I'm burning HDV to Blu Ray and not seeing a difference between my old HD DVD's.... they look just as good (I'm using the PS3 for playback). Are you using MPEG2 or converting to avc? You will lose quality in a conversion. Are you using the standard HDV bit rate?

Thanks for your reply bsuratt, I will install 8.0c today and try Smart Render as you suggested. I'm using my PS3 and an HD-A1 for playbacks. I play them through a hidef projector onto an 8x6 screen. As I mentioned the hddvd playback is spectacular compared to the BD.

Thanks for your reply blink, yes I'm using the mpeg2 not avc. From the timeline burn, I chose the 25mbps setting. In DVDA I tried different settings all the way up to 40 mbps.

I hope you all can help. I think I may be doing something wrong and it seems you guys have the kinks worked out.

I am using material shot with my Sony HC7. No problem with capture or working with it on the time line in VP 8c. I then select the render with template "MC mpeg2 - Blu-Ray 1440x1080, 60i, 25mbps", no audio. After that I get an .m2v file. I then render audio to ac3 format.


I move over to DVDA and just want to do single movie slect the media and also set the ac3 file for audio,I set preferences so that it is for Blu-ray disk and for a regular 4.7 dvd.
(I have only about five minutes of material)

Start "burn" disk and I always get this message:

"File name: STREAM/00000.m2ts
Status: TSWrapper.dll::CTSWrapper::ProcThreadMain::Video buffer underflows. - "

Running on quad core machine, vista home premium 64bit, 8 gb ram.

Any help would be appreciated since it seems tha you guys are already successfully making discs.

Thanks alot for you help!

Galen

Hello bsuratt, In 8.0c I'm having trouble locating Smart Render, I've checked around in the render section and in preferences. I do remember seeing it when I used to burn avi's to dvd in Vegas7. Any help would be appeciated.

Options/preferences/
Be sure "Enable no-recompress long-GOP rendering" is checked

To set your project to the correct settings for your input files:
File/Properties...

At top right is a folder icon (hover shows "Match media settings")
click on this and find one of your source M2t files and click on it. This will set your properties to your source params. I also use Best, Gaussian, Interpolate.

Then edit; remember any changes you make to clips like color correction will be re-rendered completely. I just add transistions/titles now and then... these specific areas will be re-rendered. However the majority of clips will be copied thru directly with no re-rendering.

Then render by choosing 1440x1080-60i 25mbps Blu-ray template
You should see "No recompression Needed" show up sporadically in your preview window indicating Smart Rendering is taking place.

Thr trick to it is keeping the same settings thru the process... if the audio and video files are named the same you should be able to go into DVDa5 and use the defaults for Blu-Ray disk.

If going to DVD-R use Ulead MF6 for DVD authoring.

@rstrong

Is DVDa recompressing your work?

You should be importing a M2V and a AC3 file into DVDa. Anything other than this may well cause DVDa to recompress.

@ Galehng:

I don't think DVDa 5 does Hi Def to regular dvd... just real Blu Ray

Thanks for your reply blink, yes I'm using the mpeg2 not avc. From the timeline burn, I chose the 25mbps setting. In DVDA I tried different settings all the way up to 40 mbps.

If you want decent quality and you're using MPEG2, you should render from the timeline to 40 Mbps, because if you're not using smart-rendering and you're recompressing footage that was originally compressed at 25 mbps, and then you re-compress it again to the same bitrate, it's not going to look good, especially when the camera starts moving around.

Now, to answer your first post, in my experience DVDA 5 doesn't accept HDV footage without re-compressing it. I tried many times to no avail. The only other BD authoring program I tried that accepts it and doesn't re-compress it is Encore CS4, and it looks just as perfect as the tape. On the other hand, Premiere CS4 is downright pathetic to smart-render HDV. You can easily tell the parts it re-compresses because it does a very poor job at it and it looks far worse than the original. HDV smart-render in Vegas 8.0c is far better.

My guess is that the reason you're seeing a decreased picture quality is that you're re-compressing your whole timeline to 25 MPEG2.

Of course there could be something wrong with the settings of your Blu-ray player, maybe it's outputting 720p instead of 1080p? You might want to check on that.

I am using material shot with my Sony HC7. No problem with capture or working with it on the time line in VP 8c. I then select the render with template "MC mpeg2 - Blu-Ray 1440x1080, 60i, 25mbps", no audio. After that I get an .m2v file. I then render audio to ac3 format.

If you want to make a BD5, you can't use HDV material that was smart-rendered, or for that matter, nothing over 20 mbps. While perhaps a computer drive will play it, at least in my Sony BDP-S300 blu-ray player, any BD5 or BD9 with footage over 20 or 21 Mbps will choke after a few seconds and start skipping frames.

The reason for your underflow message might be that DVDA 5 senses that it's a bitrate too high for DVD media (even if it's in BD format) and stop the build because it's pointless. If your final format is BD5 or BD9 you might want to either render from the Vegas timeline to Sony AVC 1440x1080 at 15 Mbps, or to render to a lossless codec (if you have lots of free hard drive space) and then import that into DVDA 5, choose a 4.7 BD project with AVC at 20 Mbps, either 1440x1080 or 1920x1080 (if the footage has a lot of movement 1440 would be a better choice) and then wait a loooong time because DVDA5 only uses about 45% of the processor, no matter if you have a beast of a machine, it won't use it.

"Now, to answer your first post, in my experience DVDA 5 doesn't accept HDV footage without re-compressing it. I tried many times to no avail."

This is completely untrue. I do HDV to Blu Ray all the time with DVDa with no recompressing.

If you use a Blu Ray template and render as M2V and a separate audio file there is no recompress. If you're recompressing then you're doing something wrong.

"This is completely untrue. I do HDV to Blu Ray all the time with DVDa with no recompressing"

Absolutely correct Blink... I do it daily with no problems! And the output looks as good as the source.

Hello bsurat, thanks again for your help. Do I 'Match media settings' for every M2t file I use, or just one file in the folder containing all the files? Also, when I optimize what bit rate should I use? It goes up to 40mbps.

robert

Just one.

Also... when you render with one of the Blu Ray templates, go into customize and click on the video tab. There is a quality slider there that defaults at the 1/2 way point... why I'm not sure but push this all the way up.

"Do I 'Match media settings' for every M2t file I use"

Just one M2t file

I just use the template settings... change nothing.

If you are referring to optimize in DVDa5 if you have used the template and not changed anything else then you should not have to set any thing in DVDa5. The settings there are used if DVDa5 has to re-render, otherwise no effect. The object here is to send DVDa5 a file that does not require re-rendering!

I agree with Blink on the slider being all the way right. Other than that do not change anything, just use the template defaults.

This is completely untrue. I do HDV to Blu Ray all the time with DVDa with no recompressing.

I conducted a small test again to see if perhaps I had missed something, but it's the way I said it. If you smart-render HDV in Vegas, then DVDA 5 will re-compress it. First of all, in Vegas 8.0c you cannot choose one of the Blu-ray templates and expect smart-render. That's because the 1440x1080 60i 25 Mbps Blu-Ray template is not 25 Mbps CBR like HDV is, but instead 25 Mbps VBR. So choosing this template re-compresses every single frame. So in Vegas, to avoid re-compression, you would have to choose the HDV template. With this template Vegas 8.0c smart-renders (Vegas 8.1 doesn't because of an obvious design flaw). Then you can also modify that template to make it an elementary video stream and it will still smart-render to an m2v file.

I opened DVDA 5a and set the project properties to Blu-ray, Mpeg 2, 1440x1080 at 25 MBps and audio AC3 at 448 kbps. I imported all these different files into DVD 5a and went to the Optimize Disc options, and every single one of them was set to re-compress the video, and it wouldn't let me set it to not compress.

Now, what you all might be talking about is that probably DVDA 5a doesn't force a re-compress if you rendered the HDV footage to one of the Blu-Ray modules in Vegas, but in that case you already recompressed it, because as I said before, the Blu-Ray modules in Vegas, even the 1440x1080 60i at 25 Mbps, are not HDV compliant.

Sebaz...

You have a valid point. I never noticed because I rarely ever do "no recompress" editing.... always have other things going on on the time line.

Not sure it has to do with vbr vs cbr though. If I change the blu ray template to 25cbr I still get recompressing. I will say though... it's not recompressing a whole lot. The frame counter is moving like the wind and I get spurts of "no recompress" flashing on the screen while rendering. Even at 25cbr, DVDa will not recompress

Interesting... the HDV template recompresses in DVDa no matter what you do. I even tried setting for VBR at 25/25/25 (which is essentially cbr) during render and DVDa still wants to recompress.

Thanks all, especially to you bsuratt, for your valuable assistance & information that enabled me to reach my current goal of burning Hidef content to BD.

Cheers!
robert

Sebaz,

Thanks for your help. 'll work on those suggestions. Burning to a BD-RE works fine.

Galen

>>>I move over to DVDA and just want to do single movie slect the media and also set the ac3 file for audio,I set preferences so that it is for Blu-ray disk and for a regular 4.7 dvd.
(I have only about five minutes of material)

Start "burn" disk and I always get this message:

"File name: STREAM/00000.m2ts
Status: TSWrapper.dll::CTSWrapper::ProcThreadMain::Video buffer underflows. - "<<<

I had this problem, my solution was to author to a BD ISO and use nero to burn to DVDR. Works on single or dual layer media. Of course, you have to have set the video length or bitrate so that the ISO will fit on the DVDR media.