[Dave Haynie]

Technically, for home use, you can burn an AVCHD DVD and play it on just about any Blu-ray player. In fact, if you shoot on an AVCHD camcorder at 18Mb/s or less, you can pretty much drag your AVCHD file structure into a program like Nero Burning ROM, create a DVD with UDF 2.5 format, and you get a playable disc… as long as you don’t care about having all that much playing time on it (at 18Mb/s, a DVD5 will give you about 35 minutes of HD video).

Of course, if you’re editing (as you should), you can’t just drag the files over, and DVD Architect won’t create a proper AVCHD disc. No worries, though. Author in MPEG-2 at 16Mb/s (the limit on Sony AVC), then use a utility like multiAVCHD to create the disc.

And yeah, only on Blu-ray players. DVD is and was always a standard definition format. There have been a very few red-laser DVD players with extended capabilities, just like some can play MP3 or limited AVI files (like DivX), but most are limited to 720×480 NTSC or 720×576 PAL.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, that’s correct. YouTube has a secret formula for what it does in conversion. Generally, the better your upload, the better the video YouTube makes available will be, but there seem to a couple of different grades, even for the same resolution. And at least awhile back, you could upload in HD but still not guarantee you’d get HD offered… that seems to have been fixed.

1080p is pretty hardcore for streaming, regardless of who’s uploading it. You may find that some folks are delivering theirs in 1080/24p, which would be easier to stream, at the same effective quality, than 1080/30p or 1080/60i (the latter almost certainly converted to 1080/30p in the process of YouTube-ization).

I’ve only done a few 1080p videos myself, and they were delivered in 1080/24p AVC at 20Mb/s. So YouTube would have nothing at all to complain about.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

BDMV is the normal “fully authored” Blu-ray disc, with menus, etc. BDAV is just a single video… this is the “consumer/home” authoring format, in theory for things like recording TV — though even in that case, you’d probably want menus and chapters added by your recorder. Both are, of course, also Blu-ray data discs… like DVD, there’s no difference in format between what you put on the disc for various purposes, just conventions of directories and file structures that player use to play a disc… or not.

The claim I’ve read on the net, but can’t verify either way, is this. Unlike DVD, in which encryption was an authoring option (CSS), it is reportedly a requirement for Blu-ray — all commercial releases in the BDMV format must be AACS protected. The story that goes with this is that there was an early grace period, in which BDMV discs would be playabout without AACS protection, but that eventually (like, by now) players would not play any unprotected BDMV. This is clearly a Bad Thing for home and small video work — certainly any of us here interested in authoring Blu-ray, and in particular, programs like DVD Architect, are based entirely on the premise that Blu-ray players support BDMV on BD-R. And again, it still works on the PS3, latest firmware and everything. But that’s the story I’ve heard tell.

You can’t burn a BDAV in DVD-Architect, but there’s really no reason: Vegas does it directly. Just get your project loaded up in Vegas and select “Tools/Burn Disc/Blu-ray Disc…”

Anyway, it seems likely that, for whatever the reason, some BD players don’t like BDMV on BD-R and/or BD-RE. It seems they never learn… all the DVD-R/+R issues with home players back in the early DVD days wasn’t bad enough?

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Hi Harry-

I guess my first observation… you have a Pansonic HDC-SD60. This camcorder doesn’t record in any version of 1080p… it has one video mode, 1920×1080/60i.

Thus, your target for Blu-ray needs to be that resolution. Set your project Template to “HD 1080-60i (1920×1080, 29.970fps) and render out to MainConcept MPEG-2, template = “Blu-ray 1920×1080-60i, 25Mbps video stream” or Sony AVC, template = “Blu-ray 1929×1080-60i, 16Mbps video stream”, and you should be well on your way to HD video happiness.

I don’t know exactly how you got jerky video. One way would be to render your 1080/60i out as 1080/24p, which is also a legal Blu-ray video format. 24p films are often represented as 60i video using a technique called 3:2 pulldown. But reversing the process, you drop fields or frames converting from 60i to 24p, which will typically make things look more “jerky” than they ought to.

When experimenting with video rendering to disc, it’s handy to have the camcorder itself, or the unedited video, available for playback on the same screen, so you can compare directly.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You obviously never went through the upgrade hell of Pro 9.

Or for that matter, Windows 98 -> 98SE -> 98ME (ok, they didn’t call it 98ME, but that’s effectively what it was).

Hopefully this is a one-time thing. But there’s a certain danger when you see this too much.

Ideally, when a program is first created, it’s a well organized, well planned design, which may have a few bugs in the specific implementation… which hopefully get fixed.

Over time, it’s quite possible to manage the upgrades, but it’s also possible that some things get fixed with weird hacks, programmers leave the company, taking some of that knowledge with them, etc. That was precisely the case with 16-bit Windows: there were many, many kludges necessary to add new features. Top programmers left, others got transferred to the Windows 2000 and Windows XP projects.

And so, eventually, it became very difficult to make any additions or even bug fixes without breaking something else. They have lost control of the code… it’s too complex, without a major overhaul, to continue developing.

Hopefully, it’s just a bug. I suspect so.. for one, the AVC emitter is clearly a separate module, and not a huge one. You wouldn’t expect that one to break, even if Sony programmers had lost control of the code. But I’m going to pay a little more attention before jumping on new versions in the future… didn’t get burned by this, but if it had come out a few weeks earlier, I might have.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Mine is really quiet. Like, you can’t hear it. It’s certainly possible the 5 or 8 bay models get louder, or perhaps with hotter drives (I have 2TB WB “Green” drives, which run pretty cool).

My main PC has a new loudness since the MB upgrade… not sure it’s the CPU cooler or a case fan, but I’ve been doing audio lately on my field recorder (recently upgraded from Tascam DR-1 to Zoom H4n)… also because my good audio interface (Tascam US-122) is questionable under Windows 7. But one of those things that needs addressing. Not so bad doing music, but for something like voiceover, this would be a real issue.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I love the Drobo.

About the only issue with my particular unit is the interface… this is USB 2.0 and Firewire 800. No shock — knew that when I bought it, and spent the prerequisite several evening tricking Windows 7 into actually supporting Firewire 800 speeds. There are several newer models that support GigE, eSATA, and/or USB 3.0 which would be an overall better idea. I get about 45MB/s reads over FW800, about 25MB/s on USB 2.0… so this isn’t for speed versus single SATA drive, but reliability.

And one nice thing about the Drobo — if I bought one of the upgraded units, I simply pop out my drives, move ’em to the new unit, and I’m good-to-go.

Yeah, it’s proprietary. Though I’m not sure how interchangeable drives are between different model RAID units anyway. The way it works is pretty cool, too; it works with 2-4 drives (newer models at 5 and 8), the drives don’t have to be the same make/model/size, and it scales. That’s actually a big win — I currently do have four WD “Green” 2TB drives in the unit, but I bought at different times, from different suppliers… so there’s somewhat less chance of two failing at the same time than if I had started with four identical drives from the same lot.

So with two drives, it’s more like a RAID0, with four drives, more like a RAID5. Pop out any single drive any time you like, drop a new on in, and within about a day, it’s reformed and redundant again.

Along with this is the virtual partition: I created a 16TB partition over 8TB of storage. Should I start running low (I’m currently using 3.14TB, 2.28TB free), I can replace 2TB drives largely models (they claim to support up to 4TB). Newer models support either single or dual drive redundancy, and allow you to dynamically switch from dual to single.

The company’s been very good, too. I had some issues… over two years ago, and they were very responsive. Not a problem since. I think they run a bit more pricey than a basic RAID/JBOD box, but it’s worth it.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

RAID at the BIOS level would be just dandy, and fully transparent, to the OS in question, with no additional drivers needed… as long as that OS used the BIOS. However, the BIOS is basically a 16-bit real mode program… modern 32-bit and 64-bit OSs don’t access it after booting.

Linux has had built-in support for the Intel Matrix RAID since at least 2005, maybe earlier. It doesn’t let you make any changes, but it does support it, via MD-RAID and DM-RAID. FreeBSD also supports it out of the box.

Windows has had built-in support of Intel’s RAID since XP. Like much of what you find built into Windows, the drivers originate somewhere else (in this case, Intel).

And of course, MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, assuming other things don’t stop them, would also support this, since they actually do use the BIOS.

I prefer the BIOS/driver-level support anyway, because, as you say, it’s not specific to Windows, and it’s also not specific to NTFS. So I could use FAT32 (not sure why I’d want to) or XFS or ext4 on Linux, and read them in Windows, whoops… can’t do that, there are only ext2 drivers for Windows. Ok, maybe Linux and MacOS (not sure why I’d want that, either).

The other good reason is disc recovery. When your filesystem gets corrupted, repair/recover tools need to go below the file system, to the low-level driver, to fix things (I wrote one of the best disc repair/recovery tools for the AmigaOS… have not been interested in doing anything like that again for other people’s OSs). If you have an NTFS raid, that repair tool needs special knowledge of Windows RAIDs. If you’re using the driver-level RAID, it looks just like any other hard drive… so you’ll inherently have a better selection of repair tools.

So really, I have no problems with BIOS/driver-level RAID, I just like everyone to understand how things really work. True “hardware”
RAID does the full abstraction… my Drobo looks like any other gigantic Firewire or USB drive. This works with any OS that can handle partitions larger than 2TB; only the custom Drobo software knows the difference. Same would be true of any of the RAID cards that use a separate processor to run the RAID code.

What you give up is generality. A Drobo drive only works in a Drobo. If my hardware fails, I need to buy a new Drobo to get at the data. If you have a Windows NTFS RAID, any old Windows computer (same or later OS revision, at least) would be able to access that partition. If you’re using BIOS RAID, you probably need the same kind of motherboard controller. There could be standards I suppose (there weren’t, the last time I used BIOS/driver RAID), but it’s a safe bet that a drive stack on one Intel ICHxR controller will work on another.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m running an AMDx6 1090T, six core, 3.2GHz, 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM at whatever the maximum supported speed on the AM3 socket is these days. No overclocking.

This is a relatively cheap six core system, and I have no doubt that a sufficiently clocked 3-bus Intel will clobber it on many things, even a 4-core on some things. Though AMD does better on most rendering than it does on as an overall average, factoring in games and the other usual benchmark stuff. And for the price of one Xeon X5650 I could have bought four 1090Ts, and had beer money left over. The 1090T is still commodity prices, while the Xeons and higher-end i7s are still in the “performance at any price” category.

The x6 wasn’t a planned upgrade. My Q9550 motherboard died one morning, and I had enough work to do that I had to fix it that day. But it’s never good to simply replace what you had, when an upgrade doesn’t cost much more. Thus, the x6, which is substantially faster at rendering (all I care about, when it comes to CPU performance) than the Q9550. So it was ~$400 (CPU, MB, memory) well spent.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I’m running NeoScene 5.2.6 as well. I had not tried to load Cineform files since upgrading to 10b, but I just loaded up a bunch of them, no problems.

With that said, I’m still seeing Vegas 10 crash on any output in Cineform format, a problem I noted in 10a. This does not happen, ever, on the same system with Vegas 9.

-Dave