First full Blu-ray disc

[shueardm]

Kevin.

That Pioneer BDR-202 burns at 4x on 2x media in certain circumstances.

If you use Encore to write to disc it will probably burn at 2x but if you output to volume and use the burn software that came with the drive, it will go at 4x- or is it the other way around. But certainly it looks like that last burn was 4x.

[Jerry]

As far as I can tell, the Edius "Speed Encoder" is one of the fastest software options anywhere for rendering MPEG2-HD output - so if I could get the files that generates to work in Encore CS3 without transcoding I think I could save some production time. On the other hand, now that I know Encore can take Edius HQ files I like the idea of generating both HD and SD discs from the highest quality source material, so maybe working from HQ files isn't so bad. CS3 makes it a snap to set up your menus and then render Blu-ray, SD DVDs and Flash output from that one setup - which looks like a good way to save time for multiple distribution options.

Regarding Blu-ray profitability, I know one videographer near me who sold $10K worth of HD/Blu-ray upgrades before he even had a functional way to burn Blu-ray discs. Another said his average wedding video fee is up almost $1000 this year based partly on his use of HD technology, but he's still defining his delivery options and is the one offering to pay me to burn his Blu-ray discs. Blu-ray can't guarantee you a profit but it's currently the most professional option for HD content delivery, so if you've spent $10K or so on new cameras and other HD gear why not pay a few hundred more for Blu-ray burners and discs to deliver HD goodness to custmers?

1. My understanding of the Speed Encoder is a little different. Here is a blurb
from the web page.
The basic idea on which Speed Encoder for HDV is based is very simple. EDIUS Speed Encoder first divides the video data into blocks, then each CPU core encodes multiple blocks simultaneously. EDIUS Speed Encoder then reassembles all encoded video data blocks into the final long GOP MPEG-2 stream. This process dramatically reduces the total encoding time.
I see it as not for MPEGHD but for MPEG transport output.

2. I hope your friend can do well with the blurays. However, getting playback compatibility has been spotty at best. Now that Sony has included BDMV playback in recent firmware updates, it should help....at least from the Sony camp. I'm sure others will follow.

[kwshaw1]

Blu-ray burn speed update

I reported earlier that my first Blu-ray burn took longer than I expected, but I have better news from doing a finalized BD-R disc: that went smoothly at ~1 GB per minute for a total burn time of 14 minutes for 13.3 GB of data, using a 2X Blu-ray disc. I think the first burn was slower because I was using a rewritable disc which had to be erased first, but even still that seemed slow compared the BD-R burn. In any case, the speed on the BD-R disc was about what I originally expected and suggests that 4X discs (when available) will take less than 15 minutes for a full 25 GB. Not bad compared to the burn times I get for regular DVDs...

[kwshaw1]

As far as I can tell, the Edius "Speed Encoder" is one of the fastest software options anywhere for rendering MPEG2-HD output - so if I could get the files that generates to work in Encore CS3 without transcoding I think I could save some production time. On the other hand, now that I know Encore can take Edius HQ files I like the idea of generating both HD and SD discs from the highest quality source material, so maybe working from HQ files isn't so bad. CS3 makes it a snap to set up your menus and then render Blu-ray, SD DVDs and Flash output from that one setup - which looks like a good way to save time for multiple distribution options.

Regarding Blu-ray profitability, I know one videographer near me who sold $10K worth of HD/Blu-ray upgrades before he even had a functional way to burn Blu-ray discs. Another said his average wedding video fee is up almost $1000 this year based partly on his use of HD technology, but he's still defining his delivery options and is the one offering to pay me to burn his Blu-ray discs. Blu-ray can't guarantee you a profit but it's currently the most professional option for HD content delivery, so if you've spent $10K or so on new cameras and other HD gear why not pay a few hundred more for Blu-ray burners and discs to deliver HD goodness to custmers?

[Jerry]

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 have to agree with Mark. I have made many Bluray discs, got paid.....not enough.
The clients I have that prefer the bluray, now that Sony has put the firmware back in to play BDMV, use it at conventions. It really draws attention to their booth.
An example of something I did recently was for Stuart Cove's for the DEMA (dive industy) convention. It amazed me to see Gates and Amphibico(underwater camera housing mfg) displaying really crapy video trying to sell camera housings....while Stuarts was pristine.
The video also landed me another big account. Thats a by product to showing in HD.


While all of that sounds nice and neat. It is quite time consuming. Preparing the data takes the time. After you have spent many hours edtiing you then have probably double that for encoding and authoring(depending on the extent of your menu structure).
More than likely, you will not deliver on BD-RE. So, the final burn has to be perfect. I can get 25gb blanks for $11 a piece. Not a bad price...the same disc last November was $25...and it still is in CompUSA.
I recently started burning for clients what I labled Bluray Lite. This is bluray at a lower bitrate on DVD-5's. The cost is considerably lower for the blank medea, and the quality is noticeably different. I am currently testing with
the Encore H.264 encoder for DVD-5's. This should up the quality with a little less size.



I guess what I am saying is just because it looks pretty and burns just like the DVD-5's, you are entering into territory that will not turn an immediate profit, if any, but will make your work look, depending on the product, really good or really bad. This is where you see the focus problems stare you back in the face.

If you are ready to jump in, go for it. But, do not expect to sell these like hotcakes.

[Jerry]

Jerry, I am sure that you have tried the same encoding to MPEG2HD in other programs such as ProCoder Express or maybe ProCoder 3, where either of these faster at encoding one hour worth of material? Does it matter what format the media on the timeline is? Does ProCoder Express encode one hour of .mts, HQ, Lossless at different speeds? I guess what I am looking for is a way to make the process a bit more efficient. A half hour here and there add up at the end.

George Dame

Hey George,

The easiest way to put it is start the encoding and walk away. If you are using HD files going to HD you are in for the day, especially if you are using only one machine.

I don't use Procoder Express because of the non-mastering setting. I prefer PC3 over Sorenson Squeeze 4.5, I have both. I don't know your workflow so Procoder express would be faster than PC3 due to the mastering setting. Squeeze is fairly quick but softer than PC3 but has great presets.

Encoding in Encore at the Highest setting in SD, HD, and H.264, takes about the same time as PC3. It seems to work fine with uncompressed files. HQ gives it a fit. But, as far as I can tell, the streaks and blobs do not transfer onto the disc. It is merely the Encore decoder/encoder not working well with Canopus codecs.

If I need HQ or lossless, I just take it from the timeline and it is pretty quick.
My media on the timeline consists of 8bit uncompressed 1920x1080, MJPEG 1920x1080, and HQ or Losseless 1440x1080. I work in 1920x1080 timelines and ususally spit out an uncompressed master for encodes on multiple machines and to store.
As far as time, I can't really help you there. I have 3 machines to access across a network while editing. Encoding for SD is on one, Encoding for Bluray is on another and Authoring of the disc is on the last one. The network makes it all happen quite easily.

The down and dirty, HD just takes a long time to encode.

[gdame]

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.

Jerry, I am sure that you have tried the same encoding to MPEG2HD in other programs such as ProCoder Express or maybe ProCoder 3, where either of these faster at encoding one hour worth of material? Does it matter what format the media on the timeline is? Does ProCoder Express encode one hour of .mts, HQ, Lossless at different speeds? I guess what I am looking for is a way to make the process a bit more efficient. A half hour here and there add up at the end.

George Dame

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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... :-)

[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...

[Deeter2]

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