Hey Nick:

I have the Sony cx760V in a Gates housing. It does 1080 x 1020 24p, 60p, and 60i. You can also adjust the quality settings on 60i, I think, and get 1440 x 1080, which seems weird. Never messed with that much.

Over 85% of my customers are from North America, but I get PAL divers now and again.

Regards,

Kimberly

Hi Kimberly,

Live in PAL land.

Have a GH2 and shoot 1280x720P. Make up BD's to 1280x720 50P and they play on standard BD player into a HDTV.

Have tested 1920x1080x 24P. This is also OK on BD through to the TV. Likewise 1280x720 60P.
Cannot discern any lack of quality between 1920x1080 and 1280x720 but this may be due to the small screen size (46 inch), plus the player may 'hardware' upscale. rather like most DVD players did.

The big advantage of 1280x720 as opposed to 1920x1080 is that you only have half the number of pixels to render and you can get away with a slower computer.

From your clients point of view whilst 1920x1080 24P is a universal format, PAL BD players will handle NTSC.

There are no standard BD 1280 render presets in VP12 so I took a standard mainconcept 1920x1080 24P template and simple customised it.

regards Geoff

Hey Geoff:

I also built a 60p template in Main Concept MPEG-2 and Sony AVC, adjusted bit rates, etc., to be consistent with my AVCHD. In a recent post from another thread, Musicvid10 commented that a person should generally used MainConcept MPEG-2 for HDV and AVC for AVCHD. That is because HDV is implicitly MPEG-2 and so forth. There was some discussion around that and the consensus was use whatever is best for you. But Musicvid knows his stuff so I pay attention to his advice. I'll post a link if you are curious but you may have seen that recent thread too.

I did notice my MediaInfo says "HDV" on my AVCHD footage rendered with the MainConcept MPEG-2 template. MediaInfo says "AVC" for the Sony AVC template. Not sure it makes a difference once the disk is burned. So far my Sony AVC rendered stuff seems okay, no black spots, weird frames.

I've had PAL people comment that 1920 x 1080 24p will play in PAL land. I've made PAL disks and tried to play them on my NTSC hardware and it was a no go, probably because the hardware for the U.S. market has been restricted.

I've stayed away from 60p because I would have to resize my footage it in all cases for delivery on disk. But I now have some curiosity due to the possibility of capturing motion better than 24p does.

Regards,

Kimberly

For sometime now my editing was done in Edius and rendered using standard presets ready for DVDA
Set up a BD template in DVDA to match the media I am supplying. Produce an .iso file from DVDA and burn using image burn.

It was only recently I completed a project in Vegas and discovered no BD templates to match my media. Bought time by rendering out in Canapus HQAVI and then used Edius to knock out the files for DVDA (BD). Luckily I used VP11 (32bit) otherwise there would have been a colour shift when porting the .avi back to Edius.
Have since used Vegas to render MPEG2 & AVC files which are accepted by DVDA. Viewed on the TV I cannot discern any difference. Have also used TMPGEnc to good effect to produce the files for DVDA.

It was the lack of standard templates that made me question whether 1280x720P was a good idea but in reality I suspect there was no great need for such templates.

Muscicvid (great respect) confirmed I was on the right line.

Geoff

As far as I know, a 60p or 60i Blu-ray will play worldwide, and you can save yourself the hassle of offering 50p or 50i for PAL-land customers.

I have made 1080x1440 60i Blu-rays and they look great and play fine on my cheap UK-bought Blu-ray player and Thai TV. Just like the original HDV footage off the camera. It's not really a weird aspect ratio, it's just anamorphic. The pixels are stretched horizontally to fill the 16:9 aspect ratio, so they're rectangular. Both the interlacing and the horizontally-rectangular pixels are bandwidth-saving "tricks" that are tolerated well by the human eye, such that it can look more or less the same as 1920x1080-60p.

1280x720 60p should also look good but arguably not as good on a big screen as 1440x1080-60i and it's 55,296 pixels per second, compared to 46,656 pixels per second for 1440x1080-60i. In effect you get more resolution for fewer pixels.

However if stock is important to you, I'd shoot 1920 x 1080 - 60 fps - 28Mbps AVCHD. You could still output 1440x1080-60i from that if you wanted.

Blu-ray resolutions/frame rates

"However if stock is important to you, I'd shoot 1920 x 1080 - 60 fps - 28Mbps AVCHD."

I am still looking for a way to view that with a full scene or options menu on my TV. (I have a solution for a PC only.) If anybody has a solution for a TV please advise.