Ellard

I make no apology for showing this image again.

Work on my own Blu Ray is going a lot slower than expected. The tools are less blunt than a year back but you’re still going to have some tough times figuring out just why your precious video looks like cat vomit. Case in point, most of my old assemblies have been done using Sony software, so trying DVD Architect seemed the go. But once you declare a disc to be a certain format in DVDA e.g. 720p50, seems there’s no way to create tracks which are some other size and shape, which is bad news for all my old standard definition videos.

On the other hand if you use Adobe Encore, you can mix up sizes, but MPEG streams made by Vegas will be imported looking like the afore mentioned feline regurgitation. If I had used Première, fine, but I hadn’t, so it’s been a round trip from Vegas to Adobe Media Encoder to Encore. You will be asked many inscrutable questions as you run each – answer wrongly grasshopper and you will be back at the start.

Because I am an old fool who grew up in a period where hard drives were very small and very expensive – I have a tendency to delete temporary files once they’re encoded. Of course you only notice the bad coding 22 minutes into the programme after you just trashed that 100Gb assemble.

Anyway this is what’s on the PS3 after three days

As you can see the idea is to pack as much crap onto one disc as I can fit. Great big fonts for reading across a room. That innocent little OP4 link was a decision made about 3 hours ago that I am already regretting.

The sub menu for the farewell gig. Menus in Encore are made in Photoshop, with a little bit of editing available inside the software. Buttons are formed via some arcane naming of layers which I haven’t quite mastered yet. The buttons are mostly the wrong shape so far and fonts are another puzzle, but keep in mind the ‘safe area’ around the edges of the screen – no room to move.

Here’s the main menu for OP which somehow has to organise 65 sub-menus. While I already have a web version of this on sevcom, a BD player like the PS3 won’t see raw WAVs in a folder structure, nor stream them from a web site. They are going to have to be made soundtracks for menus, one for each track, so that the user can navigate. This is going to be really tedious to set up. I did it once before for the Animated Family Doctor and it’s a pest.

I’m targeting the PS3. I think the majority of the audience has these, or one of the cheaper players that have come out in the last few months, with much less audience on BD-ROM drives. We’ve got a variety at work I can try.

A hard decision has been to go with 25 frames a second. Almost everything I have is 25fps, and slowing this to 24fps for the Americans is something I can try once I have a handle on the basics. Thing is, I reckon everyone who owns a BD player is using it with monitor that can handle 25 (actually 50) and seeing the videos in slow motion is not needed. Some beta discs will go out first to try this out, if I’m wrong I’m wrong. We’ll see.

Why Bother?

If I listened to Steve Jobs I’d not bother with the disc and just stream the video online, but listening to Steve Jobs is an invitation to mainstream conformity. 25Gb of material is a lot to store in one container and equals many people’s entire monthly download budget. It’s expensive, but it gets a bit better over the months, and I’ll look  into cheaper AVCHD disc versions as well. But I’m tired of seeing my good work look like complete shit on YouTube. Running the sevcom shop is a losing proposition, still, even if 10 people have this BD at least that’s 10 people that can see the videos looking like they are supposed to look, and hopefully they will pirate it well. In a world where everything seems to be a race to the bottom, we have to keep doing stupidly overwrought things to show that we’re not all businessmen.