BluRay Writing -BWU100a

Sonisfear wrote on 12/13/2007, 8:37 AM
6 months ago I bought the Sony BWU100a BDR/E writer and only recently are things coming together to actually deliver a Bluray product.

Many factors impeded this process;
-Players need the lastest update (1.3) to play BDR and recently BDRE.
-A working cost effective authoring program (Cyberlinkpower producer free in the box with the BWU100a and Encrore CS3-DVD Arch has a way better GUI)
-Firmware updates for the drive 1.0E

Bottom line is I can now burn and deliver BDRE (I use erasables media because they are the same price as BDR it is nice to reburn without making a coaster).

It will be awesome when DVD architect can Burn Bluray. The interface makes way more sense than Encore.

I like the direct to bluray function that allows you to write video directly to a BDRE with the cyberlink software great for multi cam events.

The issue I face now is the output looks really grainy on all HDTV and players ( went to the Sony Store and tried a bunch, also PC Power DVD player) coming from BDRE from both Cynberlink software and Adobe Encore.

It looks like the color went to 8 bit or less, gain and sharpen was cranked. All low light content is unusable and dithered to the point of small blocks.

The weird thing is if you import the .M2T files directly from the BDRE onto the Vegas Timeline (yes vegas can play these files direcelty off the BDRE) the quality is excellent which leads m to beleive that the players are purposely degrading the image coming from BDRE.

Weird ehh?

My next test will be to burn to a BDR from the same image files and see the results.

Also to try other codec like H.264 and AVC

Is anyone else testing or producing high quality video to Bluray?

What work flow are you using?

Comments

Coursedesign wrote on 12/13/2007, 9:23 AM
which leads m to beleive that the players are purposely degrading the image coming from BDRE

If you are playing a non-store bought Blur-Ray disk, you are by definition a Pirate, yesss sirrr!

Actually it doesn't sound like auto-degrade, but it is of course easy to believe that it is, because it would fit in with everything else they have done to ensure the failure of the format.

It really seems like they really would like to keep the entire BR thing stitched into their mattress, and to be on the safe side have that mattress put in a bank safety deposit box.

They want to sell players, but not allow any non-factory made discs that could potentially contain content they could have sold in the old model.

Because so many customers will not buy players that can't play back BD-R and BD-RE content, they are pretending to go through the motions, sabotaging each step of the way.

There is now increasing professional speculation (in the very substantial home electronics industry) that consumers are going to bypass the current two contenders and watch uprezzed DVDs (which look amazingly good!) while worrylessly waiting for the next format to take over.

So no profits from BD or HD player sales over the next 12 months at least, and both manufacturers and dealers lose big time.

Sonisfear wrote on 12/13/2007, 11:36 AM
"which leads m to beleive that the players are purposely degrading the image coming from BDRE"

I take the word "purposely" back. Maybe its a glitch. The raw files on the BluRay work and look amazing in Vegas, DVD arch and VLC.

I don't know what it is... It is a bit frustrating because it is the last barrior for me to deliver BluRay. The viewer is not going to be convinced when I say "It looks great on my editing system, I swear!!!"

As far as uprezzing DVD, I recently bought the cheap Venturer HD DVD player and wow HD dvd movies look great.

I Beleive that people will make the switch to next gen formats eventually. I think the manufactures are missing the fact that consumers favorite content to watch is themselves.

Once a consumer can record his kids birthday party on at SSD or HDD and dump it too a BDRE and mail it to uncle tom. Boom!!! Sold.

For the few weddings I produce these days every customer tells me they will buy whatever format (Bluray or HD DVD) I print their wedding in shows what is actually important to the viewer. Themselves!!!
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/dvdpvr/0,39030701,49294617,00.htm

Micheal Bay draws some interesting conclusions about manufactures trying to herd the consumers into downloading content rather that physical media.

If this happens a lot of stores, cable companies and distributors wil loose a lot of money and microsoft and other empires will be more rich. Which is neither here nor there for me. I guess it would reduce the amount of piracy and increase content tracking.

If this is the case, I wish more effort could be put into making the format (BluRay or HD DVD) more suitable for independant production. I can't see me setting up a media sever for customers to watch their wedding or live event neither do I see them wanting their precious memories fixed on a volitile TB HDD.

Anyway, its been a long wait but at least I can burn something on bluray.

Maybe I will have better luck with another codec.
Sonisfear wrote on 12/13/2007, 12:09 PM
I just thought of something..

All of the footage I tested ws 720P could it be the scaler in thee players are not great?

I will try some 1080i.
MH_Stevens wrote on 12/13/2007, 2:55 PM
I'm just about to test a SONY upressing DVD player with Spiderman 3 DVD against the SONY PS3 playing the blu-ray version of the movie both output on a 42" 1080p LCD and I'm wondering what res is the blu-ray disk? How do I know if it is 720p, 1080i or an unlikely 1080p. Seems it will be a fun test that's set for Saturday week.

Mike
John_Cline wrote on 12/13/2007, 5:25 PM
I suspect that the BluRay version is 1080p as are most BluRay movies, the PS3 will interlace it if necessary.
4eyes wrote on 12/13/2007, 7:45 PM
Every Blu-Ray Movie I've viewed recently was encoded in AVC, bit-rates from 20MBS - 35MBS.

What?, Reducing the quality of a Home Made Blu-Ray disc from the player?
Sounds to me like you de-interlaced interlaced video & at the same time dropped the bit-rate.
All my high def videos play great on the sony blu-ray players.
They are all the original interlaced videos, 1080i.
I personally counted every field.....
Sonisfear wrote on 12/14/2007, 11:52 AM
ya I know (refering to 720p)

the JVC HD100 is my primary camera mainly because I can't give it to my inexperienced assistants to run because of its manual nature unless its a live event where I call the shots through the intercom.

The result is 65% of the content is me @ 720p. I find it is better for consistancy to bring 1080i down to 720p than vice versa. In the AVC 1080i test I have done so far using the Vegas burn disc function it already looks better. I will bring it to the Sony Store for review.

You are probably wondering why I don't have a Bluray/Ps3 player of my own yet. Seeing that until recently none of the players could play burned content except for the PS3 I decided to wait until the market got their act together. Good thing I did... Deck now are only $450.00 and dropping.

It wouldn't surprise me if the problem is scaling. These new flat LCD screens unless given a native signal look like crap. I miss the good old CRT HDTV. I bought a Hitachi Rear projection HDTV in 2000 and it destroys all of these LCD screens they push today. Especially with motion even with the 120PS feature.

Anyway I will report my finding tomorrow and at least we will learn what format not to burn blurays with.
Sonisfear wrote on 12/14/2007, 4:11 PM
Great News!!!!

I went to the Sony Store and tested the AVC 1080i from Vegas and it looked awesome (except for low light noise).

All the sales staff and every customer in the Store huddled around and XBR Bravia HDTV to watch this test BDRE.

A customer asked me for my card it looked so good even though I noticed noise at low light levels.

Then we put in the 720p M2T (HDV) BDRE completely unusable content drastically bad, worse than a SD DVD.

So the lesson learned is: The scalers in the player or and HDTV are so bad it is imperative to match or exceed the native resolution of todays HDTV's.

Tomorrow I will test 1080P not sure if that option is available in Vegas Disc burn.

OR

The players don't like the HDV/M2T codec.

I am stocked. I have been recording weddings and live events in HDV for three years now, delivering on DVD data with WMVHD files. I can now contact all of those customers and offer for $100-$200 transcode of WMVHD to BluRay. For $500.00 I will recapture from the master raw HDV Tapes that I give to the customers and re-encode at 32bit to Bluray Disc as well as print the raw HDV footage.

Cha Ching?

I just need menus. I wish DVD ARCHTECT was working with BluRay.


Sonisfear wrote on 12/14/2007, 4:36 PM
Okay Sony guys, how do I get a 25mbps 1080p disc burned?

I see the option under render out Mainconcept but how do I place it on a BDRE?

disc burn only has 15mbps 1080i. I am actually suprised that it looked as good as it did at 15mbps.

BTW I am available for BEta testing of bluray burning.

Sonisfear wrote on 12/19/2007, 11:09 AM
Okay so I bit the bullet and bought PS3 wow it is way better than I thought it would be.

I have not even put a game in it yet and I am blown away.

One thing I have learned is all of these flat screen are not anywhere close to CRT quality. You get motion blur even with 120 fps, noise in low light areas, artifacts and a terrible scaling issues if content is anything else but naitve res (ussually 1440*1080i.

I put the same BDRE that I thought was bad in my PS3 on a Hitachi rear projection HD CRT TV and they looked great.

I lke the feature of being able to surf the web from the PS3 console and even better the ability to serve content from my editing systems to the PS3 via the DLNA newtork (free). So far only pictures and music is working but it will be great if I don't even need to burn a BDRE to play on my rear projection.

I wish there was a Sony app that did this for Blue ray instead of using windows media player.

The Blue tooth remote is a great feature which transmits commands without pointing at the unit even through walls.

Well bluray HD workflow is here thanks to Sony.

SD is dead.