Combine old SD DVD’s onto a Blu-ray disk?

[Nigel O’neill]

1) You would use the DVD import feature of Vegas, pop it onto the time line and add your chapter markers, so that when the rendered file is imported into DVDA, it recognises them.

2) Alternatively, you can create the chapter points in DVDA. The thumbnails can be easily generated in DVDA without screen grabs, and you can select any section of video.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Paul Gregory]

Would the recoding to H264/AVCHD result is a significant drop of video quality?

If you can get about 3 hours of top HD quality onto a 25GB Blu-ray disk how much should I expect to get if the video is only 720×576? About 3 times more?

Thanks in advance

[David Shirey]

[Nigel O'Neill] “1) You would use the DVD import feature of Vegas, pop it onto the time line and add your chapter markers, so that when the rendered file is imported into DVDA, it recognises them.”

As a somewhat related follow-up question, if you were to do that, and if the original DVD files were done at a variable bitrate, is there a way to create the mpeg2 file without recompressing but just having Vegas just rewrite the same video into a new file? I remember several times years ago when I’d render an mpeg2 from mpeg2 footage and every once in a while it’d give you the flash that a screen doesn’t need recompression because the new bitrate was the same as the bitrate on a few frames of the original, but I’m wondering if there’s a way to forget about the template settings and just use all the original mpeg2 frames.

[Nigel O’neill]

David, you cannot ‘reverse engineer’ data that has been removed by a render process. You really need the original source files to get the best possible quality.

There are products on the market that claim to upscale footage, but since I have not used them, I cannot comment on their efficacy. Perhaps someone else has and will respond to your post.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[David Shirey]

Except the source I’m thinking of in my case is those horrid Sony mini dvd-r camcorders that burn right to mpeg2. In that case I wouldn’t think it’d be a matter of reverse engineering anything, simply copying the existing stream data into a new m2v file. Or is it the nature of mpeg2 that precludes the ability to copy some frame but not others, since it instructs the pixels that have changed from the previous frame instead of every single frame being an individual data set? But if that were the case Vegas wouldn’t be able to say that some frames don’t need to be recompressed, right? Eh, I dunno. I was just looking to shave some time off a project that isn’t good quality to start with 😛

Thankfully most people have moved on to HD camcorders which make mice manageable files.

[Nigel O’neill]

Depends on the capture rate of the DVD-r camcorder. Typically, they record at mpeg-2 8.5 mbps (compressed), which compared to mini-DV tape of 25 mbps (uncompressed) is a 1/4 less in quality. Many DVD-r camcorders allow you to record more, but at a lower quality setting. A good indicator of quality is the recorded length on your DVD-r. If it is around 30 minutes per disc, you have selected the highest possible bit rate and quality setting. If your discs are 1-2 hours or more in length, you have compromised quality for quantity. There is no software that I no of that can replace the missing bits of data.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6