SD video to Blu-ray Disc

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Volodymyr,

I have the same setup as you, except a GTX 470. I only tried this once just to play around, but I used Mini MAX to capture DV tape direct to 1080i Blu-ray codec. I believe I used the default setting. Then I took the result into a Matrox 1080i timeline to play out to an HD display and it looked great! Sorry that I don’t know the data rate.

I would suggest just create a few samples at different rates and then view them out of Premiere as I did, as a test. If the DV tapes are 4:3, you’re going to have black pillar bars on the HD, so that area doesn’t have to be compressed, and then it is SD footage, so it doesn’t have the detail of HD to start with. I know I can encode Blu-rays from HDV 1080i at the 18-20 data rate and they look great, so guessing you could try 15 as a starting point? I bet it looks fine.

Jeff Pulera

[Volodymyr Kashuba]

Thank you Jeff for such a quick respond.

Maybe I did not say it at the beginning. I allready captured MiniDV tapes via Firewire, so I have .avi (not Matrox). I do not have a target to upconvert it to 1080i, I want to keep in SD H.264 Blu-ray. I thought this way I will fit more tapes on one BD-R without losing the quality.

In Encore there is 4 settings for transcoding H.264 Blu-ray 720×480.
Low:
Target – 3.43 Mbps
Max – 4.15 Mbps

Medium:
Target – 3.8 Mbps
Max – 4.56 Mbps

High:
Target – 4.17 Mbps
Max – 5 Mbps

Custom: I can crank it up to 35 Mbps.

That was my question.

Your way is pretty interesting. How did you capture it using Mini MAX to capture DV tape direct to 1080i Blu-ray codec. My camcorder does not have either HDMI or component output, and Mini MAX does not have Firewire. Did You use analog composite input or S-Video input??? I always thought the FireWire is the best way to capture the best quality.

Thank you.
All the best.
Volodymyr.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit,
Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (overclocked to 4.5GHz),
CORSAIR CWCH50-1 High Performance CPU Cooler, ASUS P8P67 PRO,
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB,
EVGA GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 2GB ,
Matrox MXO2 with MAX,
COOLER MASTER HAF 932 Black ATX Full Tower Computer Case,
Adobe CS 5 Production Premium

[Jeff Pulera]

I don’t have access to Encore at this moment to experiment, but I did some web searches and it appears that you can simply encode your SD video to MPEG-2 for DVD like normal (using Adobe Media Encoder), and those files can then be imported into a Blu-ray project. The difference is, you can crank up the data rate a bit if you want, going beyond the 8mbps limit of regular DVD. Not to exceed 15 is what I saw, though beyond a certain data rate, you won’t really gain anything. Would 12 look better than 10? Likely not.

Regarding my direct capture to H.264, I was using the S-video connector from a Sony VX-2000 into MXO2 Mini with MAX, to create a 1080i H.264 file. As all Blu-ray players, and most newer DVD players, have upconversion built-in for playback, not sure if there is a benefit to converting SD to HD when we can simply let the player do it with excellent results. Was just playing around at the time.

If I get time to play with this workflow, will share my results.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Volodymyr Kashuba]

Thank you Jeff,

I did this same, capture it over S-video into MXO2 Mini with MAX, to create a 1080i H.264 file.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit,
Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (overclocked to 4.5GHz),
CORSAIR CWCH50-1 High Performance CPU Cooler, ASUS P8P67 PRO,
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB,
EVGA GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 2GB ,
Matrox MXO2 with MAX,
COOLER MASTER HAF 932 Black ATX Full Tower Computer Case,
Adobe CS 5 Production Premium