Blu Ray Burning Opinions / Workflow / Experiences
 

Hey, going through the festival submission process with our new film, and some festivals are offering the option of screening from Blu Ray. I'm curious what experience some of the Vegas people on this boards is with the new technology. Specifically, I'm wondering about burning to Blu Ray onto both DVD+-R and Blu Ray discs from the Vegas timeline. We would be burning tests of small segments to DVD+-Rs and the 91 minute feature to Blu Ray discs. My questions:

What burner are you using? Has the technology been reliable? What kind of results have you had? Tried 3rd party software? What's your overall take on Blu Ray? Any input and advice is appreciated.

I have an old Sony 2x BD burner for BD discs, but have been burning a LOT of AVCHD discs to DVD 5 for a major film festival distribution happening right now. We did these a couple months back, and they're working very well.
Burn to DL DVD5's and you can get your feature on a disc that a BD player will play as HD of course. 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.

Thanks, Spot. You must be one of the busiest guys on these boards, yet you still always find the time to respond to posts. You are the first to reply to my query, so again, thank you. How long is your feature? I really didn't think I could burn our whole feature to a DL DVD - what bitrate are you encoding to?

On a D/L disc, you can just fit about 75 mins at around 15Mbps.

Thanks again - I'll see if I can get creative with the compression. We shot at 720P - should I maybe try rendering to 720P? I'll test it at least and see how it looks played on the PS3...

I haven't burned anything at 720p that was for actual use, but it should look great, and of course give you a bit more time. Vegas will let you know RIGHT away.
Be sure you're using Vegas Pro 8b.
Have fun, keep a smile on!

Was just going to ask how to do this; bur found if I went into the "render as" Sony AVC menu and created and saved a new 720P template, it automatically showed up as an option in the tools-burn BluRay disc menu options. Burned it, but PS3 only identified it as "unsupported format". Perhaps because it was 720P at 24P? I'll try again...

Hi,i finally managed to burn blu-ray to a standard dvd,using vegas pro 8.b.
My question is,i know roughly how much i can put on a standard dvd,around 30 mins i think,but nowhere in vegas during the process does it indicate how much i can get on or how much of the disc will be used.
So if i try and put to much blu-ray on a standard dvd will vegas just say "can't do it",or words to that effect ?
Paul.

I was playing with this last week to mixed results. I authored a project in Encore CS3 as a Blu-ray project. I had Encore buld a BD image file that I burned to a standard DVD using Nero. The DVD will play on a Plextor 2X BD burner, but plays poorly (jerky video) on a Sony Blu-ray player. The Sony can play the content just fine if I burn it to a Blu-ray disk.

For those that have had success doing this, are you playing your disk on your burner, or on a Blu-ray player or both? Is there a data rate restriction that Blu-ray players have when reading a standard DVD?

Filename: STREAM/00001.m2ts
Status: TSWrapper.dll::CTSWrapper::ProcThreadMain::IO Error --- Failed to open file: 'C:\Documents and Settings\Computer\Local Settings\Application Data\Sony\Vegas Pro\8.0\~bdmux3652\media\Untitled.w64.ves' -

This is as far as I've got. It rendered the video, then the audio. At this point it went to making compiliation and this error came up. Any Ideas?

Mark, for a bridal show demo, I used Vegas8b to render a HDV MPG file and then took NERO 8 Ultra with the BluRay & HD-DVD Plugin and made a BluRay h.264 DVD at 1080 resolution... I was able to get 27 minutes on a single layer DVD-R and tested an hour on a DVD+R Dual Layer... at 17 Mbps bitrate (you can actually fit more on the discs!) This was tested on my Samsung BD-P1400 player.

Here are the basics how to do it:

Using a PC and Nero:
1- Open Nero Vision
2- Select "Make BluRay Disc"
3- Add video files and select the M2T file rendered from NLE. MAKE SURE its about 29 minutes or less for DVD-R SL!
- add chapters here too if desired.
4- At the bottom, click "More" then "Video Options"
5- Click on Blu-Ray Video tab in that new window.
6- Video Format: Choose MPG4 then click on "Configure Encoder" and choose HIGH.
7- Quality Settings: Custom
Sample Format: Automatic
Bitrate: 17000 kbits
Resolution: 1440x1080 (You can choose 1920x1080, but on my processor, it takes longer to scale this... the player does the correct aspect on the 1440x1080.)
Encoding Mode: 1 Pass
Audio Format: Automatic
8- When you get to the menu screen, just select not to use a menu if you want straight play or create your own menu.
9- Go through the rest of the process. And finally choose burn or whatever... just create the folders to a hard drive and burn later!
10- When encoding finishes... open Nero Burning Rom and choose DVD (UDF)... click on the UDF tab and choose Manual settings, then physical partition, then choose UDF format 2.5 then choose Label and type in a name for the BluRay disc such as Bridal Show.
11- Click NEW
12- Navigate the right pane and locate the folders "Certificate" and "BDMV". Drag BOTH folders to the left pane... this is the BluRay disc you'll be burning.
13- Insert blank DVD-R and BURN AWAY!

A related question ...
 

If one simply renders out an HDV compilation to .wmv or .mp4 (in Vegas) and writes the rendered files to data DVD, will a PS3 play them?

Russ Snyder

I got the exact same error with Vegas 8.0b on Windows XP Pro. Did you ever solve the problem Alastair?

Hi Jom,

Nope...was hoping for an answer here. The workflow above sounds worth a try. That said, I am still patiently waiting for the day we can author using DVD-A.

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?

Switch your audio to ac3 when burning Blu-ray

Sorry, new thread...

BluRay Burning Fails Immediately in Vegas 8.0b
 

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

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

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

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.

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

Identical.

Guys I'm only a novice with Vegas
 

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

Jon and 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

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...

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.

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

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

My son tried playing a 10Mbps HDV wmv data DVDR (that I sent to him) on his PS3, reporting that it plays, but freezes periodically. Has anyone else tried playing such data DVDRs (either wmv or H264) on a PS3?

Does anyone know where to find the support specs for the PS3 (listing what red laser DVDR formats it will play at what bit rates)?

Russ Snyder

.m2t and DivX HD files on DVD+R to play on PS3
 

I routinely burn .m2t (i.e. HDV) files onto "normal" DVD+R's (i.e. data files) once I've completed editing them in Vegas 7 (as long as they are under about 20 mins long and under about 4.5GB or so, i.e. to get it on a DVD+R, they play beautifully on my 60GB Playstation 3.) These are 25MB/s files of course. In fact I'm watching one right now that I did of our Chinese New Year party at the weekend...it looks stunning on my big HDTV! The video definitely looks better than the "normal" Std Def DVD's I also do for distribrution to family and friends even when played on the very same PS3 with it's upscaling. There is no comparison!

This is also my current solution for archiving some of my projects - and for some others I keep the master, un-edited m2t files on numerous external USB drives ...but these are growing in number at an alarming rate!

Following the recent PS3 firmware update I have also viewed HD DivX files downloaded from www.stage6.com on my editing PC and viewed them the same way via the PS3. Again superb results, no stuttering - very, very smooth and razor sharp.

I quite often stick the files onto a Sandisk 4GB U3 USB stick as well (no pun intended!) and that works flawlessly too, but in that case the file size is limited to 4GB max for the PS3 to recognise the file since it's USB interface uses the FAT32 system. This is a shame as it would be great to hook up one of my 500GB external USB drives and just play HD from that! (they are all NTFS so it won't work that way.) I have several U3's and my model of PS3 has 4 USB slots so it's a rough and ready quick solution sometimes without the need to commit to discs.

Finally, the video file has to be in a folder called 'video' for it to work easily, so I've read (I've not tried it without this yet.)

I've not yet tried HD WMV's.

Hey Russ, supported files for PS3 can be found here:

http://manuals.playstation.net/docum...filetypes.html

And thanks to all for their input and info!

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your input. In fact I do something similar with my source HDV files. I capture them with CapDVHS in three overlapping segments (per source tape), then archive these captured files on three DVD-Rs. I currently preview these archived files or view any resulting edited HDV presentations (also archived to DVD-R as .m2t files) using a JVC SRDVD-100U HD Player, which does a good job, but has some quirks that have never been fixed. (This player is still available, but I think they gave up on the firmware several years ago. Actually, some earlier versions of this firmware work better than the later versions.)

As you suggest, at 25 Mbps, you can only get a little more than 20 minutes of video on to an SL DVDR. That is in fact often quite enough. I don't know about your videos, but, despite the stunning quality of HDV, 20 minutes is often about all my friends and relations can stand.

On the other hand, there are definitely times when I'd like to double or even triple that. (Beyond an hour there is no way I'm going to get anybody to watch!)

It appears that the new formats, wmv9 and mp4 (H264), are efficient enough that one should be able to achieve HDV playing times approaching an hour without compromising quality (on a single SL DVDR). Hence my interest in the capabilities of the PS3 (which I am thinking of buying).

Unfortunately, it appears to me that, unless there is something wrong with the wmv9 DVDR I sent on to my son (which was rendered out of Vegas 6 with a bit rate of something like 10 Mbps and which plays with my JVC player), his PS3 has a problem playing it.

I suppose that several years down the road, we'll all have affordable BD burners in our PCs and affordable BD authoring software to match, and BD media will be $.50 each, but I have to wonder what this will give us that we don't already (almost) have with standard DVDR. (I'm thinking that BD, which apparently has now won the fight with HD DVD, may be more valuable as an archiving and backup medium than as a consumer presentation medium for HDV.

Russ

Thanks, Mark.

wmv and mp4 (H264) are on the list, but there is no information regarding maximum bit rates. Could it be that 10 Mbps is too high for a wmv file input from red laser DVDR?

Russ

I've burned up to 50 Mbps MP4s - once you save them to the PS3s HDD they play fine.

But at what bit rate do they play as red laser data DVDRs?

Russ