Orange County

Last week I ended up going out on a show in Orange County. It was nice to be at the beach, but unfortunately I never really had any time to enjoy it. This is a close as I ever got to the ocean:

The show ended up being a small nightmare and I don't think I got more than four hours of sleep the entire three days I was there. But everything worked out well in the end. Here are a few pictures from the show:



Upon getting back to the airport in Dallas, there was a suspicious package at the luggage carousel so they weren't letting anyone near it to get their bags. They had to get out the bomb disposal robots, which took forever. Apparently the package was on our flight. We'd flown all the way from California with the package on the airplane and they didn't notice it till after we'd landed! That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in airline security.
I've added a few more pictures from the trip on my pictures page here.

Finally checking out my Hd-dvd player and another Blu-ray demo

As I said in my last entry, I've been super busy lately. But I finally took some time out Saturday to play with my new HD-DVD player. After four discs, I have to say I'm totally blown away by it. To say I'm happy with the purchase would be an understatement. The player was hooked up to a projector via an hdmi to dvi cable (dual link), with the audio going out the analog outs to my receiver. Since there's no receiver out yet that will decode the new formats, analog using the player's internal decoders is the only way to check out the new audio formats. The native resolution of the projector is 768, but per suggestions I left the player set to output 1080 (the resolution of the discs) and let the projector scale down.

The four discs I watched were Apollo 13, Goodfellas, Serenity and Phantom of the Opera. I also have Million Dollar Baby and Last Samurai, but haven't watched them yet. But first of course I baptized the player by playing a bit of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on standard dvd. It's kind of silly, but with every piece of electronics hardware I've owned since my first laserdisc player, I've played something Lynch related on them first for good luck. This also gave me a chance to check out the upconversion of standard dvd. Granted, the encoding on the FWWM disc isn't the greatest, but it was a good test of the average dvd. Images were sharper upconverted, but only a little better. The scaler in the player doesn't appear to be all that great. Granted, you can only do so much with resolution that wasn't there, so I wasn't expecting miracles.

Then it was on to the real hd-dvds. First, I want to report that after watching all four films back to back, I had absolutely zero lock-ups or player freezes, as some people have reported. Nor did I have a single click or pop in the audio. Looks like I must have got one of the good players. The player does take a good 40 seconds after you insert the dvd to start playing. By watching what both the player and projector is doing during this time, it looks like the hdcp handshaking is what's taking up most of the 40 seconds. So you can thank paranoid hollywood studios for the delay in playing. Once it get started though, menus and scene selection are pretty quick. Of course, the fact that the menus pop up over the film make things move a bit quicker. I never saw a single indication of a layer change. The Warner titles go straight to a little HD-DVD intro and then the film, instead of starting with the menu as I'd rather it did. But that's a minor nitpick. The first two Warner titles, Phantom and Samurai, have the audio levels authored a bit low. They appear to have fixed this with later titles as Goodfellas was fine. Even then, the lower audio level wasn't so bad as to cause any problems. I had to bump up the levels about 8 db to get it to where I usually listen at. But there was still plenty of headroom left on my receiver.

Phantom of the Opera looked simply amazing! The amount of detail in the street scenes and inside the theater was truly incredible. The colors were about the most vibrate I've ever seen on home video. NTSC and even PAL have nothing on HD. There was not a compression artifact to be seen. I would go so far as to say not only did this look as good as it did in the theater, it looked better (which is probably as much a statement on modern theaters as it is on HD-DVD). The sound blew me away as well. I've always really liked the sound design in this film, and the Dolby Digital Plus really gave it a fuller sound the regular dvd didn't capture. I gave the lossless TrueHD soundtrack a listen as well. Unfortunately, while the disc is encoded with 5.1 True HD, the player will only decode and output 2.0. It was certainly crystal clear, but listening to this film in only two channels is not the way to go. I can't wait till new players come out that will decode the lossless 5.1.

Goodfellas, Apollo 13 and Serenity weren't nearly as clear as Phantom, but then they were shot softer with more film grain so that's to be expected. Still, they all showed great clarity in details. Again, the Dolby Digital Plus gave them an extra bump over their standard dvd counterparts. Though I didn't think the Apollo 13 track quite matched the DTS version on dvd. But it was no slouch.

I have only one minor nitpick with the player - its remote. It's good and sturdy, but the labels on the buttons are next to impossible to read, especially in the dark. Also, the player has a really small sweet spot you have to aim for. Fortunately for me I'm the type that usually pushes play once and watched a film all the way though, so the remote isn't really needed that much.

Overall, I'd say this is probably the best $450 I've spent. HD has finally come of age (that badly compressed stuff on cable and satellte doesn't hold a candle). I know there have been a few reports of people having problems with the players, but I'm happy to report I experienced none. At such a low price, it's a steal. I only hope Blu-ray looks as good since it'll have more studio support. Speaking of which...

Starpower in Dallas had another Blu-ray demo this weekend, so I stopped by on Friday. There were no Sony reps but they did have the player hooked up and running. However only the video was hooked up, they had no sound. They guy at the store claimed the prototype player didn't have any sound yet, but I don't know if I buy that. More likely they were just too lazy to hook it up. The player was indeed a prototype, but not the same one that they were using last time. This one looks kind of like the BDP-S1 but it's black (see picture). All the menus were still in Japanese, so I suspect this is the prototype of the BDP-S1 from Japan. They said the BDP-S1 should be in stock by the end of June or start of July.



They had a new demo disc playing. It started with a Blu-ray ad that featured a guy sitting in a chair watching a few seconds from several studio's films. Off the top of my head I seem to remember seeing Team America, Spider-man 2, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Corpse Bride, The Dukes of Hazzard, Moulin Rouge, The Fantastic Four, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Crash, Constantine, Batman Begins and The Transporter. I noted there were a lot of titles in the ad that are coming out on HD-DVD as well, so it seems like they're trying to point out that you can get them and more in their format. The ad also played up the studios and manufacturers supporting Blu-ray.

The contents of the rest of the demo disc are as follows:
Chicken Little clip
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe trailer
Spiderman 2 clip
Fifith Element clip
Hitch trailer
Resident Evil 2 trailer
Click trailer
The Davinci Code trailer
RV trailer
Dido - White Flag clip
Sheryl Crow - Always On Your Side clip

It was interesting to see that some of those trailers are for films currently in theaters or not even released yet (Click, Davinci Code, RV). Probably a good indication of what some of the early day and date releases are going to be.

Honestly, I'd say the encoding on this disc was actually worse than on the demo disc I saw in March. Lots of artifacting. Some of the clips looked no better than badly compressed cable/satellite. Chicken little was the only clip I was truely blown away by - it was flawless. Too bad it's a crappy film. The guy at the store didn't have a way to check the player to see what the disc was encoded with, but he thought it was mpeg2. I'd say the HD-DVD discs I own look far better than what was on the blu-ray demo disc. But then, the HD-DVD demo disc in stores didn't look as good as the actual films ended up being, so I suspect the actual final release BD discs will look a lot better than the demo as they get the bugs worked out. And who knows how they had the display calibrated. I had pre-ordered the BDP-S1 from Starpower back at the first demo in March (had to drop 50% up front on the player too) and I see no reason to cancel my order even though the demo was less than stellar. I'm keeping the faith that the final discs will look great.

Here are some pictures I took. Of course, they don't really represent what it looks like in person. Also, there's some nasty glare on the screen caused by the sets behind me due to the way they had everything arranged.

Manufacturer support
Chicken Little
Team America
Narnia
Fifth Element
Hitch
Resident Evil 2
Click
The Davinci Code
RV
Dido
Sheryl Crow
Moulin Rouge

Tales of the border, Deca and other assorted updates.

Yeah, I know it's been a while since I updated my blog. I've been busier than hell lately. So busy that my new HD-DVD player has been sitting still in the box on the floor of my office for the last couple of weeks, as I haven't had time to play with it yet. And anyone who knows me knows that's something I was really looking forward to. That should give you an idea of how crazy things have been.

I ended up going out on a couple of shows last month, which I usually try to avoid. One of them was in Brownsville, Texas. Brownsville is as far south as you can go in Texas and still be in the U.S. In fact, the checkpoint for the border was right across the street from the hotel!

This way lies Mexico!

Brownsville might as well be in Mexico. Most everyone only spoke Spanish, and the town, especially close to the border, was really run down. It kind of looked like something out of the film El Mariachi. Also, they seem to really love shoes down there (or zapatos for the local residents). I swear every other store was a shoe store. Actually, I need to pick up a new pair of shoes, so I probably should have checked them out. No time though.

The show was a performance with the University of Texas at Brownsville symphony and jazz band. It was a ball buster going into it, but things worked out and the show went off pretty well.




The week after the Brownsville show I found myself doing a show for the Deca National Conference in Dallas. That was kind of a blast from the past. Back in high school I was actually in Deca. For anyone who doesn't know, Deca is an organization for high school students interested in marketing. It used to stand for Distributive Education Clubs of America, but after a while they realized no one knew what the hell that meant and dropped the acronym completely. So now I guess you could say Deca stands for nothing. :) I didn't really intend on getting that involved in it when I was in high school. But I needed something to have as an extracurricular activity on my college application, and I was already taking a marketing class, which pretty much made you a member by default. So Deca it was. Somehow over the course of those two years I went from planning on just showing up so I could say I was in it, to being an officer my senior year and actually placing at a few competitions and going to the national conference both years. Go figure! Both years at the national conference they had lasers, and I remember thinking to myself back then that some day I'd have to do the lasers at the conference and show them how it should be done. Of course, that was back when I was young and naive and didn't understand the concepts of limited budgets and such yet.

So now 14 years after the fact, I found myself back in the land of Deca. I can't say much had changed. Most of the kids seemed fairly stupid and clueless, just as it was back in my day. And of course I now knew that, as much as I used to think of all the cool laser things that could be done for the opening of the conference, most people don't want to spend that kind of money for their event. So green beams is all Deca was willing to spring for this year. Still, it looked pretty good. I programmed up a spiffy segment for their opening Coldplay songs (I seriously hate Coldplay!). Then latter on I jammed a bit with some live beams during the country music act they had playing, who I'd never heard of. They did the most bizarre country version of Zeppelin's Kashmir that I've ever heard. The real fun started about three songs from the end of their act when all the kids decided to run out of the stands and rush the stage. Nothing like hearing screams of "fuck!" and "shit!" in my ear coming from the comm. I think the organizers were afraid they were going to riot or something. Alas, no such luck. The band left the stage and everyone went back to their seats. And thus I finally achieved the goal I had set back in 1992 of doing lasers for a Deca national conference.






Nothing else much going on lately. I made it back to Lincoln towards the end of March for my dad's wedding. He seems happier than I've ever seen him, so that's pretty good. And while I was back there I finally got a Davinci's cheesesteak that I'd been dying to have for a while. No one in Texas seems to be able to make good cheesesteaks! I also stopped by at the SAC Museum and saw the Liberty Bell 7 exhibit. The photos I took of the exhibit are posted here.

I'm somewhat behind on seeing movies. Last thing I saw was Scary Movie 4 (a few chuckles but not great). Hopefully this week I'll start to get caught up on them. I had to get my car fixed (again) a couple of days ago, so now I can get out and about more. I swear though, this is the last time I'm spending any money on repairs for that car. Next time something breaks I'm buying a new one!