I went to the Toshiba/Universal/Warner HD DVD promo on Saturday in Toronto. Great event. Well organized and well-attended. Everyone was enthusiastic. Everyone involved deserves kudos for doing such a good job, especially on such short notice. BTW, They gave us Ocean's Thirteen on HD DVD along with I Now Pronounce you Chuck and Larry as swag for showing up, and Ocean's Thirteen isn't even out yet. Nice lunch too. They also had Shrek The Third playing during the lunch break. I have to admit though, not that many people seemed all that interested in Shrek the Third. Everyone was going gaga over the Blade Runner Limited Edition Box Set as well as the Harry Potter 1-5 box set when Warner showed them to us. One guy also walked out with a Toshiba HD-XA2 as a door prize. Lucky bastard.
Some points from the talk:
XA2 to get 7.1 bitstream support over HDMI next week.
Did a demo of a 1080i60 source vs. a 1080p24 source on a 1080p60 TV. Nobody could see a difference.
Did a demo of a 1080p24 source on a 1080p24 capable 120 TV, and on the same TV with 24p support turned off. Nearly everyone could see a difference, because the lack of jitter.
Did an audio comparison of DD+ vs TrueHD PCM vs TrueHD HDMI 1.3. Hard to compare since the volumes were a bit different.
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They had a commercial compressionist/DVD/HD/BD disc author there. It was interesting to hear Pat's take on the war.
1) VC-1 rocks in terms of video quality, and its encoding is fast. H.264 AVC rocks in terms of video quality, but it takes forever to encode, and many times longer than VC-1 for the same quality. MPEG2 cannot get close to either of them in terms of video quality with any reasonable bitrate, so they stay away from MPEG2 for HD completely. They stay away from AVC as well because of the encoding times (but not because of quality). He prefers VC-1 to AVC in terms of the look but overall it's pretty much a wash, and he knows some who prefer the look of AVC.
2) 50 GB is irrelevant. Well not really. It may be relevant in outlier cases with a four hour movie with lots of extras. However, if you put extras on a second disc, 4 hours shouldn't be a major problem for 30 GB. They feel confident in saying for the vast majority of situations 50 GB = 30 GB in terms of video quality, because they have the original uncompressed video to compare at any time.
3) It takes them 2-3 days to author a complete commercial DVD, once they have all the assets in place. (Video encoding for MPEG SD is in real-time, so that's not an issue.) It takes them 4+ weeks for HD DVD or Blu-ray with all the fixin's. Encoding is variable bit rate 2-pass, and a fast VC-1 encode is about 8 fps for each pass, while slower ones are... slower. Then they have to manually select parts to re-encode. So that's about 4 fps (or 12 hours for a 2 hour movie), plus additional time for selective re-encodes. Because this takes so long on even VC-1, they don't use H.264 AVC at all, except for testing. Judging by their previous comments, a similar H.264 AVC encode would take days on their equipment. He had said their test encodes can take 6-7X as long for AVC vs. VC-1.
4) They can do in-house HDi programming for HD DVD. HDi is similar to XML + Javascript. They don't touch BD Java at all - far too complicated for compressionists. They contract to 3rd parties for Java programming, and add in the Java applications later to their BD authored discs. Memory conservation is very important regardless of the format. For example, on Surf's Up BD, the pinball game is 64 MB. BD's Java implementation is very robust. Any problems with compatibility isn't the fault of BD Java per se, but that of the firmware of the players. Contracting out Java can be a problem because memory conservation becomes more difficult (since they have little control over what the 3rd parties do with the code), as does testing.
5) HD DVD and Blu-ray are completely different in terms of authoring. Basically the only major thing that can be shared is the encode, but the interactivity is programmed completely differently (as evidenced above), so it means that if a company is format neutral its authoring costs are nearly twice as much. For HD DVD they use a Sonic Scenarist solution, but for BD they're forced to also use more Sony produced software which is not user friendly. Testing is also harder on BD since there the same type of emulated HD DVD environment. (I hope I got that right.)
6) BD requires AACS on all discs, so it's harder to demo interim work. On HD DVD for short clips, they just burn to cheap DL DVD-R without AACS for that.
7) Blu-ray discs waste more of their space, because of a very large lead-in and lead-out, but still have significantly more space than HD DVD.
8) His personal opinion, but he says at this point with current prices, it makes almost no sense to get any BD player besides the PS3. It's the most feature rich and the most potentially upgradable for the cheapest price.
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Wayne, VP from Warner was a very animated guy, and a very good speaker. Some points.
Reaffirmed their dual-format status, and says he's seen the 2008 slate which at this point continues to include both formats. Nonetheless they are watching Q4 closely. TotalHD is not quite dead, but almost dead.
Canada year to date: xx% BD ($x.x million), xx% HD ($x.x million) (including all companies). (Edited out because of new rules.)
Somebody asked about Kubrick discs and why they're so hard to get. They said they underestimated demand, and haven't been able to ramp up easily because most of the replication is going towards Harry Potter. No HD or BD replicators in Canada. Elsewhere in the world, there are many HD replicators, but BD replicators are rare (effectively only Sony). For SD replication, there's one just down the street (Cinram).
Top 8 titles in Canada in terms of $ in 2007 YTD. (I didn't write down the rest of the top 20 because I ran out of time.)
Planet Earth BD
300 BD
300 HD
Planet Earth HD
Casino Royale BD
Transformers HD
POTC Dead Man's Chest BD
POTC - can't remember which one
Planet Earth on SD was predicted to ship xxxx copies in Canada. YTD they've shipped xxxxxx. (Edited out because of new rules.) The popularity of Planet Earth on BD/HD also totally shocked them but they didn't give us numbers.
Extras? Yes they matter, esp. for some movies.
- Some filmmakers love it. They almost demand it now, and actually tailor their workflow to be able to include stuff for extras.
- 300 on SD sold a crapload of the higher-priced special-edition two-disc sets, so there's lots and lots of extra money to made by including extras.
- It helps combat piracy since people have to pay to get the extras. If they just had the disc with nothing else, they think many would simply stop buying.
Go see I Am Legend, not only because it is supposed to be good movie, but also because it will have the Batman: Dark Knight trailer.
The definitive director's cut of Blade Runner is being screened right now in Toronto at The Regent. It's listed for a couple of weeks, but the run will be extended if it does well.
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Universal's VP, Richard, was less animated but a very good speaker, and very diplomatic. One guy was trying to tell the VPs of these companies that every new DVD release should be a HD DVD/DVD combo disc, or perhaps a Twin Disc so that everyone buying a DVD would automagically get an HD DVD.
The Universal VP very diplomatically said to him that even if cost weren't an issue (it is), it's still a marketing issue, because some consumers simply don't understand. The Warner guy then said that if they did that, they'd be very worried that they'd get a lot of them returned simply because they didn't understand that the disc wasn't playing because they had picked the HD DVD side and not the DVD side. Universal said even Twin Disc would be confusing to some consumers, as he still sees people in store wondering if they should get widescreen vs. full-screen, because they don't know exactly what the difference is. I think this is true. It will take more penetrance in the market before average people really understand what HD DVD (and Blu-ray) really are. With such a miniscule market share by hi-def types, it's asking too much to risk DVD sales.
OTOH, Paramount is releasing Star Trek on combo HD DVD/DVD only. No DVD release is planned. So there goes that argument. Too bad Paramount wasn't there, because it would have been interesting to hear their take on all of this. Paramount wanted to be there, but had prior commitments. So the Toshiba guy simply summarized their coming release schedule, and the fact that Transformers sold extremely well.
The Kingdom will be out on HD DVD in Canada before the US, only by a few days, but it's a very important few days. I think Universal said Dec. 26 for USA and Dec. 21 for Canada, so it will be an interesting experiment.
Spielberg movies had appeared on the slate, but then were dropped. He said while they could release those movies without permission from Spielberg, the sales gained would not overcome the problems encountered by pissing off Spielberg.
Universal's VP agrees that extras help combat piracy, because a lot of people like them. Their info tells them the average Canadian watches 46 minutes of extras, even on rental discs. The average Quebecer watches 63 minutes of extras, or 17-18 more minutes than average Canadians for whatever reason.
They tried hard to get Tricia Helfer to come to help launch Battlestar Galactica on HD and SD at a store, but she charges way, way too much money for these types of appearances.
Web enabled extras will be supported for quite some time, but there will be a window around the release. Don't expect to necessarily get web enabled extras for say an 8 year old disc.
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Dave's Toshiba wrap up:
Going forward, all Toshiba HD DVD models (including the HD-A1), will be getting updates when necessary. Maybe not for 10 years, but for the next couple of years at least. The XA1 can't be updated to 1080p though.
The A2 is now discontinued.
Q4 is VERY important, since the last 8 weeks of the year represents 68% of yearly sales.
In September the HD-A2 outsold their SD4000 DVD player in Canada, which is their only sub $100 player here (at $69), and a player which is #4 overall in Canada for DVD players. The A2 also sold well in October, but then they ran out of stock in the first two weeks of Oct. Going forward it will be the A3 at the low end. No more A2.
There will be an off-brand HD DVD player in a major retailer this year in Canada.
One of the other Toshiba guys said they weren't keen on selling the Toshiba in Wal-Mart, and preferred to stick to Best Buy and Future Shop for the big chains.
Putting 2 and 2 together, I'm guessing that means we'll see a Venturer (or an Alco-manufactured player) at Wal-Mart Canada, but like I said I'm just guessing on that
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