DVD Studio Pro: Leaving 4x3 behind for good

With the prevelance of flat screens and digital transition, it’s time to stop worrying about 4x3. That statement might seem a bit lame, as many of us have already migrated to HD work where 4x3 SD really isn’t our concern any more. However, when it comes time to distribute our work, documentaries, shorts, bah’mistzva’s, whatever they may be, the good old DVD is still the most feasible means of distribution. The mandatory AACS fees for Blu-ray will keep legitiamte distribuion on BD out of reach for 95% of us (oh how I miss the, HD-DVD). So until the cost of blank BD media drops into the realm of sanity (likely still 18-24 months away) at which point you could distribute duplicated discs which dont require AACS, you are left bring your HD project back down to an SD world.

It’s happened a number of times now for me in the past year where I’ve had my head in HD and then sit down to design some nice DVD menus for a project and forget all about 4x3 title safe. So I’ve started forcing “16x9, 16x9 Letterbox” only for my DVDSP projects. For the feature this is not a big deal at all, but for menus and subtitles it has an impact.

When a 16x9 project is displayed as native 16x9, the DVD player typically just spits out the 720x480 (or 720x576 for you PAL kids) anamorphic pixels unadultered, and lets your TV stretch out the composited image for so it appears correctly. However, in letterbox mode, the player will vertically squeeze the video by 25% and center it in the 480 frame. The issue arises that this squeeze is done to the video layer, not the composited image, so it happens before any graphics were involved. So if you have button overlays or subtitles, the video underneath them just shifted and thus they no longer line up in the correct position any more.

I Decide: Anatomy of a No-Budget HD Spot

This was the first project shot for California’s No on Prop 8 campaign. In an attempt to reach out to young voters I recruited my cousin Catherine, and her best friend Austin, to record an appeal for youth to get up and vote down Prop 8. They’re both politically active and immediately said “yes” to the project.

The Thorons: Anatomy of an HD Spot

I shot this spot a few weeks ago and it hit the air in a big way on Sept. 22.

Why “Exposing to the Right” Works on the RED

There’s been a lot of talk about “exposing to the right” in the RED community: instead of relying solely on your meter, the idea is to watch the RED’s histograms and use whatever room is available on the right side. If your meter says to shoot at 2.8, and there’s nothing hitting the right side of the histogram, open up the stop and move all the values over until something clips or you run out of stop.

I did this on my last two RED shoots and it worked great. Using REDSpace as my color and gamma preset allowed me to see more-or-less exactly how the image would be seen once processed using those settings in post, and by setting the zebras to come on at their maximum of 103 (I assume that’s 103 ire on a scale of 0-109) I could use them the same way I would on any other HD camera. Processing the footage through RedRushes using the REDSpace preset resulted in images that were very close to what I saw on location while still offering me all the grading latitude that I’d expect from RED raw footage.

This white paper on Adobe’s web site explains what “expose to the right” is and why it works. I highly recommend it.

Form vs. Content

I sit down this evening to watch Professional Wrestling—erm, the first 2008 Presidential Debate. I’ve got KQED-HD tuned in, the local PBS channel on 9.1. Ray Suarez in the News Hour studio, neat and clean and perfect in every respect. Man, I love HD… until they cut to the feed from Mississippi. All of a sudden it’s Ken Burns & “The War” all over again: audio and video out of sync. Dang!

Welcome to Web Video & Beyond

As we mentioned earlier, we are in the process of launching a series of “themed” channels on PVC. One of the new channels we’re most excited about is Web Video & Beyond.

The advent of cable and satellite television had a big impact on the industry, as they created a demand for more content - content that had to look as good as any “national” feed, but produced at a lower cost. This was fuel to the fire for the desktop video industry, highlighting the economic advantage desktop production brought.

Today, we are still in the early stages of another large explosion in content distribution: web video, and other alternate outlets such as cell phones, PDAs, intelligent multimedia gaming devices, and beyond. Even while the business models are still being built up, the demand for cost-effective content is as strong as ever. (I’ve talked about this before.)

But there are new challenges as well: the technology (Flash has a huge installed base - but it’s not in iPhones), new program formats (an attention span closer to a 5-minute podcast than a 30 or 60 minute network program), the impact of increasing bandwidth (the movement from SWF to FLV means traditional editors and motion graphics artists can use their current skill sets, rather than learn how to animate sprites), and the question of just how much production value is needed in this Web 2.0, user-generated-content, YouTube world. It’s confusing; it’s evolving; it’s exciting. We hope to learn together with you up here.

Speaking of learning together: We are always on the lookout for good writers for PVC, and this new channel is a new opportunity to share what you know. If you already have a blog and want to repost some of your “classic” articles here (as well as new content, of course), or previously wrote for magazines or other web outlets and now want to be part of PVC, let’s talk! I can be reached at cmeyer @ PVC’s web domain above. Writers share in PVC’s ad revenue based on their traffic.

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