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.
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.