How to make a DVD to play on Blu-ray in HD?
 

Hi, I'm new and just got a Canon HF S100 and I have a Sony Blu-ray player. I had been using a Hi8 camera using Vegas 8 and DVD Arch 4.5 to make SD DVDs for home videos. I just downloaded the trial version of Vegas 9 since my ver. 8 does not handle mts files .

What is the work flow one would use for making a DVD that would play on a Blu-ray player in HD? I did make a DVD that plays on our DVD player ok using DVD Arch 4.5. But I'm not sure if I choose Blu-ray or DVD with the "make movie" menu in Vegas 9. Can one just burn the .mts or mp4 files to the DVD disk?

I have a dual core 2.8 Pent D running XP with 2G of memory. They preview "jittery", it seems that's normal from what I have been reading. I assume that does not effect the final rendering other than taking longer to generate?

Any web site suggestions for a newbie? I also have questions about the Canon, which frame rates and data rates are best, improving sound etc.


Thanks, Greg

Greg, this is a good question...I would like the answer to. I've seen it discussed in the past and not paid attention, but now I too want to make some short HD videos on regular DVDs...I believe we can only fit about 20 minutes or so on a standard, single layer DVD.

I also believe there are some optimal settings for bit rates also...so like you I'll be interested to see some responses.

You're right about jittery preview NOT affecting rendering. However, before rendering I do resize the preview window to very small to take unnecessary load off the processor during rendering...it just seems sensible to me...but it may be completely unnecessary.

Aside from what Jeff is saying. I might add a little more to it. You will get 15-20 miniutes HD in a stanadard DVD burning very high bit rate. You can also get 40 minutes HD in a DVD
with less bit rate (11500) I have not use DVDA to burn HD contain onto DVD but I had have burned HD onto DVD using MultiAvchd program.

With Duo core 2.8GHz 2gig ram will take you a long long time to render and author HD material.
Here is an example.
Dell Laptop Duo Core T5750 2.0 GHz, 2GB ram 32-bit Window Vista
Render 5 minutes in AVCHD take 8+ hours in Vegas not to mention onto of burning it into DVD. My Core i7 920 6gig DDR3 take 1 1/2 minute per minute of HD. You will want at least a Q6600 processor and 4gig of ram to do anything with HD.

Your Vegas 8 can edit m2t file. All you need to do is to update your Vegas 8. No need to buy Vegas 9 unless you want to.

> Your Vegas 8 can edit m2t file

The Canon has .mts files and Vegas 8c I have does not recognize them, unless I'm doing something wrong. I upgraded it last week, build 142.

I'd like to build a faster PC this summer, for now, I just let it render and go do something else. :)

I'll check out the MultiAvchd program, thanks.

Greg, Yes Vegas 8 can edit m2t file. When I first bought Vegas 8 it came in with old version 8 and it does not recognize m2t file. I update it and it fine.

Here is your problem, Greg. The Canon and many other AVCHD cameras produce mts files, not m2t files. Vegas 8 Pro - even the last update for it - does not know what to do with the mts files; it simply cannot recognize such files. Some of the mts files can be renamed with the m2t extension in place of the mts extension.

Vegas 9 Pro, even the latest 9.0c, can edit and stitch together mts and m2t files with no or minimal recompression as long as the overall video bitrate is no higher than 17 Mbps. However, your Canon HF-S100 is capable of shooting AVCHD videos at up to 24 Mbps. When importing and editing any AVCHD clip with an overall video bitrate greater than 17 Mbps, Vegas will recompress the video to a lower bitrate since the AVCHD encoder's output supports an overall video bitrate only up to 17 Mbps. In Vegas, currently the only way to use a higher video bitrate than 17 Mbps would be to transcode your video to high-definition MPEG-2 (which will degrade image quality because transcoding AVCHD video to anything other than uncompressed or lossless YCbCr/YUV will also degrade image quality; after all, any video codec which produces higher image quality at lower bitrates is much less likely to withstand transcoding from one lossy codec to another than video codecs which produce comparatively low image quality at comparatively high bitrates).

In addition, you need to watch your video bitrate when burning HD video onto standard red-laser DVD: You need to limit your overall video bitrate to less than 18 Mbps (and the video to be exported to disc should be in AVC/AVCHD format - or if the original video was in MPEG-2 or HDV, it should be transcoded to AVC or AVCHD) if you want to burn the result onto regular DVD+/-R.

By the way, your 2.8 GHz Pentium D is a bit too weak to handle AVCHD - in fact, it is rather marginal for HDV editing as well. That Pentium D is based on the now-defunct, relatively inefficient NetBurst technology - in other words, the very same technology as the old Pentium 4 processor. As such, it struggles with AVC material even more than the least-expensive Pentium Dual-Core E2xxx processor (based on the later Core technology); in fact, it performs only at about the same level as the most recent of the Celeron Dual-Core CPUs (also based on the Core technology). In other words, the only video editing that should be done on a system with such a processor is Standard-Definition (SD) - either 480i or 480p. It's the processor performance, not just the processor clock speed, that matters here.

You can burn bluray media to a standard DVD that will play on a bluray player in DVD Architect. Just set the project properties to bluray and change the size of the disc. I've been doing this for a while, waiting for the price of bluray burners and media to come down.

The only caveat to this was that I have a Playstation 3. A bluray disc on standard or dual-layer DVD media, I guess this is called an AVCHD disc, will play on a PS3 as a data disc. You lose the menu & navigation. There is a workflow to get this type of disc to work with menus & navigation on a PS3 though. Let me know if you need it.

Come down to what? At what price point would you feel comfortable buying?

Actually, if I don't make my media purchases at BB (overpriced for blank media, IMHO), the price of blank Blu-Ray media has come down low enough that I feel comfortable making my purchase. With blank Verbatim-branded 25GB single-layer BD-Rs coming in as little as $3.00 to $3.50 per disc while the same brand's DVD+R DL media still costs $1.40 to $1.50 per disc (for only one-third the overall usable capacity), it's a no-brainer between the two. Blu-Ray burners for the PC, however, still cost about $150 to $200 on average.

Anyway, before you burn any Blu-Ray compatible high-definition video content onto DVD, make sure that the particular DVD burner you have supports UDF version 2.5 or higher. Many older DVD burners and (strangely) a few of the newer ones from certain manufacturers do not support UDF 2.5 at all (and are therefore limited to UDF 2.0x, used on DVD-RW and DVD-RAM, or lower); thus, you are limited to standard-definition (480i) DVD burns if you have one of those (of course, you can technically burn HD content onto DVD with UDF 1.x, but the end result will not be playable on anything other than a PC with a DVD reader because such footage can only be authored on such a disc as data).

It's quite reasonable to get an hour of HD video on a single layer DVD. If you shoot 1080p24 and downscale (properly) to 720p24 (or shoot 720p24 to begin with), AVC at 8Mbps is quite capable of yielding pretty respectable quality images for viewing (assuming reasonably typical footage - not non-stop car chases). When you take a moment to realize that consumer and prosumer HD cameras record 800 lines or less of actual resolved detail (600-700 is pretty typical), there isn't a whale of a lot of loss of image detail when you downscale (again, properly) 1080p source, to 720p, for viewing - but you can get far better compression efficiency. As a practical matter, low motion 720p24 footage can look reasonably good even at 4Mbps (with good AVC 2-pass VBR encoding) - a couple hours on a single layer DVD (that costs a whole whopping 20 cents or so).

How do we determine this?

I can wait until USB burners, I work with laptops, are under $100. Right now I'd need to spend at least $200 for the burner and another $50 for the enclosure.

Version 9 seems to work fine.



I read somewhere about converting it to CineForm to edit, I guess it's less lossy than others.

Are there any NLEs similar to Vegas that will edit 24 Mbps?


I'm trying to render a 10 min HD (17 Mbps)video and it's taking about 2 hours. I was thinking about building a new system. It's been awhile since I built a system, what's a good motherboard/CPU for NLE& rendering?

Also, which Blu-ray burner would be good. I read in another post that this LG was good:

Newegg.com - LG WH08LS20K Black 8X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 5X DVD-RAM 6X BD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA 8X Blu-ray Burner - Bulk - Blu-Ray Burners

Thanks all.

Greg,

Cineform is yet another form of "lossless" compression. In this case, it can preserve the qualities that make AVCHD what it is - a super-efficient lossy codec which can produce remarkably high image quality at very low video bitrates.

And I think Vegas can edit 24 Mbps AVC files. But when you render it out, it will recompress because the Sony AVC encoder does not support video bitrates above 17 Mbps. (I tried manually setting the video bitrate to 18 Mbps using the Sony AVC encoder, and the program would not render the video but give an error message instead.)

And Cineform does not come cheap: You will spend a minimum of $130 (on top of what you've already spent on an NLE) to do a proper transcode of AVCHD material to something else.

Usually by trial and error. If the resulting disc won't play back on (or more specifically, won't even get recognized by) any standalone Blu-Ray player at all even though you had finalized the disc, then you likely have a DVD burner which does not correctly support UDF 2.5 or higher. (Or, if the burner does not support UDF 2.5 at all, the authoring software would not even let you continue with the burn process unless you downconvert all of the videos in the project to standard definition and reconfigure the project itself as a regular DVD video project.)

Edius - arguably the most AVC friendly NLE out there right now, especially Edius Neo 2.5 (with the booster thingy that makes dropping AVCHD right onto the timeline work pretty smoothly, so long as you have a least a modest quad core CPU).

I was able to create an ISO image (picked Blu-ray) using Vegas 9, then burned it to a DVD on my Linux machine, not sure how to burn ISOs on XP. Played fine in my Sony BD player. This was at 12Mbps (I thought it was 17). I'll have to try 17Mbps.

Cineform isn't anywhere near lossless. What it gives is something kind of the same idea as DV for HD... no intraframe compression (eg, like DV, but unlike MPEG-2 or AVC, every frame is independent of one another). It's much faster for editing purposes. Also much larger... HDV and DV run about 12GB per hour, while Cineform for 1080/60i HD content is usually over 50GB per hour. But do the math... that's compressed.

Cineform is, in fact, is based on a set of mathematics called wavelets, which is a fundamentally different compression technology than DV, JPEG, MPEG-2, and AVC, all of which are based on use of the discrete cosine transform. Not too important to know the gory details (I do, but I'm not trying to write a book here), just note that because wavelet is different than DCT, the kind of compression artifacts you'll see (or not see... these are pretty high quality CODECs) are different.

There are some free technologies that do the same kind of thing as Cineform. The first, available today, is the Avid DNxHD CODEC. You can get this free for Windows (under Quicktime) on the Avid website. But the good news here is that this has been accepted as a standard, it's now SMPTE VC-3. Like Cineform, this has been designed to much lower in CPU use than MPEG-2 or AVC, but also to withstand repeated encoding and decoding without much damage, which is critical when you're doing heavy editing on video. I believe DNxHD is based on DCT, but it's new, and from a high end company like Avid, fairly trustworthy.

Another standard in this space, though not quite ready yet, is Dirac Pro, which was invented by the BBC in England. This is very much like Cineform, based on wavelets. The Dirac format was created by the BBC with the idea that they, as well as the world, needed a video format for archival that was very high quality and not dependent on any patents or proprietary technology. It's too early to know just how fast this will be for editing, as it's kind of experimental at the moment. But it's coming... and the family of Dirac technologies was accepted by SMPTE as VC-2, so this is another open source industry standard.

That seems to be the case. You can actually get somewhere around 20Mb/s from the Main Concept AVC CODEC in Vegas. But the Sony encoder seems to be fixed at 17Mb/s. That may be based on the specific profile they're supporting. AVC is a huge thing, and there are all kinds of different levels and profile specifications that mandate just which of the big set of magic tricks you can use, the maximum video formats (I have trouble with Vegas on 1080/60p video in MP4/AVC from one camcorder... could just be bugs, but there's definitely an issue here), etc.

You can buy Neo Scene from Videoguys for about $100, as I did. But there's a big problem with their activation procedure.. I'm basically locked out of using Cineform, even after buying it, and their tech support people have not solved the problem.

If it's just editing speed, try DNxHD if you're doing pro-level stuff, it may solve the problem. Otherwise, you can render out AVC in one of the higher end Sony MXF formats with virtually no loss. These use MPEG-2 at very high quality (better than HDV), and that's actually included with Vegas. The main issue there might be repeated layered edits.. I don't know if MXF/MPEG-2 would hold up as well as Cineform or DNxHD. But if it's just to get faster edits, try the MXF... it's built-in.

Thanks for correcting me. I made the wrong assumption about Cineform.

Heck, if you want a free intermediate codec, XVID can be configured to actually work quite well (limited to 8 bit 4:2:0 though). I did some testing with XVID (configured to use intraframe only compression) vs Canopus HQ and while Canopus HQ was a little faster, XVID was not exactly what I would call slow and yielded notably better SSIM scores and at slightly lower bitrates to boot (with some footage I shot of my puppy).

Any comments on preview frame rates with these codecs?

I tried DNxHD several months ago, with poor timeline performance, which I attributed to the QT wrapper. Not sure if this was a fair assessment. This was on something like a 2.6GHz Core2 Duo.

Right or wrong, I'm thinking we need Direct-X or AVI or something other than a QT wrapper to get good performance on the timeline.

Comments?

Avid's DNxHD is an excellent codec. But it is not wavelet like Cineform. It is DCT (Discrete Cosine Waveform) much like Apple's ProRes or CanopusHQ though it preceeded both of them. You are correct that there are free Wavelet based compression codecs. Jpeg2000 and Motion Jpeg2000 aka MJ2K is one of them. Dirac, as you mention later is another. DNxHD is hardly new. It's over 6 years old at this point.

The idea of Dirac has some appeal, but as you say it's not quite ready. For someone who wants the Wavelet technoloigy now, Cineform and MJ2K are really the only games in town. I use MJ2K for archiving purposes now. Sony Vegas has a free implementation in the .MOV container, and Morgan Multimedia has a nice implementation in the .AVI container but that implementation costs $30. It was well worth it to me as it offers excellent control over all parameters.


MXF/Mpeg-2 will most certainly not hold up as well as Cineform or DNxHD, and neither of those is 10bit some DNxHD and Cineform also hold an advantage with available color and luminance space. But all of these are miles better than HDV. In the MXF container, the HD 422 is a 50Mbps Mpeg2 variant that is intraframe. It's probably the best option if an 8-bit, slightly lossy codec can be used. I've used it for web-based stuff and it's just fine for that.

Greatly dependent on the NLE. For NLEs that call Quicktime to handle .MOV (Vegas is one of these) the timeline performance of DNxHD or any other codec in the .MOV container is going to be rather poor. This is irrespective of what CPU you have. It's just a software limitation. In applications that can process .MOV files without an outside call, then DNxHD performance should be rather good.

One of the reasons I wanted to move to MJ2K was to get an AVI container with a wavelet inside. Much like Cineform, but without the cost or having to have proprietary software to read and write the codec.

I'm doing okay in 9c, no stuttering just yet. Still playing with it though. i7 920/Vista, 1080p footage in a 720p timeline. Perrone has reported some stuttering in the past though.

Its amazing to see the knowledge floating around in here, I love it.
So, uhm, could one of you rocket scientists answer me this? LOL.
Would any of these codecs you speak of give me any better "bang for my buck" (quality for file size) than Lagorith?
And is there anything wrong with Lagorith? A bit surprised it hasnt been mentioned.

I've never used Lagorith, but unless I'm mistaken it's a lossless codec, which means there there's no loss of quality at all from encoding, but file sizes will be larger than can be achieved with "lossy method" compression.

For "visually lossless" encoding of 4:2:0 source footage, that is really quite flexible (either optimizing for speed or for file size*), it would be difficult to beat XVID for the price (free).

*XVID can be configured so that quantization never exceeds "1" even if using interframe compression with P and B frames, so in addition to being capable of configuration for very high quality (and quite fast) I frame only compression, the same image quality can be achieved with significantly smaller file sizes too (but performance is slower).

MSU has a lossless codec (also free), which I believe is the best available for achieving the smallest file sizes without any loss of image quality. It's dang slow though.

several years ago I used MSU often for some SD projects. Indeed it is slow - I rendered overnight. However, I never use it now. As I recall, I started having trouble with crashes - perhaps because I was moving from SD to HD

I've been using lagarith for years. It has it's place. But it's not at it's best on the editing timeline. I use it as a lossless traveling codec from my NLE to Virtualdub and back. I don't want generational loss in that move.