Anybody shooting in AVCHD and producing BOTH BD & DVD from final edit?
 

Hey all,

I've been shooting events (recitals, plays, weddings, etc) SD for four years now and I'm taking the plunge into HD.

Using Vegas Pro8 & DVDA5 right now and cutting on a 3 year old dual core laptop and a five year old P4 HT 3.0 Ghz desktop. I'll be buying a new desktop and, if necessary, proxy edit on the laptop.

I plan to multi-cam using AVCHD equipment however the demand for Blu-ray will be significantly less than my DVD demands. At least for now. That, I'm sure, is going to quickly change.

My question relates to workflow in relation to producing BOTH Blu-ray AND SD-DVD as a final product. Also, how does an SD-DVD produced from AVCHD look? Does Vegas/DVD Architect give a pleasing downconvert of the footage?

Thanks for listening.

sincerely,


ian

Not burning "official" BR yet (as in actual BR disks, using BR on regular DVD), waiting for the burners to become reasonable and demand to appear...

BUT, AVCHD looks great when rendered to SD, no complaints there. SD now looks soft to me in comparison, but it's not bad for compatibility with the installed base of players. 99% of people probably won't notice the difference between SD and BR in all honesty, unless you point it out.

I also have started to render BR files at 17Mbps settings (not as high quality as the 25Mbps BR setting in Vegas, but that won't play back from a burned standard DVD, so I modify that template for the lower bitrate).

You can fit a reasonable amount of time on a regular DVD burned with BR format, and I've tested it against BR players in the store, and now on a BR player on an HP laptop (got my toe in the water). Looks quite good. I also try to archive the original files, but that's getting rather large...

So there are some weaknesses/compromises, but it's quite doable, and the Hi Def stuff sure looks good!

SD Produced from AVCHD *can* look stunning. Vegas does not do a great job with the downcovert. It's passable, but for a paid gig, I wouldn't use it.

So what would be the best option once the BR edit is ready to go to BD disc and you have to produce SD-DVDs as well?

sincerely,


ian

I would cut the Bluray first, the go through my workflow for SD downconvert with virtualdub, then burn th SD version. If you do a quick search you'll find the multipage thread on HD -> SD downconvert where I discuss this detail.

Thanks, Perrone. :)

I'll check it out.

sincerely,


ian

What specifically are your objections? Just saying it doesn't do a great job and then not offering up any specifics to back up the statement relegates your statement to Internet hearsay.

LOL! Well that's alright then I suppose. There are at last a dozen threads on here in the past few months detailing the poor downscaling of popular NLE's. I'll refrain from rehashing it here.

Vegas can produce great looking downconverts. You have to set things up properly - things like Best rendering quality and having an Interpolate method specified.

I've never had anything but compliments on how my Vegas rendered DVD videos look, and that's from HDV earlier and now from EX1 HD.