Sebaz, DVD Architect has a bug in it that refuses to accept any AVC source above approx. 16mbps. I discovered in my last project that Vegas Pro 9 now produces very nice efficient VBR AVC output that can have transients above 16mbps during complicated passages, and these won't be accepted by DVDA 5 without recompression. (SCS acknowleges the bug, but has given the usual "will be addressed in a future release of DVDA" response.) So that is probably why your footage is not able to be imported into DVDA.

I have been using tsmuxer to produce AVCHD DVDs from individual m2ts files for my last client -- but was unable to produce an anthology BD-R containing all 8 individual presentations, because of the menus required.

I am going to have to try out multiAVCHD referenced earlier in the thread -- if it is able to produce a BD-R compliant image from my rendered m2ts files, I might be able to deal with the not-as-nice menu options... at least until DVDA gets their bug fixed.

The big problem is DVD Architect, I think.

Even if you can't get AVC out of Vegas at higher bitrates, you can get VC-1 compliant WMV-HD (you have to mess around with some of the settings, but I've done this at 20-something-Mb/s recently just as a test). VC-1 isn't quite as efficient as AVC, but it's a legal Blu-Ray CODEC and certainly much better than MPEG-2.

The problem is, whether you get AVC at higher bitrates, or VC-1, I think DVDA is going to reject these, and offer to re-encode as either MPEG-2, or AVC at the 16Mb/s limit.

You can't really do a Blu-Ray-style menu in DVDA anyway, but it's been fine for most of my projects, where I'm probably also doing a DVD, and the 16Mb/s AVC (with full quality otherwise, and those many hours of rendering) is of sufficient quality from HDV (it's also reasonable to render 1440x1080 from HDV to Blu-Ray, which is fortunately a Blu-Ray compliant resolution and also makes a bit better use of that 16Mb/s).

I'll also claim that 16Mb/s out of Vegas is a far cry from 16-17Mb/s out of a first generation AVCHD camcorder... the PC based render does not suffer from the kinds of problems that realtime encoders have so far. On the other hand, it's also pretty much a no-brainer to know that you could get better looking video at higher bitrates, if you have the source material for it (well, Vegas 9 does read .r3d files, right?), room on your BD25 for it, and if Vegas didn't have these artificial limits.

Sebaz, DVD Architect has a bug in it that refuses to accept any AVC source above approx. 16mbps.

Well, it does accept 20 Mbps from Adobe Media Encoder, in the sense that if you go to Optimize it shows that it doesn't require re-encoding, but so far I've tried to burn a couple of test clips done with AME and it stops the prepare process with a buffer underflow error, so you might be right in that it doesn't accept clips more than 16 Mbps. What's weird is that if you import a clip and set DVDA to recompress to 20 Mbps AVC, it will do it just fine, although it will take an eternity because it's using only about 40% of the total CPU power.

I have been using tsmuxer to produce AVCHD DVDs from individual m2ts files for my last client -- but was unable to produce an anthology BD-R containing all 8 individual presentations, because of the menus required.

The problem with TSMuxer (and mutliAVCHD uses it too) is that the result plays in the BD player, but when you try to rewind or fast forward you can tell there's something not right, especially on rewind, it freezes for a moment and then it begins rewinding but in a way that is different from regular BDs or even DVDs in BD format done with DVDA.

Another choice for those who have Adobe CS4 is to encode with Media Encoder to 20 Mbps (if your output is BD5 or BD9) and then prepare the blu-ray project in Encore, setting the build to a folder. Then burn the BDMV and CERTIFICATE folders to a DVD with ImgBurn using UDF 2.50 or 2.60. The result of that always plays in my blu-ray player but I don't know if it plays on all of them.

It's not a bug that limit's it to 16, it's the codec level. It's not likely to change in Vegas anytime soon.

SCS confirmed that it is a bug.

Lou

Sebaz, it all depends on how professional you are or how much your clients are willing to pay. My client asked my why the bitrate was around 16 Mbps and the is so much free space left on the disk.

As for the so-called bug, I asked SCS support the same Q to hear that the bitrate is limited. Then I rephrased my Q and inquired if it could be increased - been waiting over a week for an answer. And the answer is simple: well, it's market segmentation.

Lou:

SCS must have thought you were drowning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoke_enema

I wouldn't call the use of a different codec level a bug.

I can save the template at up to 20 Mbps. Can't everybody?

Edit: Make that "I can save the template at up to 20 Mbps, but I can't seem to render past 16 Mbps.

I analyzed a couple of AVC and m2ts files from Vegas in tsmuxer, which reports them as Main and High Profile 4.0 respectively.

Wikipedia says that Baseline and Main profile level 4.0 is limited to 20mbps, and High Profile 4.0 is limited to 25mbps.

Neither of these numbers is 16mbps.

Hmm...

As for whether AVC is really higher quality than MPEG-2 at bitrates over 20Mb/s, well... That's open to debate. When I was deciding on my next camera system, I read Sony's white paper on how they picked MPEG-2 Long-GOP over AVC Long-GOP (and other codecs) here:

http://pro.sony.com/bbsccms/assets/files/micro/xdcam/articles/XDCAM_WhitePaper_F.pdf

Page 12 is where Sony states that any advantage of AVC over MPEG-2 is minimal above 20Mb/s.

This would also seem relevant toward the choice of Blu-ray codecs as well.

Which white paper should one believe, I don't know. But I don't really see the big advantage to AVC when one isn't data rate limited to low rates. It certainly takes a lot longer to encode, and my MPEG-2 encodes for Blu-ray at 25Mb/s or higher look great to me.

Playing around with Vegas 9.0b, I do seem to have no problem rendering AVC at 20Mb/s. This is using the Sony CODEC, High profile. It does seem to be limited to 20Mb/s, though.. anything higher reverts to 20Mb/s.

I have not used MainConcept for any high-def stuff.. but they may well have a different limit.