OK, maybe this has been covered, but what if any are the tricks to burning an HD project onto a regular DVD for playback in HD on a BR player?

I've burned a couple test projects, took them by the local Best Buy Samsung demo BR player, they load, menus work, and the video plays and looks phenomenal (the sales people are blown away)... for a few seconds, then it starts to stutter.

I'm guessing it's a buffering issue, as pausing and restarting yields a few seconds of perfect playback... then stutter.

I guess there are some tricks to making this work... I rendered using the 1920x1080 24P template in Vegas 8c, the video looks incredible on my PC. Also tried using the 1920x1080 60i template, still looked good but I see interlace combing, and I hate that!

Project in DVDA 5 seems to work and while it takes a while, it burns to a regular DVD-R.

Hoping there's a trick or two setting wise that I missed, as I'd like to be able to deliver this wedding in HD on DVDs... they have a PS3 and a new HDTV, wanted to impress them a bit beyond the SD DVD mix, and it should fit on 2 regular DVDs

Suggestions? Of shall I just continue my great blu ray experiment until I succeed!? I know I'm close, but it's not quite there! I remember the early hassles of burning DVD's... so not a surprise this is not quite a smooth ride!

OK, experimented with rendering "8 bit" template - huge degradation in quality, pretty much as expected vs. the 25 bit template.... having some random crashes related to glitches with titles/credits... so not ready to burn a DVD yet...

Looking to retain the quality of the footage and still play back well... suggestions??

Dave,

Believe it or not, what I've done was just render my project back to .m2t HDV format (1080i 25Mb/s) and copied this file as a data file onto a DVD disk. Load it up in a PS3 and it plays back beautifully.. Have not tried this on another type of BR player so I'd like to hear if anybody else out there has done this with success.

Jon

Third time was the charm, as they say... I realized that it was probably something with too high a bitrate, and since the AVCHD cameras are topping out at 16Mbps... I adjusted the render in the "custom" settings.

Got smaller file sizes, still looks extremely good (if the camera is at 16 can't see a reason that the render at 16 should lose any quality??). I could fit more on the disk, and when I burned it and took it back to the ol' BB, voila! Played back perfectly! No stutter, smooth playback, and now I can burn with some confidence.

For most of the things I do, 40-60 minutes is PLENTY of time for the deliverable DVD disk, worst case I guess dual layer or multiple disks would work too.

I still want to experiment a bit with vbr vs. cbr and slightly higher bitrates, but for the moment, I have the concept "working", with menus and all!

Since I'm not quite ready to jump on the BR train (player, burner, disks), being able to deliver a reasonable amount of video that will just pop into a BR player and play back hi-def seems like a good compromise! I'm intrigued to see how the client likes the finished product, as I'll deliver in DVD as well as my "experimental BR" discs... this was just a whim, but looks like a good workaround.

I have played .m2t files no problem on my PS3 at 25mbps. Even from DVD-R. I think the problem is the BD player is reading the DVD not at speed. The PS3 however might be a different story.

I'm trying for solid compatibility, and when I noticed the stuttery playback, it seemed logical that the Samsung BR player was hitting some buffer overflow type issues - causing it to pause and jerk on playback.

Was happy to find that with 16Mbps, same as the AVCHD cameras record at, it worked fine. Maybe something with Vegas trying to pump up the bitrate on AVCHD to 25M?

At 25mbps, you're rendering MPEG-2. Not AVCHD.