need 720p60 on AVCHD disc

corug7 wrote on 2/13/2008, 9:41 AM
I am attempting to author an AVCHD disc with a 90 minute H.264 file at 720p60. Of course, Ulead wants to take a couple of days to convert my footage to 1440x1080, a waste of time and disc space considering the file I created should be blu-ray compliant. Will Vegas 8 use my footage from the timeline to create a compliant AVCHD disc, or will it transcode? It may be worth the upgrade from 7 for this job alone.

Also, does anyone have experience with REPLICATION from AVCHD? I know it isn't officially supported, but is it possible? This whole HD-DVD dive is really a bite in the shorts, as replication was supported for 3xDVD. We were looking at some serious authoring work, and Blu-ray offers no similar options (don't say Ulead, it is junk).

Thanks,
Corey

Comments

DJPadre wrote on 2/13/2008, 1:16 PM
why wold yo uwant 720 at 60p when that in itsellf taks up as much space as 1440x1080i/p at teh same bitrate?
Im doing a render as I write this and like u say, its taking a bloody long time. Longer than i thought it would in any case ,which is why i jumped ship the VC1, which nto aonly allows me to use SD, but also deliver a HD file on the same disc.

As for the encode your wanting to do, its certainly a possibility. With V8, all you need to do is create premade templates which vegas will offer once you go into "burn disc"
If you dont have templates, Vegas will offer the standard types.

You can easily createa an AVCHD 720p project (24p) with 5.1 surround using the Pro Encoder settings but all these settings MUST be individually set up within each codecs preset.

Whether or not these conform to BD standards, i dont know, i honestly dont think so... whther or not they play back is another story altogether

BUT, doing a 1440x1080 render out to 24p at 7mbps (for a 2hour and 15min project) has taken over 6 hours... ive cancelled that and rendering out to VC1 with the same bitrates, and the render is taking about 2 to 3 times realtime (this on a core 2 duo laptop with USB drives)

In any case, im not happy with AVC render times compared to VC1 considering im not even changing resolution of the original file...
corug7 wrote on 2/13/2008, 2:10 PM
"I jumped ship to VC1"

How so? I know it is part of the Blu-Ray spec but how are you implementing it on the disc? I have access to a hardware VC-1 accellerator and that would drastically reduce my render times.

I guess I forgot to mention that this is a dual-layer project as well. My source file is 720p60, so that is why I want to keep it at 720p. Why scale it (or encode it) more times than necessary? I already have an h.264 file I used to create the HD-DVD 3x master, and I have tried just about everything to make it AVCHD compliant. Muxing, re-muxing, etc. Maybe Ulead just doesn't like h.264 that originated in Compressor.
Guy Bruner wrote on 2/14/2008, 3:53 AM
Why not use Nero 8 and just burn it?
4eyes wrote on 2/14/2008, 9:39 AM
Nero 8 may also recode them, haven't tried.

According to this spec 720P@60 is compliant:
http://www.avchd-info.org/press/20060713.html
corug7 wrote on 2/17/2008, 9:08 AM
Found the first problem. Apparently, Quicktime h.264 cannot be made AVCHD compliant (without rendering, of course).

Guy, you said to burn it with Nero. Does their program support Menus? A first play video? I need to make a basic, yet professional looking disc.

Thanks

EDIT: DJ, for VC-1 are you remuxing to make a m2ts stream? Will that work on an AVCHD disc (not BD-R).
blink3times wrote on 2/17/2008, 9:32 AM
To the best of my knowledge, there is no program that can work with avc(hd) without re-encoding. It has not been invented yet... one of the big pitfalls when working with avchd.

I'm not the happiest guy in the world about this either.... but such is life. Until such time as they figure out how to "smart render" this stuff, I'm afraid we're all stuck with unnecessary renders and long render times. Those who have worked with avchd for the last little while have gotten used to it.... I on the other hand am still envisioning my lightening speed HD DVD renders going by the way-side only to be replaced by endless hours of heavy duty cpu head banging.
4eyes wrote on 2/17/2008, 4:56 PM
Ulead's programs smart render the avchd videos now (good luck). I usually always have trouble with them after they were smart-rendered out. A real hassle, better to re-encode them, takes awhile, even on a fast computer.

I also prefer mpeg2 video in high def. I can still work on the hdmpeg2 video using a P4-3Ghz machine, editing them and playing them back still on a P4 computer, not bad.
I still think the mpeg2 is still higher quality, that is since my source videos are hdmpeg2.m2t videos, the avchd looks great to, I think the mpeg2 looks better.

I wonder if the avc/h264 codec has to read behind & ahead when decoding to rebuild frames, compared to mpeg2 compression which is decoded from previous/behind frames.