HD For Indies

Hey all -

since I'm actively in production right now on the HD Shootout DVDs, I thought I'd spell out my current thinking (ever in flux) and ask you folks what you think about it.

Cameras Tested

For review and those who aren't famililar, I'll be including footage from all cameras tested. The shoot was put together by myself, Adam Wilt of DV Magazine, and Chris Hurd of DVInfo.net and HDVInfo.net. The cameras were (in order of price here):

Sony HVR-Z1U
JVC GY-HD100U
Panasonic HVX200
Canon XL H1
Sony F350 (new XDCAM HD camera)
Panasonic Varicam

Interested? Click here to email me with "Shootout DVD" as the subject line to get on the mailing list, and please put an "X" in the email to indicate which version you're interested in.

OK, so why should you be interested? Why, let me tell you...

What was shot

We shot 24p, 50i and 60i; we shot 720p, 1080p (or 1080F), and 1080i; we shot indoors, outdoors, on sticks, hand held, low light, standard lighting, people of varying skin tone color (blond and African American models), we shot greenscreen, we shot codec torture tests, we shot close ups, medium, wide, long shots outdoors, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. (I'll eventually post a complete list.) Four days of shooting, I have over 600 shots logged in. We also shot, while in studio, uncompressed straight off the cameras to hard drives - using HD-SDI when possible (Varicam, F350, and XL H1), and using analog to HD-SDI converters for those that didn't (all others). This was in addition to the native recording media (tape, P2, and XDCAM HD discs), so I can make comparisons between those as well.

So it'll be a pretty darn thorough runthrough, and should be indicative of most types of shooting situations. OK, we didn't do a car chase, white water rafting, or sky diving shot but you get the idea. If you're shooting a "normal" narrative piece, there will be something useful for you to evaluate for most of your scenes here.

WHAT'S ON THE DVDs?

Current plan, as of 2:40pm Wed., assuming I don't change my mind yet again:

SD DVD: These will be standard def DVD, with MPEG-2 compressed clips, as well as a data portion of the disc/s. Somebody suggested multi-angle early on, but to get 6 angles would require massively dropping the bitrate on each, so quality comparisons other than color/contrast go out the window. So I'm thinking of cropping in on a portion of the same detail from all cameras and putting it 6 up, stuff like that. Or butterfly comparisons (mirrored halves) for 1 on 1 comparisons. But you'll see what each of these cameras look like when compressed to MPEG-2 using desktop type tools. I'll include uncompressed still frames on the data portion on the disk, and the footage will have voiceover with commentary.

High Def DVD: At this point, it looks to be an HD DVD on a red laser 8.5 GB disc, since there are virtually no set top boxes out there. It'll play on recent Macs with recent OS X installed.

Windows users - I don't know about DVD Studio Pro authored HD DVD on DVD-R 9's playing back under WinXP with 3rd party DVD players, if somebody knows, clue me in, I haven't done any testing to date.

Multiple discs most likely for space reasons.

It will also include workflow commentary/diagrams/analysis, which varies camera to camera and gets pretty complicated right now.

I'm definitely going to do Final Cut Pro workflow for each camera, but considering doing Avid Xpress Pro and/or Adode Premiere Pro...but it'll depend on demand. If you're an Avid or PPro user, LET ME KNOW if you're interested in workflow for your app!

Might include more shots than the SD disc has, if I'm running out of room on the SD disc/s.

Planning to include SHORT video snippets in native media format of SOME of the shots on the data portion - it just isn't feasible to include them all unless I'm going to have a large number of DVDs in the set. Maybe the full set as yet another product? Let me know what you think.

The good news is, if you have the kind of Mac to edit HD footage on, this will play.

PRICING

I'm thinking of an indie friendly price for the SD disc - you get samples, some stills, and some commentary on the footage differences, but that's about it.

The HD DVD - will include more in depth coverage, workflow analysis for cameras involved, explanation of the formats and their differences, more shots, actual footage as data on a disc, etc., and will be priced higher.

For those that want the full kit of all of it, to see how footage looks in SD and HD, and get all the analysis, there will be a bundle that offers a discount.

So far, between prep for the shoot, the 4 days of shooting, and all the time I've spent in post to get where I am now (and still not close to finished), I'm already in the hundreds of hours spent so far, so I need to price it to make that worth while.

Why should you want to pay for this?

Somebody in an email exchange said (and I'm paraphrasing here) -

"Sheesh, I can get sample DVDs from Sony or Panasonic or whatever for free. Why should I pay more than cheap for yours?"

The answer is this - the samplers from vendors were produced who knows how, in different times and places. We have no idea, for instance, on that outdoor shot, how much scrim, flagging, and/or bounce card/s were used. We don't know the context. It's also very difficult to look at one studio shot from one camera, and compare that in a meaningful way to another studio shot of somebody else in a different environment shot with a diffferent camera. With enough careful lighting, skill, and time, you can get a good looking images from any of these cameras. Was that footage color corrected, for instance? How did it look plain vs corrected? If there was marketing budget, I'll betcha they had an experienced colorist on top notch gear doing that color correction - not indicative of what you'd get most likely.

On the other hand, the content on these DVDs was produced in the most bias free manner we could manage, with no overt agendas.

Also, more significantly - all this stuff was shot at the same time, by the same folks, under the same circumstances (as much as possible), so it is truly apples to apples comparable. We also meticulously logged as much info as we could about shoot settings, recording the format, bitrate, fps, shutter, iris, gain, ND setting, gamma settings, matrix, sharpness, knee, noise reduction, lens used, etc. etc. etc. - so you'll KNOW what the shot means, rather than wondering "Yeah, but was that wide open or not?" I'm planning on including all that info as well (in some fashion TBD).

WHAT I NEED TO KNOW FROM YOU FOLKS - FEEDBACK!:

PLEASE tell me the following:

-Does this sound appealing to buy in the first place?

-How much would you be willing to pay for these (and I'd like to know your "I'd like it to be" as well as the "I wouldn't pay more than.")

-Which product sounds more appealing to you?

-What is missing?

-What should I drop that you don't care about?

Feel free to copy and paste those questions and email me with the answers cut in.

Why again?

I'm asking all this now, because this product is a test for me - one of the (many) reasons I started the blog was to hopefully build an audience for products such as these. If there isn't much market, I'm not going to do these kinds of things, I'll look for other ways to make a living. So I need to make sure I'm on the right track...so tell me now, otherwise I'll assume folks aren't interested.

WHEN WILL THEY BE READY?

My initial plan was to get these done before I left for IBC in early September. At this point, I'm guessing IBC would be a logical time to release a new version of Final Cut Pro that could handle 24p from the JVC and 24F from the Canon - which would completely change all my thinking on workflow for those cameras. So I'm thinking I may be able to get the SD versions off to the replication house before I leave, but the HD version should wait until I know what's up with FCP.

Other stuff on the back burners:

Other stuff I'm considering doing to offer for sale: a huge BlackMagic vs. AJA HD-SDI card comparison, comparing what are the real world differences when capturing, editing, mastering, up/downconverting, add/remove 3:2 pulldown, etc. I've got all the gear, it'll just take a week or so to figure it all out, and I'd probably sell that for $10 or $20 as a downloadable (possibly secure) PDF or something.

I'm also thinking of doing a big "How much realtime performance do you get with what video format on what machine?" comparison. What are the limits, and can I do X & Y with Z format on such and such a Mac? Can I get a realtime cross dissolve, when I have 3-way color corrections on both shots, in X format on my Mac or the Mac I'm thinking of buying? If I have to render, how long does it take?" I've got everything from a 12" Powerbook up to a Quad G5 inhouse already, with AJA and BMD cards aplenty to answer all this. (And of course, Intel Macs would be tested too!) But again, it'd take a week or more to do this, so it's not something I can afford to do for free on the blog. Again, $10 or $20, with the idea that it would help folks decide if their present or to-be-purchased Macs were up to snuff for planned projects, and to know how camera selection affected that process.

OK, now it's feedback time - what do you folks think of all this? Feel free to use the Comments link below, or to email me directly if you don't want to discuss publicly - mike AT hdforindies DOT com.

And once again, shameless self plug:

Interested? Email me with "Shootout DVD" as the subject line to get on the mailing list, and please put an "X" in the email to indicate which version you're interested in.
-mike