Bluray to DVD

[Jeff Harper]

I have a Bluray project setup in DVDA that has come out great. I now need a DVD version of this video. Normally I render the video out, crop the footage on the timeline, etc, and it comes out great.

I want to try the simpler method of having DVDA recompress the video. Anyone have experience with this? How should it turn out?

[Juris Lielpeteris]

Downconvert and recompress the video in DVDA works too slow, it is better to use the Vegas or some 3rd party software.

[Jeff Harper]

Not concerned about speed, only quality.

[Juris Lielpeteris]

DVDA use one pass CBR mpeg-2 encoding, unlike several options in Vegas Pro.

[Jeff Harper]

thanks Juris.

I understand Vegas has options. I use Vegas full time in my business. I only want to know how well DVDA does at recompressing. It seems to me I've heard it does quite well, but I've never allowed DVDA to recompress anthing before. Just curious.

[Garrett Low]

Jeff,

IMHO DVDA and Vegas in general does a horrible job at converting HD to SD The problem is in the algorithm it uses to resize the frames. I regularly have to produce both DVD's and BR's from a lot of what I shoot. The quickest way for me to do it while maintaining the highest quality is to shoot everything in HD, First convert all footage to Cineform RGB 4:4:4. Edit through in HD render out a Cineform 4:4:4 master. Take the master into TMPGEnc which for a $100 program does a great job in rendering both a BR AVC (or mpeg2) file and a mpeg2 DVD file. It takes advantage of GPU rendering capabilities so it is faster than Vegas' or DVDA's rendering.

Author the disc as an HD version so the Bluray set to go. Then all I do is set the DVDA project setting to DVD, Replace the video file with the DVD mpeg2 file. And do a "Save As" to save the DVD file. Then I create the disc. Works great and once I have the Bluray disc setup in DVDA it takes about 5 minutes to get the DVD disc setup.

I usually set the menu pages up to be HD (1920x1080) so the need to be rerendered for the DVD but that doesn't take much time. usually DVD disc ISO's are created in a matter of minutes.

I always create an ISO then use ImageBurn to burn the ISO. That way I can preview all menu activities with my Western Digital TV Live box. It actually reads the ISO so that it mimics the disc being played in a set top box.

While it may be easier to let DVDA rerender the DVD from a BR project I don't know that you'd be happy with the results. And the few added steps I use actually takes less time to get the end product of a burned disc. At least in my experience.