Editing off blu-ray

[roxics]

So lets say I wanted to take my 60D footage and transfer it to blu-ray so it can be playable in a blu-ray player. I set it at the highest bitrate blu-ray can handle. Can I then get rid of my original files and just keep the blu-ray and use it to edit with later on if I decide to? Will I lose any quality?

 

[Alex H.]

Yes, you will lose quality. You're putting the footage through compression to format it for Blu-Ray. To edit later, you'll have to transcode it back to a higher codec, and then compress it again for output.

The best thing to do is to archive you entire project on its own external HD, whichever one you use to edit (if you use externals to edit). I try to keep a separate drive for each project, and simply store that drive when I'm done. For the really important stuff, I buy a second drive (USB) and make a backup of the editing drive.

 

[roxics]

Yeah that's usually how I edit anyway. I've never made a blu-ray but I know it's H.264. So I was just kind of hoping the 60D footage could transfer over without encoding it again.

 

[Andrius Simutis]

It's a different flavor of H264, and it's more compressed.