HD = Blu Ray?

[Stephen Mann]

Not necessarily. If it’s short enough you can burn it to a DVD-5 (4.7 Gb), but some players won’t handle it.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Gilles Gagnon]

thansk Stephen,

If I burn to BD, I get better quality? even if both are burned in the 1920×1080 resolution?

What makes BD better than? I don’t quite understand.

Gilles

[Stephen Mann]

BD is 25Gb and DVD5 is 4.7Gb. The quality would be the same. The question is will you material fit on 4.7Gb, and will your player accept a DVD5?

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Gilles Gagnon]

Got it! Thanks Stephen. I thought there was more to BD than capacity. This answers many of my questions.

Cheers,

Gilles

[Stephen Mann]

[Gilles Gagnon] “Got it! Thanks Stephen. I thought there was more to BD than capacity.”

There is, but it is way above our pay grade. To get to all of the really cool stuff in Blu-Ray, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J

DVDA does not support BD-J, but they do make a product that does: https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/bluprint

The price? Remember, this is way above our pay grade. (If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.) But the retail price of BluRay is $50,000 per copy.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Nigel O’neill]

I am not sure I agree that blu-ray offers just capacity benefits. Video quality from an HDV/HD source is definitely visually vastly superior in Blu-ray when compared to applying the same source to a DVD.

Are my eyes deceiving me? How can something which has a maximum data rate of 40 mbps (blu-ray) produce the same result of that of 9.8 mbps (DVD)?

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

[Stephen Mann]

You are comparing apples and oranges. Put the same encoded file on a DVD and on a Blu Ray disc, you won’t see the difference.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[John Rofrano]

[Gilles Gagnon] “I have a project which is 1920x1080i. Since this is HD, does this mean that I have to burn Blue Ray to get HD quality?”

YES… or NO depending on what you mean by “burn Blue Ray“.

Stephen answered your post as if you asked this question:

Do I have to use a shiny plastic Blu-ray Disc?

His answer of, “No you could use a DVD disc” is only a partial answer assuming that you already know that you MUST burn the Blu-ray format and MUST use a Blu-ray player to watch it.

Don’t get Blu-ray the FORMAT confused with Blu-ray the DISC.

Here are the facts:

• YES, you must burn a Blu-ray formatted disc if you want HD
• YES, you need a Blu-ray player to watch your Blu-ray formatted disc.
• NO, you can burn the Blu-ray format to DVD media (in which case it will not play in a DVD player anymore because it is now a Blu-ray formatted disc) but this is not guaranteed to play in all Blu-ray players so it is strongly recommended that you use Blu-ray media instead.

So, No… you don’t need to use Blu-ray media but Yes, you must burn the Blu-ray format if you want HD.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Haynie]

You can’t burn an HD video in the DVD-Video format on DVD. But there are other data formats to use. The best supported is the AVCHD format; virtually every Blu-ray player will support AVCHD on DVD5 or DVD9.

The most immediate problem is that you can’t make an AVCHD using DVD Architect. DVD Architect will burn a full Blu-ray to DVD if it’s short enough, but most DVD players will not play a BDMV composition on DVD. No idea why, but they will not.

There are limits on AVCHD. For one, the video has to be in AVC… you probably want that anyway, but Blu-ray allows VC-1 or MPEG-2 as well (DVDA only supports AVC and VC-1). To be in spec, AVC for AVCHD discs must be rendered at 18Mb/s or less… Blu-ray supports something like 40Mb/s. This should not be an issue, particularly given a camera that records at a peak of 24Mb/s. But it’s something to know, and potentially a quality issue, should you start with higher quality material.

Like DVD, AVCHD requires the UDF 2.5 or 2.6 file system, unlike the 1.x file system used on DVD. Not a big issue, but this does mean that DVD players and older PCs can’t read AVCHD discs (not that DVD players know what to do with AVC video files, anyway).

There’s a handy open source program called MultiAVCHD that can build AVCHD disc structures from properly rendered AVC and AC-3 files.

-Dave