Transition to HD - for those interested in technical stuff
Posted: 13 Jan 2012, 15:18Lavender's new movie set, which will be out late today or tomorrow, was filmed in high definition. The movies will be released keeping the 16x9 aspect ratio, but their physical dimensions are around 720x405 pixels. This may sound tiny, but in fact when you expand the movies to full screen, they hold up remarkably well, better than the old SD output.
I am still experimenting with various settings in Final Cut Pro and Compressor 4 to get the best quality while holding the file size down as much as possible. The experiments are taking a little time because there are so many choices, and it's a case of picking the best compromise for download manageability. I think I am just about there, as of today, but Lavender's set is already loaded so I don't plan to make any changes there. The teasers should convince you that the files are good quality.
For the next set, which should be Scarlett, I anticipate that the file dimensions will be increased to 1280x720 pixels with bit rates of around 2500-3000 kbps. This level of compression (down from an original bit rate of approx. 12000 kbps) brings the Quicktime file sizes into the 18-20 MB per minute of video range. It's still quite big, but not unreasonable in size for download. When WMV versions are made from these, they hold up a lot better than the quality you have seen in the past.
A typical B2B movie would now be 300-400 MB, and a Quicktime one-hour set of movies would be around 1.2-1.5 GB. Obviously, sets longer than about 75 minutes will no longer be possible because of the 2 GB file limit on Files Forever, but that's more than most people would want to download anyway.
I am still experimenting with various settings in Final Cut Pro and Compressor 4 to get the best quality while holding the file size down as much as possible. The experiments are taking a little time because there are so many choices, and it's a case of picking the best compromise for download manageability. I think I am just about there, as of today, but Lavender's set is already loaded so I don't plan to make any changes there. The teasers should convince you that the files are good quality.
For the next set, which should be Scarlett, I anticipate that the file dimensions will be increased to 1280x720 pixels with bit rates of around 2500-3000 kbps. This level of compression (down from an original bit rate of approx. 12000 kbps) brings the Quicktime file sizes into the 18-20 MB per minute of video range. It's still quite big, but not unreasonable in size for download. When WMV versions are made from these, they hold up a lot better than the quality you have seen in the past.
A typical B2B movie would now be 300-400 MB, and a Quicktime one-hour set of movies would be around 1.2-1.5 GB. Obviously, sets longer than about 75 minutes will no longer be possible because of the 2 GB file limit on Files Forever, but that's more than most people would want to download anyway.
