How to create a AVCHD DVD

[Jorma Nippala]

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/208/879728#879766

Goes for Platinum 10/11 too.

[John Rofrano]

[Bill Williams] “I want to do it again for testing so I don’t waste expensive BluRay discs.”

Why don’t you buy some read/write Blu-ray discs (BD-RE)? They cost the same as regular Blu-ray disc. I do all of my test burns on BD-RE’s.

~jr

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

[Bill Williams]

Hey John, thanks for your reply. I finally remembered how I created the AVCHD DVD’s. It’s part of Picture Motion Browser that came with my SONY HD Camera. Yes, I agree I could do a BR RE but, really, the DVD’s these days are even less then 30 cents apiece if you look for sales at Frys. I am not a high end video creator as of yet and just want to see if I’m getting close before I blow a full dollar on a BR. It took me the whole 15 pack of BR disks before I found out how to burn them correctly. Yeah, $15 isn’t much especially with my salary but why not spend $2 instead before I start throwing $1.00 BR’s in the burner?

Ok, I’m cheap.

[Dave Haynie]

For testing, as John mentioned, you can buy a few BD-RE. Some folks recall that DVD-RW was sometimes a compatibility issue back in the DVD days. That was largely because it was kind of an afterthought… the DVD Forum was promoting DVD-RAM, a better but not DVD-ROM compatible format. The upstart DVD+ people produced a DVD+RW format, which was compatible yet still worked well for video recorders (for that week that recording on DVD for consumers seemed a better idea than recording on hard disc).

Anyway, on to AVCHD. You can actually burn “Blu-ray on DVD” using DVD Architect with Vegas Pro.. I don’t know about Vegas Platinum. It’s easy.. in the “Properties” menu, set “Disc format” to Blu-ray Disc, and “Target Media Size” to 4.7GB (single layer DVD) or 8.5GB (dual layer DVD).

That may work. It may fail. That actually builds a Blu-ray structure for a DVD, which you may burn to a DVD. Some players will play it, many won’t.

AVCHD isn’t exactly the same thing, but it’s far better supported. AVCHD was derived from Blu-ray, but today it lives as a stand-alone format. It was specifically designed to support HD video on those silly DVD (and ever-so-slightly-less-silly Blu-ray) camcorders. And of course, it was pretty much adopted for all flash media camcorders.

The first thing you need for AVCHD support is AVC formatted video at 18Mb/s or less. The AVCHD specs require a 2x DVD player, nothing more, so anything higher bitrate will fail. You also want to grab yourself a copy of “multiAVCHD”, an open source tool that knows pretty much everything about AVCHD, including how to create AVCHD complaint discs. Because of the fact that this was largely promoted for consumer camcorder use, I believe it’s more widely supported in Blu-ray players.

Naturally, if it’s just for test discs, you can try a Blu-ray formatted DVD and see if plays on your Blu-ray player. It did not play on the PS3, 2+ years ago when I first tried it, and thus learned the whole tale I relate to you here.

-Dave

[John Rofrano]

[Bill Williams] ” Yeah, $15 isn’t much especially with my salary but why not spend $2 instead before I start throwing $1.00 BR’s in the burner?”

You might be missing the fact that AVCHD on DVD cannot have any menus. I guess if you don’t use menus that’s not an issue. Also you can only fit about 20 minutes of AVCHD on a DVD while you can have over 2 hrs on a real Blu-ray disc so I don’t see how that’s a “test burn” substitute for spending $2 on a BD-RE and having 100% compatibility but if you’re happy with AVCHD on DVD then I guess you can use that.

BTW, you can burn those directly from Vegas with Tools | Burn Disc | Blu-ray Disc… and just use a DVD instead.

~jr

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

[Bill Williams]

I agree with you 100% John but I’m a very new amateur. I do use menus but am unbelievably green when it comes to this. Right now I’m just trying to string several video clips together after trimming and then adding music. I see you’re a musician too. I’m in 3 bands and have a full recording studio. I use Cakewalk (Sonar) and love the way I can cut and paste clips. I’m frustrated with Vegas because it isn’t that easy – guess it’s the price you pay with giant video files rather than Mp3’s or wav’s. Lastly, I’m going to buy a mega fast computer so my video editing won’t be so painfully slow. One step at a time. I do appreciate your advice and really like this COW site. Thanks again.
Bill.

[John Rofrano]

You’re welcome Bill. I’m glad you like the COW and that I could help.

~jr

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