It’s such a heavy mother that it cost $99 just to ship, but I get to play Halo 3 again, and I look forward to playing games with a nice game pad again. See you on Live… I am Lyr1s, if I can still remember my password…

This was shot as a DVD bonus feature. Scott’s album (which you can buy in HMV stores in Glasgow right now, and soon online, I am told) comes with a pack-in DVD featuring the music video to the original song, the music video I shot, and a Making Of feature. I encoded and authored the whole thing.

Since the DVD is PAL and I refuse to buy any 50hz HDTV equipment (the whole world should be using one scan rate by now, and since Japan and the Americas paved the way, it’s only realistic that that should be 60hz), the acoustic music video I just linked to was shot at 23.976fps (i.e. within groping distance of the standard frame rate of film). It was a complete bitch to do standards conversion on. One option was to use a field-blending converter, but this meant that I would have to have vertically blurred the video to avoid all the shots of guitar strings introducing annoying aliasing. Motion compensated systems would be the ideal choice, but they were all confused by the same diagonal panning shots and the rapid hand movement on the guitar. I really, really wanted the final result to maintain high frequency detail without aliasing and also to play back on progressive scan systems perfectly, so this meant that I had to convert the video to 25p.

In the end, I synthesized each 25th frame with motion vector interpolation and manually corrected the artefacts in Photoshop. I feel the result is very convincing, although some slight judder is apparent every now and then because of the inserted frames. The music video is quite gentle and slow paced anyway, so I felt this was the best solution.

Before you ask, “why didn’t you just make the disc NTSC since everyone in Europe who isn’t using a wooden television can play that anyway”: the main music video was shot at 50i (not by me, obviously). I didn’t feel it was fair to degrade the quality of the “main event” for the sake of the bonus features. Anyway, it turned out nicely and apparently the album is selling like hot cakes.

Fun trivia: if you watch the Luc Besson/Jet Li movie “Unleashed”, the street the gangsters drive up to early on in the film is the same one at the very beginning of this video.

The bit rate in this scene is about 34mbps. Seriously. Hmmm, this looks like the work of crApple Compressor…

In altogether happier video compression news, X264, the insanely, wonderfully, ridiculously good open-source (free) AVC encoder should be producing Blu-ray compliant video without modifications in the very close future. Programmers (aka people who are much smarter than I am) have been working on support for some time now in the form of a patch to add additional stream information demanded by BD authoring applications, and the fruits of their labour are apparently passing verification and should become part of vanilla X264 builds soon. About a year ago, I publicly harassed (OK, publicly begged) the developers of X264 to make this happen, so I am delighted to know that I should be able to use such a fantastic encoder when the time comes.

AND! Cinema Craft Encoder SP3 was just announced officially yesterday for SD MPEG-2 needs. I laughed when I read this from the official web page: “There is a growing need for much higher picture quality in DVD production industry.” Guys, you seriously aren’t kidding. SP3 costs half of what SP2 did and now has segment re-encoding. If they can make the quality any better, I will be a happy guy.

The situation: you’re encoding MPEG-2 video and there is a problematic shot in the film. You want to make sure that the problematic shot looks as non-horrible as possible. So you test out a bunch of different encoder settings: lowpass filter (if you REALLY must), dithered quantization, and the somewhat elusive “Quantizer characteristics”. It takes so long to compare the different versions and you stare at the results for so long that you lose objectivity.

Not any more! CCE Assist shows you results in a side-by-side view (with optional sharpening to make compression artefacts really stand out) and thanks to the open source world, it gives you an SSIM result so if your eyes are failing you, it can tell you which one most resembles the source for something of a second opinion.

Perhaps there are some other people working on DVD titles who care about the quality (if you’re using CCE in the first place, I’m sure you do) who will find the tool useful.

Fetch!

It might seem like an obvious question, but think about it. In the 90s at least, a ton of this material is likely to originate on Beta SP, which is inherently Component (even the original Betacam was Component based). There were Component VTRs in heavy use, so why do these shows contain NTSC/PAL composite video artefacts (dot crawl, cross-color, etc)? Clearly they were fed through a Composite video system at one point, but why?

Was it simply a case of the people involved thinking, “It’s going to be broadcast as a Composite TV signal anyway, there’s no point in preserving discrete color channels”, or is there something else obvious that I’m missing? Digital TV was certainly on the horizon in the 90s, did nobody seriously consider the implications? When did the signals become NTSC or PAL encoded? During editing? During original acquisition?

Edit: that’s 12 MONTHS hosting, not 12 YEARS as I previously mistyped. Thanks, ChuckZ!

First of all, I do not normally like anime. Although I have a special fondness for the likes of Spirited Away, I find most Japanese animated features to be incredibly plodding. For every enjoyable one, there’s something like Akira (which has a really neat setting, but honestly just bored me), or the mind-numbing Paprika, which seemed to have the idea that incomprehensible weirdness was enough to get by on. Normally, I like fully animated, classic, American cartoons which are unashamedly, well, cartoon-like.

Ponyo is my favorite film of this year, so far. OK, it’s technically a 2008 film, but it only just played here, so cut me some slack. The whole thing is mesmerising in a plausible way, and is gorgeous to look at. It’s filled with appealing abstraction (that means appealing characters and poses, not 50-foot tall robots with 20 bazillion parts) and the animation is several times better than the previous Studio Ghibli movies I’ve seen. I could have sworn it goes onto ones, that is, full animation, in parts, which is a sight to behold for Japanese animation. Oh, and it’s also very nice to watch something like this that’s free of the usual patronising messages which infect US studio animated features. There are no kids exclaiming how they “just want to believe in themselves” or how they want to please their fathers, etc.

Throughout the whole thing, there was one thought at the back of my mind: live action movies can’t possibly compete with animation done like this. Imagine a film like this one, then strip out all of the abstraction, a good chunk of the hand-craftedness, and consequently, a lot of the delight, and you’d have something that would probably be called “Good” by live action standards. Here’s what the film might look like if it wasn’t made of drawings:

Dubs vs subs: I ended up seeing the dubbed version with a friend today, and I loved it, as you can tell. I look forward to watching the BD at home in Japanese with English subtitles, but John Lasseter and co seem to be making sure that things are handled as competently as possible. (Except for a song that plays over the end credits, which is slightly horrifying, that is). The only way to “properly” see Japanese movies is to learn Japanese, and other than the kana chart on my wall (I can just about remember SE and GA), that isn’t happening any time soon.

There is also the issue of shared experience (something a lot of home theater people are too quick to forget). The audience I saw the film with was about a 50/50 split between kids and their parents, and adults like myself. Subtitles are a flawed but decent way of watching foreign material, but excluding a large part of your audience wouldn’t be good for anyone from a shared experience point of view. It would have been very different seeing the film with only the faster readers (probably not kids, although I may be overly patronising with that) being able to get it.

Now all I need are BDs of Spirited Away, Porco Rosso and Totoro (ESPECIALLY Spirited Away – all of the DVDs I’ve seen are complete blur-fests).

Now I’ve started using Google Chrome for basically the same reasons and have deja vu. Firefox isn’t a bad browser, but Chrome is faster, and is full of little smooth animated touches which make the browsing experience FEEL faster even at times when it, in reality, is the same. By contrast, Firefox feels slower, and appears to be filling up with features which I frankly don’t want (poorly designed “Personas”? Who cares?)

Still, I’d be fairly happy to use either browser, which is more than I could say for Microsoft’s offering back in the day. (Incidentally, does anyone know if that can display HTML pages correctly yet?)

Yes.

Oh, OK. That’s fine then. Can I get an ETA on that?