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

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/4/2007, 1:25 PM

blink3times,

Please update us when the new software arrives and you have had a chance to burn some dual layer HD DVDs. The Pinnacle software has gotten mixed reviews on the newsgroups I frequent, although the latest version is supposedly much improved.

Larry

Laurence wrote on 5/5/2007, 7:03 AM

My guess is that the difficulties with using mpeg4 arise mostly from Toshiba wanting their blue laser HD-DVD format to have a market. After all, if you can get two hours of HD movie content on a standard dual layer red laser disc, why bother with the new more expensive format.

None the less, their approach of allowing HD content on a standard red laser disc is far more liberal than Sony's "don't allow it at all" approach.

Laurence

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/5/2007, 7:36 AM

laurence,

I have commercial HD DVDs authored with the more efficient codec and they look as good to me as the mpeg2 disks, so I believe that both Toshiba and the motion picture industry can and will support this codec. It is disappointing not to find it yet in consumer software for HD DVD authoring, since it could permit an entire 1 hour (or 80 minute) miniDV tape to be copied in its' entirety to a red laser dual layer disk at full resolution. Somebody will eventually release consumer authoring software for HD DVDs and for BluRay to allow this, since both formats allow the use of these newer and more efficient codecs.

Sony's "don't allow it at all" is really surprising since all the neccesary hardware to read and decode red laser disks is already built in. Like many decisions, I imagine this was a "political" / marketing choice to ensure the success and popularity of BluRay, and / or possibly to ensure DRM protection from casual computer users.

Larry

tnw2933 wrote on 5/5/2007, 5:51 PM

Larry,

I attempted my third HD-DVD in Ulead's Movie Factory 6 Plus last night. I used the same procedure that I had used in preparing the successful HD-DVD described above, and I left my computer running all night with istructions for Movie Factory to shut down the computer when it was finished. When I came in to the computer room this morning, I found the computer still running -- not a good sign. Sure enough, when I turned on the display, I had a dialog box in Movie Factory stating "An unspecified error occurred". Not a very helpful error message. I rebooted the computer and tried the project again. Four hours later I got the same "unspecified error" message.

About 5 PM this afternoon I reinstalled Movie Factory 6 Plus and attempted to run this same project. The only thing I changed was to uncheck two-pass VBR. This speeds things up a bit although I don't yet know what the imapct on quality will be.

I have yet to figure out the following things about Movie Factory 6 Plus:

(1) How to take HDV footage (.mt2 files) and encode it so that Movie Factory sees it as mpeg compliant video and does NOT reconvert it. So far I have used both Vegas 7 and Procoder Express to convert the .m2t file to an .m2v file which I can bring into Movie Factory, but MF converts the video file again.

(2) If I check Pre-render Menus, the menus look terrible (posturized and distorted) in the Simulation Mode. If I uncheck pre-render menus, the menus look fine in the simulation.

I am pleased to say that while typing this, Movie Factory completed my last project and wrote the HD-DVD disk image. I cannot see why 2-pass VBR made this project fail, but that is the only change that I made on this successful run of the project, i.e. I unchecked 2-pass conversion.

Incidentally, Ulead's Tech support is, by the admission of one of the Forum Administrators, non-existent (meaning they never reply to any request for tech support), and I did not find anyone responding to these issue on the Ulead Forum alhtough they have been viewed by numerous people.

At this point the jury is still out for me on Ulead's Movie Factory 6 Plus. I may yet have to turn to Pinnacle Studio for the preparation of HD-DVD's on red laser DVD disks.

Tom

johnmeyer wrote on 5/5/2007, 7:05 PM

Incidentally, Ulead's Tech support is, by the admission of one of the Forum Administrators, non-existent (meaning they never reply to any request for tech support), and I did not find anyone responding to these issue on the Ulead Forum although they have been viewed by numerous people.

Ulead was never a strong support company when they were on their own. They started back in 1989, in Taiwan, and then came here to the states looking for a marketing partner. I met with their president and development team at Comdex and recommended that they talk with our competitor, Aldus. Aldus did indeed sign an agreement to market their photo editing product, but when Adobe bought them a few years later, Adobe didn't need the product and turned it back to Ulead (with a restriction for two years on new development). Ulead decided to market the product themselves, and after the following two years of wandering around in the wilderness with a product that they were restricted from developing, and with a marketing team that really didn't understand how to sell software in the U.S., they finally upgraded the product and introduced a pretty neat product: PhotoImpact (I think it was 3.0 or 4.0). Despite lousy marketing and very little support, the product gained a following (including me). However, they were always a second-tier player, and finally needed a way out, which led to their purchase by Corel a few years back.

Problem is, Corel has not provided much support in the past decade for their products either, and it is not clear what the relationship is between Taiwan and Canada (Corel's location, in Ottawa). So, bottom line is that as much as I LOVE PhotoImpact, I have long since given up on getting any support from anyone.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

blink3times wrote on 5/5/2007, 7:55 PM

"(1) How to take HDV footage (.mt2 files) and encode it so that Movie Factory sees it as mpeg compliant video and does NOT reconvert it. So far I have used both Vegas 7 and Procoder Express to convert the .m2t file to an .m2v file which I can bring into Movie Factory, but MF converts the video file again."

That's one of the reasons I use Pinnacle studio. If I import as M2V to studio, there is no recoding. A 48 min timeline takes about 15 minutes to smartrender and about 20 minutes to burn to a DL disk (at 2.4x)

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/5/2007, 10:16 PM

Tom,

It sounds like the 2-pass VBR has a bug, and you can avoid it by not choosing this option. I don't see the point of 2-pass VBR here at all. The HDV camcorder is inherently 25 Mbit/sec CBR, and re-rendering can only worsen the image quality. I understand that you could potentially gain more recording time using a variable rate encoder, but in this case the raw video is already an mpeg2 stream with intraframe and interframe compression as opposed to avi file capture. I personally would not want to re-do all of the GOPs and packets even if it came with no huge time penalty for re-rendering.

Ulead support is pretty weak, and I have been their customer for at least 5 releases of VideoStudio, PhotoImpact, and Movie Factory, as well as own several of their other products. (My registered serial number list on their user support website is 3 pages long!)

I mention this only to say that their support is actually better now but still weak, but their support forum has some very fine people with excellent suggestions. Hey......we are talking about programs for $59 and $79 bucks here.........

Larry

tnw2933 wrote on 5/6/2007, 9:01 AM

Guys,

Thanks for responding. Johnmeyer, thanks fo the details on Ulead's company history. A few years back I bought Ulead's DVD Wrokshop for authoring DVD's at version 1.0 and later upgraded it to 2.0. I was disappointed when Ulead never further developed this software which I thought was reasonably good.

Blink3times, I am going to take a look at Pinnacle Studio. My only reason for not doing so before now has been the horrendous stability problems reported on forums by Pinnacle Studio users. Perhaps this has improved recently.

Larry, your feedback has been invlauable to me in geting me going with DVD Movie Factory, and you make some excellent points in your latest response. I have posted several times on the Ulead DVD Movie Factory Forum, but there have been few responses. However, this may be due to it being a weekend and may improve with time. You are absolutely correct to point out that Movie Factory is a $79 product and perhaps it is too much to expect support for such an inexpensive product. While Movie Factory definitely has flaws (only some of which I have listed in my posts), it also creates some of the neatest motion template menus that I have ever seen, and the output in HD-DVD is nothing short of spectacular.

I have continued to keep this thread alive because frankly the responces here in the Vegas Forum have been a lot more helpful than those in the Ulead DVD Movie Factory Forum. I also hope that Sony people are reading this and will understand our interest in burning high defnition formats and move forward with a new version of DVD Architect that will enable this.

I have learned on the DVDit Pro HD Forum that it is also apparently possible to burn Blu-ray content on to red laser (ordinary) DVD's. Apparently one can do so by burning a Volume to your HD in DVDit Pro HD and then removing the AACS folder. This wil then playback in high defnition on the Sony BDP-1 Blu-ray player. I plan to give this a try later today.

Thanks again to all of you for responding and offering excellent comments and suggestions.

Tom

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/6/2007, 1:37 PM

Tom,

It's my please to participate in this discussion and I have gained knowledge as well. Since my HD DVD playback is literally indistguisahable from direct HDMI camcorder output, I consider MovieFactory 6 and the Toshiba / red laser solution to be as good as it is likely to get other than with regard to longer playing times (e.g. blue laser). More templates and more editing of templates would be nice, but the companion program Ulead PhotoImpact actually offers a full-blown HD DVD menu creation and editing capability so that I / you can make any menus you want. This Ulead stuff is mighty impressive to me despite its' various comparatively minor flaws, particularly considering how much more costly the Sonic, Sony, Final Cut and other products are.

I am especially surprised and interested to hear that red laster disks can be played in a blue ray player with menus, thereby achieving what could and hould be equivalent functionality to the Movie Factory approach we have been discussing, albeit at much greater cost for the Sonic $500 software.

I hope that somebody on this forum can actually perform the required experiment and see if this is indeed true, or provide a link to other sites where success has been demonstrated. I still have a desire to make BluRay disks as well.....

Larry

hazydave wrote on 5/7/2007, 12:54 PM

- I am in no hurry to buy any HD player.

I'm not, and I already did. Two years ago I bought the IOData AVeL Linkplayer, a networked red-laser DVD player with support for 1080i output of MPEG-2, WMV9, and DivX video. The main point was to enable easy preview of HDV from my PC hard drive to my HDTV... no wear and tear at all in that mode, and it's a $250 DVD player, vs. a $2500+ camcorder.

- The Blu-Ray spec has changed two times since the first BD players hit the
- market.

I didn't know they changed twice, but I did know the first players, released in Japan, only supported MPEG-2, no VC-1 or AVC... they were only built-in on local satellite receivers.

I did the whole DVD thing... early, expensive, buggy software, disc compatibility issues, all that stuff. I'm not anxious for this, but particularly given the slowdown in adopters that the format war has created. I can make a WMV/HD disc, on standard red laser DVD, that plays on all modern Windows PCs, some advanced DVD players like mine, and even most HD-DVD players (not sure about Blu-Ray), and can store an hour or more of WMV9 (VC-1) video.

There's some ugliness... the only authoring tool I know of is a mega-expensive one from Sonic, and I know, ultimately, this is a dead end. On the other hand, it's all generic WMV9, HTML, and JavaScript, so it's at least possible to author simple discs by hand.

I'm content to let the war play out, and sit on the metaphoric beach drinking allegoric Margaritas while the war plays out...

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/7/2007, 5:18 PM

Dave.

-"I can make a WMV/HD disc, on standard red laser DVD, that plays on all modern Windows PCs, some advanced DVD players like mine, and even most HD-DVD players"

Is WMV supported on HD DVD? I tried to make an h.264 file play on my Toshiba and never got it to play the video but I did hear the audio track.

Any thoughts are most appreciated.

Larry

Laurence wrote on 5/8/2007, 11:02 AM

Check this out! The guys on the Roxio forum are doing the same thing we are talking about with HD DVD only with Bluray and the DVDit Pro HD software. Check it out http://forums.support.roxio.com/index.php?showtopic=21074here.[/link]

Laurence wrote on 5/8/2007, 11:08 AM

OK, now that people are talking about burning Bluray compatible discs to red laser DVD-Rs, this reminds me of an issue I have with the Ulead software. In the chart on their website http://www.ulead.com/dmf/compare.htmhere,[/link] it clearly states that Movie Factory 6 Plus can encode Bluray format. I can't find it in my copy of the software though. Has anyone used this software to author a Bluray disc? If so, how did you do it?

Edit: OK I see now. With Movie Factory 6 I can only burn a BDAV: a disk with no menus that won't actually play back in current Bluray players. Not much use in that is there.

Former user wrote on 5/8/2007, 11:15 AM

Funny it says it can do HD DVD authoring, but it only says

"Output to HD DVD-R/RW & Blu-ray-R/RE disc"

Is that the same as authoring?

Dave T2

blink3times wrote on 5/8/2007, 11:31 AM

"Edit: OK I see now. With Movie Factory 6 I can only burn a BDAV: a disk with no menus that won't actually play back in current Bluray players. Not much use in that is there."
===============================

The first blu ray version that Ulead put out (movie factory 5) did REAL blu ray authoring (BDMV... with menus) but it was QUICKLY shut down and hasn't come up again. This leads me to believe that it's strictly a licensing issue.... Sony is being very sticky about blu ray burning, and I am not sure why.

blink3times wrote on 5/8/2007, 11:35 AM

"

"Output to HD DVD-R/RW & Blu-ray-R/RE disc"

Is that the same as authoring?

Dave T2"
=========================

You can FULLY author in HD DVD (red laser or blue), but you can not do full author in blu ray. It's BDAV... a very basic and rudimentary"option" menu system.

(The HD DVD burners will be out in another few months for the blue laser authoring)

Former user wrote on 5/8/2007, 11:37 AM

That is what I thought. It is vaguely misleading. ;)

Dave T2

Laurence wrote on 5/8/2007, 3:19 PM

The point for me is, if I can author an hour of video in either Blu-ray or HD DVD format using my current DVD+-RW burner, why should I even bother with a new burner of either format, especially considering that once we start figuring out how to author mpeg4 rather than mpeg2 discs, we'll be able to up that time to two hours!

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/8/2007, 6:31 PM

Laurence, et al,

This is where my prior post regarding mpeg4 / VC1 is coming from. I have been searching to find a way to make mpeg4 / h.264 / vc1 disks, since the commercial ones I've seen look excellent to me, much better than I would have ever expected. I have found very little on the web either with regard to authoring techniques or usable software. If anybody has any details, please let us know!

Larry

tnw2933 wrote on 5/8/2007, 6:46 PM

I have succeeded in using DVDit Pro HD to burn a Blu-ray volume to a red laser ordinary DVD. It plays back on my Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray player which shows it as an AVCHD disk. I have gotten some freezes occurring but I believe this is due to the fact that I used a very very high bit rate. I have lowered the bit rate, rendered the file to .m2v in Vegas at a lower bit rate, and I am currently working to get this ready to save as a Blu-ray volume to my HD. I then use Nero to burn it to an ordinary DVD. I'll post more when I have a disk that plays without any anomalies on my BDP-S1 -- assuming, of course, that I ever succeed in getting one.

As others have noted, one can prepare nearly one hour HD-DVD's on ordinary red laser DVD's in Ulead's DVD Movie Factory 6 Plus. I have prepared one 32 minute HD-DVD in this manner and it played perfectly on my Toshiba HD-A2.

Tom

tnw2933 wrote on 5/8/2007, 8:50 PM

I am happy to say that lowering the bit rate to a minimum of 13,000, average of 15,000, and maximum of 18,000 gave me a Blu-ray on red laser disk that played back perfectly from beginning to end without a single anomaly in my BDP-S1. By lowering the bit rate, the size of the project dropped from 5.5 GB to 2.8 GB and easily fit on a single layer DVD-R. I could see no noticeable loss in quality at the lower bit rate compared to the much higher (25,000) bit rate. It should be possible to easily get an hour of content on a a dual layer DVD and 30-40 minutes on a single layer DVD. This seems a great method of delivering high definition DVD's on an ordinary DVD that will play back in Blu-ray players as high definition output.

Tom

LSHorwitz wrote on 5/8/2007, 9:30 PM

Great work Tom!!

Now if I may ask I a few questions:

1. Can you elaborate a bit on how the Sonic encoding was done, in particular, does it Sonic software contain its' own AVC encoder/ codec? (or is some 3rd party software also required)

2. Can red laser BD disks have menus using this method?

3. If so, are the menus high resolution and wide screen, or do they appear as standard def (I ask this since the Roxio site has had complaints in this area, I believe).

4. If the average encoded bit rate is around 15 Mbits/sec, then a single layer disg should allow for about 40 minutes and a dual layer disk should allow around 80 minutes, just as you have stated. Is 15 Mbit/sec merely the bit rate which allowed you to make a non-stuttering disk, or is there reason to believe that a lower bit rate would be visually indisguishable?

Thanks for all of your work, your willingness to publish it to this forum, and thank you in advance for your reply.

Larry

Laurence wrote on 5/8/2007, 10:29 PM

OK now this is really cool:

There is an upgrade deal http://www.roxio.com/enu/upgrade_center/dvdit/default.htmlhere[/link] which lets you upgrade from almost any Roxio program to DVDit Pro HD for $199. Since I have EZ Media Creator 9, I thought I'd try it. Well it worked. I am now a registered user of a Blu-ray authoring package! This is a pretty good deal. I never even had to look up my old serial number or anything. Woo hoo! Now to make some red laser Blue Ray discs that will play in my PS3!

Laurence wrote on 5/8/2007, 10:33 PM

So far I'm just looking things over, but a really cool thing is this: you can author both SD DVDs and Blu-ray discs from the same project! What I really want to do is be able to author SD DVDs, Blu-ray and HD DVD compatible discs from the same project, but this will do for now! ;-)

By the way, this is EXACTLY what DVD Architect should be doing (authoring Blu-ray and SD DVD from the same project).

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