Vegas blu-ray & H.264

[Bill Ravens]

what'r ya looking for? I think bluray is a ...hm......let's call it a personal exploration. You want the easy way out? You want someone to tell you the guaranteed path? From what I've seen, everytbody seems to find a muddle thru it to a bluray. You can sit back and let someone tell you, or you can get some cajones and get out there and burn a few bluray coaster. Wanna give something back to the community? Waste a few blurays, tell me what you did. Maybe I'll share with you what I've learnt.

[Alastair Brown]

I render my footage out as MPEG2 50i (I'm in PAL land). Then I simply drag them into DVD Architect and let it do it's thang. Takes 12hrs to make a disc with about 2hrs of content on it (on a quad core machine with raptor drives). Haven't had a coaster yet, and found it nothing but simple. Playing back on a PS3.

[Dave Haynie]

Originally Posted by Roger Shealy

I'm thinking of taking the plunge and getting a LG blu-ray. What 's the best way to get the best quality from HDV onto disk using V8Pro? Is Vegas BR codec = H.264?; better? worse?

The best quality from HDV to BD is MPEG-2... because you can make a BD without any recoding at all. Of course, if you have space concerns, you can get twice the video on BD at the same quality using AVC.

Also, don't go crazy on audio coding... if you're using on-tape HDV audio, keep in mind you recorded this in MPEG Layer 2 audio. Transcoding that to AC-3 at 192kb/s will deliver all you have there on tape, so don't bother going to higher bitrates. Of course, if you're using addional recorders, that's not an issue.

[Dave Haynie]

Originally Posted by Paul Kepen

I tried encodig as AVCHD to a DVD-R using Edward's Workflow in Vegas 8. My Panasonic BD-30 Blu Ray player still gives the message "unsupported."

Well, here's the thing... most DVD players don't really support "Blu-Ray on DVD". At least not quite. So, despite the fact that Vegas can produce this, it's not likely to play.

However, many if not most Blu-Ray players actually will support an AVCHD DVD... the sort that's produced by AVCHD/DVD camcorders. Which is nearly, but not exactly, the same thing as a Blu-Ray encoding on DVD.

[John Estcourt]

this is the method I use to produce blu ray discs that work on ps3 and panasonic players.
capture my 25p footage with cineform HD link and convert to 24p during capture
frameserve from vegas to sorrenson squeeze 5
render as VC1 24p @ 28000 kbps multi pass vbr
render audio as AC3
import into Sonic DVDit Pro
make up disc using menus etc
write disc image and burn to BD-R or BD-RW using sonics in built burning facility
This works for 25gb or 50 gb discs.
so far zero failures/ coasters.
Hope that helps someone.
cheers

[Jon McGuffin]

Originally Posted by Dave Haynie

Well, here's the thing... most DVD players don't really support "Blu-Ray on DVD". At least not quite. So, despite the fact that Vegas can produce this, it's not likely to play.

However, many if not most Blu-Ray players actually will support an AVCHD DVD... the sort that's produced by AVCHD/DVD camcorders. Which is nearly, but not exactly, the same thing as a Blu-Ray encoding on DVD.

What I've been able to do is copy my .m2t files directly onto a regular DVD file and play them back in a PS3 at full 1920x1080i resolution (my source resolution captures on my FX1).

So if I want to export a project and preview it in High Def, who needs Blue-Ray? I just render to HDV Mpeg-2, copy the file and it plays great on the PS3...

Jon

[Gary Franks]

Hate to open an older thread up but after much searching I am coming up with zero.

My distributor has agreed to let me do a small run of my film in the defunct HD DVD format... simply because there are enough HD DVD fans starving for new content and I felt like it would be cool to do.... however, I can't seem to be able to find a bitrate higher than 8mbps in WMV, for making VC-1. Am I missing something in the render window because I am not seeing VC-1 at all and I am using Vegas 8.0 Pro.

Any help on how to get there or where to look would be great.

Thanks in advance

[Dave Haynie]

Originally Posted by Gary Franks

Hate to open an older thread up but after much searching I am coming up with zero.

My distributor has agreed to let me do a small run of my film in the defunct HD DVD format... simply because there are enough HD DVD fans starving for new content and I felt like it would be cool to do.... however, I can't seem to be able to find a bitrate higher than 8mbps in WMV, for making VC-1. Am I missing something in the render window because I am not seeing VC-1 at all and I am using Vegas 8.0 Pro.

Any help on how to get there or where to look would be great.

Thanks in advance

Well, you could just use AVC, assuming your HD-DVD authoring tool supports it. AVC is just as legal on HD-DVD as it is on Blu-Ray.

I used to make WMV/HD discs, before Blu-Ray came along. MS's answer at time was to use the stand-alon Windows Media Encoder, if your NLE didn't have enough tweakability on the WMV output. You can find it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...r/default.mspx

However, that was written back when WMV/HD was the target, so you can't (far as I know) get anything better than 1280x720 at 5Mb/s out of it.. which might be somewhat reasonable for WMV-HD (though I usually made these in 1080i), but not what you're looking for, for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. I'm also not sure if you can get real VC-1 out of that (Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile, WVC1 is the FOURCC tag), or whether it only does older, non-compliant versions of Windows Media Video.

The latest answer from Microsoft is to find a 3rd party application that uses the Microsoft WMV + VC-1 SDK. You can find the SDK itself here: Download details: VC-1 Encoder SDK. There's a command-line tool in the SDK to let you access the CODEC... looks crufty, but it might work.

You may be able to access this in Vegas... it seemed to me that recent versions of Vegas might potentially use this interface for rendering control, so I tried it. Rather than rendering from a preset (never rely on the presets for much, you probably want to tweak any given video based on content and target), go into the "Custom" panel for WMV output, and select "Advanced Profile" for WMV9. I haven't rendered using this before (I'm doing Blu-Ray these days with Sony tools... they like AVC, not VC-1), but I did just fire up Vegas 9 on an existing HD project, set up WMV Advanced Profile, set 20Mb/s VBR, and it's rendering (usually, Vegas will fail out of the render if you select a bitrate the CODEC doesn't support). So maybe this works... I'll have to wait out the render... And this, on a Q9550 machine... though curiously, this is far less efficient than AVC rendering... if I render AVC, I pin all four cores at 100%... rendering this way, I'm seeing one core peaking at around 60%, the others pretty unused. Well, part of it may be the fairly weird layout of this particular project. At least it's not to busy to just let run while I get some CAD work done. See you in an hour or two...

.. I'm back. Yeah, that works... maximum bitrate 21099.5kb/s, as reported by Windows Media Player. And it reports as FOURCC type "WVC1", which means it's HD-DVD compliant, at least in theory. Now, of course, how you're making the HD-DVD itself... particularly using a program that won't create it's own VC-1 files, is rather odd. And you know, you can also use AVC... the video CODECs supported in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are the same, only HD-DVD had lower limits on bitrate. There's some difference in the high-end audio types supported... I generally use PCM (uncompressed) or plain old AC-3 for my Blu-Rays, depending on space.

I think commercially produced VC-1 discs are likely to use something like Sonic Cinevision PSE. Cinevision PSE is actually using Microsoft-developed encoder code, but they're the retailer... so you can expect it to be way pricey. You might want to just use AVC.

Main Concept has two VC-1 plug-ins for their "Reference" encoder. The "consumer" version does VC-1 up to 20Mb/s ("Advanced/L2 profile"), the "professional" version even more. I think this starts at around $600. Though you can apparently download a free version of "Reference" with fully functional but watermarked versions of all CODECs, so you can at least evaluate this. Main Concept's doesn't use Microsoft code; the designed it from the SMPTE VC-1 specifications.

[Gary Franks]

Thank You ... I will give this a try today.