Do you author/create Blu-ray or HD content? Let's get organized...

[lordsmurf]

Note: If you've come to this post because you have questions about or want to share information on how to copy Blu-ray discs, convert HD-DVD to Blu-ray, convert downloaded HD videos to Blu-ray, or put Blu-ray on a DVD, please go jump in a lake. You are background noise, you clutter forums. Go away.
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Now then...

I know there are some fellow professionals here. Please chime in.

Adopting tech before it's fully mature (which Blu-ray is most definitely NOT mature), is not my favorite way to spend time. however, customers are starting to want it. I have little choice but to adopt. I have a BD-ROM as of this month, I'll have a BD burner in the near future, and a nice fat spindle of Verbatim BD-R. Yay, me.

Now what? Yeah, lot of reading. It's not like I have no clue as to what's going on, but the devil's the details. Isn't it always?

If you're a content producer, share with me real quick what your current workflow is... from capture, to basic editing, to authoring, to burning. What software and/or hardware are you using right now? What sort of aggravations or limitations are you finding? What are your choices for codecs.

Worse yet, what's the hardware and software costing, excluding the blank discs and burners?

I don't see much on VH about BD work, just a lot of random questions. Let's get organized! Make this a thread of various methods different folks use, so we can all learn.

Anybody here using special hardware to assist in processing time of the HD? Share what you can about that too. I know of some options, but I'm hesitant to buy anything without ample research and advice.

My goal with this post is to have a nice sticky at the top of the Blu-ray authoring sub-forum.

[yardline]

I have a DXG595V (1080p .264) and a Sanyo HD700 (720p .264). I use Corel Video Studio X2 Pro (VSX2)and can create AVCHD with no noticeable loss of quality that will play on my PS3 over the network and can be burned as AVCHD onto DVD+R. VSX2 for $60 is an amazing program. It can also burn straight to Bluray. It can encode a one hour AVCHD 1920x1080 (with tons of overlays and PIP) in about 2.5 hours on a QuadCore 9550 system. I'm thrilled.

[racer-x]

For someone that has bashed BD in the past, you're now jumping on the band wagon? A little late for the party, but that's OK.........

I've been doing this stuff for well over a year now:

1) I shoot with a Canon HV20 in HDV and edit as such in Vegas.

2) I encode audio to ac3 (256 kbps) and video to AVC (13-16 mbps) @ 1920 x 1080-60i, 1080-24/30p, or 1280 x 720-60p, depending on my needs and type of footage. I will either use the built-in Sony AVC encoder or x264 via megui.

3) I will author using various methods like DVDA 5 or free tools like TsMuxeR and multiAVCHD. I burn the content to standard DVD+Rs.

Lot's of useful information on this rather long thread about various methods:
http://www.hv20.com/showthread.php?t=7432

[vhelp]

Don't mind my chiming in as background noise..

I am not a (professional) content provider by no means. But, I am a freeloader. That is, I give away lots of free-bees, mostly DVD media. Been doing that for years. Nothing special, no fancy-schmanzy menus or anything. Just the bare basics that the end user will require. I've done various contents from commercial (tv series) to home videos, plus a few of my on-the-spot shootings of special events..the kind that I find while driving by and I can't miss the excitement, and even actually shared a few discs of these events with some co-workers over the years. It started out as hobby and still is to this day--driving by and coensidentially catching an event happening. These are what I live for in my driver-by from wherever I happen to be going. That is about the extent of my media content providings.

I will be opening up a new dialog in my video endeavors with a new HD cam..been considering the HV20/30 models and if I do get, I will most definately be creating some bluray medias, possibly even venture into the fancy-schmanzy seam.

I have a short topic I started on my first BluRay writer. I can't complain. It worked virtually the first time, and still does to this day, though I don't use it very much, yet.. not when you have 1TB HDD's. But I can see as a business--one that provides media content, there are definate uses in this latest format, BluRay via disc medium.

My authoring experience with this format, from video source to bluray (BD-RE) disc, snipped from my latest topic on this subject elsewhere goes like this, and should still work:
(I did attempt athoring with *.m2ts videos successfully as well. More info/experience can be found in the link below. )

--> Buffalo Mediastation Bluray and HD DVD player, model BRHC-6316U2, vhelp -- Feb 28, 2009

**** A MINI GUIDE TO: COMPILING AND AUTHORING A BLURAY DISC **
** video sources includes: mp4, and raw .264, as encoded via x264 cli tool
** video sources includes: mpeg-2 encoded videos <-- not thourghly tested with all formats

STEP 1:
Compile a Bluray disc with: tsmuxer (tsMuxeR GUI) 440kb size
1. drag your .mp4 or raw .264 videos into this tool.
2. select (o) Create Bluray Disk
3. compile it: note the location you create the folder (or create one) for these files (for use w/ imgburn below)

STEP 2:
4. Download: ImgBurn 1.9mb size
* no installation necessary: yea!

STEP 3:
( remember! we just created the bluray structure in STEP 1: 2 and 3 )
5. Tools -> Settings -> Write tab, select [x] enable "DVD-RAM / BD-RE FastWrite", and Click [ OK ]
6. Now, in imgburn main window (the intro interface) choose [ "Write files/folders to disc" ] icon
7. then, click Options tab -> File System: UDF, and then go to UDF Revision: scroll down to 2.60 and select it.
8. then locate your two bluray folders: \BDMV\ and \CERTIFICATE\, and drag it into the window just below where it says, Source. You'll see the mouse pointer turn to the '+' sign, and drop them into it.
9. last, we compile it by clicking on the green arrow or cd-rom diskette icon.
10. your done

Here's a hint. May or may not work for you nor may be the recommended short-cuts to practice, but..

To save time, I keep a local copy of the above folders (without the video files of course) and simply copy *new* video (if only one video) to the \BDMV\STREAM folder. This usually works flawless-ly without txMuxerR or other authoring pre-setup. You just dump the video file(s) in the folder and then dump the two folders into imgBurn and go.
I have several folders for 1, 2, and 3 videos. So far this has worked out pretty well in all my tests. But I can't guarantee it will work for everyone or every video. Perhaps I've been lucy up to now.

-vhelp 5093

[zoobie]

1) Been shooting HDV for about 2.5 years on a Sony HC5
2) Usually edit in Vegas Pro, sometimes quickly in VS
3) I have no BD burner or HDTV yet so I'm sending my edited productions right back to the cam's miniDV tape. This works with NTSC cams only I'm afraid...PAL cams have some sort of copyright which blocks sending it back to tape. I also burn the m2t straight to DVD and backup again to another HDD.
4) I usually use free music but since a lot is cheap midi, have recently been adding my own mellow acoustic guitar instrumentals which is working well. I record thru the camera's excellent microphone and sweeten it with Audacity.
5) I put some clips on the net at 720x400 x264 mp4 @ 1250kbps that play in a webpage thru the embeded JW flash player using BaldRick's guide for Handbrake & Xvid4PSP.

[poisondeathray]

1) I'll limit my comments to BD25 (haven't tested BD50 yet), because I think that's what LS intended this topic to be on (not AVCHD on BD5/9). I've done a fair bit of both, and most my content is primarily from an avchd camera

2) My editing is done with avisynth, premiere pro cs4 (sometimes vegas), after effects, soundbooth and photoshop to generate/tweak various assets

3) For quick and dirty (and free), I use multiavchd which can author bd25 (and bd5/9), with simple static menus

I use encore cs4 for bigger projects because of the tight integration with Adobe apps, and your menus can look incredible by using after effects. I've used DVD Architect 5 as well which works fine, and it's a bit easier to use, but I lean more towards Encore now. Encore doesn't do bd5/9, but DVD Architect does. DVD Architect doesn't have set menu transitions or blu-ray pop up menus, but Encore does.

Pro studios will probably use Scenarist or Blu-print with Blu-code. I don't own scenarist (very $$$), but I played with it for a few days at a friend's studio. It is very complete but hard to use, but you can do everything that Architect and Encore does and much more, including BD-J interactivity. It is very strict on streams compliance and what it will and will not accept for pass through

4) Format choice is not really a choice: h.264. MPEG2 will require a 1.4-1.6x the size for the same quality. I've done many tests that confirm this on various genres at blu-ray bitrates. My h.264 implementation of choice is x264, and I've tested quite extensively Mainconcept Reference, Elecard Encoder, Ateme, NeroAVC, even Cinevision. x264 clearly provides the best quality/compression/speed if you know the proper settings to use. The 2 cases where I would use MCR over x264 are with interlaced h.264 encoding (e.g. 1080i30) and generating assets for Scenarist. Pass through works for both Encore and DVD Architect if you use the correct compliant settings for the assets with any encoder.

5) Hardware is overclocked Core i7, it's actually faster for encoding than my previous generation dual socket quad Harpertown workstation. I've investigated dedicated hardware encoders (cards based on spurs engine), and video card encoders (badaboom, avivo), and they are severely limited in terms of quality. Not something you would want to use for clients or quality HD output. There are plenty of comparison, samples, graphs, links to other reviews at Doom9 on the the above.

A high quality hardware deinterlacing can significantly speed your workflow if you have a recent Nvidia card using DGAVCdecNV, DGVC1decNV, and DGMPGdecNV (Donald Graft's aka Neuron2's tools) which utilizes PureVideo VP2 engine on the card for decoding and deinterlacing to frameserve with avisynth. If you cut out the the heavy duty avisynth deinterlacing methods, your can save HUGE amounts of time.

A lot of info can be found at Doom9 as well, with quite an active discussion in the blu-ray forum, although it's geared more towards BD5/9

[lordsmurf]

Nice post, poison, thanks.

[poisondeathray]

LS - I forgot to mention another cool thing about Encore CS4 is it's ability to output the project to flash without even knowing action script or how to use Adobe Flash Pro CS4!

So if your client wanted to preview your work before the final output, you just output the entire project in a smaller flash format and upload it to a site (working menus, navigation and all) for feedback

[pajaropicu]

Hi, I'm going to start authoring BD in a few days and I think I should not have any problem with it. But just in case I let you know my workflow so if you can give some advice... I'm shooting on a SONY Z7 with the Hard Disc unit which makes .m2t files. Then I edit the stuff in Adobe Premiere CS 3 (on a PC with a Matrox RTX.2). Finally I export the edit and make a Blu Ray with Adobe Encore CS 3. Please if you can warn me about anything it would help me to keep my job!!!

Thanks

[ronnylov]

I own a Canon HV20 camcorder which I use for making HDV video at 1440x1080 MPEG-2 format and since I live in Sweden I use 25 fps, either interlaced or progressive.

I understand that Blu-ray can use MPEG-2 as a valid codec but do I understand correctly that 1440x1080 is not a valid resolution for Blu-ray with MPEG-2? Is it also correct that 25 fps is not a valid frame rate? My camera can record 25 fps progressive video or 25 fps interlaced video (which some people call 50i)...

https://www.videohelp.com/hd

"High Definition Video
1920x1080x59.94i, 50i (16:9)
1920x1080x24p, 23.976p (16:9)
1440x1080x59.94i, 50i (16:9) AVC / VC-1 only
1440x1080x24p, 23.976p (16:9) AVC / VC-1 only
1280x720x59.94p, 50p (16:9)
1280x720x24p, 23.976p (16:9)
Standard Definition Video
720x480x59.94i (4:3/16:9)
720x576x50i (4:3/16:9)"

Looks like standard interlaced HDV is not well supported for direct conversion to Blu-ray. I can compress it to h.264 or VC-1 keeping it interlaced 1440x1080 but then I think my favourite h.264 encoder x264 is not very well optimized for interlaced content and I do not like VC-1. I could resize to 1920x1080 and encode to MPEG-2 with HCEnc but then there will still be a reencoding which I would prefer if it could have been avoided (as if Blu-ray supported 1440x1080 interlaced MPEG-2, which it seems not do).

Considering the options I think the best option is to convert it to 1280x720 50P using x.264 to compress it to h.264 but I do not like the idea to loosing quality compared to just use the original MPEG-2 video stream of my video...

If I shoot 25 fps progressive I guess I need to slowdown it to 24 fps, or is it enough to just set an interlace flag (as 1440x1080 50i)? I wonder why 1280x720 at 25 fps progressive is not supported but 23.976 and 24 fps are supported. Feels stupid if I must copy every frame to make 25 fps 50 fps just to be able to use 1280x720 resolution or slow it down to 24 fps. Looks like discrimination of us PAL users.

Looks like the people making the Blu-ray specification forgot some facts regarding common video specifications...

[rhegedus]

Sony HDR-XR106 (1080i) used to make medical education videos and for personal use.

Records to HD and us transferred to PC via USB.

Edited in Vegas Moviestudio.

Trying MultiAVCHD for authoring.

[johns0]

What i use for editing and authoring avchd is tsMuxerGUI,multiAVCHD,mkvmerge GUI,yr_eac3to_more_gui and uncropMKV,all freeware and very quick,just as easy as authoring dvds.