Making a HD disc on a standard DVD-R
 

I have only recently wanted to publish my video to a higher quality then standard NTSC. Almost all of the time, I shoot beautiful HDV footage and end up down converting to DV....clients! But I have a demo that I would like to get out to several clients and want it to look as good as it can. The demo reel is only 5 or 6 minutes long. Someone told me once that you could put HD quality on a DVD-R just not a lot of space for content. I hope this is not one of those subjects that has been covered before. I use latest FCP and Mac with SuperDrive. Is this something that I have to have a Blue-Ray? What is my option for getting best picture quality on DVD-R or DVD+R. My demo is HDV rendered in PRO-RES. Thanks for any help given, I am under a massive time crunch here.

You can easily put a (short) HD clip onto a standard red-laser data DVD if you are OK with playing it back using a computer. These disks will not play on a normal DVD player, although there are a few specialized players (e.g. the Avel Linkplayer) that will play HD mpeg2 and wmv files off a red-laser disk.

I recall hearing that some blueray players may also play these disks if carefully formatted, but have no experience of that myself.

Another option is to use one of the hard-drive based players like a TViX TVIX M-6500A Rev. 2 Product Details - dump your HD file on its hard drive and play it back via HDMI or component.

Look up Toast 9 and 10 with the hd plugins. I can confirm that a PS3 can play bluray discs made with toast and that a MacBook Pro can play an HDDVD.

It's kinda iffy most of the time, but it works if you have the right stuff to play it back on. I'm sure there's lots of posts on dvinfo and elsewhere that have more info. Just search here or google it!

I play standard DVD's, encoded with HD bluray content, on a Samsung p1500 bluray player. Encoding is done via Sony DVD Architect in BD mode.

Bill, could you explain the workflow for this.
I have vegas pro 8 (c) and DVD-A pro (5.0), a stack of dvd-r's and a standard burner.
Can you include the render templates please.

So when i've burnt Blu Ray on a standard DVD, (from now on known as a BDVD, cos it's easier to type) i can play that back on a pc or a BD player.

Is it possible to also put menus on the BDVD ?
I know DVD-A 5 can put menus on a proper BR disc.

Thanks.
Paul.

Paul...

First, you must have a BD burner. After cuts and edits on your timeline, using Vegas 8, render out to bluray "TOOLS/BURN DISC/BLURAY DISC". Insert a standard DVD in your bluray burner. Select Sony AVC or MPEG2 format in the drop-down menu.This method will not allow menus, and only a single play. When finished, go play your DVD disk on a BD player.DVDA has the same feature, with menus, but, I've never used that method.

Thanks Bill.

Paul.

This is accomplished by many authoring programs. It all depends on the bitrate. Keep in mind that lower bitrates cause pixelations with high motion scenes. This will look like what you get from satellite or cable HD H.264 codec transmission. If the project has no to minimal movement, you should be fine for about 20minutes on a single and 40 minutes on a dual layer.
Been doing these for a couple of years now.

In Vegas 8.0, you don't even need a BD burner, just a DVD burner (under Vista, haven't tried under XP since Vegas 8 was Vista designed) and you can make a BD-5 under the option "Burn Blu-ray disc". Be aware that there are max bitrates. If you encode at 15mbps, you're fine. But using 25Mbps would cause lag in some players.