MacFair was a fun time. Unlike most trade shows that have a tendency to grind you down, it had a friendly atmosphere.
I was somewhat surprised by the attendance at my 1hr class "Understanding DVD Picture Quality". Firstly, there were more people than I expected. And secondly, I got a great reminder about how effective MPressionist graphics are at communicating difficult concepts to people who have no background in video compression.
I also used MegaPEG Pro HD to create a test movie that used various filtering and subsampling techniques to reduce the bitrate of a clip from 9.8 Mbits/s to 3 Mbits/s with no apparent change in perceptual quality. I concatenated the clips end to end and let them play through a few times, and also scubbed the timeline to seek randomly to different points in the three clips. Aside from the interlacing artifacts which were only present one of the clips it was nearly impossible to tell the clips apart under the viewing circumstances (1024x768 SVGA projector in darkened room).
