First, I LOVE SONY VEGAS!

However, I’ve been up to my ears with a TV show as it is now going National on a cable network and as the wonderful loving FCC requires, that’s right… closed captioning!  Didn’t have to do it locally because the station grosses less than $3M revenue per year.

I originally thought, “No problem, Vegas handles CC!”  WRONG! It does EVERYTHING EXCEPT actually embed the CC data into a MPG2 of which format I deliver EVERYTHING for broadcast with a special “recipe”.  Looks and sounds great.

I spent countless hours this past week in trials of uploading to the network to test this and that and it never worked.  The network can’t use the .scc files that Vegas creates wonderfully.

Due to some factors including turn around time for outside companies to do the CC work and getting the show to air, outsourcing is NOT an option PLUS even if  I outsourced the .scc creation with transcription, still can’t encode the CC data into the MPG!

HERE IS THE WORK AROUND! IT WILL SAVE YOU TIME, HAIR, AND MONEY!!!
Do all your CC work in Vegas (look in help file, but basically press “C” and it inserts the CC Command and you go from there…  then export.  It will create the file AND a .scc file with same prefix as exported file.  Take those files and open on a MAC with Compressor.  There is a button somewhere I think it is “User Data” or something (Can’t recall because I don’t have a MAC) but it is right there in the middle/lower area…  you simply point to that .scc file and then export from compressor your desired flavor of file…  BAM! It works!

Now, by the time I bought a MAC and software, I could buy the expensive programs that is required to do this but Vegas SHOULD do this because it handles everything else CC!!!  I saw on the Creative Cow forums that someone did this and is beta testing something from Sony to allow cc embeds in mpg.  Don’t know if it works, but its where I learned of this work around and thought I’d share because it is very frustrating indeed and and took a long time to find this solution and Sony Tech Support is not of any help because they won’t even respond to a support request.  I updated the “incident” a couple times and updated with this work around…  oh, there is a script floating around that is command line called cc_mux.exe but it takes like an hour per MB to work….. ummmmmm, no (maybe Sony can peek into that sourcecode to make this work???)

Anyways, hope this helps someone.  FYI, I’m on Vegas Pro 10c.

Check this out guys and gals! This looks VERY interesting and affordable!

This DSLR wireless monitor takes the video or still photo feed from any DSLR camera or video camera and sends it wirelessly to a seven inch or 10? portable, battery powered monitor.

Read more here:
http://robertbenson.com/blog/2010/07/04/wireless-dslr-external-monitor/

And here’s a short video from his blog… I may order one of these!

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!