[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Kevin,

I’ve not burned that many Blu-ray discs, and they have all been 1080i material. Never tried burning SD video to a Blu-ray. That said, you’re not going to fill a 25GB disc with just 90 minutes of SD material.

First thing to remember is that Encore does not put the original .mov file to disc, so its size doesn’t matter. It’s going to transcode to a DVD-legal or Blu-ray legal format first. Meaning MPEG-2 or H.264 that fits the disc specifications.

When creating a DVD, the upper limit of video and audio combined is in the neighborhood of 9.8Mbps I believe. Doesn’t matter if only using 5 minutes of video, you can’t increase the data date. You’ll have a lot of empty disc.

So now on to Blu-ray. From Premiere, I tried an Export to “H.264 Blu-ray” format, and changed the settings to 720×480, and the top allowable data rate dropped from 35Mbps down to 12Mbps. So apparently 12Mbps is the highest possible data rate for SD material being burned to Blu-ray.

And there is a point of diminishing returns – meaning beyond 12Mbps, the SD material would not look any better encoded at higher data rates, 12Mbps is about as good as it can get. Full HD has 5x as many pixels as SD, with a top rate of 35Mbps, which is barely 3x the data rate of the SD, so that makes sense that the SD can’t get any better.

I’ve attached a screen shot of export settings showing that 12Mbps is the max allowable.

I recommend never transcoding your video with Encore. Meaning don’t feed it .mov or .avi or .mp4 files. Give it the “final” and legal format for the media being burned. So from Premiere, export using “MPEG-2 DVD”, “H.264 Blu-ray” or “MPEG-2 Blu-ray” as appropriate. What you output will be burned without further conversion/transcoding.

You may need to use a “bitrate calculator” to figure out the optimum data rate for the length of your movie to make sure it will fit the media being used. There are free ones online. For DVD, best to not approach max for best compatibility, don’t go above 7 or 8Mbps. A quick rule of thumb is 560/minutes = data rate for DVD. Use a calculator for Blu-ray.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Please try this – make a New > Color Matte, use a bright color

Drop that into sequence – does that have black edges?

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Any chance the black edges are on the Source clips themselves? Can you check them in QT player or something maybe? Otherwise, with 1920×1080 clips in a 1920×1080 sequence, I have no answer.

One more thought, were the clips shot as 1080 or maybe downsized from 2K or 4K?

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Another thought – I don’t know what percentage of your footage is SD and how much is HD. Perhaps you could edit as 16:9 SD? Considering that 4:3 displays have gone the way of the horse and buggy, going 16:9 for delivery might be a good choice!

There are tricks to make the 4:3 footage work in the 16:9 frame. One of course is to scale the 4:3 clip up until it fills the frame, eliminating the black side bars. The quality loss is not that bad. Of course, you may also need to slide the image down to avoid cutting off heads. Depending on content, this may not work for you as important parts of the image might be cropped.

Another option that I see all the time on the news and on documentaries and such, is to fill in the black bars area. Basically, put the 4:3 clip on V1 track, and Scale only the WIDTH, stretching it sideways to fill the 16:9 frame. Now add Gaussian Blur effect, adjust to taste. Now put the original 4:3 clip right above on V2. The sides that were black are now matching in color and content (clip below)! People are used to seeing this and as their eyes are focused on the center video, they really don’t notice the side bars the way they would if they were black. Works nice!

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

While dropping the 16:9 HD clips down to SD will of course give them “SD quality” those clips should look just as good as the 4:3 SD source material – they certainly should not look any worse.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Where are you viewing the issue – in the Program Monitor window? Or at Export? Screen shots of settings and issue are helpful.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

So what format/resolution are the video clips? I’m pretty sure they are not 1422×832 resolution 😉

You can right-click a video clip in the Project Bin and select Properties to see the specs.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi,

First issue I see is the Sequence resolution of 1422×832, while exporting as 720p (1280×720). Meaning you have some weird scaling going on between source and export which will degrade quality.

Are there video clips in your project, or is it all stills? What is the size of the stills? Might need to rethink the Sequence sizing and still sizes.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

You’ll need to decide if you want to deliver 4:3 SD video, or 16:9 HD video. If you wish to deliver HD, I would go with 720p25 since you will be upscaling the SD clips. The quality of SD will be softer when upscaling to HD, but 720p will be better than 1080p since you are not scaling up as much.

You will have to apply “Scale to Frame” on the SD clips in an HD sequence, or use Motion effect to scale them up to fill the frame.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

The clip may use Variable Frame Rate, which Premiere doesn’t like. Convert the file using HandBrake and then try in Premiere

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers