I decided to buy the Ulead DVD Movie Factory with the HD stuff and try to create my first menu-driven AVCHD disk. After rendering from Vegas with the Sony AVC H.64 encoder and using the M2TS file format, I imported it into DVDMF, created some menus etc. BTW, the capabilities of DVDMF are pathetic when it comes to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. You can not even add menues etc, only fixed templates. Wouldn't recommend this at all if there was any other solution. Anyway, I haven't received my new PS3 yet, so I have no way of testing it at home (should be here in a week or so, waiting for the 40G, 399 one), but I took it down to Circuit city, and the AVCHD disk played in all players, menus and all, and it looked aswome.
Some questions.
1/ DVDMF only supports H.264 wrapped in an M2TS (Mpeg transport stream) format. The Sony AVC codec supports this, but the Main Concept encoder does not. The H.264 output from the Main Concept encoder is not accepted by DVDMF. So, the first question is, how can I use the MC encoder and have it wrapped in an transport stream file?
2/ When I have written the AVCHD DVD, I insert it into various DVD burners I have around the house and oddly enough, it shows up as empty. Does anybody know why? Does the AVCHD DVDs use a file format not supported on Windows?
3/ Anyone know DVDMF enough by now to confirm the amazingly few options available there? I mean, you can't even determine how many menu pages your project will have, or what menus goes on which menu page.</li>
4/ How about Sony? If a tiny little outfit like Ulead, chronically out of money and people, can do this in a few weeks, why not Sony? Where is our Blu-Ray and AVCHD authoring? DVD Architect is already a rather dated piece of sadness (sorry, but it is) far less appealing for DVD Authoring than DVDMF. DVDMF is more more flexible when it comes to DVD Authoring than AVCHD authoring, and the features it has are what people want, and they far surpass DVD Architect when it comes cool things. I mean. Seriously Sony? This is just sad. And no, adding a few rather dated templates doesn't really change that.
Taking Vegas away from me, even the slightly buggy V8, is going to be a lot harder than trying to take a gun away from Charlton Heston (I don't think that is all that hard anymore), but DVD Architect leaves a lot to be desired. Considering Sony is backing the Blu-Ray format, and have in reality bet quite a lot on it being victorious (if Blu-Ray fails so will the PS3 in my opinion, and vice versa). Not being on the ball for the enthusiasts who wants to create inexpensive HD disks (AVCHD disks are a huge thing for those of us never creating anything that runs longer than 15 minutes) is, in my opinion, a Really Bad Idea (TM) for Sony.
Some questions.
1/ DVDMF only supports H.264 wrapped in an M2TS (Mpeg transport stream) format. The Sony AVC codec supports this, but the Main Concept encoder does not. The H.264 output from the Main Concept encoder is not accepted by DVDMF. So, the first question is, how can I use the MC encoder and have it wrapped in an transport stream file?
2/ When I have written the AVCHD DVD, I insert it into various DVD burners I have around the house and oddly enough, it shows up as empty. Does anybody know why? Does the AVCHD DVDs use a file format not supported on Windows?
3/ Anyone know DVDMF enough by now to confirm the amazingly few options available there? I mean, you can't even determine how many menu pages your project will have, or what menus goes on which menu page.</li>
4/ How about Sony? If a tiny little outfit like Ulead, chronically out of money and people, can do this in a few weeks, why not Sony? Where is our Blu-Ray and AVCHD authoring? DVD Architect is already a rather dated piece of sadness (sorry, but it is) far less appealing for DVD Authoring than DVDMF. DVDMF is more more flexible when it comes to DVD Authoring than AVCHD authoring, and the features it has are what people want, and they far surpass DVD Architect when it comes cool things. I mean. Seriously Sony? This is just sad. And no, adding a few rather dated templates doesn't really change that.
Taking Vegas away from me, even the slightly buggy V8, is going to be a lot harder than trying to take a gun away from Charlton Heston (I don't think that is all that hard anymore), but DVD Architect leaves a lot to be desired. Considering Sony is backing the Blu-Ray format, and have in reality bet quite a lot on it being victorious (if Blu-Ray fails so will the PS3 in my opinion, and vice versa). Not being on the ball for the enthusiasts who wants to create inexpensive HD disks (AVCHD disks are a huge thing for those of us never creating anything that runs longer than 15 minutes) is, in my opinion, a Really Bad Idea (TM) for Sony.