DV Expo LA 2006 What fascinated you?

For me it was great seeing a few demonstrations of Flip4mac and Sorenson Squeeze.

I thought Sorenson Squeeze couldn't shrink the files down sufficiently for dial up. Everybody here said forget dial up; but I persisted... and the fellow at Sorenson Squeeze asked me what do you want the file to be? I said first 500 k's. He shrank it in a jiffy and there it was -- not bad! Then I pushed my luck, I asked him how about 100k? Without hesitation he dialed in 100k and again it was almost as good as the 500k.

Now you ask, well, what was the size of the video clip. Okay. It was 12 seconds ... wait, wait -- it was 62.5 MB! It was a skier doing a flip in the air. And although in 100k the sky fell apart a little (you could see the separation in the shades of blue), but it wasn't all that bad. Oh, yes, of course, the size of the frame was small, like 240 pixels wide -- which is okay for certain types of clips that I like to post on the Internet. I was very pleased with the demonstration.

Then I went to the Flip4mac booth and I was amazed, Flip4mac could do a lot of format conversions between Mac and PC, but in addition it could also do Flash 8 files like Sorenson Squeeze, and the price was right -- for about $400 you could have it all.

Then I walked over to Apple and a brilliant editor showed me how to preserve the HDV advantage and how to use the compressor 2. He recommended going straight from the HDV and Convert to mpeg2. True it would take longer to compress but the quality would be better. i used to go first to 10 bit uncompressed, but he said that was not the way.

I asked him about de-interlacing and progressive output for film and he said "nattress"...

Which confirmed a lot of what Ben and some others have been telling me. I got to get me one of those :-) I hope you'll add to this thread what you saw at DV Expo at the Convention Center.

I was hoping to go to the LAFCPUG event but we'd gone to the Expo at 9 AM and the doors didn't open until 12 -- our mistake, we hadn't checked the time. I was too tired to wait for the evening event.

Im pretty sure FlipforMac does not do Flash 8 files...at least it doesnt say so on their site although i didn;t talk to anyone at their booth. Its primarily for making WMV files right?? Thats the only export codecs they listed. Maybe they can import a FLV file for conversion to WMV but i dunno

It was def interesting to see Sorenson being run, although i couldn;t see any real need for it, mostly just because i already have the Flash 8 Video encoder. It's nice to know that there is 96% accessability rate for Flash and Sorenson Spark and almost 86% for the new On2 codec, which is much much better. For my limited web distribution, i think H.264 and On2 are completely viable.

Sony's V-1u was pretty nice to see, def a step in the right direction. They best part was getting my hands on the HVX and having an Apple & Panasonic rep explaining the workflow, very very interesting setup

Telestream, makers of flip4mac introduced a mock up of their soon to be announced Pipeline Hardware encoder that works over ethernet and has SDI in and out and sells for only $1750.00 Supposed to ship at end of Dec. More on that in 2 weeks or so.

Michael Horton
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filmman Wrote:
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> Then I walked over to Apple and a brilliant editor
> showed me how to preserve the HDV advantage and
> how to use the compressor 2. He recommended going
> straight from the HDV and Convert to mpeg2. True
> it would take longer to compress but the quality
> would be better. i used to go first to 10 bit
> uncompressed, but he said that was not the way.

Could you fill in the details on that workflow? Did he say to first export a self-contained QT movie, and then submit to Compressor and choose mpeg-2 for a std def. DVD?

If you want to avoid going to std def and make a HD DVD from the hdv project, what's the workflow? I experimented and chose H.264 in Compressor and it tooks hours to compress 2.5 minutes, and the end product was not compatible with DVDsp.

SmartSounds Sonicfire Pro 4. Although I've long been aware of SmartSound, I really like their more recent advances with mood mapping and multilayer instrument tracks.

I liked the demo - seemed like an easy way to adapt music selections for your specific needs with the great feature of being able to select or delete different instruments as needed within the music selection. The new library samples I listened to sounded like they'd work for me. The show price had a nice discount, which sealed the deal for me and I bought it.

So far I haven't had time to explore FCP Studio's Soundtrack composing features, but I suspect that, as a non-musician, I wouldn't be able to quickly and easily compose something usable. Dunno, but maybe later I'll discover that I could do some added creative touches to SmartSound segments inside SoundTrack Pro.

The other thing that really wowed me was the show & tell "One Six Right" at the lafcpug meeting.

Wished I realized earlier in the day that Apple was only upstairs, couldn't find it on the program or map and by the time I discovered that it was upstairs, everything was pretty much over. I could only attend one day, so unfortunately, did not get the info I needed about specific hdv workflow scenarios.