AVCHD -> Hi-def DVD (Blu-Ray or HD DVD)?

[Steve Maller]

I am loving this little gizmo. The HG10 is a home run for me. I am a working pro still and video shooter, and I was looking to dabble a bit in HD for the first time with some holiday and behind-the-scenes footage. I wish it had better battery longevity (B&H and everybody else are out of the hi-cap batteries), but that's a minor nit.

Anyway, I have had good luck in converting my first couple of silly 24p tests into 1080 and 720 Quicktime movies (what a Rube Goldberg-ish process that is!). The quality is quite good. Better than I expected.

But here's my question: I am thinking about getting a Blu-Ray DVD player to replace our home DVD player, which is quite old. I do not own (nor do I want to right now) a Blu-Ray burner. But I understand there is some degree of compatibility between the Blu-Ray (or HD DVD?) players and HD content burnt onto ordinary DVD-R media.

Is there a standard want of formatting these discs so that my HD content (arguably just short pieces that can fit onto DVD-R) is recognized and played in all its glory on a hi-def DVD player?

I am a Final Cut Studio 2 user (FCP6 and DVDSP4) on good, fast, modern Macs.

And extra credit if somebody knows how to dump the media from the HG10's hard drive *directly* onto a DVD-R. I see that Canon (and Sony and Panasonic) are selling (or soon will be) DVD players that do this. Presumably these simple external players will not be transcoding any video (which I know is pretty intensive for AVCHD).

So, who wants to try for the lollypop? :-)

Thanks!

[David Saraceno]

DVD SP will author red laser dye HD DVD discs for playback on Toshiba HD DVD set tops.

You can encode 10.3 mbps h.264 and AC3 audio or HD MPEG2 with Compressor.

No Apple app supports blu ray, but Encode CS3 does

[Brian W. Smith]

Originally Posted by Steve Maller

I am loving this little gizmo. The HG10 is a home run for me. ... I wish it had better battery longevity (B&H and everybody else are out of the hi-cap batteries), but that's a minor nit.

Thanks!

I managed to get 2 of the 2L24's a couple weeks ago (12/9) from B&H Photo. ;-) Hopefully they'll get them back in stock soon.

With everything I bought from there (WD-H43 Wide Angle, CB-2LW charger) it was $50 cheaper than Amazon. Awesome.

[Chris Soucy]

Check out:

www.nero.com

for Nero 8 Ultra and it's associated plug - in's, seem to do what you want and considerably more. It's even on special in the States, so don't hang about.


CS

[Paulo Teixeira]

Just get yourself a PS3. Use your computer to make a data DVD, stick it into the PS3 and the files plays back flawlessly. You don’t need to do any editing this way and the clips stays 100% native. You can also dump the files inside the hard drive.

Those AVCHD disc burners are for people that don’t want to use their computer. You just hook the camcorder up to the burner and the clips are transferred. The Panasonic and Sony version is already out but Canon won’t release theirs until around March.

[Sean McCormick]

I recently got a 40GB PS3 for 399.00 and It is a lot of bang for the buck. It even plays Divx files with the latest system update. It looks fantastic via HDMI with my Mitsubishi HC1500 projector.

I haven't tried playing the raw HG10 files (as I usually edit in FCP first), but via Compressor, I have made a few Blu-Ray compliant Mpeg-2 files that I play off of a thumb drive sticking out of the front of the PS3.

Another nice feature of the PS3 is that it is DLNA aware (http://www.dlna.org/en/consumer/home) , so it can talk to my NSLU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2) and play pics, music, vids wirelessly on my network.

[Steve Benner]

When you edit AVC HD on a Mac, the files are converted to another codec, so using Blu-Ray over HD DVD will not help you in any way because it needs to play the raw AVC HD files, not your Final Cut Pro edited ones. Either way transcoding is required.

DVD Studio Pro works perfectly with regular DVD-R Red Laser discs and makes them HD DVD Compliant. I suggest going down that route...neither format is really winning anything, and right now HD DVD players are cheaper.

Canon is actually coming out with one: http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=109121 - Don't really know how useful it is though.

On a side note: You have no problem with the 24p from the HG10? I just returned mine to B&H because of the ghosting...I was disappointed. In 1080/60i though the camera performed amazing.

[Steve Maller]

No ghosting here. Brilliant stuff, actually. Rube Goldberg-ish workflow with Final Cut Studio 2, but the results are awesome.