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Mini DV to blu ray?
Hi,
I’m shooting 16:9 video on mini DV on a Panasonic NV-GS400 and I want to end up with a blu ray disc via editing and rendering through Vegas Pro 8.
Firstly, when I import each tape into the computer, I have just been allowing Vista’s inbuilt video import to do the job, ending up with an avi file – I’ve assumed this is lossless and as just as good a way as any to get the video into the computer – is that correct? I know that avi is just a container and doesn’t really tell you how the video is encoded but a program called videoinspector simply tells me its a Sony DV codec. I’m in Australia so its 25 fps and my avi files are apparently about 29Mbps bitrate.
More importantly, when I finally finish my project, I want to render it at the highest possible quality – even if it takes a 25 Gb blu ray disc to hold one hour of project. When I finish my project, I then have a multitude of choices to render to blu-ray: the top contenders seem to be either Sony AVC – Blu-ray 1920×1080 50i 16Mbps video stream or mpeg-2 Blu-ray 1920×1080 50i 25Mbps. Does anyone have any idea which rendering setting would result in the least compression/best quality of the project?
Alternatively, would I be better off just saving the project as an avi file and burning the whole thing uncompressed to a blu ray disc? Each finished project is probably going to be an hour to an hour and a half so the avi would probably fit.
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6 Replies
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I’m not sure why you want to use Blu-ray with miniDV footage? For the best quality I would recommend that you do not output DV to HD. HD has 5x the resolution and your footage will look bad as it’s scaled 5x it’s original size. The best quality is to render in the same quality as the source which is DV/SD.
It’s not clear what you are planning to do with the Blu-ray disc. Is this just for data backup? Do you plan on playing it in Blu-ray player? If it’s just for backup or playing on a PC you can always place the DV AVI file on a 25GB disc as you suggest. If you plan on playing it in a Blu-ray player then you must use the two formats you mentioned (AVC or MPEG2) and be prepared for poor quality from miniDV source.
If you just want a high quality render then render to DV AVI. It is the same quality as your source and you will never get higher quality than what you started with. If you want a playable disc that looks great, make a DVD.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I’m planning on playing the disc in a blu ray player and I want to use blu ray as it should result in less compression than a DVD – if my miniDV avi file is about 17Gb per hour, surely to compress this to about 4Gb to fit on a DVD would be poorer quality than putting it on a blu ray disc which could fit the whole 17Gb?
You say that “If you want a playable disc that looks great, make a DVD” but I should be prepared for “poor quality” if I render my miniDV avi to either AVC or MPEG2 to blu ray. Yet, surely, by making a DVD, I must render it to MPEG2, so why would that quality be better than rendering to MPEG2 for blu ray?
Good DVD players will play avi files, even ones compressed with things like DivX – does anyone know whether a blu ray player would play my avi files from miniDV if I were to simply transer them uncompressed to a blu ray disc.
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Why are you goping to all this trouble? 60 to 90 minute video will make a very nice DVD depending on your settings.
I don’t know anything about Vista but personally I”d prefer to capture my videos directly in Vegas using the capture tool.
SD/DV is 13gb/h not 17. Just author a DVD in DVDA. Like John says you’re not going to get any better quality than what’s on the original tapes.
Allen
ASX Media Group, Inc.
http://www.asxvideo.com
NEW DVD – Europe, Trains-n-Trams -
When viewing my rendered DVD’s on my widescreen TV, I’m not happy with the quality when compared with playing the avi directly from the camera. There’s only a tiny amount of pixelation but if I can avoid it then I want to.
I know that I’m “not going to get any better quality than what’s on the original tapes” but that comment has no connection at all to your preceding statement about rendering to DVD – surely you realise that rendering to DVD involves a fairly substantial compression and loss of quality.
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> …surely you realise that rendering to DVD involves a fairly substantial compression and loss of quality.
You are talking about compression and bitrate (which is also important) while I am referring to the quality loss due to resizing 5x from SD up to HD. All I can say is to try it and see what you think. Make a Blu-ray and see if you like it. I have no issues with the quality of the DVD’s I produce.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Steve,
I’ve been waiting for a recordable format to do the same thing you want to do with home videos for a few years now.
I was never happy with the quality loss when compressing the raw miniDV video to DVD+R and gave up after trying to find a way to burn them to DVD+R-DL.
I would love to back up my home videos to recordable blu-ray now that it is affordable without having to use any compression.
Have you had any luck and if so can you advise me of what you did?
Thanks in advance.
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