My First Attempt At REcording A Blu-Ray Movie

[tnw2933]

Today I received a new Lacie d2 Blu-ray recorder. This recorder is a firewire/USB 2.0 device that records to every disk format other than, of course, HD-DVD. It records to both 25 GB and 50 GB BD-RE and BD-R disks. I began my work with the Blu-ray drive by connecting it via firewire to my Core 2 Duo PC (2.67 GHZ) which is equipped with 4X250 GB 10K RPM Western Digital Raptor drives in a Raid 5 array giving a total array storage of about 420 GB. I tested the Lacie burner by using Nero Ultimate 7 Extended Edition to backup about 5 GB of files (with verification) to a 50 GB Panasonic Blu-ray dual layer disk. That all worked perfectly. The files were backed up to the Lacie with no problems and verified as well. I even checked and saw all the files in Windows Explorer.

 

I then purchased, downloaded and installed DVDit Pro HD. I planned to make my first Blu-ray DVD from a project shot on HDV and edited in Vegas 7d (the latest version of Vegas). I had previoulsy rendered this project out to a .m2t file for playback on my Sony FX1 HDV camcorder. I took this .m2t clip into Vegas and rendered it using the Bluprint template provided by Vegas. Audio was rendered as a Dolby Digital. ac3 file. The project is only 24 minutes in length. I then proceded to add the Bluprint rendered file and the .ac3 file to the assets for my first project in DVDit HD Pro. All went well, and in about one hours time I had my project finished and it checked out thoroughly in the Simulator. So far so, good, but read on.

 

I then selected "burn" in DVDit Pro HD, and the program proceded to transcode two audio files, brought the .m2v Bluprint rendered video file in without transcoding, created some .m2ts files, and finally sucessfully created a UDF image. Moments later, I had the following error message on my screen: "unexpected device sense code: %0-27240. I have no idea what this means or what to do about it. I had a new single layer 25 GB Sony- BD-RE in the Lacie drive and I know the Lacie Blu-ray dirve had previously worked fine with Nero's backup. Any ideas on what to do? I am, needless to say, quite disappointed.

 

Device Manager report the Lacie Blu-ray drive is enabled and working properly.

 

Tom

[tnw2933]

Scott,

 

Thank you for responding, and for your suggestions. Let me apologize if my comments in some parts of this thread above seem unduly negative. That is not my intention. DVDit Pro HD is a well thought out product at an excellent price point that allows me to create my own HD Blu-ray movies --pretty ammazing technology! My kudos to your programmers, and the problems I am having can and (I hope) will be solved by their future efforts. This is one reason why I am trying to be as specific as possible in describing problems I am encountering.

 

(1) I understood that DVDit Pro HD does not currently support the creation of dual layer BD-RE disks. However, I had read on this forum of one user who apparently succssfully burned to a single layer of a dual layer 50 GB Blu-ray disk. I tried it for that reason and becuase I only had one 25 GB Blu-ray BD-RE and I have five 50 GB BD-RE. I actually do not believe the failure of the 50 GB BD-RE to play back properly has anything to do with DVDit Pro HD, but rather is a problem with this first generation Sony BDP-S1 playing back dual layer BD-RE disks. I hope that if anyone has used the BDP-S1 to play back dual layer 50 GB BD-RE disks they will speak up.

 

(2) Your second suggestion is, I believe, right on the money. I don't think DVDit Pro HD will write to a new blank BD-RE disk. You should be able to confirm this by consulting people at Roxio. I believe the only reason I was able to burn the Pansonic 50 GB Blu-ray disk was that I had already burned some data to it using Nero. Thus Nero had carried out whatever preparation of the BD-RE that DVDit Pro HD requires. I believe that I can erase blank disks with Nero. I don't have Power Producer.

 

(3) All of my latest burns have, as stated above in this thread, been done from disk images prepared successfully in DVDit Pro HD. The disk images were all ceated just as you described. I quickly figured this out after you suggested it in your initial response.

 

Thank you agian for your help.

 

Tom

 

 

 

First off, I am glad you had success. That's good news. I am sorry you are having to do a two step process. Here are a few observations:

 

1) I am not sure our burning module in the release you bought supports BD-50 in any way. It certainly doesn't support it as a dual layer disc with a layer break. Could just have issues writing to that disc. You are the first person I have heard who has tried a BD-50 disc with the software.

 

2) I have heard of some people having to first erase some BD-RE discs on their systems before DVDit Pro HD can write to them. If you shipped with PowerDVD you may have shipped with PowerProducer as well and I am told that has a quick erase utility. Erase the 25GB disc and write it again directly from DVDit Pro HD and let us know what your results are. By the way, in the "Burn Disc" dialog of DVDit Pro HD, you can select "From Image" and burn from that ISO image you have on your hard drive.

[SS Scott]

Not sure why we are not recognizing the burner. Try outputting a Volume or an Image to hard drive and burning to disc from there. Also, try reinstalling the drivers for the burner.

 

Scott

[tnw2933]

Not sure why we are not recognizing the burner. Try outputting a Volume or an Image to hard drive and burning to disc from there. Also, try reinstalling the drivers for the burner.

 

Scott

 

 

Scott,

 

Thank you for responding.

 

Thre are no drivers required by or included with the Lacie d2 Blu-ray buner. It is a firewire 400/USB 2.0 device. It is recognized immediately by Windows XP when connected and appears as "enabled" and "working properly" in the Device manager. Furthermore, it worked perfectly backing up to a 50 GB Blu-ray disk about 5 GB of material and verifying the backup in Nero Backup.

 

I am not sure how to "output a volume or an Image" during the burn step in DVDit Pro HD, but I shall try and figure this out and carry out your suggestion.

 

One additonal item of information. When I was trying to prepare this very simple project for burning to Blu-ray disk in DVDit Pro HD, I had 8 seconds of black at the begnning of my one video clip. (I did this because I had prepared the file originally as an .mt2 file for archiving to HDV tape). Of course, this 8 seconds of black carried over in the Bluprint render in Vegas of the .m2t file. I wanted to trim the resulting file asset (an .m2v file) in DVDit Pro HD's Preview window by dragging the green slider in by 8 seconds, but the program would not let me drag either the green or red sliders and the timecode was greyed out. I do not know if this has any significance, but thought i would mention it. I solved the problem by making Chapter 2 occur just before the end of the black section and starting my movie at the Chapter 2 point.

 

Tom

[tnw2933]

Scott,

 

Thank you for responding.

 

Thre are no drivers required by or included with the Lacie d2 Blu-ray buner. It is a firewire 400/USB 2.0 device. It is recognized immediately by Windows XP when connected and appears as "enabled" and "working properly" in the Device manager. Furthermore, it worked perfectly backing up to a 50 GB Blu-ray disk about 5 GB of material and verifying the backup in Nero Backup.

 

I am not sure how to "output a volume or an Image" during the burn step in DVDit Pro HD, but I shall try and figure this out and carry out your suggestion.

 

One additonal item of information. When I was trying to prepare this very simple project for burning to Blu-ray disk in DVDit Pro HD, I had 8 seconds of black at the begnning of my one video clip. (I did this because I had prepared the file originally as an .mt2 file for archiving to HDV tape). Of course, this 8 seconds of black carried over in the Bluprint render in Vegas of the .m2t file. I wanted to trim the resulting file asset (an .m2v file) in DVDit Pro HD's Preview window by dragging the green slider in by 8 seconds, but the program would not let me drag either the green or red sliders and the timecode was greyed out. I do not know if this has any significance, but thought i would mention it. I solved the problem by making Chapter 2 occur just before the end of the black section and starting my movie at the Chapter 2 point.

 

Tom

 

I have identified one of my problems. The Lacie Blu-ray burner came bundled with Cyberlink's Power DVD which I installed right after installing DVDit Pro HD. I have no real use for Power DVD because the video card in my Pc does not support playback of Blu-ray disks and I have no intention of watching Blu-ray disks on my PC. I found that if I inserted the Panasonic 50 GB blu-ray disk (upon which I had already recorded 5 GB of data using Nero -- see above messages), then the burn of the Blu-ray disk would begin but almost immediately PowerDVD began loading and attempting to play the Blu-ray disk WHILE IT WAS BURNING !!! Of course, this caused the disk burn to fail and ultiimately I received the error message reported in my first message in this thread. I uninstalled PowerDVD and rebooted the PC, went into DVDit Pro HD and sucessfully burned the Pansonic 50 GB disk from an .iso disk image that I had earlier created in DVDitPro HD from this project. Yeah!!! (but more later about this 50 GB burn from DVDit Pro HD).

 

I then tried to do the same thing in DVDit Pro HD using a blank new Sony 25 GB Blu-ray disk. No luck! Each time I clicked on burn, I almost immediately got the "sense error message" cited in my first post in this thread. No burn to this disk -- not even for a second or two. After several attempts, I gave up on burning to this 25 GB Blu-ray disk from within DVDit Pro HD, and I closed the program, opened Nero Burning ROM from the Nero Ultimate 7 Extended software suite and sucessfully burned the .iso image created in DVDit Pro HD using Nero's Burning ROM program.

 

Now I had two Blu-ray disks (one 50 GB Panasonic and one Sony 25 GB) to try in my Sony BDP-S1 player running 1.55 software. First, I tried the 25 GB Sony disk. It played absolutely perfectly with beautiful color, excellent detail, no motion artifacts, etc. Note that I am viewing the output of my BDP-S! on a Sony VPL-VW100 (LOCOS) front projector displaying its image on a 96 in. (diagonal) Stewart StudioTek screen. The Blu-ray really looked nice! Now for the 50 GB Pansonic blu-ray disk. This disk burned from within DVDit Pro HD, loaded and played in the Sony BDP-S1 but it showed droped video frames and fractional second gaps in the audio every few seconds. It was not acceptable!

 

I brought the Pansonic 50 GB Blu-ray disk back to my PC, and I used Nero Burning ROM to burn the disk image created in DVDit Pro HD (just as I had done for the Sony 25 GB Blu-ray disk). I tried the Pansonic Blu-ray disk in my BDP-S1 and it played perfectly -- no audio or video freezes or pauses, no artifacts, and looked great.

 

The Lacie d2 Blu-ray drive is, it turns out a Matshita BD-MLT SW-5582 drive in disguise. Lacie has increased the cache size to 8 MB and equipped the drive to run under firewire 400 or USB 2.0.

 

Conclusions: DVDit Pro HD's burning feature has real problems. These sense error messages should not be occurring. Momentary freezes of the video and gaps in the audio should not be produced. Roxio has further work to do for this program to be ready for prime time. I do like the features, the workflow, and the overall layout of the program.

 

I have detailed my results for comments from all. Please feel free to disagree with anything I have said. Remember, these are only my observations on my system and your mileage may vary.

 

Scott, I would especially like a response from you, a Roxio staff member, to the above observations.

 

Tom

[tnw2933]

I have to correct one of the observations in my previous post. I have now watched my entire 24 minute movie on the Panasonic Blu-ray 50 GB dual layer disk. It is perfect for the first 15 minutes or so, and then every 3-9 seconds (not occurring with regular periodicity but apparently randomly) the video freezes for a fraction of a second and the audio drops out for a fraction of a second. This occurs all the way through the remainder of the movie.

 

In as much as Nero verified the data burned to this 50 GB disk, I believe the problem is that the Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray player is not reading the dual layer 50 GB disk well. The data stream is being interrupted for fractions of a second as the player either buffers new data or reestablishes synch with the data stream. This is causing the video and audio problems. Conclusion: For the moment 50 GB dual layer disks cannot be used for preparing and playback of movies with the BDP-S1.

 

I would be interested to learn if any other owner of the BDP-S1 running under 1.55 version firmware has noticed this problem with Blu-ray dual layer disks that they have created in DVDit Pro HD or Nero.

 

Tom

 

 

I have identified one of my problems. The Lacie Blu-ray burner came bundled with Cyberlink's Power DVD which I installed right after installing DVDit Pro HD. I have no real use for Power DVD because the video card in my Pc does not support playback of Blu-ray disks and I have no intention of watching Blu-ray disks on my PC. I found that if I inserted the Panasonic 50 GB blu-ray disk (upon which I had already recorded 5 GB of data using Nero -- see above messages), then the burn of the Blu-ray disk would begin but almost immediately PowerDVD began loading and attempting to play the Blu-ray disk WHILE IT WAS BURNING !!! Of course, this caused the disk burn to fail and ultiimately I received the error message reported in my first message in this thread. I uninstalled PowerDVD and rebooted the PC, went into DVDit Pro HD and sucessfully burned the Pansonic 50 GB disk from an .iso disk image that I had earlier created in DVDitPro HD from this project. Yeah!!! (but more later about this 50 GB burn from DVDit Pro HD).

 

I then tried to do the same thing in DVDit Pro HD using a blank new Sony 25 GB Blu-ray disk. No luck! Each time I clicked on burn, I almost immediately got the "sense error message" cited in my first post in this thread. No burn to this disk -- not even for a second or two. After several attempts, I gave up on burning to this 25 GB Blu-ray disk from within DVDit Pro HD, and I closed the program, opened Nero Burning ROM from the Nero Ultimate 7 Extended software suite and sucessfully burned the .iso image created in DVDit Pro HD using Nero's Burning ROM program.

 

Now I had two Blu-ray disks (one 50 GB Panasonic and one Sony 25 GB) to try in my Sony BDP-S1 player running 1.55 software. First, I tried the 25 GB Sony disk. It played absolutely perfectly with beautiful color, excellent detail, no motion artifacts, etc. Note that I am viewing the output of my BDP-S! on a Sony VPL-VW100 (LOCOS) front projector displaying its image on a 96 in. (diagonal) Stewart StudioTek screen. The Blu-ray really looked nice! Now for the 50 GB Pansonic blu-ray disk. This disk burned from within DVDit Pro HD, loaded and played in the Sony BDP-S1 but it showed droped video frames and fractional second gaps in the audio every few seconds. It was not acceptable!

 

I brought the Pansonic 50 GB Blu-ray disk back to my PC, and I used Nero Burning ROM to burn the disk image created in DVDit Pro HD (just as I had done for the Sony 25 GB Blu-ray disk). I tried the Pansonic Blu-ray disk in my BDP-S1 and it played perfectly -- no audio or video freezes or pauses, no artifacts, and looked great.

 

The Lacie d2 Blu-ray drive is, it turns out a Matshita BD-MLT SW-5582 drive in disguise. Lacie has increased the cache size to 8 MB and equipped the drive to run under firewire 400 or USB 2.0.

 

Conclusions: DVDit Pro HD's burning feature has real problems. These sense error messages should not be occurring. Momentary freezes of the video and gaps in the audio should not be produced. Roxio has further work to do for this program to be ready for prime time. I do like the features, the workflow, and the overall layout of the program.

 

I have detailed my results for comments from all. Please feel free to disagree with anything I have said. Remember, these are only my observations on my system and your mileage may vary.

 

Scott, I would especially like a response from you, a Roxio staff member, to the above observations.

 

Tom

[SS Scott]

First off, I am glad you had success. That's good news. I am sorry you are having to do a two step process. Here are a few observations:

 

1) I am not sure our burning module in the release you bought supports BD-50 in any way. It certainly doesn't support it as a dual layer disc with a layer break. Could just have issues writing to that disc. You are the first person I have heard who has tried a BD-50 disc with the software.

 

2) I have heard of some people having to first erase some BD-RE discs on their systems before DVDit Pro HD can write to them. If you shipped with PowerDVD you may have shipped with PowerProducer as well and I am told that has a quick erase utility. Erase the 25GB disc and write it again directly from DVDit Pro HD and let us know what your results are. By the way, in the "Burn Disc" dialog of DVDit Pro HD, you can select "From Image" and burn from that ISO image you have on your hard drive.