: a DVD image, which the boss can then burn to DVD or play it from his hard drive.

To burn an image on Windows, an easy to use tool is ImgBurn, which is really DVD Decrypter without CSS cracking. ImgBurn works great, but only rips & burns ISO images. If on the Mac you don't end up with an ISO but only generate a "VIDEO_TS" DVD folder (I'd check Visual Hub but the website is down), in Windows you can still use DVD Shrink (like Popcorn usually used to convert a 9 GB DVD to 5GB) to convert the DVD folder to an ISO image. Both ImgBurn and DVD Shrink have a clean UI and are very easy to use.

If there is a problem burning a DVD, you can turn to solution #3: the ISO file can be played from the a hard drive. This can be done in any number of utilities, but I'd recommend using the cross platform utility VLC Media Player, which can play just about any filetype around.

Of course all of this could be easier if somehow the boss could install QuickTime and play a QT file from his notebook PC. Of the course, then he'd have to know how to connect the laptop to a projector or TV.

Somewhat more difficult would be exporting to Windows Media, though the boss would still face transcoding and building a DVD. On a Mac, you can export to Windows Media with WMV Studio at $49. Even harder is using Microsoft free Windows Media Encoder on Windows, because it doesn't import QT files. The new Microsoft Expression Encoder (XP SP2/Vista) does import QT though and has an 180-day trial version.

Finally, there's intriguing but untried YouConvertIt.com, "the world's first and most complete conversion, file storage, units conversion website allowing internet users to convert audio video images and documents into an array of formats also sending or delivering file(s)."

September 8, 2007

Extract movies from a DVD

MPEG Streamclip is a free video converter, player, editor for MPEG, QuickTime, transport streams, iPod. And now it is a DivX editor and encoding machine, and even a stream and YouTube downloader.

As a DVD ripper MPEG Streamclip is commonly used, and it "lets you visually set the In and Out points for the conversion so you can convert just the part of the file you are interested in, and also cut commercials and other unwanted parts, or edit the stream and join two streams with Cut/Copy/Paste."

A notch above in extraction features and some cost is Cinematize2 from Miraizon, which available for both Mac and Windows.

Note: MPEG Clipstream is not limited to exporting QuickTime; look under File>Export/Convert/Demux.

You can use the MPEG data on your DVD in Premiere without transcoding since Premiere can import .MPG files. Just copy the .VOB files from an unprotected DVD to a hard drive and rename them to .MPG, then import that into Premiere.

If you can't decode (ie, see) MPEG files then you have problems. Installing a codec pack like "K-Lite" should do the trick. Also Premiere Elements and other editors like Vegas and Liquid import from DVD, so you can download a tryout version and check it out.

On the Mac you'll need Final Cut or Apple's QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component for QT MPEG. I'm not sure what the free codec situation is now, beyond open source compressor/decompressors that come with ffmpegX and Visual Hub.

August 27, 2007

iDVD 7: Professional Quality option





Ken Stone has a review of iDVD 7 in iLife 08, where the good news is a 3rd compression option, 'Professional Quality.' iDVD just might be preferable to Adobe Encore because of stability. I'm just a little annoyed by my last project where motion menu thumbnails stop looping in Encore, but I probably would melt down completely without Encore's Photoshop integration.

May 17, 2007

Encore CS3 and Blu-ray on new Adobe blog

Dave Helmly, an Business Development Manager, has published his first entry on his blog, DAV's TechTable. According to The Genesis Project, Dave's video blog will be focusing on hardware and technology. This time out, there's an in-depth discussion on Working with Encore CS3 and Blu-ray.

June 13, 2006

They want you to transfer YouTube videos to DVD

What to tell friends that want you to transfer YouTube videos to DVD: "try it."

Use the Firefox browser and install the Firefox extension "VideoDownloader." You can find cool FF extensions in Firefox in Tools>Extensions>Get More Extensions.

Then load the YouTube movie click on the VideoDownloader icon and right click to save link as, but rename the link to xxx.flv (it's really Flash). If you know how the play Flash movies, great; others need something like Wimpy Standalone FLV Player. Then use your laptop's video out to play back on a TV.

Otherwise download iSquint/Mac and convert the Flash file to QuickTime. You can use your laptop's video out to play back on a TV. If you want a DVD, get iSquint's $23 sibling VisualHub, which lets you easily convert to many formats. An alternative would be Roxio Popcorn, which also shrinks oversized DVDs down to single layer size. Then use iDVD or another app to finish the job.
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