Brittany and Jeremiah got married at the beautiful Emory Henry Campus this weekend.  There were some rather strange coincidences with this wedding and our first wedding this year! 

• Both were at same location.
• Both had US for videography!
• Both had same photographer!
• Both had same Best Man!
• Both had a LOVELY AND HAPPY WEDDING!

Oh yeah, even saw Ashley and Steven there too!

Here’s their cinematic trailer!

We have all these high definition projects still archived and only ONE has been distributed on Blu-ray disc.  Yeah, that format “won” the HD wars, but its probably soon to be dead.  There’s several articles online about this… long story short, the price of the players are still high and the blank discs are high… with upconverting DVD players displaying near HD quality on the cheap, why bother?  I think that is most of the problem…

Enter the new and quietly released Western Digital TV HD Media Player for USB Devices Item code: WDAVN00BN (Its still not on WD site, but that’s a direct link to Best Buy’s site.) EDIT: Now it is on Western Digital’s site.  It is currently on sale for a mere $99 at Best Buy!  A friend of mine told me posted this on a forum I belong to and for $99, I figured I would try it out… all I can say is WOWZERS!  I am highly impressed with this little device!

The reason for this post is simple… to introduce this and to provide a hands on review.  I feel there are some great uses for this device:

1. Same Day Edits – oh yeah!  Shoot it, edit it, show it directly from the USB hard drive!  No burning to discs or printing back to tape and playing back from camera…
2. Tradeshows – another oh yeah!  Instead of packing up a blu-ray player and everything, just take a HDTV, this tiny unit and its hard drive and it will loop beautiful 1080p video all day long.
3. DISTRIBUTION TO CLIENTS – I’ve been on a search for a viable cost effective method for distributing HD to our clients since we’ve been shooting HD!  REALLY, for right at $200 (USB Hard Drive and this unit).  The main difference in this and other methods (including Blu-ray) is this… you can play MANY types of media on this device including photos!  So, you could get all your wedding video “chapters” in the Video folder, the photographer could essentially either give or sell you all your wedding photos and you can copy them to a Pictures folder (you could setup a slideshow on this unit to show your photos on your HDTV) and yes, you can even play music on it!  All from a USB hard drive.

OK, enough with these ideas, let’s get into the unit!

What does it look like? (Click Images to enlarge!)

Small.  In this photo, you’ll see it sitting next to a small Canon HV30 camcorder and a regular WD My Book External USB drive… I told you its small!

Click image to view full size.

Note the connectors… There are 2 USB ports.  Yes, you can even play media off of a USB Thumbdrive!  Be sure to press “Eject” on the remote when you want to disconnect the drive……..

Operations, menus and screen grabs…

This unit is very easy to operate… Turn it on, go to settings and set everything like HDMI output size and such… it has NTSC and PAL (50 hz and 60 hz)   Mouse over image for description and click for full size pic)

Like I said, it is very easy to operate this.  I wish you could build custom menus like a DVD or Blu-ray disc, but you can’t.  When I loaded the sample HD media on the WD CD-Rom, there were thumbnails of each video instead of the default disc icons you see in the 3rd pic… I want to figure out how to make a thumbnail show up.  There wasn’t any jpgs or anything, somehow in the MP4 sample files, it knew of a thumbnail…. hrm. 

Anyways, the specs show the following file formats that it will play… note that M2T is not mentioned, but that was the first file I tried when loading my own videos… it played it just fine (perhaps because it is a MPG2 video???)  So you can dump native HDV M2T files on a HD and play them instantly… no conversions!

This doesn’t allow chapter skipping or the like, but has a relatively fast 16x forward search.  It reminds me of VCR days, but faster.  You can update firmware (although this unit is NOT currently listed on Western Digital suppoer site) so I would think that they could add a “skip forward 5 minutes” or something like that in a firmware update… who knows.

So, this is a short and sweet review.  I highly recommend this product to anyone wanting to playback HD content easilly on your HDTV.  Without a standard delivery method (even though Blu-ray “won” the HD Disc wars) I feel this is a viable candidate WITH BENEFITS…  Think about it.  You can use endless hard drives for your content, convert existing DVDs with proper software to playback via the hard drive, playback photo slideshows (you can put different folders on the drive and navigate and play folders so you could have “wedding”, “birthday”, holidays” etc or play all of them!  You can also playback downloaded Quicktime MOV files, Windows Media WMV files and such so download web content and watch on your HDTV with this unit…  I can’t confirm if there is an upscaler/upconverter, but it does appear to do a good job at upscaling.  For instance, I put a 480p WMV clip and a 480p MP4 clip and played it back and it looked really good!  Better than any standard definition cable channels being played on my other HDTV.

There is software that comes bundled with it to be used for converting media… frankly, it is aweful.  I don’t need it because I can encode everything I need with Sony Vegas Pro…  Why they packaged an inferior converter is beyond me… I could only get it to configure for 480i resolution… NO WHERE NEAR HD!  Like I said, I don’t need it…….

Yes, you can do h.264, but from what I am seeing so far… why not just encode back to HDV and dump that to hard drive and playback?  Disc space is not a concern really, and it plays it back beautifully PLUS M2T files are faster to encode! 

So, go buy one if you can find one (I got mine from Best Buy in the link above) and enjoy the beauty of HD at a relatively low cost!  For all of our JC/DV clients who has not received your Blu-ray copy yet because you don’t have a Blu-ray player yet… contact us if you would like to pursue this option!  I wouldn’t spend the time to write up this review if I didn’t believe in this product…….

Have a great day!

That’s right! I found this on my hard drive just now and thought I’d share… guess you can say I’ve come a long way, but its not that bad really….

This was Tramara & Whitney. Whitney and I worked in a kitchen together at Meadowview Conference Center in Kingsport Tennessee in my chef days. Tramara worked there in banquets… I talked to Tramara recently and she said they still watch and love their video! SWEET!

Here you go!

First, let me say that I apologize for being a bad blogger!  I have been extremely busy the last few months and just recently had to move to a new host–so I took the opportunity to go ahead and do a makeover of JC/DV Productions site and blog.  I hope you like the new design and the blog is now finally skinned to match the website!!! YIPPPEEEE! 

With the new changes, there are some remarkable changes–most notably the videos on the front page of www.jcdv.com! They are big.  They are crystal clear.  They are streamable on most internet connections.  They are streamed on my new server.  There used to be 4 versions of each video that got served dependant on what your connection to the server was at that particular time.  It worked great, but with so many videos on the site, it started getting unmanageable and had lots of wasted space.  After checking server logs, the bulk of the files being served was the larger and better videos, so I decided to make it large.  For those that have slower connections, don’t worry, there is a “Low Bandwidth” version available too.  you just have to click on the link at the bottom of the player.  They look good too, but smaller.  I was able to stream them from a PDA phone tethered to a laptop, so anyone should be able to stream (unless you are on archaic dail-up connection.

The only downside at this time to view the videos is the latest Adobe Flash Player MUST be installed to view them.  They are MP4 files being served via flash player.  Yeah, I could make a fallback, but just go ahead and do the simple upgrade.  You’re going to have to get it sooner or later and those “IT Rules” that work has… well (Don’t hold me responsible IF someone “busts” you” its harmless.  Almost every computer has it already… just update it!

Also, there is a new wedding movie poster page.  Again, it is served via flash, but its cool!  You can click on a poster in the background and that one rotates up to the front.  I still have to figure out a way to show the photographer’s link to their site on the appropriate poster, but that should happen in the near future.

Next up, all domains will now point to the correct place and look seemless… www.jcdv.com  www.jcdvproductions.com   www.jcdvproductions.net   www.tnweddingvideo.com  www.tennessee-wedding-video.com  www.tennessee-wedding-video.net (some are still propogating the internet as I type this.)

Something new on the horizon…  JC/DV Productions is on a semi-dedicated host!  That means, we are able to host other sites for other companies.  Stay tuned for future announcements!!! This could be good for many of you…………….  To get a sneak peek, check out www.jcdv-hosting.com.

OK… I’ve been a bad blogger and will update soon.  Now I have to get the videos that used to be embedded on the blog to work again………..