HDV to HD-DVD compatible DVD+/-R
 

I'm bewildered by all the editing choices available today, and which packages can and cannot build a dvd-r or dvd+r disc that has an mpeg-2 stream that decodes as hd in an HD-DVD player, such as the Toshiba HD-A1 or Xbox 360 HD player. To keep this topic restricted to HDV input sources (and not satellite or cable recordings), let's begin with the editing packages surveyed here:

http://www.videomaker.com/article/12655/

From what I have been able to gather from:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=705146

Ulead Movie Factory 5 or Videostudio 10 (?) + videoredo, and Pinnacle Studio v. 10.7 are "low-end" applications that can do the job. How about Vegas Movie Studio Platinum edition or Nero 7? How about the higher-end apps such as Avid Liquid Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0, Apple Final Cut Studio 5.1, and Edius Pro 4?

I'm not sure who has or will have functional software to burn blu-ray and hd-dvd write once discs, because this is also an important next step. Man, picking an NLE with a full suite of features is harder than buying a camera.

I would recommend using the NLE just to generate the mpeg files. Try to find an appropriate standalone application for your disk authoring. Jack-of-all-trades is often master of none, as they say.

I think i can give you part of an answer, but i'll post a question at the same time.
With DVD Studio Pro (part of FCS) i can burn HD on regular DVDs, but i can only see them on a Mac. Is there any windows software doing the same?

at the current time, there is only workaround software that can burn HD content to regular DVD's on a PC. That method involves creation of an mpeg2 format video, conversion to stream format via Womble.com software, creating HD formated content with Ulead Movie Studio 5 , then burning to a standard DVD with nero. A seperate patch has to be used if your HD format is 720p.

Thanks a lot man. But what about only viewing the DVDs (forget burning)? On the Mac you can see them with the bundled DVD Player. I've already tried many DVD players on my PC, but nothing works.

I'm interested in your work flow to create these. Can you give the basics to make an HD DVD with DVD Studio Pro, especially the settings? Cheers!

Can you see the file system on the dvd? If the top folder does not say HVDVD_TS or something similar, then the disc that the mac is producing is incompatible with the Toshiba HD-A1 player. Second, for the disc to be playable on a PC, you will probably need a special player. Even explorer cannot read the file structure of one of my hd-dvd compatible dvd+r's. Before burning, the folder had files such as HV000I01.BUP, HV000I01.IFO, HV000T01.EVO, etc., I have no idea how these are mapped on the dvd.

Anyway, after spending a day searching the web for solutions to the topic of this post, I settled on Pinnacle Studio Mediasuite version 10.5 Titanium Edition. A quick summary of the steps:

1. Install the software. Do all the packages at once (I didn't and found later that certain functions were missing). After the installation, the software advised me that an update was available. You can also get this on

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSit...mode=documents

2. Start Pinnacle Studio Plus from the Studio Launcher.

3. Choose the Capture tab, Click the settings button, and under capture source, choose your camera. Mine is a Canon XH A1. You can choose scene detection or not. TV standard for us is NTSC. Under capture format, they only allow the MPEG-1/2 preset, which defaults to HDV2. Video is MPEG Layer 2, and audio is 16 bit, 48 kHz. Under project preferences, you can either pick "Set from first clip added to project" or choose one of HDV 1080/60i, HDV 720/30p, or HD1080/60i. As this is a low end app, there are not too many choices. When I chose "Set from first clip ...", it pulled the data in as 1440x1080 60i. That was what I shot my video in. It generated three files: the video had extension m2v, and the left and right audio channels were wav. There was also a clip index. There was a tab called video and audio preferences, but I left these settings alone.

4. After capturing I went to the Edit tab, where I took some of the scenes that were automatically detected, and dropped them on the timeline. You can also do some fancier editing such as trimming and transitions, but I bypassed that on the first experiment.

5. Next I went to the Make Movie tab. Under disc type, pick HD DVD. At this point, they will ask you for another $49.99 for the HD DVD Authoring pack. More nickel and diming, but, by now I have learned to bite the bullet and suffer the consequences. For video quality, choose Best Quality.Then click Settings. I like to build my movies on the hard drive so I chose "Create disc content but don't burn". For Disc Type make sure HD DVD is selected, Best Quality. You can choose to use PCM or Dolby 2-channel compression for audio. For Media and device options, make sure the program sees your dvd drive. For Image type, I picked HVDVD_TS. You can also generate iso. After you do the settings, click ok. Under Make Movie, you can now click Create disc. You will be asked to create a new folder on your hard drive. Into this they will create a folder named HVDVD_TS. After about 10 minutes worth of transcoding, the necessary files will be in this folder. My video runs around 20 minutes.

6. Next step is to burn the files on the dvd-r or dvd+r. Go back to Settings, and choose "Burn from previously created disc content". Disc type is HD DVD, Target media is DVD 4.7 GB (they also allow dual layer, but I don't have these), Disc writer device is your dvd writer, Image type is HVDVD_TS. Choose an appropriate write speed. Click ok and then Create disc. For the folder name, just point them to where you put the HVDVD_TS directory. Don't use the directory above it.

7. After burning, enjoy your movie on your Toshiba HD-A1 player and widescreen tv. To my eyes it looks as good or nearly as good as it did coming straight from the camera via component video.

In summary, I was wary of Pinnacle Systems and all the low ratings they got on Amazon. But I have to give them credit for creating an integrated application in a single package that allows me to produce HD samples that people can play on a standalone player.

Some other things I did in the past day were:

1. Tried transcoding the capture file to 1920x1080 60i. Works great. You can even drop this on your timeline. They claim you can mix multiple formats on the timeline, but I have not attempted this. I guess if you have m2v files from another system, this is the application to get them into a hd-dvd format via dvd+-r/

2. The crop/trim function is highly intuitive, at least a bit more than Vegas. The transitions are pretty good for a $129 program. It's too bad they nail you with a $50 fee to get HD disc output.

Very easy. The workflow is exactly the same as for regular DVDs. Just need to choose the HD format in the preferences and the media type.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301484

What About XBox 360?
 

I have an XBox 360 that I use to watch HD-DVDs. I've been successfully burning HD-DVDs (from my two HDV cameras) that play well in the XBox player. Unfortunately, anything produced using my Pinnacle Studio 10.7+ with HD authoring pack will not play in the XBox. I get the error code: C66700A. It's only the production part of Studio 10.7 that doesn't work. When I produce a video with Premiere Pro 2.0, and convert to HD-DVD files with Ulead Movie Factory 5, and then burn with Studio 10.7, the videos play well. It's just when I use the entire Studio package to make a video that it fails.

Has anyone used Studio 10.7 to produce videos in HD-DVD that play in an XBox 360 player? Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Max

Hi Max,

I recently picked up Pinnacle Studio 10 Ultimate as well. I was initially having problems with Vegas 6 after upgrading to Vista, so I tried Pinnacle as a stop gap since they claim full compatibility with Vista. While playing with the software, I found out that it had the capability of burning HD DVD content on standard DVD-R media. So I tried it, and surprisingly works quite well on my Xbox 360.

I know your post is a tad old, but MS recently released a software update for the HD DVD drive. If you're still having issues at this point, make sure that your 360 is running the latest firmware.

Anyone using the Studio Platinum experiencing crashes? I want to get this for the purpose of burning HD DVD to a regular disk. A review by PC World stated that it crashes while Ulead Studio11 Plus does not.

I use PremierePro2 + Access HD to edit. For authoring, I use Roxio DVDit Pro HD to author Blu-Ray projects with nice menus. For most projects I select 25GB disc as the target and make an .iso image that I burn to an Blu-Ray disc with the software that came with my Sony BWU-100a (Cyberlink BD solution).

For short projects the DVDit forum provides instructions for DVD-+R. At least for my Sony BDP-S1, I still declare the project "25GB" so it knows to make the project with Blu-Ray style menus and folders. I then "Burn" to "Write Volume" on hard disc. Finally I use my Cyberlink to make a data Blu-Ray and ONLY burn the BDMV folder, not the (empty) AACS folder. For best results on DVD media, keep the encoding to no more than about 22 megabits/sec. These play in my BDP-S1 and when it sees DVD media with a BDMV folder it announces "AVCHD", even though it is all encoded mpeg anyway.

Isn't DVDit re-encoding your video?

Actually it isn't re-encoding since I do it directly from a Cineform .avi. There are others who used the Adobe Media Encoder (or ProCorder) and were able to use that encode rather than DVDit's.

Have a Link?