HD Video Production Questions

[Silas Barker]

I am using Adobe Premier Pro CS3, and Sony Z1u Cameras.
I am switching to Hd and Blu Ray media.
Anyone have any suggestions for what format to render your HD files in and settings for Encore.

Any and all info regarding HD editing, formats for rendering (uncompressed AVI, mpeg format, etc) would be extremely helpful!

Thanks in advance!
Silas
Wedding & Corporate Video, Sacramento, Roseville, Folsom, Auburn

[Perrone Ford]

While I can't help you with specific questions for Premiere and Encore, ALL BluRay only supports three codecs.

1. AVC
2. VC-1 (Microsoft WMV Advanced Profile)
3. Mpeg2

Each of these needs some very specific settings to be BluRay compatible, so programs like Encore are set up to provide that. I tend to provide lossless files to my encoder and let it do the work to ensure compatibility.

[Wesley Cardone]

There are two primary issues you want to be concerned with:

1. Transcode to MPEG-2 or h.264
2. Bitrates

You will probably always want to transcode to MPEG-2 since it transcodes about 5x faster than h.264 with no quality difference assuming reasonable bitrates are used. The advantage with h.264 is the small file size of the file it generates. Use h.264 if your project is too big when using MPEG-2.

[Perrone Ford]

Well,

I will go ahead and disagree with Wesley. For the same bitrate, AVC or VC-1 will look FAR better than Mpeg2. And since you have limited bitrates when going to BluRay, you'll want the most efficient codec possible.

Encode speed will certainly be slower, but if quality is your primary concern, and not transcode speed, it makes no sense to use Mpeg2. If you look at commercially produced BluRay's, Mpeg2 fell out of favor long time ago primarily because it needed far more space on the disc to get the same quality as it's more efficient peers.