How to make a DVD to play on Blu-ray in HD?

[Greg Thornwall]

Hi, I'm new and just got a Canon HF S100 and I have a Sony Blu-ray player. I had been using a Hi8 camera using Vegas 8 and DVD Arch 4.5 to make SD DVDs for home videos. I just downloaded the trial version of Vegas 9 since my ver. 8 does not handle mts files .

What is the work flow one would use for making a DVD that would play on a Blu-ray player in HD? I did make a DVD that plays on our DVD player ok using DVD Arch 4.5. But I'm not sure if I choose Blu-ray or DVD with the "make movie" menu in Vegas 9. Can one just burn the .mts or mp4 files to the DVD disk?

I have a dual core 2.8 Pent D running XP with 2G of memory. They preview "jittery", it seems that's normal from what I have been reading. I assume that does not effect the final rendering other than taking longer to generate?

Any web site suggestions for a newbie? I also have questions about the Canon, which frame rates and data rates are best, improving sound etc.


Thanks, Greg

[Jeff Harper]

Greg, this is a good question...I would like the answer to. I've seen it discussed in the past and not paid attention, but now I too want to make some short HD videos on regular DVDs...I believe we can only fit about 20 minutes or so on a standard, single layer DVD.

I also believe there are some optimal settings for bit rates also...so like you I'll be interested to see some responses.

You're right about jittery preview NOT affecting rendering. However, before rendering I do resize the preview window to very small to take unnecessary load off the processor during rendering...it just seems sensible to me...but it may be completely unnecessary.

[Bruce Phung]

Aside from what Jeff is saying. I might add a little more to it. You will get 15-20 miniutes HD in a stanadard DVD burning very high bit rate. You can also get 40 minutes HD in a DVD
with less bit rate (11500) I have not use DVDA to burn HD contain onto DVD but I had have burned HD onto DVD using MultiAvchd program.

With Duo core 2.8GHz 2gig ram will take you a long long time to render and author HD material.
Here is an example.
Dell Laptop Duo Core T5750 2.0 GHz, 2GB ram 32-bit Window Vista
Render 5 minutes in AVCHD take 8+ hours in Vegas not to mention onto of burning it into DVD. My Core i7 920 6gig DDR3 take 1 1/2 minute per minute of HD. You will want at least a Q6600 processor and 4gig of ram to do anything with HD.

Your Vegas 8 can edit m2t file. All you need to do is to update your Vegas 8. No need to buy Vegas 9 unless you want to.

[Greg Thornwall]

> Your Vegas 8 can edit m2t file

The Canon has .mts files and Vegas 8c I have does not recognize them, unless I'm doing something wrong. I upgraded it last week, build 142.

I'd like to build a faster PC this summer, for now, I just let it render and go do something else. :)

I'll check out the MultiAvchd program, thanks.

[Bruce Phung]

Greg, Yes Vegas 8 can edit m2t file. When I first bought Vegas 8 it came in with old version 8 and it does not recognize m2t file. I update it and it fine.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Greg Thornwall

> Your Vegas 8 can edit m2t file

The Canon has .mts files and Vegas 8c I have does not recognize them, unless I'm doing something wrong. I upgraded it last week, build 142.

I'd like to build a faster PC this summer, for now, I just let it render and go do something else. :)

I'll check out the MultiAvchd program, thanks.

Originally Posted by Bruce Phung

Greg, Yes Vegas 8 can edit m2t file. When I first bought Vegas 8 it came in with old version 8 and it does not recognize m2t file. I update it and it fine.

Here is your problem, Greg. The Canon and many other AVCHD cameras produce mts files, not m2t files. Vegas 8 Pro - even the last update for it - does not know what to do with the mts files; it simply cannot recognize such files. Some of the mts files can be renamed with the m2t extension in place of the mts extension.

Vegas 9 Pro, even the latest 9.0c, can edit and stitch together mts and m2t files with no or minimal recompression as long as the overall video bitrate is no higher than 17 Mbps. However, your Canon HF-S100 is capable of shooting AVCHD videos at up to 24 Mbps. When importing and editing any AVCHD clip with an overall video bitrate greater than 17 Mbps, Vegas will recompress the video to a lower bitrate since the AVCHD encoder's output supports an overall video bitrate only up to 17 Mbps. In Vegas, currently the only way to use a higher video bitrate than 17 Mbps would be to transcode your video to high-definition MPEG-2 (which will degrade image quality because transcoding AVCHD video to anything other than uncompressed or lossless YCbCr/YUV will also degrade image quality; after all, any video codec which produces higher image quality at lower bitrates is much less likely to withstand transcoding from one lossy codec to another than video codecs which produce comparatively low image quality at comparatively high bitrates).

In addition, you need to watch your video bitrate when burning HD video onto standard red-laser DVD: You need to limit your overall video bitrate to less than 18 Mbps (and the video to be exported to disc should be in AVC/AVCHD format - or if the original video was in MPEG-2 or HDV, it should be transcoded to AVC or AVCHD) if you want to burn the result onto regular DVD+/-R.

By the way, your 2.8 GHz Pentium D is a bit too weak to handle AVCHD - in fact, it is rather marginal for HDV editing as well. That Pentium D is based on the now-defunct, relatively inefficient NetBurst technology - in other words, the very same technology as the old Pentium 4 processor. As such, it struggles with AVC material even more than the least-expensive Pentium Dual-Core E2xxx processor (based on the later Core technology); in fact, it performs only at about the same level as the most recent of the Celeron Dual-Core CPUs (also based on the Core technology). In other words, the only video editing that should be done on a system with such a processor is Standard-Definition (SD) - either 480i or 480p. It's the processor performance, not just the processor clock speed, that matters here.

[Rich Petruccelli]

You can burn bluray media to a standard DVD that will play on a bluray player in DVD Architect. Just set the project properties to bluray and change the size of the disc. I've been doing this for a while, waiting for the price of bluray burners and media to come down.

The only caveat to this was that I have a Playstation 3. A bluray disc on standard or dual-layer DVD media, I guess this is called an AVCHD disc, will play on a PS3 as a data disc. You lose the menu & navigation. There is a workflow to get this type of disc to work with menus & navigation on a PS3 though. Let me know if you need it.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Rich Petruccelli

I've been doing this for a while, waiting for the price of bluray burners and media to come down.

Come down to what? At what price point would you feel comfortable buying?

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Rich Petruccelli

You can burn bluray media to a standard DVD that will play on a bluray player in DVD Architect. Just set the project properties to bluray and change the size of the disc. I've been doing this for a while, waiting for the price of bluray burners and media to come down.

The only caveat to this was that I have a Playstation 3. A bluray disc on standard or dual-layer DVD media, I guess this is called an AVCHD disc, will play on a PS3 as a data disc. You lose the menu & navigation. There is a workflow to get this type of disc to work with menus & navigation on a PS3 though. Let me know if you need it.

Actually, if I don't make my media purchases at BB (overpriced for blank media, IMHO), the price of blank Blu-Ray media has come down low enough that I feel comfortable making my purchase. With blank Verbatim-branded 25GB single-layer BD-Rs coming in as little as $3.00 to $3.50 per disc while the same brand's DVD+R DL media still costs $1.40 to $1.50 per disc (for only one-third the overall usable capacity), it's a no-brainer between the two. Blu-Ray burners for the PC, however, still cost about $150 to $200 on average.

Anyway, before you burn any Blu-Ray compatible high-definition video content onto DVD, make sure that the particular DVD burner you have supports UDF version 2.5 or higher. Many older DVD burners and (strangely) a few of the newer ones from certain manufacturers do not support UDF 2.5 at all (and are therefore limited to UDF 2.0x, used on DVD-RW and DVD-RAM, or lower); thus, you are limited to standard-definition (480i) DVD burns if you have one of those (of course, you can technically burn HD content onto DVD with UDF 1.x, but the end result will not be playable on anything other than a PC with a DVD reader because such footage can only be authored on such a disc as data).

[Robert M Wright]

It's quite reasonable to get an hour of HD video on a single layer DVD. If you shoot 1080p24 and downscale (properly) to 720p24 (or shoot 720p24 to begin with), AVC at 8Mbps is quite capable of yielding pretty respectable quality images for viewing (assuming reasonably typical footage - not non-stop car chases). When you take a moment to realize that consumer and prosumer HD cameras record 800 lines or less of actual resolved detail (600-700 is pretty typical), there isn't a whale of a lot of loss of image detail when you downscale (again, properly) 1080p source, to 720p, for viewing - but you can get far better compression efficiency. As a practical matter, low motion 720p24 footage can look reasonably good even at 4Mbps (with good AVC 2-pass VBR encoding) - a couple hours on a single layer DVD (that costs a whole whopping 20 cents or so).

[Brian Luce]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

Anyway, before you burn any Blu-Ray compatible high-definition video content onto DVD, make sure that the particular DVD burner you have supports UDF version 2.5 or higher. .

How do we determine this?

[Rich Petruccelli]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

Come down to what? At what price point would you feel comfortable buying?

I can wait until USB burners, I work with laptops, are under $100. Right now I'd need to spend at least $200 for the burner and another $50 for the enclosure.

[Greg Thornwall]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

Here is your problem, Greg. The Canon and many other AVCHD cameras produce mts files, not m2t files. Vegas 8 Pro - even the last update for it - does not know what to do with the mts files; it simply cannot recognize such files. Some of the mts files can be renamed with the m2t extension in place of the mts extension.

Version 9 seems to work fine.

Vegas 9 Pro, even the latest 9.0c, can edit and stitch together mts and m2t files with no or minimal recompression as long as the overall video bitrate is no higher than 17 Mbps. However, your Canon HF-S100 is capable of shooting AVCHD videos at up to 24 Mbps. When importing and editing any AVCHD clip with an overall video bitrate greater than 17 Mbps, Vegas will recompress the video to a lower bitrate since the AVCHD encoder's output supports an overall video bitrate only up to 17 Mbps. In Vegas, currently the only way to use a higher video bitrate than 17 Mbps would be to transcode your video to high-definition MPEG-2 (which will degrade image quality because transcoding AVCHD video to anything other than uncompressed or lossless YCbCr/YUV will also degrade image quality; after all, any video codec which produces higher image quality at lower bitrates is much less likely to withstand transcoding from one lossy codec to another than video codecs which produce comparatively low image quality at comparatively high bitrates).

I read somewhere about converting it to CineForm to edit, I guess it's less lossy than others.

Are there any NLEs similar to Vegas that will edit 24 Mbps?

By the way, your 2.8 GHz Pentium D is a bit too weak to handle AVCHD - in fact, it is rather marginal for HDV editing as well.
...

It's the processor performance, not just the processor clock speed, that matters here.

I'm trying to render a 10 min HD (17 Mbps)video and it's taking about 2 hours. I was thinking about building a new system. It's been awhile since I built a system, what's a good motherboard/CPU for NLE& rendering?

Also, which Blu-ray burner would be good. I read in another post that this LG was good:

Newegg.com - LG WH08LS20K Black 8X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 5X DVD-RAM 6X BD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA 8X Blu-ray Burner - Bulk - Blu-Ray Burners

Thanks all.

[Randall Leong]

Greg,

Cineform is yet another form of "lossless" compression. In this case, it can preserve the qualities that make AVCHD what it is - a super-efficient lossy codec which can produce remarkably high image quality at very low video bitrates.

And I think Vegas can edit 24 Mbps AVC files. But when you render it out, it will recompress because the Sony AVC encoder does not support video bitrates above 17 Mbps. (I tried manually setting the video bitrate to 18 Mbps using the Sony AVC encoder, and the program would not render the video but give an error message instead.)

And Cineform does not come cheap: You will spend a minimum of $130 (on top of what you've already spent on an NLE) to do a proper transcode of AVCHD material to something else.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Brian Luce

How do we determine this?

Usually by trial and error. If the resulting disc won't play back on (or more specifically, won't even get recognized by) any standalone Blu-Ray player at all even though you had finalized the disc, then you likely have a DVD burner which does not correctly support UDF 2.5 or higher. (Or, if the burner does not support UDF 2.5 at all, the authoring software would not even let you continue with the burn process unless you downconvert all of the videos in the project to standard definition and reconfigure the project itself as a regular DVD video project.)