DVD-R

[harry]

Almost here...

"Pioneer also announced it will ship its DVR-A03, a combination DVD/CD drive, by the end of May for $995. The Pioneer drive includes DVD-R, DVD-rewritable, CD-R and CD-rewritable. The Pioneer drive will also bundle Sonic Solutions' software, MyDVD, for DVD-video authoring"

Harry

[cjyo~]

Apple is selling media for our SuperDrive for $10 right now (we are burning test disks with it), the price can only come down. And of course Apple isn't known for low prices, so $10 must be on the high side.

On the RT2000 Unofficial forum, there is a pre-order price of $785 or $795 for the Pioneer DVD-R.

More news on upcoming products:

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...081598,00.html

Personally, I'm holding out for the $500 drives at the end of this year

[bongo]

just wish blank dvds weren't so expensive...$15

[wkulecz]

Yes the problem with the Pioneer A-03 DVD-RW is they are up against Phillips-Sony-HP with the soon to be released DVD+RW. This is the next generation that has most of the current large volume CD-RW drive makers behind it (Sony, HP, Ricoh, Phillips).

Sony claims a drive that supports both CD-RW and CD+RW is "trivial". We'll see, but all I really care about is the DVD-R media being the same in both systems.

As long as the DVD-R media is the same for the A-03 and the soon to flood the market DVD+RW drives, it should be safe to buy the A-03 for video use. Otherwise you could be stuck needing expensive blanks as the "mainstream" blanks plummet in price. Compare the first CDRW disks -- PD from Panasonic (also put in some Compaqs when first introduced) with the price of the later CD-RW blanks.

I'm waiting until I find a "for sure" answer before buying.

--wally.

[dchip]

I'm with you on playing the wait and see game for a while. This next purchase needs to be a solution that keeps on rewarding.

I was wondering, with the camera equipment, software and computing power that most of us now have, how close do you think our DVD's will be to something produced on expensive professional equipment and mega-buck software packages? Because I have given up on the current state of compression technology, I am simply playing my DV movies from the timeline back to DV tape, and the tapes look beautiful. I try to imagine that my homemade DVD's will look like that too. Am I just dreaming?

[Elie]

Bongo,

The reason the DVD media is so expensive is because people will then buy the blank for example $5.00 US and make infinite copies of released movies and then sell them for half the price.

But if the media is just as expensive as the actual DVD movies you buy, then it wont be worth it

Cheers,
Elie

[cjyo~]

We are using the Apple DVD Studio in a Hollywood feature DVD production house (clients include Sony Pictures, MGM, Disney). Alongside our $20,000-$30,000 authoring packages (not including hardware) and $30,000 - $100,000 encoders, the Apple is very impressive.

Everyone one in the A-title DVD industry is worried about the Apple DVD Studio or low-end PC solutions threating their jobs. At the same time, everyone of us has thought, "Hey, I could buy one of those, freelance at home, and make more money than I do now..."

Granted we have not used the Apple for A-titles, but we have encoded video on our $60,000 encoder and used it to author B-titles and specialty discs on the Apple. Everyone here is very impressed, and no client has ever come back asking if the disc was authored on a cheap system. Most clients won't be able to tell the difference and even fewer consumers will.

The Apple MPEG-2 transcoder is passable for some low-end menu work, but when we tested it on higher-end titles we found we had trouble matching gamma and mainting consistency with hardware encoded menus and video (so we stopped using it, in most cases).

Of course there will always be a market for high-end production and in the future we will migrate to HD-DVD or whatever. Also, keep in mind that most people who buy a $3,500 Apple DVD System will not be able to afford a $40,000+ DigiBeta deck to go along with it. That's another limitation, since studio masters are on high end (=expensive) formats.

So yes, the low end stuff really is quite good. The big pro-studios will stay in business, but lots of smaller houses and freelancers will be able to get work and produce high quality titles.

I don't know if the cd-recorder analogy works perfectly, but when consumer music cds were first released, who would've though you could master high quality audio at home? (But the high end pro facilities still do it better...)

I don't know if it's public or not, but I know of a certain major corporation that will be rolling out dirt-cheap mass market DVD production services this summer (send in your home video and get back a dvd).

[cjyo~]

One more thing on compatibility wars...sure maybe there's a reason to wait for cheaper media, but the Pioneer DVD-R drive currently burns DVD discs that play in every set-top player (except the few that don't play any "burned" media) and DVD-Rom. And if you burn data, it is readable in every PC/Mac DVD-ROM out there, not just similar Pioneers. It works with everything. NOW.

In the DVD world we have been using these Pioneer drives for years. The first one was $15,000, the second was $5,000 and this new one is $800. That's the reason to buy.

The competing drives are a different story. They only are readable in similar drives (the burners themselves) or some non-existent future DVD-Rom drive standard that may not happen.

Okay one last note...

For 3 years, I worked at another big studio DVD facility owned by Panasonic. And guess what - we used the Pioneer drives exclusively, instead of the Panasonic options. Sure one of our sister companies made the Panasonic drives (and we did evaluate them), but we were working in a real-world production environment and the Pioneers just WORKED.

[This message has been edited by cjyo~ (edited 25 April 2001).]

[dchip]

cj, thanks for the encouraging words about Pioneer. I like their drive technology too. All my audio CD players and two so called set top DVD players are in my possession now are Pioneer, and they perform beautifully.

Because I am not in the video business I cannot get really comfortable with that $800 price tag for this particular Pioneer. My practical side keeps saying this is just a drive, with components not unlike a CD-R drive. Why am I even thinking about paying $800 for it? And my other side keeps answering that this drive could possibly be the final answer to keeping my digital video looking crisp and sharp when put it on disc. Will it be?

I'll be starting with very good quality taped digital video from my 1-CCD camera. It's certainly video worthy of becoming a good quality DVD. Anyway, enter our good friend "compression" to get the video ready to become a DVD. Bear in mind that I will be using software such as TMPGEnc or other free or very inexpensive packages that might come with the drive. So what will I get when I burn my TMPGEnc-encoded and Nero-authored MPEG-2 on the Pioneer DVD-R? Somehow I don't think it's going to magically become some fantastically wonderful crisp DVD video.

Deep down I think I should let the price of this drive fall some more and maybe think about putting the more serious bucks into some software that can give me professional quality encoding. I have never seen video from some of the packages like those from Terran, but, again, my gut tells me that that is the kind of stream I will need to really get the best from DVD-R. I know damn well the video I'm starting with is good enough to become a great DVD. It seems that all the "magic" will have to happen in what I process the video with.

Help me out here. I'm open to thoughts, feedback, criticism, etc. Is this new hardware going be DVD heaven for me?

[wkulecz]

dchip,

Can your computer play back DVD? ie WinDVD or Cinemaster? Can a friends?

IF you can, encode a big of your DV into 720x480 into 8 Mbs MPEG2 and play it back as a "DVD" from your computers hard disk. Compare this quality to a comercial movie DVD played back on the computer.

I think you will be quite hot to get DVD-R after trying this.

--wally.

[dchip]

Hi wally. Thanks for the info.

I have not really played any DVD's on my computer. That probably sounds strange, but, I guess I am wanting to jump into the DVD game with the end in mind of making completely portable discs that look great no matter what player I put them in. Since the days in 1994 when I started doing my first captures of tiny mpegs on a tiny hard drive with a gigantic Happaugue ISA TV card, portability has been most important to me. I am going to do what it takes to make sure the money I spend on DVD-R does not turn into very expensive incremental steps that leave me with the same limitations we now have with VCD, SVCD, etc. Namely, the big guessing game about what player(s) will recognize the discs.

All the players seem to recognize store-bought DVD's. I want my discs to have that kind of compatability. What will that cost me?

[cjyo~]

just a note regarding what type of quality you can expect...

With a good DV to MPEG2 software encoder/transcoder you can get quite good results. To a trained eye, it won't look as good as playing the original DV tape out of your S-Video into the TV, but it will be quite good. The weakness of such a transfer is the double compression - first DV, then MPEG2. Of course, you should absolutely be able to get it looking better than any analog tape copy (even SVHS).

You can't really expect your DVD's to look as good as commercial Movie DVD's since those go through every kind of tweaking you can imagine, at every stage of the way.

Personally I think the main quality limitation will be the DV format itself. Having worked in studio DVD production for years, I have developed a certain eye for good video and a sensitivity to artifacts. Last fall, I finally took the DV plunge - buying a VX2000. Frankly, I was a little disappointed with the DV compression format and its inherent artifacts and other weakness. Properly compressed high-bitrate DVD MPEG2 can definitely look better than the miniDV format is capable of recording. I'm almost certain that if you paired the VX2000 lens and CCD with a higher quality recording format you could get a much better image than you can record on consumer miniDV tape.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that you should be able to get something looking quite decent with DV to DVD, until you decide to upgrade to high definition...

[dchip]

CJ, Thanks for the good info. For me, mini DV has lived up to it's reputation for excellent video but that's about it. I have otherwise been disappointed with the inability to compress it to any extent without losing a lot of quality. Now that DVD for home systems is on the horizon, I feel justifiably concerned about what kind of quality I'll get if I take the plunge.

What about some of the better compression packages and reasonably priced hardware encoding packages. Might one of these compress my high-quality DV AVI's into MPEG-2 and maintain or enhance the quality? I ask not for a specific product recommendation, but, a general opinion of what I might expect would be quite helpful. Thanks again for sharing your expertise.

[cjyo~]

I think software encoders will get you 80% - 90% there (which is good in my book). A few examples: TMPEG (Tsunami), Cinemacraft and Ligos LSX.

As for hardware, I haven't tried the low-low end (such as the Dazzle II), but I would guess you might get better results from software. The next level of "low-end" hardware would be the RT2000/2500 class encoders. The RT boards turn out very good results at high bitrates and are ideal for transcoding from DV. I have not done much work on the RT2000 at lower bitrates, because I haven't had the need to squeeze the bits in any projects. I usually did my dvd work at 7mbit/s, the max allowed to covert to elementary IBP in the Matrox utility. I never tried direct IBP capture, but conversion from DV source, or I-frame MPEG2 (analog capture) was quite good. You would definitely be satisfied with the quality of output from these boards.

The next step up the ladder (that I have experience with) is the Zapex 300 ($10,000). Honesty, I was not very impressed with this board. It definitely is not 10x better quality than the RT2000. The major differences are component inputs, deck control and locked hardware ac3 encoding (all of which you don't need).

The high-end encoders I've worked with are the Minerva (not Impression), Sony and Panasonic encoders which range from $30,000 to $100,000+ (at least when they were first purchased). For examples of these, just take a look at Hollywood movie DVD's.

[Mance]

I would question the 1 hour per 4.7gigs of DVD-R storage that you heard about. For one thing you can compress MPG2 at different bitrates to achieve different file sizes at different qualities.

Maybe someone else here can respond to this further, but I don't think that the DVD subset of MPG2 has to be a certain bitrate in order to be playable by a DVD player. In other words, there's a set maximum that you can't exceed, but I don't think there's a set minimum per se. In fact I would guess that 4.7gigs an hour would exceed a DVD's maximum bitrate, but I'm not sure.

I have a Sigma DVR and with their second generation drivers (using their DVR profile) it gives me a bitrate of 4500mb/sec (I need to doublecheck that number, but it's somewhere in the 4000 range). This gives me an MPG2 file that's 2.35Gigs per hour. If this is consistent then I should be able to fit exactly two hours on a 4.7gig DVD-R.

I need to check that profile again as I think it's doing VBR but am not sure, and I'm also not sure what maximum bitrate it would allow under that setting for VBR. I guess I need to use a bitrate viewer on one of my files and see what the min, max, and average are. VBR should make the file sizes change according to the motion of their content, shouldn't it? But I'm getting pretty consistent file sizes.

Anyone else here use a Sigma DVR? I haven't tried the new DVD plugin for MSPro6 yet, but I'm hoping my Sigma files are compatible so that I'll be able to use them as is for DVD authoring to a DVD-R. Right now I keep them small (under 15 minutes) and just burn them to CD-R for archiving as data files.

So what are the rest of you guys doing to store your MPG2 files in anticipation of the forthcoming DVD-R drive? And with a Sigma DVR in hand I haven't yet bothered to go the software route of capturing to HUFYUV AVI and transcoding using Tsunami. Anyone have any experience using the Sigma DVR and being able to compare it to software based encoding? Also, does anyone have any experience comparing the Sigma DVR to Hauppauge's WinTV-PVR which uses the same KFIR chip for encoding? I'm thinking of getting the WinTV-PVR since my DVR doesn't have a TV tuner, but I've heard mixed things about it (seems to be applicable to all the products here). I wonder how well it uses the KFIR chip in comparison to the DVR (do they encode the same? Does one do VBR better than the other, etc.).

Anyhoo, I'm very excited about the forthcoming DVD-R drives (Panasonic announced a combo DVD-RAM/DVD-R drive just recently). I'm hoping I won't have to re-encode all that I've done so far in order to use one.