DVD video limits?

[djleekee]

I have just purchased a Sanyo Xacti HD1 camera which records video at 60fps at 1280 x 720i.

BUT

What can I actually do with it at the moment?

I can play the files successfully on my pc but can't really do anything else with them!

I would love to burn them to DVD and play them on my 32" widescreen tv but cannot.

First of all you need :-
a video editing application that will handle widescreen HD files,
a computer fast enough to handle editing these files,
a dvd burner capable of burning the new HD-DVD standard commonly known as Blu-ray or H.264,
A new DVD player that will play back HD DVD disks,
and lastly a television that is High Definition!

So all in all it's going to be a high cost situation upgrading all this kit to get some quality HD pictures on your television!

THEREFORE

I was wondering if there was any way of burning these HD files to standard DVD disks which will play on my standard (non HD) DVD player?

I was wondering what the maximum settings for MPEG2 video are? Can we still put 1280 x 720i files on a dvd all edited and re-encoded as MPEG2 or do we have to live within the 768 x 576 limits?

I have no problem downscaling my edited video from 60fps to 25fps but wondered if DVD can get anywhere near the resolution of the Xacti HD1 files?

SO many question so little answers?!

Leek

[guns1inger]

I believe Vegas, and probably Premiere Pro, can edit these in their native resolution.

A current dual core with planty of ram should be quite capable of editing this footage.

BluRay burners are on the way. HD-DVD will be some way behind them. Players, on the otherhand, will be expensive.

At present, without spending a lot of money to be on the bleeding edge (too late, you bought the camera), the best you can do is progressive PAL DVD.

[yoda313]

I was wondering what the maximum settings for MPEG2 video are? Can we still put 1280 x 720i files on a dvd all edited and re-encoded as MPEG2 or do we have to live within the 768 x 576 limits?

I have no problem downscaling my edited video from 60fps to 25fps but wondered if DVD can get anywhere near the resolution of the Xacti HD1 files?

Nope if its dvd it has to meet the specifications in order to play properly. You HAVE to downconvert it otherwise dvd players won't recognize it.

https://www.videohelp.com/dvd

That link has all the specs for dvd. It has the max resolution and bitrate than can be allowed. You can push it to the edge but it still has to meet those basic guidelines.

[djleekee]

Ok cheers for that! I suspected that was the case but I thought I would check anyway!

Thanks

Leek
www.xacti.co.uk

[shardison]

This is a bit late, but probably useful for anyone who has purchased the Sanyo HD-1 Camera and having trouble with editing and making standard DVD disks.

I found that handling the multiple individual MP4 files a real hassle, and the included Ulead software I either had bugs (no 16x9 output) or made studdering DVD's (DMF5). TMPGEnc was no help either.

I finally found that "MPEG_Streamclip" could import all the MP4 files at once (but a bug makes renaming the files and reversing the list order necessary to import properly). That program has a simple but very effective editing feature that allows you to edit in HD and save it out as a .MOV file, without re-compressing.

These HD MOV files are easy to import. But if I used the Ulead or Tmpgenc software I either got strobing video (at 8000kbs vbr) or crazy high bit rates (>10,000kbs at scene changes if set to 9600kbs vbr) that froze my DVD player. It also took 8 hours to encode 30 minutes of video for both programs.

I also tried to import the MOV file to ffmpeg with the SUPER GUI, and got great output, except I got lots of bad blocks at scene changes. When I increased the kbs to 9600, (using the .VOB output option) I found that the problem was fixed, and the video was beautiful. (No other MPEG2 setting worked.) Even though Power DVD reports >10,000kbs at some scene changes, my DVD player plays them fine. It looks fantastic on my 50" plasma. I suppose if my DVD didn't like it, I could have re-encoded with the Ulead MF program to flaten those high points.

Now I can edit in HD once, and make a HD-DVD and DVD at the same time with great results. To top it off, SUPER is very fast making the DVD files, either standard or HD MPEG2.

[jman98]

Shardison - I don't use Ulead, but while I do like TMPGenc, yes, you have discovered that it happily ignores whatever maximum bit rate you tell it to use when encoding. CCE is one encoder that actually will respect the maximum bit rate you give it.

[shardison]

I was trying to encoding the full 1280x720p MOV movie down to 720x480 with encoders that don't seem to be able to deal with HD material. The odd thing is, whatever mpeg2 encoder used actually needs the giant jump in bitrate at the scene changes. Ulead and TMPEGenc were choking no matter how high I made the settings... the output ended up looking like it was 10 fps half the time. ffmpeg with .VOB output seems to be happy spiking the bitrate, which is something that was necessary to avoid a lot of blocks and ugliness at scene changes. After a week of messing around with a half-dozen different programs in a chain, nothing worked perfectly until I used SUPER with VOB output and 9600kbs rate. Importing the resulting .VOB files into Ulead DMF5 completes the package. And the results are flawless, like the best DVD you ever saw. Using DMF5 also allows me to import the orginal HD MOV edited file and output an HD-DVD disk.

[TBoneit]

One other option for now would be to try and find a Divx/Xvid player that can handle HD resolutions and encode to avi format.

I'm guessing that there should be such an animal since my Toshiba 3990 won't play them it says HD not supported or some such message.

The www.divx.com has Divx HD trailers so hopefully their are hardware players you could buy and that would be an option to keep your content as is. Being stuck in the SD not HD world right now I can not test my speculation. But What you could do is burn a DVD with these trailers as a test disc and try different machine as a test. one to test might be the Toshiba Divx/upscaling DVD player.

Cheers

[Nelson37]

Tbone you are right on.

There a few Divx/xvid players listed as being able to handle HD resolutions on standard DVD disks. This would currently be the only reasonable way to play these files back to an HD TV, other than using a PC for playback.

I looked into this a couple months back, there were four or five players listed, and one or two fairly inexpensive ones.

Encoding times will be long, and not many tools work with these files, though check out HDTV2MPEG2.

Please post back with any further results.

[mtrax]

This is a bit late, but probably useful for anyone who has purchased the Sanyo HD-1 Camera and having trouble with editing and making standard DVD disks.

I found that handling the multiple individual MP4 files a real hassle, and the included Ulead software I either had bugs (no 16x9 output) or made studdering DVD's (DMF5). TMPGEnc was no help either.

I finally found that "MPEG_Streamclip" could import all the MP4 files at once (but a bug makes renaming the files and reversing the list order necessary to import properly). That program has a simple but very effective editing feature that allows you to edit in HD and save it out as a .MOV file, without re-compressing.

These HD MOV files are easy to import. But if I used the Ulead or Tmpgenc software I either got strobing video (at 8000kbs vbr) or crazy high bit rates (>10,000kbs at scene changes if set to 9600kbs vbr) that froze my DVD player. It also took 8 hours to encode 30 minutes of video for both programs.

I also tried to import the MOV file to ffmpeg with the SUPER GUI, and got great output, except I got lots of bad blocks at scene changes. When I increased the kbs to 9600, (using the .VOB output option) I found that the problem was fixed, and the video was beautiful. (No other MPEG2 setting worked.) Even though Power DVD reports >10,000kbs at some scene changes, my DVD player plays them fine. It looks fantastic on my 50" plasma. I suppose if my DVD didn't like it, I could have re-encoded with the Ulead MF program to flaten those high points.

Now I can edit in HD once, and make a HD-DVD and DVD at the same time with great results. To top it off, SUPER is very fast making the DVD files, either standard or HD MPEG2.

thanks this is the issue with the Xacti FH1, I'm getting as I've got about 800 clips which is about 1-2hours worth of video and most of the editors crash when I import more than 40-50 clips.