Success Burning Long (37 Min) Blu-ray On Dvd

[Jeff in Tallahassee]

I have only a little experience with Toast and Blu-ray, but have been doing some experimenting and wanted to share a success (and maybe ask for feedback to see if it's "real").

 

I have Toast 10.0 Pro w/ Blu-ray plug in, and like the idea of burning high def movies on inexpensive blank DVDs. Plus, my MacPro (10.5.6; 2x2.8 GHz Intel, 6 GB RAM) doesn't have a Blu-ray burner! I have read in other materials that you could burn a nice Blu-ray movie on a DVD using Toast, but you had to stay under 20 min or so in length due to the large file sizes associated with HD.

 

I am shooting in AVCHD on a Canon HF11 compact camcorder at the FXP (17 MBps, 1920x1080) setting. I shot a few long clips and imported into FCE 4.0.1 with no editing. Then Exported my 37 min movie from FCE using the QuickTime movie setting (not self-contained). It wrote the audio & video files very quickly (only about 1 min) and created a small (410 MB) .mov file. I dragged this into Toast's Blu-ray video, and selected custom encoding (MPEG4, 15/17 MBps avg/max bit rate).

 

Toast took a while (about 1 1/4 hours) to encode & burn the DVD. Played it on my living room setup (50" plasma, Sony Blu-ray player) and it looks fantastic. I compared to plugging the camera directly into the TV, and you can't tell the difference. The DVD is only 4.01 GB, so I guess it could have held even a little more.

 

One caveat -- I recorded the clips just on a tripod, without a lot of motion. But wouldn't setting the Toast encoding settings manually make that a moot point? Anyway, just wondering where the 20 min rule of thumb came from and if I'm doing something wrong I don't realize. Thanks, Jeff

[sknis]

Yes, what you found is very real. With a low bitrate (5 Mbps) you can put as much as 2 hours of HD material onto a DVD.

 

At that point is it really high definition?

[Jeff in Tallahassee]

If anyone has experience with other bitrates, I would be appreciative if they would share their results. Frankly, I just guessed at the settings I tried (15 MBps avg; 17 max), but the results were good so I stuck with them.

 

Well, maybe it wasn't quite a total guess -- my camera was recording at 17 MBps, so I figured no need to go above that for the max, and then just reduce a little for the average.

 

How does the picture look at 5 MBps? Significantly better than something made with iDVD?

[revwally]

At that point is it really high definition?

 

It's far more a function of your encoder than the bitrate actually. I have a Hauppauge HD PVR USB-encoder that receives input from Component outputs. I can tell you that the quality of encodes from the HD PVR at low bitrates (as low as 3 or 4 Mbps) is as good as broadcast quality HD (at 720p). I hooked my Canon HF10 up to my HD PVR and even though the HD PVR used a lower bitrate (around 12 Mbps) it had a far superior encode to the built-in encoder on the HF10 running at 17 Mbps.

 

I've read about the "low bitrate HD lie" and while there's a lot of validity to it, bitrate doesn't tell the whole story.

 

As far as software encodes of 1080, I try and stay with 15 Mbps average if I'm burning an AVCHD disc because 18 Mbps is the max for AVCHD on DVD anyway.

[revwally]

Yes, what you found is very real. With a low bitrate (5 Mbps) you can put as much as 2 hours of HD material onto a DVD.

[sknis]

I have only a little experience with Toast and Blu-ray, but have been doing some experimenting and wanted to share a success (and maybe ask for feedback to see if it's "real").

 

I have Toast 10.0 Pro w/ Blu-ray plug in, and like the idea of burning high def movies on inexpensive blank DVDs. Plus, my MacPro (10.5.6; 2x2.8 GHz Intel, 6 GB RAM) doesn't have a Blu-ray burner! I have read in other materials that you could burn a nice Blu-ray movie on a DVD using Toast, but you had to stay under 20 min or so in length due to the large file sizes associated with HD.

 

I am shooting in AVCHD on a Canon HF11 compact camcorder at the FXP (17 MBps, 1920x1080) setting. I shot a few long clips and imported into FCE 4.0.1 with no editing. Then Exported my 37 min movie from FCE using the QuickTime movie setting (not self-contained). It wrote the audio & video files very quickly (only about 1 min) and created a small (410 MB) .mov file. I dragged this into Toast's Blu-ray video, and selected custom encoding (MPEG4, 15/17 MBps avg/max bit rate).

 

Toast took a while (about 1 1/4 hours) to encode & burn the DVD. Played it on my living room setup (50" plasma, Sony Blu-ray player) and it looks fantastic. I compared to plugging the camera directly into the TV, and you can't tell the difference. The DVD is only 4.01 GB, so I guess it could have held even a little more.

 

One caveat -- I recorded the clips just on a tripod, without a lot of motion. But wouldn't setting the Toast encoding settings manually make that a moot point? Anyway, just wondering where the 20 min rule of thumb came from and if I'm doing something wrong I don't realize. Thanks, Jeff

 

Coming from the PC side, you should be able to get about 40 minutes of high definition video on a AVCHD disc. That may vary depending on the quality setting.

 

BTW, the encoding is fast; with a PC, it could take much longer unless the video is already AVCHD compatible, then it becomes a pass through (smart encoding).