And another funny thing is if a burn straight from my camera to DVD using Toast on my Mac, the PS3 plays it just fine so I now it is possible to have a working BR movie on DVD.

I my not sure if BR on DVD is part of the spec, but I think it is lame that Sony's own program can't do it correctly when Toast can. Didn't Sony invent BR and AVC?

Any help on this would be appreciated!

Even a nudge in the right direction if I'm totally off base with my questions..

"2. When I burn a project to actual Blu-Ray media, it plays fine in standalone BR players and my PS3. When I burn to DVD, the PS3 sees the disc has data and I have to navigate to the stream file to play it."

It happens to me too. This is a bug in Vegas that has existed since they started this "avchd disk" creation, and there is nothing you can do about it. It doesn't even work if you create a iso and burn it in something else. The disk is clearly a BDMV yet the PS3 still sees it as a "data disk". The only work around that I have found is to export a m2ts from vegas then import to Ulead movie factory and author/burn the disk there.

OR,
Buy a Western Digital TV unit and just play your AVCHD files right off an external drive = $100 and no BR discs to buy and burn

Hopefully VP9 will have better Blu-Ray features, as HD is now much more mainstream than it was when VP8 was being developed. They'll need to include a better codec for AVC encoding, though... hopefully a more up-to-date version of the Mainconcept one; I haven't had great results trying to use the one in VP8, however the Mainconcept AVC encoder included with TMPGEnc 4.0 Express gives me great output.

It's quite simple really, the PS3 can not play Blu-Ray content burned to a DVD in the way Vegas burns it, and Vegas can not make HD on a DVD in such a way that the PS3 (and a bunch of other players) can understand. The fault is with Vegas and the solution is sadly not DVDA since it has exactly the same problem.

For some reason Sony Creative Software doesn't seem to care about Blu-Ray that much and they have made no real effort to support it for enthusiasts. I am sure their $50K BD solution works fine, but most of us don't have $50K extra to have fun with.

The solution is to use something like Ulead DVD Movie Factory, a toy-style thing from Ulead at $50. It can do, and has been able to do for quite a while, what Vegas and DVDA can not: Function as a Blu-Ray tool.

Why Sony Creative Software for a couple of years now have completely ignored the Blu-Ray market and in general given anyone who would like to work with HD content in an enthusiast capacity the bird must have something to do with the fact that the product manager for the Vegas and DVDA products in fact has no brain whatsoever.

Why Sony Creative Software for a couple of years now have completely ignored the Blu-Ray market and in general given anyone who would like to work with HD content in an enthusiast capacity the bird must have something to do with the fact that the product manager for the Vegas and DVDA products in fact has no brain whatsoever.

lol, perhaps. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt until VP9 and DVDA6 are released, though. Currently, Final Cut Pro doesn't support Blu-Ray at all (which is a stupid move by Steve, I admit)... but it's not like SCS are the only ones. Adobe Encore has decent Blu-Ray features, though... I don't have a burner at the moment, however I have created exported a few Blu-Ray ISOs from Encore CS3, and test it on a virtual drive.

I started using Vegas with version 8, though, and for what I've been doing it's served me well. Admittedly, I haven't done much HD editing... and what I have done was with uncompressed AVI footage; which is incredibly easy to manipulate. I typically render the final product to uncompressed AVI again, and then convert to H.264/AVC with the aforementioned TMPGEnc 4.0 Express.

Yay, thanks for the replies!

I guess as I am in the video editing arena, BR authoring in not fully mature.

I really hope that Sony doesn't drop the ball, nor BR in general for that matter, by not catering a least a little bit to enthusiasts. I feel by dropping 1500 bucks on a camera (retail) and 600 on software and 300 on a BR writer should get me the ability to play a 1gig movie on my 300 dollar PS3 without spending 15 bucks on BR media.

All from the "same" company, well maybe not the media or the burner.. :P

I will search, but are there any rumors on when V9 is coming?

Cheers,
Brian

I will search, but are there any rumors on when V9 is coming?

None that I've heard, but personally I hope it's sooner rather than later.

None that I've heard, but personally I hope it's sooner rather than later.

If you can hold your breath for nine months or perhaps a little more or less, then go right ahead, if not, in and out as per usual.

Terje:

I agree that the Ulead MF6+ with the HD Power Pack is a cheapo application that does some great stuff. I use it for all my HD authoring to DVD for now. Without it, HD would still be too expensive for many applications. Great product!

Im betting that Sony will create an 8.0d (and I guess 8.2?) because there are a few new cameras out that 8.0c dosent support (my HMC-150 for one). FCP recently (11-21-2008) put out an update for new cameras, so this probably twists Sonys arm a little.

Two problems though:
1. Sony is totally broke and has laid off at least (without exaggerating) 15,000 people in the last 3 months. Is SCS untouched?
2. There is now double the work for an update since the 32 and 64 bit versions would both need an update.

"The solution is to use something like Ulead DVD Movie Factory, a toy-style thing from Ulead at $50. It can do, and has been able to do for quite a while, what Vegas and DVDA can not: Function as a Blu-Ray tool."

I have to disagree with that Terje. Well.... to a certain extent anyway. It's true that MF6 is a great little program for the money and it was MILES ahead of dvda for bluray authoring... I even used it for a while. But I then got into a snag with my new subtitle routines (which MF6 won't do) so it was off back to dvda;. After doing a couple of blu ray projects in dvda... I'm sold.

MF6 is hard to beat if you want to turn out some rather SIMPLE Blu Ray projects... but you can't do anything past a consumer level with it (obviously... after all it is a consumer level product)

My last Blu Ray project was in DVDa though, and it included subtitle tracks, Introduction media, AC3 sound, 3 titles, a menu that popped in piece by piece at the beat of a drum (ie: beat, beat... background pops in....beat, beat... Title 1 frame pops in... beat, beat... Title 1 motion image pops in.... etc... etc)

It all burned to Blu Ray without a hitch. This is surely beyond MF6 and it's even beyond DVDit Pro HD at a cost of $500 (I know because I tried)

BTW... Ulead's new X2 Pro videostudio.... it won't burn avc to a real Blu Ray disk..... only mpeg2

Nine months? I hope not, as I think this would be a mistake for Sony. At the moment I think even Encore CS3 has better Blu-Ray burning abilities than DVDA. Though I've only created image files so far, they playback great from a virtual drive, with animated menus, etc. Also, it seems to accept *.mp4 AVC video that I render out of TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress without wanting to transcode it.

1. I'm shooting with a fairly new HDR-SR12 and running Vegas 8.1 x64. Is Vegas ever going to support burning direct to Blu-ray at 1920x1080 using AVC? The only option in the Blu-ray burn dialog for AVC is 1440x1080. I've read that certain cameras use rectangular pixels and 1440x1.3333 gives you the full 1920, but I don't think this is the case with mine.

You can render an AVC file with the 1440 x 1080 bluray setting and change the resolution to custom and set it for 1920 x 1080 and have choose square pixels which is the native resolution for the SR12 HD setting - I've not tried burning directly to bluray doing that but have created menu driven Blurays using DVDA and those Vegas files. The only way I have been able to get it to work in Vegas with those settings is using 32bit pixel and progressive scan though. Anything else fails early on in the render process for me.

It's true that MF6 is a great little program for the money and it was MILES ahead of dvda for bluray authoring...

It still is in the area that I commented on, namely the ability to burn AVCHD disks, that is, HD content onto regular DVDs. This is something DVDA still is not able to do. If you are burning to BD, you are absolutely right, DVDA is good. The AVC encoders Sony ships with Vegas and DVDA leaves a bit to be desired, but we can hope for an update to these in 9.