First full Blu-ray disc

[kwshaw1]

I just started preparing my first full Blu-ray disc image using about 45 GB worth of Edius HQ files being processed by Adobe CS3 into MPEG2 format at 1440 x 1080 resolution. At the current rate of progress it looks like it will take several hours to transcode all the footage, but at least that's an unattended process. I'm also happy to report that Encore CS3 is pretty easy to use, although it appears it needs Photoshop installed on the same machine to do any significant editing of the menu. If you have an old copy of Premiere (or Encore) you can buy the CS3 upgrade for $299, which is the best deal I could find for proper Blu-ray authoring with menus.

I'm using a Pioneer BDR-202 Blu-ray burner which worked fine for doing a test burn a while back, and a TDK BD-RE disc for testing purposes. Bought the hardware/software/discs from Videoguys for about $925 using one of their bundle deals. And I've already got one videographer offering to pay me to make Blu-ray discs for him, so hopefully I can absorb some of the upgrade cost that way.

Good stuff! :-)

[Blast1]

Pioneer BDR-202

Does this one do DL BD out of the box or does it need a firmware upgrade?

[shueardm]

No it doesn't and probably wont.

Let's not get carried away with DL BD-R discs, from what I have heard they are next to useless at the moment. SONY's first generation DL BD drive was a failure, promising 50GB on one DL disc is great, however Speedlabs did a test with one burning almost 50GB data (not video) to a SONY DL disc and the analysis showed too many errors at the layer break. They reported to SONY and SONY showed them the silent treatment.

[shueardm]

The next big thing I am waiting for is a quality H264 software encoder. Don't know about using Encore to do it.

[Blast1]

No it doesn't and probably wont.

I sort of heard mumbles about it, The rest of the BD burners I've looked at are in the same boat, but at least they are on the market, the HD-DVD burners are hen's teeth, they probably are tied to a promotion gig by Britney Spears ;)

[Khoi Pham]

The second generation DL Sony 4X burner are out, I'm about the get one after I get a big check from this job. (-:, also Panasonic and LG about to come out with their second generation also.

[STORMDAVE]

Can't wait for 16x BD burners :D

[Deeter2]

Kevin,
Please keep us posted on how well they perform as far as compatibility, etc..

[kwshaw1]

Does this one do DL BD out of the box or does it need a firmware upgrade?

No dual-layer support yet, but I've never had any interest in DL discs and a single-layer Blu-ray can easily hold two or more hours of high-quality HD footage. I was just happy to get support for 4X burn speeds, which looks like is going to be useful based on the speed I'm getting at 2X - which appears to be about an hour for 15 GB of content. I thought 2X was supposed to be faster than that, but so far no joy in that regard.

It took almost five hours for Encore to transcode over an hour of HQ footage to MPEG2-HD, which isn't bad compared to render times for more compressed HD formats. But I did notice that Encore CS3 has a transcode setting for H.264 output, which I suppose could be useful to pack a huge amount of footage on a Blu-ray disc...or burn a Blu-ray project on a red-laser disc.

Total production time to get from a lengthy Edius HD project to a finished Blu-ray disc was roughly 9-10 hours, most of which was unattended rendering and transcoding. I'll know in a few more minutes what the finished quality is like...

[kwshaw1]

Okay, it worked! I created a Blu-ray disc image file in Encore CS3, burned that to a BD-RE disc using CS3 again, and played that on my Sony Playstation 3 no problem. Image quality on a 1080p display is good enough to make me wish I had an even better camera than the FX1, but what the heck. If anyone wants to buy me an EX1 for Christmas let me know... :-)

[Imagine Video]

kwshaw1

Would you give a list of the process and settings you have used?

1. capture with......
2. edited with......
3. encoded with.......settings....
4. files size bit rates VBR CBR?????

Sorry I know its a bit abc but would be very helpfull in my reasearch........

I think its a great idea to offer the BD-R service to other videographers to get some quick return on investement.

Cath

[shueardm]

I dont think there is a quick return on investment. If you consider that a good BD project can take up to 20 hours in capture, export, author, burn to test disc and then burn to master- what is the price you would charge? Seriously what you want to get paid will not be paid by many people- trust me.

With regard to your abc- it's much the same as making a DVD, only very much longer. Only difference is that you dont need to worry about bit rates too much, max video bitrate is 40000mbps and audio is anything you want.

As long as you use a compliant encode such as the Mpeg2HD preset available in the ProCoder forum- or one that has been thoughtfully provided by the software vendor in another program (Sorenson Squeeze 4.5) it's all easy enough.

[kwshaw1]

Would you give a list of the process and settings you have used?

1. capture with......
2. edited with......
3. encoded with.......settings....
4. files size bit rates VBR CBR?????

I shoot with three Sony HDV cameras and typically capture and edit in HDV format in Edius, although using HQ capture would help with editing performance. HQ at "standard" quality appears adequate if you want to go that route.

For HD output I'm currently rendering to the HQ format at standard quality with 1440x1080 resolution, then pulling that directly into Adobe CS3 for disc authoring. CS3 has a variety of transcoding options, and for this first project I picked "automatic" 1440x1080 MPEG2 at maximum quality. Transcoding and building the Blu-ray disc image took about five hours for ~90 minutes of content, and burning the Blu-ray disc took another hour or so (which was longer than I expected).

For standard DVDs I typically use variable single-pass encoding with a minimum bit rate ~6000 kbps, target bit rate ~6500 and maximum ~7400 (depending on the amount of content I have). Output is elementary stream MPEG2 with WAV audio, which I've been taking into Ulead DVD Workshop2 for making the discs. But now that I have Adobe CS3 I may start using that for all discs once I figure out some details, like getting Photoshop installed on my authoring computer.

[kwshaw1]

I dont think there is a quick return on investment. If you consider that a good BD project can take up to 20 hours in capture, export, author, burn to test disc and then burn to master- what is the price you would charge? Seriously what you want to get paid will not be paid by many people- trust me.

I'm still struggling with what price to charge for Blu-ray and don't necessarily expect a quick return on investment, but I know someone who's made over $10K in the past year selling HD/Blu-ray upgrades. And that was before he could actually deliver the Blu-ray discs, which he only recently started doing!

Another alternative is to put HD content on standard red-laser DVDs using compressed formats like WMV-HD or H.264, and tell clients to play those on their computer. I know another videographer who's doing this for most of his customers and teaching them how to connect their computer to their HDTV to watch the video, but that seems too cumbersome to me. Plus encoding time for such compressed formats can be as much as 10-20X the length of your editing timeline, which is 15-30 hours for a 90 minute video! (And another 15-30 hours if you need to change something.)

As noted above, my entire production time for Blu-ray from the editing timeline to a finished disc was under 10 hours, which isn't much longer than some people take to make an SD disc. And most of that was unattended processing time by my second computer, which doesn't affect my editing workflow.

[Jerry]

It took almost five hours for Encore to transcode over an hour of HQ footage to MPEG2-HD, which isn't bad compared to render times for more compressed HD formats. But I did notice that Encore CS3 has a transcode setting for H.264 output, which I suppose could be useful to pack a huge amount of footage on a Blu-ray disc...or burn a Blu-ray project on a red-laser disc.

Yes, CS3 will encode to H.264 codec. I have used it. Without having 2 monitors and 2 bluray players, it is hard to compare accurately.
It did take about 1gb less that the MPEGHD file. I used the exact same settings as I did for the MPEGHD file. I'm sure these settings can be manipulated. But, not knowing what is what, it is hard to play with it and get a good estimation of the quality.
I wish Adobe would publish the settings that are acceptible through Encore CS3 for the H.264 codec.
The Encore encoder for MPEGHD is actually pretty good. However, I still liked the results that Procoder 3 in mastering settings produced much better.

I have also produced bluray content onto regular dvd's at a much lower bitrate. Plays fine on my BDP-S1, and now that firmware is available for all of the Sony players to enable BDMV playback, life is good again.