DV to BLU RAY

rpatel wrote on 9/9/2011, 1:33 PM
Hello All,
I have footage that is shot on DV and I want to output on blu ray. I tried doing this but I end up with like a square box in the middle. I have Movie Studio 11, I checked the settings and I think to output to blu ray the footage goes from 4:3 to 16:9.

Is there a way to maintain 4:3 when burning to blu ray and then once your blu ray player plays it is can go to which ever format you have your player set to.


If someone has done this please let me know.

Thanks
Rpatel

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 9/9/2011, 2:43 PM
Well, you can certainly do it -- but you're just going to end up with a blurry BluRay video, since you're over-rezzing the video to nearly four times its size. (You'd get better results if you just played a DVD in your BluRay drive. Most BluRay players, and my DVD players, have an upscaling feature for filling in the extra pixels.)

First, set your project properties to HDV, then enlarge your DV video to fill the frame.

HDV and BluRays are, on the other hand, 16:9 by nature. So you're going to end up with black bars on the sides of your video. There's nothing you can do about it.

Are you sure you wouldn't rather just make a high-quality DVD and let the player upscale it?
rpatel wrote on 9/9/2011, 3:28 PM
Hey Steve,

I have done a regular DVD already. I wanted to have a higher resolution video for my client. I do understand that there will be top and bottom bars on the change from 4:3 to 16:9 which I am already fine with.

I am trying the method you are mentioning about Project -> Properties -> HDV, now I see that I have black bars on the right and left side of the video. The video also is 16:9.

I will try this method this afternoon and repost back my results on Saturday AM.



Thanks
Rpatel
Steve Grisetti wrote on 9/9/2011, 5:00 PM
But I do want to stress that your video won't be of a higher resolution. You'll just be doubling (actually quadrupling) the pixels you already have. So it's not going to look higher resolution. It's just going to look blurry.

That can't be what you really want, is it?
rpatel wrote on 9/9/2011, 5:20 PM
Steve,
This is not what I am looking to do at all. I want to give something that is not compressed. I don't like the way the DVD quality looks. I can make an .avi file, but then how can they play it back on a blu ray player? The avi files are so nice and clean, pretty much exactly like the original footage shot.

Give me your thoughts on this. I have read other topics in this forum discussing this as well.

The perfect solution would be outputting the video back out to DV and having the client purchase a stand a alone DV deck to watch it, but that is not going to happen.

Thanks
Rpatel
Chienworks wrote on 9/9/2011, 8:16 PM
It sounds like you're more concerned with less compression than with the resolution, right? Are they willing to watch it on a computer? Copy the DV file to a memory stick and hand that to them. However, there may be a few older media players still in use out there that can't decode DV.

If you want to be completely safe you can render to MPEG-1 up to 15Mbps. This is over twice the bitrate you can use on DVD and approaches BluRay levels. I think it looks better than DV. Another bonus is that the deinterlacing algorithm Vegas uses when converting to MPEG-1 progressive is amazingly good. If you know they have some sort of MPEG-2 playback software installed (any DVD player software will work) you can render to MPEG-2 up to 25Mbps. In either case retain the DV 720x480 resolution.

There are also a lot of newer HD TVs that have a USB port that can play back the video on the memory stick. If your stick is big enough include the video in several formats because you probably won't know in advance which formats any particular TV can handle.