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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Multi Region Bluray player
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 07-05-2015 12:44 PM
When I looked into this, the Oppo machines cost $500-800 depending on options.
The last time I was over in England visiting relatives, I bought a couple of £50 region 2/B Samsung players (one of each of our theaters) and took them back with me. Should we ever need to play a region C disc I'll probably make a region-free copy using DVDFab. It hasn't happened yet, and unless we do something like a month long festival of Australian movies, all of them on BD, we're never likely to show enough of them for the time and blank media cost of doing this to become a problem.
The British Samsungs get quite intensive use, not so much because of region B BDs, but because our region 1/A Panasonics will not play PAL DVDs. Yes, I know that showing 576i DVDs on a theater screen is, as a character in a Tarantino movie might put it, "pretty f***ing far from ideal," but the programmers do ask us to regularly.
I'm not sure if the shipping cost involved in ordering a player from amazon.co.uk (or anyone else, for that matter) would be high enough that buying an Oppo here would be worth it, but if you are going, or know anyone, going over for a visit to Europe and/or Asia, this would be a relatively low-cost way of getting hold of region B and C players.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 07-05-2015 01:54 PM
Yup, BDs are a regular fixture at festivals, especially the second-tier ones that have a lot of "kid with a Mac" first-time entrants. The drawbacks of using a consumer format for professional presentation simply aren't on their radar: audio channels that won't play, decode and/or route properly, pixel aspect ratios that end up wrong unless player, scaler and/or projector default settings are overridden, fingerprints on discs causing them to glitch and stutter, subtitles that don't appear unless you wade through multiple menus (sometimes in a foreign language) to enable them, menus with sound making it difficult to present the show without any menu content playing to the house, 1-2 minute pauses between movies in shows consisting of multiple shorts shown from multiple discs (the wait while they boot and then the FBI death threat appears for 20 seconds), etc. etc. Most of those can be worked around when testing the disc before the show, but someone who hasn't worked a booth tends not to understand, and in some cases not even accept, that it's not as simple as inserting the disc and pressing play, like it is in their living room.
I've suggested to the director of one of our festivals that comes back every year that for next year's event, he accepts DCPs as the only allowable digital format. There are now several free packages that make them (plus a basic but functional plugin built into Adobe CC), and using them should not be any problem to anyone who can work out how to author and burn a BD. I suspect it's only a matter of time before the better run fests start to take this line, but that still leaves art/rep venues that do seasons of, say, French gangster films or Soviet musicals having to show the odd one on a consumer-published DVD or BD in cases where neither a print nor a DCP is available. Annoying as they are, I fear that optical discs will be a regular annoyance in the booth for some time yet.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 07-07-2015 03:22 AM
I did think of trying to get a better player, somebody seems to have bought the cheapest one they could find which doesn't even have an audio output, but Blu-Ray is pretty much dead now; the last one we ran was over six months ago. We recently had a private hire by somebody to run 'Leave To Remain'; they were offered DCP and Blu-Ray, we took the Blu-Ray as a backup, but didn't need to use it. We ran about six films from Blu-Ray in the early days, mainly for films where the distributor wouldn't talk to us unless we put up a large bond, so we used Blu-Ray with a Filmbank licence. These days I think all distributors are talking to us, and supplying DCPs. As far as I am concerned, Blu-Ray is a pain, partly because of the audio problems, and partly because of HDCP.
While Blu-Ray is almost dead, DVD is increasing. We have only ever shown two of our own films in this format, and oddly enough they were consecutive ones, however, a lot of organisations hire the cinema from the council, and many of these use DVD. This includes the local police who are screening a series on policing London which is showing on the BBC at the moment, they screen each episode a day or two after it is transmitted, with audience discussion afterwards. The discs come from the BBC, but seem to have been produced by somebody else, and the quality is poor, the countdown clock on the beginning looks like VHS quality, and the programme itself is not much better. Most of the DVDs which we show now are from various film-making groups screening their own work, this has recently included two local primary schools and a group for young people with learning difficulties. The DVD player is old, but good quality, a Marantz DV4610, and the picture quality is as good as you could reasonably expect from SD video. It has the ability to select bitstream or PCM output separately for each sound format, so we set to to output PCM from MPEG layer 2 tracks. We do still get these on discs produced with some of the cheaper software packages. Of course this is limited to two channels, but I've only ever seen two discs with MPEG multi-channel audio, and they were very early ones.
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Jim Cassedy
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1661
From: San Francisco, CA
Registered: Dec 2006
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posted 07-07-2015 09:03 AM
quote:
The drawbacks of using a consumer format for professional presentation simply aren't on their radar: - - etc, etc
Oh, geeze, Leo- - after the last 'amateur' festival I got stuck doing, I was
ready to write an entire book of how NOT do do a 'film' festival, and most of
my griping had to do with home-made blu-rays & dvds.
One of my pet peeves is people who don't understand that just because you've
dumped a video file to a disk that says DVD or BluRay on it- - that DOES NOT
AUTOMATICALLY MAKE IT A DVD or BLU-RAY.
One festival producer said he was going to 'save me a lot of work' by editing
all the shorts programs onto blu-ray disks. And he did. But to save money
he used LTH (instead of HTL) type disks which woudln't play in any of the
blu-ray players I had available at the venue. I didn't even know you could
still buy LTH type disks. But apparently you can if you are cheap enough.
(I'm not even sure an OPPO will playback LTH type disks)
The last event I did which had a lot of blu-ray & dvd content, I just dumped
all the content into an extra MacBook Pro I had sitting at home and then
ran the shows with "Playback Pro", which enabled me to make some basic
corrections to aspect ratios, plus video & audio levels on a clip basis, and
even allows me to program which clips run consecutively and which clips
need pauses between them for intros or Q&A's.
It took a little extra work on my part, but it saved a lot of 'head banging'
during the actual shows.
I think I spent around $400 initially on the Playback Pro program, but
I later upgraded it to a $600 version that has a few more bells & whistles.
IMO it was worth every penny.
Fortunately, at most of the venues I get stuck doing 'amateur' events at,
I also have an OPPO available, and those are definitely worth the money too.
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