Shifting its Blu-ray marketing machine into high gear, Sony Electronics is enlisting NASCAR racing's biggest star for a new high-def ad blitz.

Late last week, primary Blu-ray backer Sony announced that it had signed Dale Earnhardt, Jr., considered today's most popular and recognizable NASCAR driver (and, of course, son of racing legend Dale Earnhardt, Sr.) to serve as the company's spokesperson in a new marketing campaign touting its high-def products.

The campaign will feature Earnhardt in ad spots across multiple media, hawking a variety of Sony high-def offerings, including Blu-ray players, HDTV sets and the PlayStation 3.

Though he's perhaps as well-known for being NASCAR's reigning "blonde party animal" as he is for his driving skills, Earnhardt is the sport's current top product pitchman, enjoying lucrative and high-profile endorsements with such top brands as Budweiser and Addidas. He is also a well-known avid gamer, which Sony says was instrumental in choosing him as their new high-def ambassador.

"His love for our products was a big benefit," said Stuart Redsun, Sony's senior VP of corporate marketing.

Sony's not the first electronics company to hire a celebrity spokesperson to hawk its high-def products. As we first reported n early May, Toshiba has teamed up with 'Sopranos' star Michael Imperioli to anchor their own extensive marketing push for HD DVD, including multiple television spots that are currently running across various cable and local network outlets.

Whether or not Earnhardt will be seen in the new Sony campaign attempt to mow down Imperioli, or any other rival HD DVD-supporting NASCAR drivers, remains to be seen. Stay tuned...

With the variety of new, lower-cost HDV video cameras on the market today, just about any event videographer can afford to shoot in high definition. Recent versions of popular NLEs have been upgraded to handle HDV editing, and most new editing systems can handle the processing demands associated with HDV postproduction. Unfortunately, due to the format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray, the video production world has been waiting for a solution to deliver HD content to their clients, and fit the technology into their workflow the way DVD Studio Pro has integrated with Final Cut Pro, DVD Architect with Vegas, and Encore DVD with Premiere Pro. And in the absence of HD DVD burners up to this point, most of us are waiting for an answer from the Blu-ray side.

It appears the wait may be over, with software giant Adobe selecting Blu-ray as their format choice for delivery of HD video in the new CS3 version of Encore, which debuts in July with the release of Adobe CS3 Production Premium. Here’s a quick walkthrough of Blu-ray Disc workflow in Encore CS3.

CS3 Basics

While Premiere Pro CS3 lacks the built-in DVD authoring tool found in Premiere Pro 2.0, the integration with Encore is much tighter in the new version. This allows the user toexport their edited timeline right into Encore. You can export your HDV timeline in the Blu-ray format as astraight-play Blu-ray Disc or a fully authored Blu-ray Discwith menus.

Even better, once your encoded HD file has been brought into Encore, it can easily be downconverted to SD for author your Blu-ray Disc, you also get to apply all the robust features that Encore provides to your BD production.