Blu Ray Burning Opinions / Workflow / Experiences

[Steven Thomas]

Switch your audio to ac3 when burning Blu-ray

[Steven Thomas]

Sorry, new thread...

[Paul Kepen]

As soon as I hit enter to burn a bluray in V8 I get back an immediate error failure message. This is an HDV to BluRay on a DVD+R DL Mpeg 4.
My computer is a 2 year old AMD Athalon X2-4200 dual core with 2 g of ram. I have 2 IDE drives, 1 - just for Win XP system and office, the second I keep Vegas, Premiere and Cineform on, and my 3rd drive is a Sata Raid (4x250g drives) for capture and encoding. I also upgrade to Cineform Prospect from Aspect. Now however I see they have raised the minimum system to a quad core E6700, which at this time is pretty much state of the art. The file I am trying to burn was captured and 99.9% edited on V6 with Cineform Aspect. This file seems to play and edit just fine in V8. Is it likely that my computer just doesn't have the moxy for Mpeg4 ? Or do I have a software issue.
The above system works fine with Ulead MovieFactory to HDDVD. However these were Mpeg-2 files. In MF6 you can play with the encoding and I used VBR to get the project to fit on a DL disc.
I would try the V8 bluRay to Mpeg-2, but its doesn't allow you to adjust the bit rate when your at the Tools\Burn\BluRay prompt. The default is too high for my project to fit on the disk. Anyone else having this problem? I see many have issues with it failing at the end of the encoding process, but mine has a failure as soon as I hit burn. Thanks for any help - PK

[Jon Fairhurst]

What's the error message? Click on the "Details" button and you can copy/paste it - assuming that the machine hasn't locked up.

[Paul Kepen]

Attached is an image of the error message. I confess, I have no idea how to read or understand what these messages mean. This is an "exception" error. Exception to what? Then theres just a bunch of what look like memorey locations along with "stack dump." The complete message scrolls down and would take 3-4 images to cover. If that helps, I'll be happy to try it again and record the entire message. Thank you very much for taking the time to look at this. Sincerely - PK

[Jon Fairhurst]

Paul, I'm not positive, but you might have a bad memory location. You could install and run Prime95 overnight to check if your hardware is healthy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime95

[Paul Kepen]

Originally Posted by Jon Fairhurst

Paul, I'm not positive, but you might have a bad memory location. You could install and run Prime95 overnight to check if your hardware is healthy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime95

Thanks Jon for the helpful info. I'll give that a try tonight.

[Paul Kepen]

Attached are screen shots from Task Manager as Prime Number runs. It shows CPU at 100% and about 1,5g of memory bbeing used (I have 2g of ram). I used the "blending" test to test both cpu and memory. Are these the correct settings? Its been going for almost 2 hours now, and I am still able to run other things, like a downloaded video clip from email, etc. If this was really pushing both of the dual core CPU's, would I still be able to do these things while the test runs? Thanks - Paul

[Alastair Brown]

Originally Posted by Jon Fairhurst

That's too bad. I'm running a quad core X6600 processor. And I have Adobe CS3 loaded. And XP SP2 is running with all of the latest updates. Do you have a similar configuration?

Identical.

[Adam Letch]

but I notices you mentioned Paul:

99.9% edited on V6 with Cineform

Isn't there a issue with using earlier versions of vegas captured hdv files with version 8? And have you updated to the current version of Cineform as it was incompatible with 8 originally?

Just throwing some ideas your ways..

Adam

[Paul Kepen]

Originally Posted by Adam Letch

but I notices you mentioned Paul:

99.9% edited on V6 with Cineform

Isn't there a issue with using earlier versions of vegas captured hdv files with version 8? And have you updated to the current version of Cineform as it was incompatible with 8 originally?

Just throwing some ideas your ways..

Adam

Thanks again guys for your time and efforts in helping me to trouble shoot this.
Jon, attatched is a copy of the Prime Number Test results. I'm not sure I had it set up right, as it only was using 1 cpu. I tried setting it to 2, but it said that was more then I had. This could be semantics - as it did sense that my cpu was a AMD X2 4200 dual core (vs 2 separate cpu's). It did keep running memory location tests for almost 16 hours and never had any errors.
Adam, I have update to the latest version of Cineform Prospect (02/08 version). You may be on to something with the fact that this was captured with an earlier version of Cineform in Vegas. I have not seen the thread that refers to this issue. Was there a work around it?
I would also like to know if my computer is up to Mpeg-4 encoding. I've read that Mpeg-4 is extremely computer intensive, much more so then Mpeg-2 encoding. Also, Cineform is listing much higher system requirements then they did just 6 months ago. Has anyone else with a similar system (AMD Athalon X2 4200 w 2gigs ram, 2 500g IDE + 1 500g sata raid) had success with Mpeg-4 encoding?
Again, thank you guys very much for your helpful input. Have a Great Day - PK

[Jon Fairhurst]

Paul, the results look good. This confirms that your RAM is running without errors.

The next most likely problem is a driver conflict - typically a video card driver. Make sure that your drivers are up to date. Sometimes there are alternate sources for drivers. I had one machine combination that required an alternate driver to work. That's the exception though...

[Laurence Kingston]

Originally Posted by Douglas Spotted Eagle

Downside is no menus, just insta-play, but you can build your trailer into the head of the vid and have it act like a menu if you need intro media.

I author AVCHD discs onto 1 and 2 layer DVD+-R with Ulead MF+ and have menus as well as video. The discs are recognized by all the Blu-ray players I've tried except the Samsung BDP-1200. In all Sony players, they work great. The menus are the regular DVD style rather than the new pop-up style, but nobody is complaining.

[Paul Kepen]

Originally Posted by Jon Fairhurst

Paul, the results look good. This confirms that your RAM is running without errors.

The next most likely problem is a driver conflict - typically a video card driver. Make sure that your drivers are up to date. Sometimes there are alternate sources for drivers. I had one machine combination that required an alternate driver to work. That's the exception though...

Thanks Jon. "You were correct, my Nvida video drivers were a bit old. I updated to the current ones, but that did not make any difference. However, I noticed with Task Manager that just loading my project into V8 was eating up 1.44g of my 2g of RAM. I cut the project in half, still unable to get the avch/mpeg-4 encoding to go, but it is currently about 8 hours and 80% of the way through encoding as an Mpeg-2. When I ran this same project through V6, it would encode for about 8 hours and then hang. I had to cut the project in half for that as well. Again that was Mpeg-2 1080x1440x60i. I then took the 2 halfs and put them together in Premiere Pro, and then took that to Ulead Move Factory to make an HDDVD. The reason for the Premier step was because MF wants an M2v, and doesn't like the M2T from Vegas - even if you change the tag. PPro was happy to convert it with ease. They truly look great. I decided to go with V8 and BluRay because (I was hoping) the workflow would be simpler, and at this time it looks to me like BluRay may win the format war. HDDVD was great because it was easy (just hooked it up like any DVD player) and it worked perfectly. With the BluRay, I've gone through several different units before I got all of the overly complicated audio formats to work.
I still have no idea why I am unable to encode with MPEG-4. It would be nice, as I could fit this on a single dual layer disk. Now, I have to leave it split between 2 DL discs. The HDDVD route allowed me to play with the VBR rates, so I could get it all to fit on one disc. I used 25mbps-22mbps-400k. This worked great because I had some simple text titles and graphics that could be encoded at a very low bit rat, while still having a very high bit rate where needed. Going out to BluRay from the timeline in V8 does not allow much flexibility. Hopefully latter this year V9 will come out with full authoring. As I ramble on here, I don't remeber what kind of computer setup are you editing with? I'm still not sure if my computer is just not up to it, or if it is cause this was originally captured with an older version. I will have to experimet some more. At any rate, I want you to know I truly do appreciate the helpful ideas and info. Take Care - PK

[Paul Gale]

For what it's worth, I just bought the LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray drive. Only limited use so far but it seems like an excellent drive. I posted some brief findings here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...829#post824829