DVD / Blu-Ray Menu Creation

[motown01]

Hi There,

I'm working at a video production company that produces dance recital DVDs. This upcoming season we'll be doing both Blu-Ray and DVD versions of each recital. We have a huge bulk of these recitals and they're usually quite long - between 2 and 5 hours each.

So we'll be editing each show in HDV and then compressing the Blu-Ray version to either H.264 or MPEG2, and also creating a 16x9 widescreen compressed version in MPEG2 for the DVD.

The biggest part of these edits is the menu creation - it's quite intensive as we place chapter markers at each song and then have between two and three 'Select A Dance' pages, which link to each chapter in the recital (sometimes upwards of 60 dances per recital).

Right now we mainly use Adobe Encore DVD - and also DVD Studio Pro occasionally. The menu templates are already created, we just add the recital information to the Main Menu page, and then type all of the song names - then link each chapter to the MPEG2 imported files.

My question is...

What is the absolute quickest way to do this menu creation for both Blu-Ray and DVD at once? It would be nice if there was a program that would recompress a Blu-Ray disc, menus and all - down to a DVD format - although I doubt this is possible.

[jman98]

Welcome to the forums. You're likely to get burned by the moderators for cross posting - posting the same thing or something very similar in multiple posts. Based on past experience, I don't think the mods are going to see enough difference in the 2 posts to not give you a wrist slap here.

I can't help with the menu questions, but I have some things for you to think about. I'd advise going with H.264 for the BluRay recital. MPEG-2 needs a lot higher bit rate for the same quality as H.264 in BluRay. However, are you REALLY sure that there's interest in BluRay copies of the recitals? BluRay penetration in the USA is pretty poor. It's probably the same in Canada. And forgive my bluntness, but Canadians do have a reputation for being, shall we say, "thrifty". Given that and the current economic conditions in Canada, I'm just saying that I don't see a lot of interest in this.

Do note that if you intend to burn these yourself to burnable media that no matter what you do, somebody will probably not be able to play your discs through having a bad and/or ancient player or just their own incompetence.
There's not much evidence to be had on burnable BluRay media quality, but I've seen some posts recently that suggest that BluRay media is just as variable as DVD media is, meaning that some manufacturers produce low quality crap and a few produce high quality discs. If I had to burn a BluRay disc, I'd buy Verbatim for it. And I'd advise trying to keep it to single layer BluRay instead of dual layer just to avoid the usual dual layer issues that have plagued DVD players in the past and probably plague BluRay players now.

[poisondeathray]

Encore CS4 can export DVD and blu-ray from the same project (keeping all links/navigation/chapter markers etc...), but older versions like the one you are using cannot

If you need more control (e.g. want to use a specific encoder or specfic assets), you can copy the 1st project and save as a 2nd separate project, and encode different assets and use the replace asset function. If you don't need the extra control, then it will transcode assets that don't match.

It also works with dynamically linked assets if you have one of the CS suites (e.g. with photoshop, AE, premiere) , so you can switch back & forth without rendering

You would normally start with the blu-ray version and template (because you can go down to dvd, but the reverse isn't possible ie. you can't go up to blu-ray)

-There are no programs that can do blu-ray => DVD and retain menus / structure yet (and you probably wouldn't want to for clients anyway, because you would incur generational quality loss)

[motown01]

Not sure about the idea of Canadians being 'thrifty', thanks for the thought though.

The Encore CS4 tip helped alot. Thanks.