Burning HDV Home Movies to Blu-ray disks

tnw2933 wrote on 4/26/2007, 3:05 PM

I was very disappointed to see that not only did Sony not release a new vesion of DVD Architect at NAB, but there is not even any mention of when this might occur. Having waited a long time for Sony to enable authoring of BD-RE and BD-R disks in DVD Architect, I finally gave up on them and explored other options.

Herin I report my results of using the Lacie d2 Blu-ray burner and Roxio's DVDit Pro HD to burn my HDV edited home productions to a blu-ray disk that would play back in my Sony BDP-S1 blu-ray player. I received the Lacie burner, one 25 GB Sony BD-RE and five 50 GB Panasonic BD-RE disks yesterday. Here is a summary of my initial results.

The HDV production that I chose was one shot using footage from the Sony FX1 and Sony HC3 HDV camcorders. The footage was orignally edited in Vegas 7.0d and rendered to a .m2t file and to tape for archival purposes a couple of months ago. To begin with, I opened Sony Vegas and placed the rendered .m2t file in Vegas 7.0d. I then selected the Bluprint template in Vegas and rendered the project to an elementary video stream file (.m2v). This step is necessary because DVDit Pro HD will not allow the direct importation of a .m2t file into that program. I took this .m2v file and its corresponding multichannel .ac3 file into DVDit Pro HD. The .m2v file was brought into DVDit Pro HD without any further transcoding but the .ac3 file was transcoded. The value of the Bluprint template in Vegas is that it produces .m2v files that can be imported by DVDit Pro HD without transcoding and DVDit Pro HD is very particular about what constitutes a Blu-ray legal mpeg2 file. I don't know why DVDit Pro HD transcoded the .ac3 file.

I then easily created chapter points in DVDit Pro HD as well as a main menu and a Scene Selection menu. DVDit Pro HD comes with a nice selection of images, buttons, menu templates, etc. and the workflow is quite intuitive if you have used any other authoring program such as DVD Architect. I hardly scratched the surface of all of the possibilities in authoring with DVDit Pro HD because I was eager to get to the burning stage, and even more eager to see what the disk looked like when played back on my Sony BDP-S1 and viewed via my Sony VPL-VW100 projector on a 96 in. diagonal screen.

All went well until I hit the burn stage. When I set up the burn parameters, inserted a 25 GB blank Sony BD-RE single layer disk in the Lacie drive, and clicked on "burn" I almost immediately got an unsettling error message: "unexpected device sense code: 0%-27240". After numerous retries, I was stumped.

I should note that I had previously checked out the Lacie Blu-ray drive by using Nero's Ultimate 7 Extended Edition to burn about 5 GB of backup data to a 50 GB Panasonic blu-ray dual layer disk followed by a verification of the data -- all of which worked perfectly. In desperation, I took the 50 GB Panasonic dual layer disk that I had previously written to with Nero, and to my surprise when this disk was inserted in the Lacie blu-ray drive, DVDit Pro HD began almost immediately burning the project. However, suddenly another program popped up on the screen and before I could shut that program down, I got the same burn error message. The Lacie blu-ray burner had come bundled with PowerDVD for watching blu-ray disks on the computer, and I had installed that program although it turned out to be useless since my video card is not compatible with Blu-ray playback. So, I just uninstalled PowerDVD, rebooted, went into DVDit Pro HD and sucessfully burned the Panasonic 50 GB dual layer disk. However, I could never get the blank Sony 25 GB disk to burn from within DVDit Pro HD.

I then had DVDit Pro HD produce a blu-ray disk image of the project on my raid array and I used this for subsequent burns. I placed the Sony 25 GB single layer BD-RE in the Lacie, opened Nero and directed it to burn a Blu-ray disk image. The burn went well with no problems. Now I had 25 GB and 50 GB single and dual layer blu-ray disks of my project to try in my Sony BDP-S1.

The 25 GB BD-RE played perfectly from start to finish in the Sony BDP-S1 and the image looked great. In fact, I could see no differences between the edited project and the original HDV footage. There were no motion artifacts or anomalies of any type. Still images were vibrant, razor sharp, and with excellent color saturation. Menus were beautiful and all the links worked as desired. I was a happy camper!

I then placed the Panasonic 50 GB BD-RE disk in the Sony blu-ray player. The first 15 minutes of the 24 minute project played perfectly and then every 3-9 seconds (but not with regular periodicity), the image on the screen would freeze for a fraction of a second and the audio would drop out for a fraction of a second. This continued until the end of the project. Clearly the video stream was not continuous from the Sony player. In as much as Sony only enabled BD-RE playback about a month ago with the release of the 1.55 firmware update for the BDP-S1, my belief is that the player is not yet fully enabled for smooth playback of dual layered 50 GB authored disk. I even re-burned the Panasonic 50 GB dual layer disk using Nero and verified the burn and it still showed the same freezing and audio dropouts.

Time to get some sleep. It has been a dream of mine for over a year to prepare my own blu-ray projects. Frankly, I am not surprised at the problems I had, but rather that it worked at all!

Tom

P.S. I began rendering a second .m2t project in Vegas 7.0d to the Bluprint template. I am using a computer equipped with the E6700 Core 2 Duo 2.67 GHz processor, 4X150 GB Western Digital Raptor 10K drives in a Raid array, and 2 GB of RAM. The machne has performed flawlessly for the 2 months I have had it.l However, this project, which consists of a single 33 minute .m2t file that I had previously rendered to tape and to a file with Vegas 7.0d has now totally crashed my machine twice. Both times the render ran for about 20-30 minutes and then Veas 7.0d went "poof", the screen went black, and the computer simply spontaneously rebooted. If anyone has any ideas what may be causing this, I'd like to hear them. I havenot encountered any previous render problems in Vegas 7, in Edius Pro 4.12, or in SpeedEdit when using all three NLE's (not at the same time of course!) on this machine.

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Comments

Laurence wrote on 5/1/2007, 3:33 AM

You can burn a dual layer DVD that has two hours instead of one of full bitrate video time on a regular DVD player, but that is not what we're talking about. We are talking about using a regular dual layer DVD-R to burn a disc with data formatted in an HD-DVD format which will play an hour's worth of video in a Toshiba HD-DVD player. Discs formatted this way will only play back on HD-DVD format players. This is a very affordable high definition distribution solution.

mbryant wrote on 5/1/2007, 4:38 AM

I agree a very interesting thread.

I'm interested in this buring HDV onto ordinary DVD discs and playing them on a HD-DVD player. I assume Vegas/DVDA doesn't support this, right - otherwise why would Vegas users go out and buy Ulead DVD Movie Factory?

If Ulead has had this for some time, do you think we'll see this feature added to Vegas/DVDA anytime soon?

blink3times wrote on 5/1/2007, 6:50 AM

One simple question I couldn't find an answer to easily - with dual layer DVDs, are special DVD players necessary, or do they play in "standard" DVD set tops?

As lawrence said, we are taliking about HD DVD, not SD dvd. But having said that, most if not all commercial dvd movies are double layer disks.... which of course means that pretty much all standard dvd players will play DL disks, (but not the ones we're talking about)

tnw2933 wrote on 5/1/2007, 9:49 AM

mbryant,

That is correct. Vegas/DVDA does not support buring an HD-DVD image to an ordinary DVD. Ulead's Movie Factory 6 Plus does support this, and that is why I and others have purchased the Ulead software. It is impossible to know if this will feature will ever apear in DVDA or in Vegas since Sony rarely if ever gives a clue as to what is coming in their software. I am NOT optimistic.

Tom

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/1/2007, 10:31 AM

I would go one step further in predicting that Vegas / DVDA will ***NOT*** support HD DVD creation. Sony, as the leader / member of the BluRay consortium, has true competitive reasons not to see HD DVD prevail, or, for that matter, survive at all.

Larry

Laurence wrote on 5/1/2007, 11:01 AM

Eventually DVDA or some other Sony app will support Bluray authoring, but it will do it on $25 blank Bluray discs that have to be very slowly duplicated one at a time (at least until some kind of affordable Bluray duplicater becomes available).

Contrast this to HD-DVD where you can use 30 cent DVD-R blanks and run off batches quickly in a standard duplicator - all because the Bluray specification arbitrarily turns off support for HD content burned on DVD+-R discs.

I have a Playstation 3 and have considered myself to be a part of the Bluray camp, but this subject has got me waiting to see what WalMart can offer me for $300 within the next couple of months.

Jay Gladwell wrote on 5/1/2007, 11:09 AM

This is a very affordable high definition distribution solution.

But is this based on the assumption that everyone will run out and buy a Toshiba HD-DVD player, is that not correct?

JJKizak wrote on 5/1/2007, 11:34 AM

A lot of rumors surrounding Walmart and Toshiba players on other forums and much speculation thereof.

JJK

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/1/2007, 11:39 AM

Laurence,

In all fairness, the Playstation 3 does permit playback (so I am told) of raw .m2t and .mpg files which come from HDV camcorders using 4.7GB and dual layer blank disks. I have not tried this myself, but a person on another (Ulead) forum did make the counter-argument to me that he could also "author" BluRay disks at the same cost and same limitation in this manner.

He admitted that there were no menus, no chapters, certainly no animated menu effects, but the HDV content was viewable at (what he believes to be) full rez. I hagve no way to independently confirm his opinion, but I imagine he is correct.

It's also very important to note that this disk will ***NOT*** play in BluRay players otherwise, but only in the Playstation 3.

Larry

Richman wrote on 5/1/2007, 12:17 PM

Jay,
Toshiba & Microsoft put together a Reference System that should be coming out in a few months from Chinese manufacturing plants. Currently all standalone HD DVD players are from Toshiba, but by the end of the year there should be multiple vendors and possibly starting at $200 or lower price point. I think most anyone that shoots HD video and those who want it in a playback medium will be able to purchase these. I think the price point, option to burn Hybrid DVD/ HD DVD's cheaply, burning software support & interactivity may put it ahead.

Rich

donwidener wrote on 5/1/2007, 12:36 PM

Larry,

I have burned the hybird disks you are referring to. Simply burn a mt2 file on a DVD+R disk ("- "would probably work also) as a "data" file and it will play back perfectly on a PS3. It plays at an average of 20mps, so it IS playing high definition (if you have a PS3 remote press the info button to get bitrate). Limitations are around 30-40 minutes of HD video, no menu, etc. The software that comes with the Sony writer will also burn a BDAV file (no menu).

I have used Vegas and DVDA for years but had to move to DVDit PRO HD because of the lack of blu-ray support. I am finding DVDit easy to use and the results are super (full HD with menus, etc.). The cost of the BD-R discs are crazy, so I use BD-REs for now, until I am completely comfortable with the software. They just posted fixes to make the discs compatable with more players. Strangely enough teh SONY players are the most particular.

Don

Laurence wrote on 5/1/2007, 12:55 PM

Yeah, the Playstation 3 plays back mt2 files perfectly. It's as simple as copying an m2t file into a directory called "Video". It works great for playing my HDV videos in the living room, but I would hardly call it an distribution format. This is what I believe we are all after: a way of burning our HD videos to a distributable disc that people can play on their home theater setups.

john-beale wrote on 5/1/2007, 5:25 PM

For those in the know: are all the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray solutions being discussed so far based on MPEG2 encoding (I presume so?) As I understand it, both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray specs mandate support for video in MPEG2, VC-1 and AVC (H.264) formats. Since H.264 is roughly 2x as efficient as MPEG2 that means you ought to be able to use a single-layer DVD-R for H.264 format video that would require a double-layer disc to do with MPEG2. Is there any way to do this kind of HD-DVD authoring yet? Preferably cheaply?

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/1/2007, 6:52 PM

I've actually tried to do this using an AVC encoder, and I was only able to get the audio but not the video to play on my Toshiba. I am really not sure whether the file naming conventions change when the cdec is AVC, so I used .EVO exactly like the mpeg2 disks which I know play properly. I apparently am missing something or doing something worng.

I have yet to find an HD DVD authoring program which provides this coding option, but do have commercial HD DVDs coded in AVC and they look excellent. I would very much like to know how to do this properly.

Another space-saving feature which I ***have*** been able to succesfully use is Dolby Digital, rather than LPCM, which is the way HDV audio is recorded. By transcoding the audio using a simple program like Ulead Movie Factory 6, the audio file size shrinks. I also, coincidentally, downloaded and purchased today the latest version of Ulead Video Studio, Version 11 Plus, which was released today (May 1st). Unlike Ulead Movie Factory, this program actually has an HD DVD templtae which optionally allows you select Digital Dolby 5.1 and 2 channel audio, and it seems to work fine based on my brief testing today.

I would love to know how to do the AVC or H.264 versions of HD-DVDs. Maybe somebody else here has some ideas......

Larry

tnw2933 wrote on 5/2/2007, 10:03 AM

With the exception of Roxio's DVDit Pro HD and super expensive Blu-ray authoring software, most of the software for authoring Blu-ray disks (Ulead's DVD Movie Factory and Nero Ultimate 7, for example) author BDAV projects. I have yet to find a stand alone Blu-ray player (I have tried the Sony BDP-S1, Pansonic, and Pioneer Blu-ray players) that will play a BDAV Blu-ray disk. Does any one know of any stand alone Blu-ray player that will play BDAV projects authored to Blu-ray disks?

Tom

vicmilt wrote on 5/3/2007, 7:30 AM

LSHorowitz -

I have totally followed your advice - and it was easy and miraculous!

Using Ulead Movie Factory, I burned a "normal" DVD disc as a HiDef HD-HDV movie (actually combined with another "regular" DV movie as a separte chapter) - it Worked! and that HD output is spectacular.

But now I've encountered a strange by-product which I wonder if you can comment on?

My screen is a Samsung 50" Plasma . It is 720p.
The Hi-Def movie was burned with a Ulead template at 1080i.
The deck is the latest version of the Toshiba - as sugggested.
The output on the screen, while magnificent, is truncated - shrunk up -
the aspect ration is perfect, but the picture has a large black border all around it.

Where have I gone wrong? Do you have any suggestions?

tnw2933 wrote on 5/4/2007, 6:28 AM

Larry,

Last night I authored my first dual layer (6.3 GB) HD-DVD project in Ulead's Movie Factory 6 Plus (latest version) and burned it to a Memorex DVD+R DL disk. All went well and when I put the dual layer DVD in my Toshiba A2 (with latest firmware installed), it played back beuatifully until about 80% of the way through it apparently hit the layer change and instead of moving to the second layer and continuing playback it bounced back to an apparently arbitrary point on the first layer and began playback. When I tried to access chapters near the end of the project and presumably on the second layer, my HD-A2 would display a still image from that chapter momentarily and then bounce back to an apparently arbitrary point on the first layer and start playback. In summary, I could not play back any of the material on the second layer of this dual layer DVD.

Have you ever encountered this issue in burning HD-DVD's on dual layer DVD's? Is there something I should have done in burning a dual layer disk that I did not do? Is there any way around this problem or must I give up burning DL HD--DVD's?

I truly have appreciated your help in this thread and thank you in advance for any help you might can give me on this problem.

Tom

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/4/2007, 7:22 AM

vicmilt,

You have at least 2 options I am aware of, and possibly more. Since your disks are being produced at 1080 resolution, but your monitor only supports 720, you have a "scaling" problem. (Incidentally, if you think your disks look great at 720, you will not believe how good they really look at their native 1080 resolution.....)

Option number 1 is to let the HD DVD player do the scaling by changing its' output resolution. You wiull see a button on the remote control which allows you to do this.

Option number 2 is to allow your TV to do the scaling. Take a look at your Samsung manual and find out how to change the display resolution, and also how to "stretch" and/or "fill" the screen.

Using some combination of one or both of the options above, you are very likely able to get an image which completeltly fills your screen both vertically and horizontally with no black "pillarbox" or "letterbox" borders.

Good luck,

Larry

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/4/2007, 7:31 AM

Tom,

I wish I was able to offer you a suggestion with regard to dual layer HD DVDs but I have not tried them and have not seen the problem myself. If you have Nero &, you could try burning the HD DVD folder yourself to the 2 layer disk with the "Nero Burning ROM" burner software, which does allow for layer break control (I believe). I don't think Ulead provides any separate preferences specific to dual layer disks, but an email to their support people could answer that question. Alternately, there is a very lively support forum for Ulead software which I also am fairly active in, and you can join, post there, and get some really impressive people who have a lot of good ideas.

The fact that the Toshiba player briefly shows the content in the second layer is encouraging, indicating (I think) that the layer reflectivity is not out of bounds, and that the player can see the 2nd surface. It might be something as simple as a flag which needs to be set in the IFO file telling the Toshiba that the disk is a dual layer, or something very basic like that which Ulead overlooked. There is always the chance that the Memorex media is a problem for the Toshiba, and you might want to burn a conventional (non-HD) DL disk and see if it handles the switch properly. Use DVD Architect rather than Movie Factory to make the standard def DL disk to avoid the same bug in Ulead's software being the culprit for both SD and HD.

So there are a few thoughts Tom....

Let us know how you make out.....and good luck,

Larry

tnw2933 wrote on 5/4/2007, 9:28 AM

Larry,

Thank you so kindly for responding.

I did post this issue on the Ulead DVD Movie Factory Forum this morning, and I recieved a response from a person who had overcome my exact problem and is very close to what you suggested. He found after experimenting that he could never burn a dual layer disk correctly in DVD Movie Factory, but if he used Nero to burn the iso image or the DVD Folders and selected the setting to "Burn extended write out area on dual-layered disks" then his dual-layered disks (both TDK and Memorex) played back fine through the layer change. Needless to say, I am about to try this right now. I'll post my results here. It is clear that we are all on the cutting edge of this new technology. My project is absolutely beautiful, however, and I am very hopeful of getting it to play in the HD-A2 through the layer change.

Larry, thank you again.

Tom

blink3times wrote on 5/4/2007, 11:15 AM

If you want to burn DL disks, I personally have found Pinnacle Studio 10.7 to work well. I have done at least 50 of them now complete with DD5.1 sound without so much as one problem or failure.. I am not so sure studio is good for much else mind you, but it DOES burn DL hd dvd's extremely well.

You have to purchase studio, and the hd dvd plugin is an extra $50. Studio 11 is out, and is supposed to be good, but I have not tested it yet (still waiting for it... my order has been backordered)

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/4/2007, 11:21 AM

Very glad to help Tom, and I hope your results with dfual layer are succesful. I was truly shocked at just how beautiful the MovieFactory 6 HD DVDs look. I took the rendered ,EVO files into my frame capture software and compared the rendered video ooutput to the original HDV input, expecting to see some compromise of quality. To my complete amazement, the frames captured from the rendered DVD look the very same as the HDV video going in, and the bitrate of 25 MBits/sec is preserved as well. I was really pleased to confirm that the finished HD DVD was as visually impressive as my original HDV footage, and that no quality loss has taken place.

Unfortunately, I have not found the same to be true for Ulead's more expensive VideoStudio 11 Plus software, the upgrade being released merely 2 days ago. I have been doing a lot of experimentation with it, and can, under some circumstances, achieve the same quality as MovieFactory 6 Plus, but only with careful and somewhat circuitous workflow. I've posted a question on tghe Ulead web site to see if others have noticed the same problem, but this topic is not germane to this Sony site so I will leave it at that.

Please let us know how your dual layer experiment works out. I would imagine that the Nero approach may solve the problem.

Best,

Larry

tnw2933 wrote on 5/4/2007, 12:09 PM

Sucess at last!!! I have now burned my first dual layer HD-DVD image to a DVD+R DL Memorex disk. I used Nero Ultimate 7 Extended Edition (the latest version of Nero). I could not find the "Burn extended write out area on dual-layered disks" as an available option under the Options tab on the Select Burner page and consulting Nero Help failed to turn up any mention of such an option. However, on the Select Burner Tab under Options all of the options were selected by default. I burned the same disk image in Nero that had failed to play back properly when burned in DVD Movie Factory 6 Plus. I am delighted to say that it played back absolutely perfectly from beginning to end without even the slightest pause when the layers changed. In fact, I was astonished that there was no indication of a layer change at all -- just totally smooth and outstanding play back.

Ulead needs to correct this bug in their implmentation of dual layer recording!

Thank you again for your help.

Tom

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/4/2007, 12:57 PM

Excellent!!!

Tom,

Congratulations!!

Ulead software is slightly unfinished here and there, and this dual layer issue is a good example.

On the other hand, making hi def DVDs of this superb quality, length, and very low cost is unachievable using any other method, as I needn't remind you of givem the BluRay experiences which you reported at the start of this thread. This alternative method is vastly better, cheaper, easier, and can only make one wonder why the HDV (and AVCHD) users would ever want to consider another method.

It's anybody's guess as to how the HD disk wars will end, but if I were a gambler, I would definately put my chips on HD DVD. The players are already cheap, and getting cheaper at a rate faster than BluRay, and the tools for creation and distribution seem to be coming along much more quickly and inexpensively.

With the right AVC / h.264 codec, we could be burning ***90 minute disks*** on red laser DL disks ***today*** with no extra hardware or high cost media. If the audio were transcoded from LPCM to Digital Dolby (a feature already built into Ulead Movie Factory) then a 2 hour HD movie on a DL red laser disk is almost achievable immediately.......

It just makes me scratch my head and wonder.........what are Sony, Sonic, etc. thinking.......

Larry

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