I'm new to this forum, and I've just purchased DVDit Pro HD. I've seen the flash demo that states I can burn blu ray and SD dvds from the same project. What is the procedure for this? I've looked through the manual but can't find anything about how this can be done.

Logic tells me I would need to import HD assets first, then burn Blu ray. But how would I get an SD disc from the same files?
thanks!

when you finish your project and select "burn" you have the option of Blu-ray Disc or DVD. if you choose Blu-ray it will output a Blu-ray disc, volume or image that has video the same size as your HD input, if you choose DVD it will reduce (transcode) the size of your HD assets to SD DVD size.

Thanks Scott! Sounds logical, but I've encountered problems along the way. First, when I import my .mv2 and .ac3 assets, it takes about 4 minutes for it to load. Is this normal? My HD project was 2 hours 15 minutes long.

As I'm scrubbing through the timeline to insert chapter points, the program crashes quite frequently (like every 10 minutes or so.) Anyone else exeriencing this?

My project contains motion menus. Finished project had 435megs of free space available for Blu ray. I've successfully written a volume, saved on my hard drive. However, when I tried to burn a BR-RE from it, I get an error message after about 10 minutes: AS-Storage error-97011. Same message appears when I tried to burn directly from current project. Why is this happening? My :V hard drive is 1Terabyte, with 300 gigs free. My :C drive has 34gigs free, running Windows XP SP2.

Lastly, I successfully burned an SD dvd from the current project. However, the resulting dvd doesn't play back in 1 of my 4 players. The other 3 plays fine. Why wouldn't it load at all in that one player? I'm using Verbatim media and never had problems prior. DVD was burned 8x although the media can handle 16x. With my previous DVD authoring program, the dvd played back fine in all 4 machines.

Any solutions to these problems?
Thanks!

One of the features of DVDit Pro HD is just that: create one authoring project and use it for HD or SD output.

I wouldn't advise you to do it, since the software must perform a downres procedure to convert your 1920x1080 source file into a 720x480 video.
From my tests, it seems that when DVDit Pro HD performs this video processing, there is a de-interlace procedure which leaves the video with some sort of "trail"...
I used 59.94i source material, and proper downres should separate the fields prior this sort of procedure. Of course, this takes longer and is more CPU intensive than just take the whole frame and scale it down to 720x480, mixing the fields.

If you can, perform the downres procedure before entering DVDit Pro HD, and author your project twice.

I know, it's dumb, but at least you get quality.



Yep... I am.

6.4 has newer versions of the encoders. have you tried that "downres" with 6.4, Mbofleur?

Yes... That's the version I'm using. I'm not familiar with the internals of DVDit Pro, but I presume there is some part of it responsible for up and dowres procedures - and then the encoder part (which is the new version you mention).

I downloaded 6.4 (latest version) and tried to burn my project again...this time successfully! It looks like upgrading to 6.4 (latest version) took care of all my problems. I also let 6.4 downrez my BD project and was pleasantly surprised how good it came out. So now I can successfully create both BD and SD dvds from the same project using motion menus with no problems. In a nutshell, here is how it was done:

1. From a 1440x1080 .m2t hdv file, I rendered a 1440x1080 .m2v elementary stream, as well as an .ac3 audio file using TMPGEnc.
2. Created BD project with motion menus and made sure the menus were under 1 gig. I kept my total project on disc under 23 gigs.
3. "Burned" BDAV blu ray folder as archive to be burned to BD later.
4. From the same open project, I changed the SD transcoding settings to keep the SD dvd under 4.3gigs total.
5. "Burned VIDEO_TS folder as archive to be burned to SD dvd later.

Tried burning BDAV, as well as VIDEO_TS. Everything works!

I archive both high def and standard def versions on a removable hard drive, and can easily burn whatever version the customer requires.
If there are any shortcuts to my workflow, please let me know as I did it this way via trial and error.

Thanks Scott for guiding me in the right direction!