preparing video for 720p24 Blu-Ray

robwood wrote on 1/25/2010, 5:29 PM
i need to provide a deliverable 720p24 Blu-Ray with about 30 short videos: under 90 minutes run-time, all media is sRGB progressive.

trying a bunch of solutions, done two so far:

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1) tried burning a 720p24 timeline from Vegas to Blu-Ray
didn't work out well... on the plus side, i could add the filters needed to make it YUV-ready... BUT there isn't a 720p24 "burn to bluray" offered in Vegas: the closest was an MPEG-2 1440x1080 24p: i tried rendering to that and it looked not-good in places... it sucked actually, so lets move on.

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2) opened up DVD-A and created a 720p24 AVC Blu-Ray
drag/dropped 30 QuickTime PhotoJPEG files, created a playlist (no sub-menus, everything on main page), and told it to prepare the ISO and left... tomorrow morning gonna check for quality... in the future gonna render the QT's from RGB to YUV before giving them to DVD-A, which leads to the question...

is there a 720p24 AVC setting i can render to in Vegas that DVD-A likes so it won't recompress?

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3) third option to be checked out tomorrow is HandBrake
gonna render out the QT's to MP4... will need to shift the colorspace... can HandBrake be told a file is RGB? and is there a list of what settings DVD-A will accept for 720p24?

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4) fourth option is using Encore, but haven't gone that far yet.

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5) is there a better way to get 30 sRGB files totaling less than 90 minutes to playback in a Blu-Ray 720p24 setup? wouldn't surprise me if i'd missed something obvious so figure i should ask.

Comments

robwood wrote on 1/26/2010, 4:08 PM
yeh i tried the 1440 template :(

i rendered the timeline directly out of Vegas using mpeg-2 1440x1080 24p (Burn Blu-Ray Disc)... the quality was very poor: mosquito noise, pre-smoothing artifacts, blocking artifacts on almost every cut or pan.

and as mentioned, tried similar templates to 720p24 ( "720p25" and 720p30") and DVD-A still wanted to recompress.

thx anyway.
TeetimeNC wrote on 1/27/2010, 3:28 PM
Rob, I have the same interest as you. I have submitted a ticket to SCS asking for some guidance on this. Oddly, I have found that I can drop a raw 720p24 AVCHD straight out of the camera into DVDA and it will prepare a bluray without recompressing. But I sure haven't been able to get anything out of Vegas to go without recompress.

I also own Encore and have been considering using it for this. 720p24 seem pretty straight forward but Encore can't burn blu-ray to DVD, which is a requirement for my work. It can burn an ISO image so I will probably go that route unless SCS comes back with something that works.

Jerry
TeetimeNC wrote on 1/28/2010, 1:40 PM
Well John, that is encouraging. I'll give it a try.

Now for what I tried. I'm not sure whether:

a) I am not very discriminating, or

b) Vegas is a great uprezer, or

c) My blu-ray player is working magic

Help me decide which. I needed a blu-ray of three different 720p24 projects TONIGHT. So, in desperation I rendered all three using the stock Blu Ray1440x1080-60i, 15 Mbps template. These then prepared without recompress in DVDA 5. Finally I burned these to a standard DVD (they are less than 13 minutes total). I played them in my LG BD390 player to my 1080i projector. To my eye, they looked excellent. I wish I could tell you why this works so well.

Tomorrow I'll try your trick.

Jerry
TeetimeNC wrote on 1/29/2010, 3:21 AM
Pardon my last post. All of my efforts have been altering the "Blu-ray 1920x1080-24p, 25 Mbps video stream" not the "Blu-ray 1440x1080-24p, 8 Mbps video stream" or the "Blu-ray 1440x1080-24p, 25 Mbps video stream" which have different pixel aspect ratios. I just rendered some 15 mbps 1280x720-59.94 to 1280x720-24 using an altered Blu-ray 1920x1080-24p, 25 Mbps video stream template and it looked soft but I could see no significant artifacts with WMP or in the DVD Architect preview. It opened in DVD Architect and prepared to an iso without re-rendering.

John, I must be doing something wrong here. See my settings below. As soon as I try to render Vegas 9c throws an error. Also, note that the largest bit rate available to me in the dialog is 9.8 Mbps. I started with the Blu-Ray 1920x1080-24p, 25 Mbps template. See anything wrong?

EDIT: Ok, got it now. I changed profile from high to main and am now able to set bit rate to 25Mbps and get a render that does not recompress in DVDA. It does look a bit soft though. I'll keep tweaking and if I come up with anthing I'll update here.

Thanks for your help on this John!

Jerry

TeetimeNC wrote on 1/30/2010, 4:44 AM
I have been playing around a bit more with this and have actually gotten surprisingly good results. I am able to render and burn my 720p24 footage to DVD at 25 Mbps which I understand is the max bit rate for DVD discs. And this was without recompress in DVDA.

They play beautifully (to my eyes) in my BD player.

I would prefer to be able to do this with Vegas rendering to AVC, but I can live the the MPEG2 for now.

Thanks all for the help with this.

Jerry

TeetimeNC wrote on 2/13/2010, 5:43 AM
I asked SCS why I couldn't create a Blu-ray compliant 720p24 render in Vegas when using the Sony AVS encoder. Here is the reply:

At lower resolutions, the Sony AVC encoder only allows Vegas to offer the Baseline profile, which isn’t Blu-ray compliant. 1440x1080 and 1920x1080 AVC renders should be seen as compliant, because we can use the other profiles.

It is helpful to know this. Hopefully this limitation will be addressed in a future version of Vegas.

Jerry