Good news, Craig. I hope it's true, but I agree we really won't know until we can actually buy or upgrade.

For the bundle, including BRD, HD DVD & SD DVD, you need to spring a whopping $150,000.
Better go rob a bank or something!
Plus it's still vapourware & not actually shipping yet.

Premiere Pro can support up to 1080 resolution footage, and if you edit & master at this res then dump down to MPEG-2 for SD DVD, you will still get a noticeable improvement in quality.
HD DVD needs a 50" (some say 60"+) to really see any benefits, and even then it is all down to your actual display, which may or may not be true HD capable. Most are not.

> Holy crap!!!

Sums the whole format up, when you get right down to basics.
The cheapest way to do this is to wait for at least 6 to 12 months, then set up an XP Media Centre equipped system, or even a Vista equivalent (assuming Microsoft can get the dreadful bugs out of it) and then install an HD DVD drive & a BRD drive.
That will save the £1,000+ per player to get both.

(Vista right now uses a whopping 800Mb of RAM just to load, and the instant you do anything at all, like open the built-in email client, it tips well over 1Gb.
It's all that nonsensical graphics frippery. The PC's get more & more powerful - but that simply just about keeps up with the OS requirements.
I remember my first SX66 486 class CPU (Pre Pentium days here) with it's massive 4Mb of RAM. And who can forget the comment from Big Bill "640K of memory is more than enough for anyone".

Funny how we still take exactly the same amount of time to actually
i do
anything though.

Bad news when anything more than a RISC makes it into consumer electronics devices. People kind of like the fact that CE gear just works, myself included. In fact, this idea is exactly backwards. The computer industry ought to be working diligently to mimic the CE industry. For example, you plug any brand of CD player into your receiver, and you get music. Period. No rebooting, no downloading updates and patches from the Internet, no missing or conflicting codecs. You plug in all the wires, you hit play, you get music.

Simple, workable. That's what folks want.

I actually think Blu-ray is the superior format, from a consumer viewpoint. Only big companies benefit from the HD-DVD format, and even those benefits (reduced manufacturing and initial startup costs) have been questioned. The DVD forum chose to back the wrong group this time, and the consumer will pay the price.

No, Blu-ray does support standard DVD playback.

Issues 1 and 2 I was aware of, which are the manufacturing benefits the HD-DVD format was touting. But as I said, I have read opinions disagreeing with those benefits. Certainly it's somewhat moot now, as there are currently Blu-ray plants up and running.

As for the fingerprint issue, I have also read reports about a new process of coating the disk which makes them even more resistant to misreads from fingerprints and scratches than standard DVDs.

I've no problem with number 4. People shouldn't be trying to illegally modify their hardware in the first place.

The Internet connection will actually NOT be required for standard playback of movies, only for extras and things.

As for game consoles, I'm definitely a PC gamer, so I couldn't care less.

Given the higher storage and transfer rates of Blu-ray, I still feel it is definitely the superior format from a consumer standpoint.

>So it's okay to be told that "Thou shalt not buy a movie whilst on Holiday, as thou shalt not be able to play it when thou gettest it home"?

I don't have a problem with that.

>In these days of "Globalization", region coding is an outdated way to restrict the sale of goods.

I am currently unaware of any other way.

>region coding is like telling me that I cannot buy a Pair of shoes in Germany

That's more than a bit overstated.

>How would you like it if you bought a CD in the UK, took it to the USA only to find that it would not play?

Whether or like it or not isn't the issue. Hollywood has a distribution scheme. Region Coding is the only way I know of to enforce that scheme. I don't have a problem with this.

>And just what content actually requires 50 to 75Gb of data storage then?

Some of my projects might well take up that much space (including the DV footage). I think it would be nice to record onto portable HD (no tape), transfer that to my editing workstation, and when finished archive all that footage onto a single Blu-ray.

>I have yet to see an SD DVD that actually fills up the maximum allowable space.

Try the extended versions of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Each movie is split into two dual-layers disks to make them fit. You actually have to get up and switch disks in the middle of the movie, ala the early days of Laser Disc.

>BRD actually has a maximum rate of 36,

The following quote comes from the Blu-ray Disk Association's web site.

"With High Definition video with a resolution of up to 1920x1080 and up to a 54 Mbit/sec bandwidth (roughly double that of a normal HDTV broadcast), no other format can match Blu-ray Disc's video quality. Furthermore, due to the overwhelming capacity of a Blu-ray Disc, no tight compression algorithms that may alter the picture quality are required, as with other formats that offer less recording space."

>HD DVD is the better format, and that is a consumer driven site.

I question that. One of the Pros listed for HD-DVD is, and I quote "enabling use of the same manufacturing infrastructure as current DVD, which minimizes disc production costs." That is CLEARLY a manufacturer benefit, and has no value whatsoever to the consumer. Unless you live in fairly land and are gullible enough to believe this will affect the consumer's cost of movies.

When you look at the pros and Cons listed for both formats, the only con listed for Blu-ray is the initial expense required to convert manufacturing plants, which has alreqady been done. But the site somehow missed listing the reduced capacity and bandwidth for HD-DVD as cons, which they definitely are from a consumer standpoint.

>as I keep saying, we shall have to wait & see

Now that is one thing we can agree on.

I don't write Pioneer's press releases. I can't say why they got it wrong.

The quote came from the Blu-ray Disk Association, the group that oversees the entire Blu-ray standard. I'm afraid I have to give the accuracy nod to them.

Rob.
Encore is a Standard Definition tool, not HD DVD or Blu Ray.
What you can do, however, and this will make a difference, is to shoot & edit in HD, then after you have your final movie finished downscale to SD resolution & MPEG encode from that.
Do not try to downscale & MPEG encode at the same time.

Currently, to Author HD DVD, you need the following
Scenarist 4 HD DVD
Sonic CineVision
(Total cost is around $110,000)

Not that well up on capturing & working in HD sad to say.
The way we have done this in the past is to capture the footage in it's source format:
HDV (The Sony High Definition format that uses a form of MPEG compression)
True HD
Do all the necessary editing in native resolution in, say, Premiere Pro (or whatever NLE you use).
Then when this is finished, export the movie out at 720x480 (for NTSC) and then encode this to MPEG-2 for DVD.
From Premiere, export as a movie and then encode the movie to MPEG-2 for DVD - the Adobe Media Encoder does a fine job.
I have found that trying to go from HD straight to DVD quality MPEG-2 is simply not as good as using the intermediate stage.

Er, no.
If you're also running EncoreDVD I would export from Premiere Pro as a movie, 720x480 NTSC, and then bring that right into Encore & allow Encore to transcode automatically for you - it will set an optimal bitrate for you.
Plus, you'll get more control over Chapter placement.

Unless you need to encode Audio to 5.1, or want more control over the Dolby Digital process in which case you'll also want to purchase the SUrCode AC3/Dolby Digital Encoder too.

The way we are working now is to use Cineform AspectHD, which brings the m2t transport stream from the HDV tape into the computer as an AVI file.
There are 3 options, small, medium & large file sizes.
Medium is not much bigger than DV, and the quality is appreciably higher.
It's 1440 x 1080i, and edits beautifully.
Export goes to Cineform HD codec, at usual resolutions of 720x480 or 720 x576 in 16:9.
This can be laid back to HDV tape, or else taken to SD DVD, and the improvement in quality is clear to see.

AspectHD is $499, and almost quadruples the power of Premiere Pro.
It is unbelievable value for money, plus of course you don't need Blu Ray or HD DVD players - there are players that will play the cineform codec, by all accounts.
Looking into this - and there is also a camera coming out (or so I am informed) that will record straight to HDD in the Cineform codec.
It is well worth checking out.