Best simple software for HDTV camera footage to H264 PS3 format

[lneves]

Still waiting for some time available to do more encoding tests.

Anyway, about the possibilty of recording the original camera files to an external hard disk, if I remember well, FAT32 does not support files with more than 4 Gb, which means that films will need to be splitted in blocks of 20 minutes approx.

Is this really so?

[racer-x]

I can confirm that making an AVCHD disk in Nero 8 out of you're HDV footage works fine.....................

I tested with some of my edited m2t files shot by my Canon HV20. I imported into Vision 5 and choose custom settings to get the best quality encodes to AVCHD. I used 1440 x 1080, 13000 kbps, 2 channel ac3, Smart Render and encoder quality to "High". I also went with an animated 2 D menu and burned it to a DVD+R disk. I took the disk to a local Circuit City and played it in a Blu-Ray player (I don't own one yet) and it played fine, menus and all..........

[lneves]

Thanks racer-x, this would be another possibility to explore. Can you edit the files with your production scheme?

Meanwhile, I would like to say that I have made some more tests and found the way to go with Ripbot264 and h264tsto. It is necessary to extract the audio part of the original m2t file with h264tsto and produce an mpa file.

Futher, when encoding with Ripbot264, it is necessary to place some audio option in off mode, otherwise encoding gets stuck in audio. These options are "normalize" and "Av same lenght". Video input is the original m2t file and audio input the previously demuxed mpa file.

It works nicely and the final mp4 output is outstanding. Deinterlace works fine with my 1080i source file.

I get a 63 Mb mp4 file with 8192 kbps quality (maximum), which is close to 1/3 of the size of the original file. This means that I can fit 1 hour of film in a normal DVD and also, when using an external hard disk attached to the PS3 with FAT32, I can also have 4 Gb files with 1 hour (the typical size of a miniDV tape).

I believe that we can go lower in the quality settings at least to 6144 kbps without any significant changes, this reduces the final output file to 46 Mb per minute (and fits 90 minutes of film into a regular DVD).

[lneves]

Ok, having my problems with 1080i footage more or less solved, I would like to have your toughts on a further question. I have lots of old films recorded with 8mm, Hi8 and miniDV cameras in past years; I have already copied to miniDV all previous formats. Obviously the original resolution of these films is SD, with the first 8mm close to VHS and the latter miniDV close to the limits of PAL resolution.

My actual HD camera can output these tapes to a PC in two formats: HD, producing a transport m2t file, or SD, in which case produces an avi file. This avi file has a size of around 210 Mb per minute, while the m2t has 195 Mb per minute.

If I use the m2t file I can encode to mp4 with ripbot264. I would be in this case "extending" the original resolution of 400 to 500 lines to 1080 during the copy and encoding procedure.

An alternative would be to use the avi file and encode to DVD resolution. This way the working resolution would be closer to the original, and only when playing the films the upscale to the 1080 lines of the TV will be produced.

What do you think could be the best approach?

[lneves]

Well...correction!

When the tape is not HDV the camera output is restricted to avi and can not output to m2t, so my previous question is not possible.

I am working on an alternative process and it seems that I can obtain good results for the avi files encoding with CCE to mpeg2 with standard DVD resolution (including deinterlacing).

The mp2 files are also also easely played by the PS3.

Final size is just a little smaller for the SD mp2 files relatively to the HDV mp4.

My goal now is to encode everything (50 hours of tapes), transfer to an external hard disk and connect it to the PS3.

A cheap USB hard disk of 160 Gb with no power need can fit all that stuff. Nice!

My final tests now are just to decide quality settings both for CCE and Ripob264.