Those familliar with BluRay...
 

I have a client requesting the BluRay files of their wedding video. They are purchasing a HD for me to store them so that in the future they can have the file in HiDef. What are your recommendations as to how I would render these? I was going to do it a HDMpeg-2 file, but then I thought that with the audio separately, the wouldn't be able to do anything with it themselves. Would a HiDef Media Player file be any better? Suggestions? This is all foreign territory to me! Thanks!

I'd render it out as an MPEG2 M2t file. That way they can render it out to whatever format they prefer and/or edit it at a later date.

Don't take that as Gospel. Just my two cents worth,

You can create MP4 with H.264 and AAC or AC3 with resolution of 720p (1280x720) or 1080i (1920x1080). These MP4s can be played on PS3 for HD quality.

Another way to go TS container with H.264 video and AC3 audio.

This is the route I would take.

If the video is going to be stored on a dedicated HD, why not render to a completely raw and uncompressed format?

Give it to them a bunch of different ways to "future proof" if one encoding scheme falls out of favor 5 years from now or more.

First, are you shooting with a HD camera that stores it has m2t? Take your edited footage and print it back to tape. Give them the tape(s) and edited m2t files on a hard drive. That way, you are covered. I would recommend tape over HD for long term storage. A drop and the Hard Drive is worthless without spending big $$$ to get it fixed.

I shot a ton of weddings in 06 in HDV and stored them on hard drive and tape just in case. Luckly for me, I know how to store hard drives and didn't have to capture any earlier this year when I started burning blu-rays.

Remember, tape is cheap. Hard drives are cheap as well. :)

On the other hand, if you are using a EX1 or better, hard drive might be your only option. In that case, have the couple buy two hard drives, hard drives are CHEAP and make two copies.

Sorry! Forgot to specify! I am shooting HD with a FX7. So thats probably a great suggestion to go with both tapes and files on a HD. Thanks!

Their concern with RAW is that they won't be able to do anything with it later. They already have upgraded to HDTV at home and know for sure that they want these files to recreate their actual DVD in the future. They want files that they can just dump on to a DVD, sound and all together. They won't have the menu that I created, but they are okay with that.

Okay, well thanks for this suggestion... I am exhausted and not quite thinking clearly, and I don't really know what all of that means, but I will look into it in the morning!

Thanks for all the help!!!

Making multiple back-up copies and storing one of the copies in Back locker is always a good idea, after all its your wedding, generations might want to view it.

About MP4 with H.264 & AAC, if you can tell me your workflow I can give some ideas to convert your video to MP4.

Backing these up is going to be a bit of a headache. I currently use a network drive that has two drives in RAID configuration for as close to belt and braces peace of mind as I can get.

A 25Gb image is going to take forever to take across.

I am thinking that just keeping complete projects on eSATA 1Tb drives may be the way forward?

Well, I record in HiDef to Mini DV and for this specific wedding, its 3 cameras in a multicam edit, download to Vegas 8.0 and edit in HD, and I am going to give them the edited files from there (verses the actual DVD files from Architect). Some of the files are quite large (i.e. the ceremony is almost 1 hour, I think). Not sure what else you might need to know, but I greatly appreciate your help! Its a crazy week, with a bridal show coming up... draining all of my energy... and my brain power, at least the little I have!

If they want the RAW footage, then sell them your original tapes if you no longer need them. If you still need them, make copies. Copy the m2t to hard drive is the same quality as on tape but they wouldn't need to capture them.

I have a Popcorn Hour and a Tvix, both play the m2t files natively right on your tv from hard drive or a network. Great way to watch raw footage or DVD's.

Jon

I have used ffmpeg (used at Vimeo) extensively to create MP4 files.

You can feed your RAW footage (m2t) files to ffmpeg and convert it to MP4.
There is GUI Version of ffmpeg available, if you don't like to use command line.

But I would give command as,


ffmpeg -i WeddingFileName.m2t -vcodec libx264 -acodec libfaac -b 25000k -ab 448k -threads 2 WeddingOutFilename.mp4

You can pretty much feed any any format file (post Vegas 8.0 & edit) to ffmpeg to get MP4 files.

(ffmpeg is freely available over net)