This is just for me to show in my booth at the wedding show.
I just bought the Sony (don't know the full mdl #) s350 Blu-ray player.
I burned a test of one highlight on blu-ray using the blu-ray streaming template.
It played no problem and looked very nice.
I just don't want to wast 15 hours rendering all these files together only to find out it's too big to fit on a disc.

If you have the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software, you can download this Excel file for all types of bitrate calculations, including Blu-ray.

http://www.johncline.com/EncodingCalculator2.zip

Thanks John,

John, I'm not too excel savvy.

If I'm doning this right. If I have 180min. of hd video and audio.
on a single layer BD-R - It would be somewhere around 16000 mbs
and on a DL BD-R it would be around 34,000?
Anybody know where the breaking point of quality is in bitrate compression? The point where you're going to start seeing loss in quality?

If I may jump in with my .02 worth; firstly I'm not doing any BR yet, but seeing as how you want to keep the highest bitrate and therefore the highest quality...pick your best 30 minutes and loop that.

No bride to be is going to be standing at your booth for more than 10 minutes...and if they are you need to book them.

You seem to be doing it right. If you have exactly 180 minutes of video and encode the audio using 192kbps .AC3, then the bitrate would be 17691 Mbits/sec for a single layer Blu-ray disc (allowing for a 4% "safety factor" reserve.) For a dual-layer Blu-ray disc, you can double that figure.

There are too many factors to state definitively the bitrate at which one can say the image starts to degrade. If there is not much motion and the video is noise-free, then MPEG2 at 17691 mbps might be fine, if there is a lot of motion, then it may be a little too low. If you have the time (and it will take a long time to render) then using h.264 at 17Mbps would probably look great.

David,

Yes I realize this. This will be my fifth wedding show.
What these are, are the highlight videos I provide each client with on their DVD's. I don't have time to go through each one and condence it all down to a smaller loop. As long as they stand and watch a few seconds of what ever is on the screen is good enough for me, it's all good footage. Some day I hope to have the time to take a few shots from each but right now I've got so much work piled up, it's not even an option.
John, thanks for your help. I have heard this H.264 before in reference to rendering for youtube or vimeo. Is this a third party render or is that one of the options somewhere in the many template options in vegas?