Recommended setup for HD out of laptop to dual monitors for trade show?
by John Willis
on
Sep 7, 2008 at 5:31:49 am
Hello,
I have a client wanting his FCP project 1280 x 720 delivered Blu Ray.
Instead, it has been suggested to me that it could be uploaded H.264 at 3mb bit rate for download to clients laptop and then played out to a dual monitor setup for his tradeshow.
Has anyone done anything like this and if so...could you give me suggestions for upload settings and what would be needed on laptop to play video in HD to two monitors?
Re: Recommended setup for HD out of laptop to dual monitors for trade show? by walter biscardi on Sep 7, 2008 at 1:58:07 pm
[John Willis]"What is the problem with looping on a laptop and is there a workaround? "
I can almost guarantee your laptop will lock up at some point during the playback whereby you will have to do a full re-boot of the system. Resulting in those high def monitors displaying the Apple startup routine instead of the client video. I've seen that happen with both Windows and Mac machines.
Even desktop computers will lock up from time to time if you simply leave a video looping all day long.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Recommended setup for HD out of laptop to dual monitors for trade show? by walter biscardi on Sep 7, 2008 at 2:29:34 pm
[John Willis]"Thankns for the heads up...just trying to come up with a solution while waiting on blu ray for FCP "
You might be waiting a while. We've been producing BluRay for a year now with Encore. Can't do anything more than a "Play Movie" button right now, but at least we've gotten 10 or 12 titles out the door already. We took delivery of a new HP Workstation last week (our first Windows machine) and we're moving to NetBlender's DoStudio. We hope to have our first new BluRay titles ready in two weeks and those will be commercial standard BD-J titles.
In your case you could always look at Toast. That's a perfect application for what that application can do.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Walter, you might want to have a look at this by walter biscardi on Sep 8, 2008 at 11:58:05 am
[Don Greening]"An in-depth article has just surfaced on the Ken Stone web site about how to author BD-R's with FCP, Compressor and Encore. Might be worth a look: "
Actually that's more or less a copy and paste right out of the Encore manual. Adobe says it works that easily too.
I can tell you the process does not work nearly as well as described in his article or in the Manual. And in the Encore forum here on the Cow, I'm obviously not alone.
Funny his Compressor settings are not what I would recommend for BluRay.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Walter, you might want to have a look at this by Don Greening on Sep 8, 2008 at 4:38:00 pm
[walter biscardi]"Funny his Compressor settings are not what I would recommend for BluRay. "
Perhaps the settings are lifted from the manual as well. Anyway, I just thought you'd be interested in having a look. I just glossed over the article myself, as my intention is still to wait for Apple to do something. Your business is quite different than mine in that some of your clients already want BluRay but very few of mine ask about it. We have a big corporate trade show coming up and I'll be using my laptop with a connected LCD TV to show my Sony EX footage in HD.
Re: Walter, you might want to have a look at this by walter biscardi on Sep 8, 2008 at 7:02:34 pm
[Don Greening]"Anyway, I just thought you'd be interested in having a look. I just glossed over the article myself, as my intention is still to wait for Apple to do something. "
It will be nice if they, but honestly I would not be surprised if they don't, or at least not for a while. The Adobe case is a good example of how difficult the BluRay authoring side is. The specs are so much harder to create than DVD. I've been contacted by numerous industry people who work at very large hollywood studios who have given me a lot of insight on the BluRay specs and why Encore doesn't work.
In the meantime we've got our HP machine here now and by next week we should have DoStudio installed and be testing that out.
If you ever need any help with BluRay products for your trade shows or anything like that, feel free to give us a call. We're already helping out some other Cow folks for that very thing. That type of stuff we can still create in Encore all day long, it's the nice stuff with the menus that Encore falls apart.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Walter, you might want to have a look at this by Don Greening on Sep 9, 2008 at 4:54:40 am
[walter biscardi]"In the meantime we've got our HP machine here now and by next week we should have DoStudio installed and be testing that out. "
Yeah, I've been following along on your PC adventure and I hope things work out for you on all fronts. Goodness knows that after all the Encore headaches it's about time something worked right for you. Good luck with that.
Thanks for your kind offer of assistance but for the moment I'll be content to just demo in HD and deliver in SD with the promise of keeping the HD versions on hard discs for awhile. Full res EX clips really don't take up much more room than DV NTSC. Maybe 30 to 35% more space, which is nothing with today's relatively inexpensive FW drives. I'm waiting for the updated XDCAM disk drive (PDW-U1), then I'll just transfer everything to XDCAM disk.
Re: Recommended setup for HD out of laptop to dual monitors for trade show? by Zane Barker on Sep 7, 2008 at 6:42:20 pm
[walter biscardi]"Apple TV is designed just for this very thing. You could feed two monitors by just splitting the signal using an HDMI splitter.
I would not use a laptop if this is supposed to loop. "
I AppleTV is GREAT for playing content, however it does not loop. I have been wishing for this feature from the release of the AppleTV. If you have found a way to get the AppleTV to loop I would love to know how.
There are no "technical solutions" to your "artistic problems".
Don't let technology get in the way of your creativity!
Re: Recommended setup for HD out of laptop to dual monitors for trade show? by Walter Soyka on Sep 7, 2008 at 10:28:40 pm
We use computers or computer-based DDRs for video playback at live events all the time, but we always also run a backup on a second unit, whether the playback source is computer, DDR, or even Beta tape. Of course, this would mean you'd also need a switcher.
When I author discs for playback loops, I encode multiple iterations of the loop. That is, if it's a 1 minute loop, I'll stack 20 or 30 of them back to back on the timeline. This saves some wear and tear on the DVD or Blu-Ray drive mechanism, and reduces the number of times you'll see the loop glitch as the laser scans back to the beginning of the disc.
