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WMV-HD to Blu-Ray?
This year I’ve been offering my wedding clients an HD upgrade which includes standard DVDs as well as WMV-HD files for PC playback. I also promised to convert their videos to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD discs once I committed to an HD format. Now that I have the required software and hardware, I’d like to start delivering these videos on Blu-Ray discs. I still have all the m2t files from the original tapes, as well as all the project files and the finished WMV-HD files. Due to hard drive space, I do NOT have the Cineform AVI files that were ultimately used for the projects. I’ve started trying to rebuild one of the projects by converting the m2t’s back to Cineform’s AVI, but so far the conversions have been buggy and inconsistent, an ongoing issue that I’m in communication with Cineform about. Even with a successful conversion, the in and out points for each clip aren’t exactly where they used to be, and there’s no clear pattern to the discrepancies. So all this hassle has me wondering…
Rather than knock myself out over this, what do you believe the harm would be in simply rendering the WMV-HD files to Blu-Ray via the BluPrint setting in Vegas, at least for these 5-6 weddings? Because of how “small” the WMV-HD file sizes are compared to a Blu-Ray disc’s capacity, I’m concerned about how degraded the quality might be. How inferior would it be compared to rendering from the original m2t or Cineform files? Has anyone converted WMV-HD to Blu-Ray? Does it still “look” like HD? Thanks in advance!
Bob
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5 Replies
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Try it. You’ll immediately have the answer to your question.
Yes, I’ve done it. No, it doesn’t look so hot. You’re taking one highly compressed format, and transcoding to another highly compressed format.
What I *haven’t* done is converted WMV to VC1, which is BD compliant. I don’t know how that would encode, but WMV to MPEG 2 or AVCHD looks pretty washed out and loses edges.Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASSTCertified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor -
How did you create your Cineform files? If you do not have a specific Cineform program like the old HD Connect or Aspect or Prospect, download a trial version and run them through the “Convert” tab on HD Link, the Cineform capture/conversion program that comes with their programs. It has a way of converting m2t to Cineform and should work very well.
If you do not buy the program you still get to keep the codec when you uninstall. You just can’t encode it again later. (That codec is better than the one licensed to Soney for use in Vegas.)
JerryW
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Thanks for your reply. I do have Cineform’s HDLink (latest build) as part of the NEO-HDV package. As mentioned before, when I use it to convert my .m2t’s, most of the the conversions won’t complete, and I’m working on that with Cineform tech support. Furthermore, for the few that DO complete, the Cineform AVI files don’t “pop up” in my old projects exactly where they used to. So the in/out points of the entire project would have to be realigned.
If I can make do with converting these several completed projects’ worth of WMV-HD files, I would prefer that route for now.
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The reason it’s not as easy as just “trying it” is that I only have Windows Media Player, which I don’t completely trust to preview these clips. Depending on the file format, I might get a stuttering effect or jaggies that I later find out aren’t really there. So I was hoping there was already a “been there done that” perspective out there. Nonetheless I’ll give it a shot.
Interesting point about the VC-1. Now I’m wondering if I can just burn the WMV files straight to Blu-Ray discs without the BluPrint render. The DVDit Pro HD software (which I haven’t bought yet) appears to “support” WMV along with a few other formats, but I don’t what that means exactly. I’m hoping it means that the existing WMV-HD file can just “sit” on a Blu-Ray disc as opposed to going through another conversion.
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I would expect WMV to badly degrade. You should try a small clip to see if it is acceptable.
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