Burning a Blu-ray format disk on a DVD in HD

BobDiaz

BobDiaz

The Professor
Burning a Blu-ray format disk on a DVD in HD

I recently upgraded my MAC's software from Toast 9 to Toast 10 Pro and started burning Blu-ray format disks onto DVDs. The end result is a disk that plays in a Blu-ray player in HD, but does not require a Blu-ray burner to create; a regular DVD burner works nicely.

The process of generating the disk is VERY easy and about the only bad part is the LONG render times. However, until I can afford a Blu-ray burner, this seems to be a reasonable approach to generating HD Disks.

A 4.7GB SL (Single Layer) and an 8.5GB DL (Double Layer) DVD is no match for a 25GB SL or a 50 GB DL Blu-ray disk, but even with the lower storage, both the SL and DL DVDs do provide enough time for short videos. The time varies depending on the compression ratio, but for the different bit rates, you can expect roughly the following times:

4.7 GB SL DVD:
25 Mbps = 22 minutes
20 Mbps = 28 minutes
18 Mbps = 31 minutes
16 Mbps = 35 minutes
14 Mbps = 40 minutes

8.5 GB DL DVD:
25 Mbps = 43 minutes
20 Mbps = 53 minutes
18 Mbps = 59 minutes
16 Mbps = 67 minutes
14 Mbps = 76 minutes

There is going to be some debate as to how low one can go as far as bit rate and still maintain some sort of reasonable quality. The type of video, resolution, frame rate and personal preference will dictate the lowest limit. I feel comfortable with 20 Mbps to 25 Mbps bit rate for all resolutions and frame rates. In general, about 30 minutes is the practical limit for a SL DVD and 60 minutes for a DL DVD, but using 720p, reduced frame rates, and limited movement in the video may allow you to go beyond the 30 and 60 minute limits. For example, a 720/24p or 30p video with limited action may be able to use a bit rate of 14 Mbps and still look good.

If anyone is doing this on a PC, I'd love for you to post information as to what software you are using and what you have found. As for other MAC users using doing this I'd love for you to post your experiences and feelings as to what you think.


Bob Diaz


 
Bob, I have been doing this for a while. Technically what you are making is an AVCHD disc. This was possible starting in toast 9 I believe. Basically, you are burning HD material to disc that can only be read by Blue laser machines. Back in the day, I would make both AVCHD discs for blu-ray players and also for HD DVD players. DVD studio Pro allows one to make HD DVD discs, playable only in HD DVD players and Mac computers using Apple's DVD software. Toast 9 also allowed to make HD DVD discs, as well. I was kind of mad when they took that out in Toast 10, as I now have to export the sequence to compressor and author in DVD studio Pro, where as toast 9 could do all that stuff for both blu-ray and hd dvd with one Pro Res file.
I have a blu-ray burner and have made some test discs with the same pro res file, both to blank blu-ray and AVCHD and I honestly can't tell a difference in terms of quality. To me, if my project is under 30 minutes, I'll make an AVCHD disc, and save on the cost of blank blu-ray media.
 
To me, it seems like when we reach around 20 Mbps, the chances of encountering compression noise are very slim. Thus, we enter a point known as "Transparency". This is the point, where one really can't tell the difference between an uncompressed source and a compressed source.

I'm sure that if you did a pause and walked up close, there's a difference, but in normal viewing, it's not possible to tell.

This does appear to be a simple low cost solution for short HD videos and I thought it worth the trouble of pointing it out for those who didn't know. :banned:


Bob Diaz
 
Freeware to do this on a PC:

1) If your source material is raw clips off the camera, with directory structure intact, simply burn the AVCHD directory to DVD using ImageBurn, specifying UDF 2.50 as the file format. The UDF setting is on the 'Options' tab while in Write mode. http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download

2) If your source is an edited, BluRay-compliant clip, you can recreate the necessary directory structure, and (optionally) create a menu, using multiAVCHD. Burn the resulting AVCHD folder to DVD using ImageBurn, as above. multiAVCHD also has options to put your edited clips back onto SD cards, if you have a BlueRay player that can read cards directly.
http://multiavchd.deanbg.com/
 
Thanks for posting this Bob.

We do this regularly with our Mac setup using Matrox Compress HD.

Really a nice way to see AVCHD on our Panasonic Bluray set top
 
Can anyone help me?
How to burn blue ray disc



MOD: The link was removed, it had NOTHING to do with burning a Blu-ray disk, most likely SPAM.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
i don't have Toast 10, but i do have final cut pro 3. is there any way i can do this without purchasing Toast 10? or are there any free programs out there?
 
If you want to remain AVCHD compliant (so these DVDs play on most Blu-Ray players), you need to keep the average bitrate below 18Mb/s, which is the limit on DVD-based AVCHD. If you don't care, and just want these around for play on a PC or maybe a PS3, the bitrate isn't much of an issue.

Most AVC camcorders are recording in a standard AVCHD file system. So as long as you're shooting in 17Mb/s mode or below, you can drag the directory structure from an AVCHD camcorder's storage directly onto a DVD, and it'll be recognized and played by most Blu-Ray players, or Blu-Ray software on a PC.
 
bradywurtz said:
i don't have Toast 10, but i do have final cut pro 3. is there any way i can do this without purchasing Toast 10? or are there any free programs out there?
Click to expand...

Do you mean Final Cut Studio 3 or Final Cut Pro 3?

If it is the former, Compressor 3.5 will burn single track AVCHD discs with a simple menu.
 
I've been doing this through Compressor, works real well, good for small projects or sample footage. I'm getting a new Mac Pro shortly and thinking about putting a Blu-Ray burner into it, though any real authoring will require Adobe Encore, might hold off on this addition till the next Final Studio is released with hope Steve Jobs takes his head out of his @ss and supports Blu-Ray fully.
 
Encore CS3/4/5, Toast 9/10, and Compressor 3.5 all support blu ray authoring and burning on a Mac currently.

If you have clients willing to pay for blu ray discs, you have solutions now.

There no indications when a new release of FCS will occur, and what it may or may not contain.
 
I have not burned any blu-ray based DVD's but I have created some HD-DVD on DVD discs with Final Cut Studio. Yes I still have a HD-DVD player which works perfectly. I cannot buy new movies for it but it is one heck of an awesome upscaling DVD player and it works really well as a short run HD media player.

Anyway the higher bitrates of 25 or 30 mbits are usually for mpeg2 based HD-DVD's. AVCHD is usually much lower and I have seen amazing results with 6 to 9 mbits. Of course it may not be as clean as the original but neither is a 4.5 mbit 2 hour DVD compared to a DVCAM master. In fact I would say without a doubt that a 9 mbit AVCHD disc would blow away a 4.5 mbit DVD even when just talking about artifacts. Of course I am talking about 24p material and not so much 60i which may vary a bit.

Keep in mind that Apple movie trailers never go above 9 mbits and they can look amazing. A disc doesn't have to look exactly like the original. That is why it is a deliverable. DVD's always made use of variable bitrate encoding to help compensate for disc space and there is no reason why the same rules cannot apply towards HD material. A AVCHD disc with 9 mbits average and 18 max is enough to fit a lot of extra video but with an extra bit of padding for those scenes that really need it.
 
A disc doesn't have to look exactly like the original. That is why it is a deliverable
Click to expand...
im not really sure what you mean by this... a "deliverable" is defined as what the client expects as the final product. and YES. it needs to be as close to the "original" as possible. if it isnt the actual "original"
 
I was tooling around with DVD Studio Pro the other day using their high definition setting and I ended up creating a Disc that could play in a regular DVD player but would also play an HD version when you played it back on a Mac. I thought this was pretty neat as someone like my mom who has a little macbook can watch it with a regular DVD player on her big SD TV then on the macbook in HD. I think it was an HD-DVD disc that I created? Seems like a nice feature and I wonder if a AVCHD / Blu-ray burn has this ability??
 
wgzn said:
im not really sure what you mean by this... a "deliverable" is defined as what the client expects as the final product. and YES. it needs to be as close to the "original" as possible. if it isnt the actual "original"
Click to expand...

Were DVD's perfect copies of a DVCAM master? A deliverable means just that a version you can mass produce and deliver to customers. That does not have to mean an exact copy of the master. In fact outside of HD cameras today and Blu-ray, deliverables were hardly ever equal to the master. Heck even Hollywood Blu-rays that use H264 sometimes don't even use anywhere near the max bitrate and some of them I have seen were around 12 mbits/s.

Is 25 mbit AVCHD better then 10 mbit AVCHD? sure of course it is but my point is that I don't think people are going to notice as much as we think.

If your aim is really to deliver the exact file as your master then you shouldn't even really consider AVCHD discs and just buy a blu-ray burner.
 
thabo said:
I was tooling around with DVD Studio Pro the other day using their high definition setting and I ended up creating a Disc that could play in a regular DVD player but would also play an HD version when you played it back on a Mac. I thought this was pretty neat as someone like my mom who has a little macbook can watch it with a regular DVD player on her big SD TV then on the macbook in HD. I think it was an HD-DVD disc that I created? Seems like a nice feature and I wonder if a AVCHD / Blu-ray burn has this ability??
Click to expand...

Long before Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and AVCHD, I used to make WMV/HD discs. This was a weird format Microsoft invented, for an HD-on-red-laser-disc HD format. They never had support tools for it -- I had to manually author the HTML and Javascript needed to implement their spec. But it was not only recognized by most Windows PCs, but also a small number of advanced DVD players at the time. There was little commercial support -- some of the IMAX films showed up on WMV/HD, and much of the stuff produced by HD-Net.

The big advantage for my own short videos -- this was a bog standard DVD format, so I could put both WMV/HD and DVD file structures on a disc, and it was happy to play HD in my IOData AVeL Linkplayer 2 DVD player, regular DVD most everywhere else.

This is a technical problem with AVCHD. It's good to know, too, that while AVCHD is derived from Blu-Ray, the structures are not 100% identical. You can make a true Blu-Ray on DVD using Sony Vegas, but many players will reject it. AVCHD is supported by nearly every Blu-Ray player, because it's also a camcorder format. For fully compliance, you have to use 18Mb/s or less video, and you have to use the UDF 2.5 file system.

That last one is a kicker -- regular DVD players and older PCs don't understand UDF 2.5. You can make a unified disc on the UDF 1.02 file system used by regular DVD players and be sure that the DVD portion will play, but it may be rejected by some Blu-Ray players. There's probably no good reason it should ... most of the important stuff in UDF 2.x was added to deal with video recording issues. But it's even possible the Blu-Ray player firmware does a file system check before it checks what's on the disc. On the other hand, many of the newer Blu-Ray players are just fine playing AVCHD file structures from FAT32 on a USB stick or SD card, so I'm not really sure how much of a real problem this is. You have to think differently when the question is "for my personal use" versus "client delivery medium". I would only make Blu-Rays for clients (which I in fact do... got my BD writer the month after Blu-Ray won the format war, February 2008).

Keep in mind, in all of these, a "video" DVD is a just a data disc with the right files in the righ places.. unlike CD, there's no magic formats to worry about.
 
Thomas Smet said:
Were DVD's perfect copies of a DVCAM master? A deliverable means just that a version you can mass produce and deliver to customers. That does not have to mean an exact copy of the master. In fact outside of HD cameras today and Blu-ray, deliverables were hardly ever equal to the master. Heck even Hollywood Blu-rays that use H264 sometimes don't even use anywhere near the max bitrate and some of them I have seen were around 12 mbits/s.

Is 25 mbit AVCHD better then 10 mbit AVCHD? sure of course it is but my point is that I don't think people are going to notice as much as we think.

If your aim is really to deliver the exact file as your master then you shouldn't even really consider AVCHD discs and just buy a blu-ray burner.
Click to expand...
Deliverables mean the items you are contractually obligated to deliver to a client. Depending on the project, that could include DVDs, HDCAM SR masters, or a 35 mm film print.

The client will take the deliverables and turn them into whatever format they plan to deliver the content.
 
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