Making Blu-ray Discs from EX1 Footage (Test Results)

Hey Tom.

I think I am wrong about the 20,000kbps for AVCHD & Blu-ray.

I have since seen some larger numbers so I have to retract that statement.

Edius seemed to have a 20,000kbps limit in the encoding settings a version back so that is probably where that number came from.

It is frustrating that we can create these beautiful images and have to downsample most of the time to DVD to distribute it.

I really thought the Blu-ray players would have come down in price by now. But they have not moved very much over the last year or two for wider adoption.

One area you did not mention for HD viewing is the web. This is a space where having an HD camera really does show as the detail comes through & helps with with the compression and you can often get away with 720p.
 
According to this
http://www.emedialive.com/articles/readarticle.aspx?articleid=11397#iif

The maximum data rate for the primary stream on a BD is 40,000Kbps for both MPG2 & H.264.

Here at least players have been dropping steadily over the last few years, now they are down to around AU$300+ The problem remains that until there is a range of low cost movies the format is pushing the preverbial up hill. How can BR compete with DVD when, after a few weeks on the shelves, a new release DVD drops from AU$40 to AU$25 but the BR simply stays at it origonal $50 price (prices here only, not reflective of anywhere else). By the time the BR gets to about AU$35, the DVD is AU$20 or less...

Sony are their own worst enemy with BR. People really can't copy BR like they can DVD so they should be pushing the whole market to BR by making the BR the same if not cheaper than DVD to BUY.
 
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Is there any evidence to support that h.264 at the high end of it's bitrate is too complex for some set top players to decode?

I noticed my Sony BDP-S301 has difficulty with many portions of a recent BD title I created. It stutters on certain scenes and the stuttering doesn't stop until the next chapter.

I have also noticed that the editing workstation cannot smootly play the high bitrate h.264, but it can play lower bitrate h.264. 20mb/s plays smoothly on the PC, but 35mb/s plays a short time then freezes. This is off a 218mB/s RAID0 array that can sustain playback of uncompressed XDCam footage that I exported as Microsoft Uncompressed AVI and imported into Premiere for levels correction and further sub-100IRE filter effects. Thus, I think the complexity of the higher BR h.264 may be a problem for both PC and older BD players. I know my Sony player takes 2 minutes just to boot up, and it takes sometimes 7-8 minutes to load a commercial movie, so the CPU must be rather slow and maybe marginal for handling h.264. I'm going to try this disc on a friend's Samsung BDP-1600 this week and see if that plays smoothly or not.
 
basspig...can your encoding software encode VC-1? That seems to be the standard format for BluRay titles...not H.264. I don't encode BD-Rs yet so that's why I'm asking.
 
Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 has MPEG1, MPEG2, h.264, Flash, RealMedia, Windows Media, and Quicktime export only. I can't find anything referencing VC-1. Is it any better quality than h.264?

The problem I have with h.264 is that unless I crank the bitrate up to the maximum 35mb/s, I get mosquito noise artifacts around sharp edges that are in motion. I've seen this on commercial Blu-ray movies too, but if possible, I'd like to avoid this artifact.

It would be great if there were a way to determine the read rate of BD-R discs in specific players. That way I'd know if my Sony player were having a problem decoding or reading the disc.
 
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