Too early to begin delivering Blu-Ray to clients?

[Ron Cooper]

That's interesting Tom, as just recently I have been evaluating a couple of HD projectors. I have an older top flight Denon DVD player which upscales - (I am a Denon Dealer), but I have not had much time to play with it. So when I checked out these projectors I used this Denon and was amazed at the quality from std. DVD discs.

Of particular interest was an older demonstration DVD put out by Pioneer, which, when I first looked at it about 8 yrs ago, was so poor that I virtually disregarded it. As we are in PAL land and I realised this disc was NTSC, I thought this was probably the reason.

Almost as an after thought, I put this DVD in the player and WOW ! It was quite amazing. Not quite HD but certainly better than I could have imagined. I am now stunned by what this upscaling technology is doing, so yes this does narrow the gap between SD & HD.

I am now further encouraged to edit more of my recent DV footage and see how it benefits from upscaling.

I always thought you got nothing for nothing !

RonC.

[Tom Roper]

Originally Posted by Dave Blackhurst

...I typically burn to nearly the full 4.7G... DVDA will always recompress certain things (audio) for some reason, but if you use Vegas's settings to render to DVDA compatible files (there are templates in vegas, fully tweakable), it's pretty much a drag and drop and burn affair... both for SD DVD and now for burning BR compatible onto regular DVD's....

DVDA doesn't recompress the audio if you render it out as a separate elementary stream from Vegas using the Dolby Pro template for 5.1 surround.

In DVDA, click on the media button, there are separate dropdown boxes for the video and the audio. It will default to the audio stream that's muxed with the video, but you choose REPLACE FILE and give it the name of the AC3 file you rendered separately.

[Tom Roper]

No one would mistake my Blu-ray collaborations for upscaled dvd. That said, I am not sold on the format, but it's the best out there, whether it is ever adopted mainstream or not. And not just for the video, but the audio. Downloadable HD content has a few obstacles, bandwidth restrictions and compression. Perhaps upscaled DVD could look as good as that.

[Ron Evans]

The one issue with upscaling is normally this is done to 1080P30 ( for NTSC) and there is a noticable loss in motion quality from the original 60i source delinterlacing and upscaling to 30P. Resolution is there and if there is little or no movement its great. Lots of movement and there is considerable judder. One of my hand held skiing shot from a DV camera is acceptable on a normal DVD player to a CRT , barely acceptable played back to my Plasma and unwatchable played back from the PS3 upscaling to the plasma!!!!
I like burning to Bluray. I have a LG burner use Verbatim disc and find them perfect for backing up large high quality files of my projects that otherwise would have to go to tape as HDV. I have as many 50G BD-RE as I do 25G discs.
Dave one reason not to burn to the full size is that on poorer quality disc the outer edge is where most of the problems usually occur and where most of the tracking errors due to imbalances in drive mechanism will also show themselves as tracking errors. Older players have electonics that have difficulty re-reading errors and this is what sometimes causes freezes or stops etc. Newer drives and PC's have lots of processing power and memory so have less difficulty. Hence for compatibility, avoid things that cause players problems. Don't go near the edge, lower bit rate so there are less re-reads and use good media.

Ron Evans

[Jonathan Gentry]

So my question is this... Can you burn BR quality audio and video on a DVD? Or are we talking about upsampling from a DVD?

-Jonathan

[Terry Esslinger]

Yes, you can burn a BR project with a standard burner, at 25,000,000 on standard DVD (if its less than 20 minutes) and it plays beautifly, at leeast on my PS3

[Dave Blackhurst]

I found that playback isn't so good on a Samsung at the local BB if you go above 17Mbps (others are saying 18Mbps encoding is the max, haven't tried it yet). BUT, the BR recorded to a standard DVD kludge seems to work, and I'm sure it's better than "upscaled" trying to recreate bits that don't exist.

[Ron Evans]

I must admit I find it interesting that everyone wants to burn to a standard DVD. To get HD video in the first place someone must have spent money to buy a HD camera. To watch the video they must have 16x9 HD TV and either a BLuray player or a PS3. They also must have a PC with a DVD burner that's capable of editing HD. That's a lot of money invested to try and avoid spending another $250 on a burner and $10 for a Bluray disc to do it properly and get over 2 hours on the disc!!!! That is less than it cost me when I started making CD's !!! I have just bought some TDK 50G BD-RE for $20 Canadian using AVC I can get almost 8 hours on this disc with full menus or with MPEG2 about 5 hours without worrying about bit rates and loss of quality!!!!! Anyone else who wants to see the video must also have at least the playback capability of 16x9 TV and Bluray or PS3. The cheapest is not to use a disc at all, buy a PS3 and play over the network from the PC. OR buy a media player from WD or now Seagate and load files on a USB drive. Am I missing something? I do use standard DL-DVD's to back up some of my AVCHD files as this is a convenient storage approach and they will play in the PS3, no menus of course !!! I can see that if one's projects are 10mins there is some reason but mine are usually 2 hours or so. Shortest is around 1 hour. Even the annual video of my grandsons this last year was 2 hour 15mins.

Ron Evans

[Tom Roper]

You have to see the bigger picture Ron. BD-R/RE doesn't play on all the Blu-ray players either, otherwise I'm behind it 100%.

Six dollar 6x inkjet printable BD-R is available online now, that's great but what's on the store shelves remains a paltry selection of mostly 2x BD-R at $20+ per disk.

So it's really just a matter of targeting the playing time required. DVD-DL is under a buck, we're up to about an hour at 18mbps AVC with amazing quality, full menu functionality and Dolby 5.1 surround.

Although Blu-ray burners are out there now with 8x BD-R writing speed, a lot are only 2x, you can't get in a hurry with it.

Otherwise, I'm for Blu-ray burners and media 100% exclusively. Blu-ray format is the best out there, whether it will ever be adopted mainstream it will have to move beyond playback compatibility problems. I'm not certain about the future of the format, thus I see no reason to embrace it exclusively nor avoid it entirely.

[Khoi Pham]

"You have to see the bigger picture Ron. BD-R/RE doesn't play on all the Blu-ray players either, otherwise I'm behind it 100%.

This is problem we had when we first burn DVD years ago, but I don't see the same problem here, I have yet ran into a incompatible player, actually I did but after they update firmware on their player, all play fine.
You can't bring your BD into a store like Best Buy and make your conclusion on it, they might have players on display forever and had never update it. If you authored it right it will play.

[Tom Roper]

Originally Posted by Khoi Pham

This is problem we had when we first burn DVD years ago, but I don't see the same problem here, I have yet ran into a incompatible player, actually I did but after they update firmware on their player, all play fine.
You can't bring your BD into a store like Best Buy and make your conclusion on it, they might have players on display forever and had never update it. If you authored it right it will play.

It is however a problem the Blu-ray association sees with BD-R/RE content. They will not permit your adding the Blu-ray logo on BD-R/RE media except that they will permit the existing Blu-ray logo on the blank media to show through. This is because they cannot assure the compatibility or quality of the disk.

When we first authored DVD years ago, we didn't have firmware upgrades, that is true. It is unfortunate that now the expectation is that owners must perform firmware updates to achieve playability. In my mind, this will restrict mainstream adoption.

Accordingly, whether a client prefers footage on BD-R, USB flash drives, XDCAM tape or something else, does not concern me.

[Chris Barcellos]

I've been wrestling with this issue too. Yesterday, I took a $100.00 gift card I got for Best Buy and bought the Western Digital Media player. In my first testing with it, I took an .mp4 copy of a film I had just completed, transfered it to a cheap 1 gig thumb drive I had, to see if it would actually play. It was a 1280 x 720 HD render I had made for upload to YouTube. It played flawlessly to my 720 HD TV. I rendered the same film using the Cineform final version to a Blue Ray preset in Vegas, and though I somehow for got to render a sound track, the image played flawlessly.

The unit weighs about a pound, has no hard drive, and is about the size of the Western Digit My Book drives.

Point is, I think this technology is where things are going next-- not another touchy optical disk system.

[Dave Stern]

Originally Posted by Ron Cooper

Thanks Ron & Garrett. I am encouraged.

However, I am aware of the data rate and I have been burning around 7 - 7.5K, but on the Sony RDR-GX7 I use, it only gives the data rate (as I see it), by playing time & type. - HQ 60min, HSP 90 min, SP 120min, etc. I usually burn at HSP, as I have for this last one which so far is OK in the 2 machines I tested it in. Quality is excellent. Maybe I should be burning on SP but I want good quality. - Surely if these higher bit rates are so buggy why did they introduce them?

I am also not using cheap discs - Imation DVD-R & Sony DVD-RW. When I use these up I will check out Verbatim. Are there any issues these days with DVD-R & DVD+R? I have only been using DVD-R.

I have Roxio (which is my preference) in one PC and Ashampoo in another which is only a new trial and so far useless, so perhaps I should investigate DVD Lab Pro2. I see it is not cheap (for a hobbyist), and on this site ( DVDlab PRO DVD authoring tool for advanced users) it says it doesn't have an Mpeg2 encoder, only the ES version ?? What have I missed here?

I'm curious that you use this for SD and DVDA fo HD. - I assume that Pro2 doesn't do BR but is it better than DVDA fo SD?

Regarding my latest problem do you think that even 3.6 Gg is too large for a reliable DVD?

RonC.

Hi Ron, I too have an RDR-GX7 in my workstream, which I use for real-time encoding for some projects (for some dvd transfers, but not all). but then I rip the disk and just use the encoded video, but not the authored DVD (menu, etc.), but the encoding is real-time, and I like the quality of the encode.

just in skimming the threads, I think the weak link in your chain may be either the authoring tool you are using (roxio) or the media. I use mostly DVDLab Pro (in fact only the 1.5 version) and have authoried plenty of disks with that and have literally no returns (and dvdlab is careful to say they are not necessarily a pro authoring tool like scenariast). I do have nero in my toolbox, but would not use it to author any final work product for a client, I just don't trust it that way. It's easy and I like it but not for final authoring. DVDLab does have a learning curve, but it is quite flexible (you have to know what you want, but it will let you do what you want), and it's authored images have been very solid for me. (I do have vegas/DVDA as well and use DVDA on occaision).

For media I use only Taiyo Yuden, and those have served me well, burned at no more than 8x with 100% verification on every single burn (e.g. re-read and compared to the original image). When people say don't use cheap media, that is a bit misleading. it's not the price really but the quality, and TY has been constant (mostly). Even with the brands you mention, there is still the possibility they they are buying from multiple sources, and that is really where the variability comes in, and in this area, reducing variability helps. But I've burned over 4gigs on each disk and have also at times used quite high bitrates, still in DVD spec and not at the limits, but 9megabits, no problem).

Anyway, feel free to post back if you have RDR-GX7 specific questions or find anything in my post useful.

edit: by the way, you can use DVDInfo (free version, which I'm not sure I see anymore, but there appears to be a trial of the pro version: http://www.dvdinfopro.com/) to check out the bitrate in any of your burned projects. Also, here's a bit rate calculator if you want to go the other way (e.g. what bitrate is needed to fit a project onto a DVD): http://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Tom Hardwick

The fact that BD players do such an excellent job of upscaling regular DVDs is somewhat shooting themselves in the foot. My regular DVD (Toshiba) player feeds my 46" 1080p TV and upscales my home burnt movies so well that many people have asked if it's Blu-ray I'm showing them.

Of course Blu-ray is better - as it should be at the price. But DVD is fighting back, and an up-rezzing player will breathe new life into your entire metre-long DVD collection.

tom.

I just did a weddign show this weekend with a Sony Bravia 1080p TV connected to a Panasonic DVD-RW bruner / player that ALSO did upscalling with a HDMI ouput to the TV and coax-digital audio to my 5.1 system.

For comparison, I also connected the s-video out on the DVD player to the HD TV. Just switching back and forth from the SD native source to the HD upscalled source showed a clear improvement. Many people could not tell the HD signal was not a native HD recording (then again, most of them were brides and not the fiance who has the fancy system and woudl know the difference).

Now if they had put my demo next to Travis's demo (shot true HD I believe) then there would clearly be a difference.

But those upconverting boxes do a fantastic job of giving SD-DVD a longer shelf life.

[Ron Evans]

I think that there was also confusion between playback of BD-R/RE with DBAV content and BDMV content. I was under the impression that BDAV content always played on the Bluray players and the firmware upgrade was to allow BDMV ( interactive menus). To answer the question of burn times one has to look at the time it takes to burn 2 hours in 20min chunks, ie at best 3 Dl discs with verify against 1 Bluray disc. Using my LG burner ( 2x) I can burn a BD-R disc in about 1hour 25 mins normally. Using the same burner and DVD-R DL would take say 45 mins. In one case I have 1 disc to look after and can watch the whole program with menus and in the other I have 3 discs to look after and have to sort out which disc to choose. As far as cost goes the difference compared to the expense of all the other equipment involved is negligible( say $3 dollars for the Dl's and $9 for the Bluray and many thousands for the rest of the equipment!!!!!!) I accept the point that if one only has 10 mins of HD then burning to a 4.7G DVD makes sense making sure to clearly label them as Bluray format as I don't think normal DVD player might like them!!!. You still need to have bought a Bluray player!!!
I also agree that the upscaling players do a pretty good job and unless one watches the Bluray version immediately the differences are small. One big difference for me is the judder introduced by deinterlacing to 30P. I like smooth motion and 30P doesn't cut it for me.
Ron Evans