Blu Ray Burning Opinions / Workflow / Experiences

[Mark Holmes]

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.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

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.

[Mark Holmes]

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?

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

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

[Mark Holmes]

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...

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

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!

[Mark Holmes]

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...

[Paul Kellett]

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.

[Kit Hammond]

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?

[Alastair Brown]

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?

[Jerome Cloninger]

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!

[Russell Snyder]

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

[Jon Fairhurst]

Originally Posted by Alastair Brown

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?

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

[Alastair Brown]

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.

[Jon Fairhurst]

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?