If you are like me you ditched your HD-DVD player and sold your movies on eBay back in February. But maybe you are starting to regret it just a little. Well sellout.woot.com has a HD-DVD player with 2 movies for $50 if you feel like ditching the Blu and getting back with the red.

Not that I’m going to or anything.

This probably deserves it’s own post but it’s too late and I need to go to bed, but Sonic released Scenarist 4.5.3 which fixed some audio bug I’d never heard of. I’m also a little mad at Sony for making such a crazy standard so I’m refusing to give it it’s own post. It’s been a long 2 days.

I promise, that’s the last time you’ll hear me mention HD-DVD.

Dave Zatz from zatznotfunny.com has a post about a Sony S300 player that is on sale for $200 at Amazon. I think it’s today only, so if you want it you better move. It’s not a bad price if you need some more QC players.

I updated the Blu-ray HDMV Flash Viewer to version .15. Mostly I added some options in the control panel thing to make it easier to send menus to clients. Here’s the changelog from the help file(which needs some updating in sections):

Version .15 - Added options into the control panel so you don’t have to mess around with parameters in the URL
- Added a close button and information button that opens/closes the control panel
- Added a show control panel option so you can have it start with it hidden if you want to
- Added a fullscreen button next to the information button
- Added a “Generate URL and Copy to Clipboard” button. What this does is once you get all your settings right you can click it, then paste a url into an email or back into a browser that will remember all your settings. 

You can see a sample of it here. Make sure you click the fullscreen button, it’s my favorite part.

Netflix sends me these free one month trial things every now and then and I don’t really know anyone who wants them. So if you want to try it out for a month, here are the codes:

M206361290975
M216321290245
M206341290225 
M236311290235

Just go to netflix.com/tellafriend to redeem it. They expire October 31, 2008.

You can also get Blu-ray discs from them if you pay an extra fee. ($1?)

Just leave a comment below if you use one of the codes so people know not to use them.

I mentioned a press release a few days ago where Sonic mentioned some new EDGe products. Well, I somehow missed several other press releases announing other new things. They can be found here:

Sonic Powers BD-Live With New Scenarist

Sonic Debuts Scenarist BD Studio Workgroup

Sonic EDGe Debuts Key BD Revisioning Solution with BD Reauthor

Sonic Dramatically Streamlines BD-J Production

There are all sorts of comments about Scenarist BD 5, Scenarist Studio, CiniVision Studio and Scenarist BD Workgroup.

So now I guess we play the waiting to see when we start seeing releases. Hopefully in the next couple weeks.

Was anyone at IBC and get to see all these new products?

I added 3 new current titles. They are Live from Abbey Road (which is a great product, probably my favorite Blu-ray disc we’ve done), Paris Je T’Aime, and Kitaro.

Back at NAB I talked about 2 new products coming from Sonic. A BD-J Flash Converter and an authoring tool called BD Fusion. Well Sonic released a press release on Friday describing the products. I’m not sure what’s different with the new versions from what was demoed to me at NAB, so if anyone is at the IBC convention in Amsterdam check it out and let me know what you think.

Also, does anyone get the EDGe program? Are these free applications for people who own Sonic’s BD-J Authoring tools? Or do you have to pay extra for them?

I’m interested in playing around with BD Fusion a little more and seeing how powerful it really is.

One last post for today (maybe, I’m thinking about making a post about something called LACP I just learned about a few days ago). To streamline our quality control operations we decided to find a way to send the compressed H.264 file from our compressor to a PS3 so someone can watch it before the final disc is done without burning expensive BD discs and wasting time authoring plug-n-play discs. So I started looking around and found a program called TVersity.

Basically what you do is mux the 264 file and uncompressed wav file using a program like TSMuxer, rename the muxed M2TS file to M2T, setup the TVersity folders, and search for the media server on the PS3. It should pop up and allow you to start watching the compressed file right away.

Of course we still have QC the final disc again, but this is giving us a head start in case we run into digital hits or audio sync issues. We could also QC the captured QuickTime from the Final Cut before compressing it in CinemaCraft, but I think that may be going a little overboard.

There is a lot of Blu-ray product news coming out of CEDIA 2008 right now and EngadgetHD has all the stories. Here are a few of the interesting ones so you don’t have to dig through them all:

Sharp rolls out AQUOS BD-HP21U Profile 1.1 Blu-ray player

Sharp sticks with Profile 1.1 on AQUOS BD-HP50U Blu-ray deck

Samsung UK exec says Blu-ray “has five years left”

Sony introduces $2,000 BD-Live-capable BDP-S5000ES Blu-ray player

Sony’s BDV-IT1000ES and BDV-IS1000 HTIB systems do Blu-ray

LG’s BD300 Netflix / Blu-ray deck ships next month for $399.95

Of course there is always Blu-ray news coming out of Engadget all year long and you can also check out Engadget’s Blu-ray tags for any new things specifically with Blu-ray.

I didn’t catch this until just now, but on August 18th Sonic released beta 2 of their QC tool. I haven’t downloaded it or used Beta 1 very much so I’m not sure what’s new.

Just thought I’d throw it out there in case others missed it as well.

Some non-Blu-ray news.

Yesterday Apple released a codec for QuickTime that allows you to play anything saved with the ProRes codec. I’ve been waiting for something like this for a while as the ProRes codec looks great and keeps files down to SD uncompressed sizes. As I occasionally capture something in HD on a Final Cut and then need to send it to our graphics guy or do some tweaking myself in After Effects on Windows I’ve always had to do 8-bit uncompressed, and render out 8-bit uncompressed. This just gives us a great new option.

Windows version can be downloaded here.

OS X here. (though I think if you have Final Cut already installed you don’t need to install it).

I added a link under navigation that has a list of titles I’ve worked on or am working on.

They also have links to where they are available to purchase and read reviews on Amazon.

Reader Nobi from Italy recently requested a tutorial on how to make menus without the use of the .scenarist.Designer file. I suggested he make one and offered to host it here for him, and that’s what he did.

If anyone else is interested in making tutorials, I’d be happy to post them here for you.

So without further ado here is his tutorial:

Read the rest of this entry »

Sonic released Scenarist HDMV 4.5.2 yesterday. It looks mostly like bug fixes, but here’s what’s new from their readme:

Scenarist HDMV 4.5.2 includes the following enhancements: 

• Video start time is now editable via the Properties window. 

Note: After you add a video asset to a Clip, the start time is no longer editable. 

• PG streams can be re-ordered via drag and drop in the Stream Tree. 

• Partial archive option added, which creates an archive with references to the original audio and video streams, but does not include them in the archive. 

• “Save Project As Another Project” option added, which copies encoded assets (interactive graphics, presentation graphics, and text streams) to the new project.

Scenarist HDMV 4.5.2 includes the following resolved issues: 

• [75556] PiP Editor: Luma Key preview now shows accurately what’s seen on players. 

• [77417] Changing the creation time for assets no longer causes project not to MUX. 

• [78334] In the Select Language Code dialog box, “Useful Code” section now opens by default when the dialog box first opens, saving the user an extra click. 

• [78347] Scenarist volume writing is now subtractive as well as additive. 

• [78806]Metadata editor no longer requires the user to specify a title. 

• [79128] Cancelling a MUX during image creation no longer requires a full MUX next time. 

• [79706] BDJOs created from SHDMV no longer appear to be corrupt.

It’s available on their support site.

Have fun!

Some non Blu-ray news for once. Digital-Rapids has finally released their 2.5 version of their Stream software that was announced way back in April at NAB. They seem to always announce their software and then wait a few months before actually making it available.

For those of you who don’t know about Digital-Rapids (which is probably everyone), they have a software/hardware solution we use to encode all our non BD and DVD encodes. Mostly Windows Media, Flash, QuickTime, DivX, xVid, MP4, and MPEG1. It’s can encode 2 streams in real time to a few different formats over SDI, so it’s a pretty cool setup.

For those interested, the change log is available on their site.