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HDV to Blu-Ray Recipe
I want to share my experience.
I edit on FCP and needed to deliver HDV projects on Blu-Ray.
At first I thought I needed a menu so I tried Adobe’s Encore and Sony Vegas DVD Architect Pro and that NetBlender one as well. Waste of time…unless you have the time to learn the apps. If you are used to DVD Studio Pro all the other authoring programs WILL drive you nuts.
My salvation was Toast. It recognizes FCP chapter markers so I, or rather my clients can live without a menu… as long as the content looks good!Making my HDV native footage look good was another trial. Less compression is best so I kept the HDV footage native all the way until export. Then I tried ProRes, DVCPRO HD, AIC, HDV. All looked like crap and/or wasn’t supported by the various authoring apps (before I surrendered to Toast). I was ready to outsource these jobs until I tried one last thing….
My final recipe for cooking a FANTASTIC looking BD from HDV:
Keep it native until export then export Uncompressed 10bit 4:2:2.
Jury is still out on whether 8bit will suffice.
You MUST create a custom export setting (1440x1080HD) as the default Uncompressed setting is for SD. Then bring that fat file into Toast and encode AVC with the bit rate as high as possible.Bruce Nazarian has a new article which helps one unerstand Toast:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/taming_the_wild_blu_2.html -
7 Replies
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Lucas,
Did you try doing the encoding in Compressor, and just using Toast for authoring & burning?
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[Chris Babbitt] “Did you try doing the encoding in Compressor”
Compressor is what we use too.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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Lucas,
I find it hard to believe that ProRes looked bad, and that 10 bit looked better. ProRes IS 10 bit. I always capture to ProRes from my HDV tapes from the getgo, and it looks great. Are you judging this on a reliable monitor?
And, I don’t believe you must create that custom export setting, you should be able to just change the compressor to 10 bit (or whatever) in your sequence, render and export. At least that’s how I do it.
Have a wonderful day.
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The part of the conversation that attracted my attention was his using Toast to burn the BD’s.
My application for BluRay will be to make BluRay DVD’s of commecial spots, or archives of hi-def b-roll, so typically my work won’t need a menu, just a slate on the front and a chapter marker to the 2-pop of the spot. How hard is that to do in Toast, after editing P2 HD 720 footage in an FCP timeline?
What is the maximum run time I can burn this way using 720 and simple stereo audio?
What external drives are you guys choosing to burn BluRay with from the mac? Got to make my list to Santa:-)
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[Mark Suszko] “What is the maximum run time I can burn this way using 720 and simple stereo audio?”
In compressor for mpeg2 you could set vbr average 12mbps and put the ceiling at 14mbps.
This MAY yield close to 1.5 hrs and be just over 6gb in size. (depends on action though since we’re talking vbr) That is with 720P 60fps.Bump it up to 14 average 19 max for this to work on 1080 with no compression
artifacts.This can also be burned as an HD-DVD on a dual layer dvd-9 and play perfectly
without a glitch on a Toshiba HD-DVD Player.I always export directly from fcp into compressor for Blu-Ray stuff.
I realize it takes 3x longer, but I’d much rather have a single step
from source to destination to retain the highest quality. Exporting
a separate 10-bit uncompressed file may work, but it will take almost
as long if not longer to do that and encode in compressor anyways, so
I save myself the extra work & always run these overnight anyways.For Blu I set the bitrate for 19mbps average and 30mbps max
(might as well take advantage of the higher bandwidth)I have found that Blu Encoding this way usually takes 1/2 the hours
as there are minutes of duration. (this on my dual core machine, have not tried the quad yet)So a 10 minute video will take 5 hours to encode.
I don’t mind this at all since I know I’ll be getting pristine drop dead
quality in the end.I’ve been cooking up some more Blu-Ray discs lately and have been
quite impressed with the stability and features of DVDITPRO-HD
It doesn’t seem to have any of the menu problems of Encore. -
Chris,
Am I hearing what I think I am hearing? 45 hours to encode a 90 min. program?
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[Chris Babbitt] “Am I hearing what I think I am hearing? 45 hours to encode a 90 min. program?”
on a G5 dualcore 2.6ghz machine with 4gb of ram….yes.
If you have an 8 core 16gb ram intel mac and you setup
virtual clustering in compressor, it could easily knock it down to 18 hours or less.And thats mpeg2, it would probably be 3x longer if it was H.264
when the bitrate is that high though, there is no reason not
to use mpeg2. That high it looks spectacular.If you consider all the time it takes a hollywood based encoding
facility to properly deal with encoding of a movie to Blu-Ray
for consumer sales, it really does not seem that long on our end of things.This is not unlike what happened with DVD initially. I remember spending
hours encoding just a few minutes at that time as well. The machines were
much slower then and we were only dealing with SD video.What I’m excited about is the upcoming release of Blu-Ray recorders to
North America. They’ve been selling in Japan for quite some time now.
When Panasonic starts selling them here, it will be a matter of just
playing your timeline out to the recorder in real time, then finalizing a disc,
or ripping the content for a custom made disc with menu’s.For me that was a turning point when I could encode on the fly with a DVD Recorder
for quick lower-budget dvd projects for my clients.
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