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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

HDcam or Bluray for projection?

C

Chris Pickle

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Screening a feature at an upcoming festival. As I understand it, they have an HDcam (not HDcam SR) deck with analogue stereo out that they can send through a Dolby processor for 5.1 emulation.

But I'm fairly certain they can do Bluray with full 5.1

Now I know that the projector is everything, and I'm not sure what they have...

but I wonder what the quality difference would be between projecting HDcam or Bluray.

(I've been in post audio past few days and the true 5.1 sounds killer)

Anyone have some experience with this?

Thanks!
 
I have the same debate + currently, a film for outdoor fests - Banff will take D5 or HDCam, but not SR and no BluRay, so D5 it is. But then most other fests don't do D5, some BluRay, some HDCam, most not SR.

We showed a short on BluRay at a festival earlier this year where they also had an HDCam deck, and overall, BluRay was preferable - not only due to technical reasons with respect to formats, but because they had lots of BluRay submissions and almost no HDCam, and the projection folks put more time into making the BluRay films look and sound good.

The differences between HDCam well mastered and projected and BluRay well mastered and projected were not huge, but the audio difference was big (as you note, in favor of BR), and the cost and ease of use...no brainer.
 
Yep I'd agree with the above, if BluRay is there use it, but attempt to speak with the projectionist beforehand as if the majority is going to HDCAM and one ow two are going to be on BR the setup might not be as good as the HDCAM.
 
Thanks guys,

Yeah, I plan to be prepared with both and then hope to get into the booth well ahead of time and see what the projectionist thinks. If the bluray looked nearly as good, but had the 5.1... although I wonder what the stereo through emulation sounds like. Geuss I'll have to see. It becomes a trade-off between sound & picture.
 
We Premiered "Dale" the movie in Oven's auditorium in Charlotte 2006 using one SRW deck "single link" to a Christie projector. The movie looked fantastic!

The look on the screen is very much the effort of acquisition, colorizing, conversion and the final display or format.

If you shoot RED and use ProRes, burn to BRD and Play-out with a blue ray player and a good projector, your results should be very nice.

I would suggest you test the system before you make a final conclusion.

Once the Red Ray hits the streets you won't need that $92,000.00 SRW deck!

Dave
 
Cail Young said:
What I don't get is why festivals (and more importantly festival venues) don't use Dolby E to provide 5.1 on HDCAM. TV stations do it all the time.
Click to expand...

Because the processors that will decode Dolby E are expensive and many film festivals are run by not-for-profit organizations.

Not a Red user but stumbled across this discussion searching for info about Bluray as a presentation medium.

I am the technical director for the Starz Denver Film Festival this year and we are accepting HDCam (no 24p, no SR) with Bluray as a backup should problems arise with the HDCam tapes.
 
If it's between HDCam and Blu-ray, you can get much better picture quality from Blu-ray because you don't have to horizontally subsample to 1440x1080 resolution.
 
Chuck Z said:
If it's between HDCam and Blu-ray, you can get much better picture quality from Blu-ray because you don't have to horizontally subsample to 1440x1080 resolution.
Click to expand...

See, that's what I thought I had heard but my local AV company told me otherwise. Does anyone know of a good web resource that explains all the ins and outs of HDCam and HDCam SR? I don't trust the information on wikipedia...
 
Chuck Z said:
What would you like to know? I'll do my best to explain anything you'd like here.
Click to expand...

Well, specifically the relative resolution of HDCam versus HDCam SR. Everyone I talked to believes that HDCam can do full wide 1080p. Is that not correct?

Is 24p the only way to output progressive from an HDCam deck?
 
HDCAM only supports 1440x1080i resolution, so you'd be using non-square pixels to upsample to 1920x1080i on output. It does support 24p and 23.976psf so you don't have to hard telecine your content before you send it to the recording deck.

Blu-ray, on other hand, supports true 1920x1080p resolution at both 24p and 23.976p. Sure, the bit rate is a lot lower (40 Mb/s vs. 144 Mb/s), but with a good source, you can easily achieve visual transparency on Blu-ray even within those bandwidth constraints.

The only downside to going with Blu-ray is that it would be a little more work in terms of authoring and encoding. However, because of the modern codecs and true 1080p resolution, you'd probably get a better picture.

You need to weigh the trade offs.
 
Chuck Z said:
If it's between HDCam and Blu-ray, you can get much better picture quality from Blu-ray because you don't have to horizontally subsample to 1440x1080 resolution.
Click to expand...

Are you basing that opinion on numbers and theory, or practical experience?
 
I've seen HDCAM transferred movies on Blu-ray and they all show horizontal aliasing. Let me just add that if you have a true 2K source, why subsample to 1440x1080? I think going the Blu-ray route would show more measurable resolution.
 
Interesting thread.
I came here googling for the same type of info for the Amsterdam film festival.
Anyone with specific info on that? Worth putting a Dolby E track on there?

It seems to me that BR should be a good idea for independent film festivals
for various reasons. I wonder why they went for HDCAM?

thanx for starting this useful thread!
 
Festivals hate discs cuz they can skip whereas a pro deck should have clean heads with time code and less likely to skip.

We had a choice of HDcam or DigiBeta for our screening Friday and the distrib elected for Dbeta...the audience didn't care -they were entertained and liked it...would I have preferred HDcam? Of course, but nobody else seemed to mind the poor sound mix and crappy color timing (neither of which were my fault).
 
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