to the people archiving HD to bluray: which BD-writer/media are you using??

Hi

Pioneer Blu-ray writers from 205 upwards support LTH, although these blanks I've yet to see, but essentially it's a way of making cheaper blank media.

You can use MultiAVCHD, a free application to create Blu-ray discs.

Regards

Phil

Of course it does. Ask the people who used Ritek or similarly low quality DVDs in the past... Make sure you always use quality discs. For DVD it's Taiyo Yuden for single layer and Verbatim for dual layer.

For Blu-Ray discs - I don't know but don't believe anybody who claims that a cheap disc is good. There's no such thing.

AVCHD discs burnt on standard recordable DVD are HD but not the same as BLU RAY,The best makes of recordable BD disc are VERBATIM followed by TDK and SONY IMO,i think its best to pay a bit more for -RW discs because if something goes wrong the disc can be written on again unlike -R discs.

Hi

Always go for good branded media from a reputable suppler so you don't get pirated brands.

A good investment is a BD-RE for testing as you can use this without fear of wasting a write once disc should it not work or be to your liking.

Regards

Phil

You do not have to transcode into inferior format to produce a valid BD. BD supports AVC, MPEG-2 Part 2 and VC1. AVCHD supports AVC only. BD supports everything that AVCHD has except AVCHD Progressive, which officially is not yet supported by BD.

Are you planning to distribute these BDs? If not, I would not convert precious 1080p60 into crappy 1080i30, but instead would buy a player that is capable of playing this format.

Is this an edited movie or you are archiving source clips? For an edited movie it does not make a lot of difference, you can always encode again. Still, I would prefer AVC @ 16 Mbit/s to MPEG-2 @ 25 Mbit/s. Also, such an AVC encode is legal to create an AVCHD disc. I wonder how long your movie is to justify using a 25 GB disc for it.

Also, early Vegas 10 versions limit AVC encode to 20 Mbit/s, later updates (either D or E) allow 26 Mbit/s for video, which gives total 28 Mbit/s for video+audio. I was able to encode 1080p60 at nominal 20 Mbit/s (actually, it spikes well above 30 Mbit/s at times, ask Steve Sebu), I burned it onto a DVD and was able to play such an AVCHD disc on different players with different level of success: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKEP70GGjjA


As I said, BD spec supports AVC encode. Most movies nowadays are encoded with either AVC or VC1, not with MPEG-2.

I hear you, you don't want to throw out the Denon. I have an oldish Samsung player with HQV chip in it, I hate to throw it away or to sell it for peanuts, but if it does not do what I want it to do (AVCHD discs, 1080p60) then what do I do? All it does well is playing BD discs, and even of those it does not play every disc, it is quite picky. At some point you just have to say goodbye to old stuff. I have a newer Panasonic player now, and even this one is not good enough: it does not play YouTube in HD, cannot frame it properly, it does not play Netflix at all, it stutters when playing 1080p60 from DVD, it does not like AVCHD-on-BD-as-BD, but for some weird reason plays AVCHD-on-BD-as-AVCHD. So I am about to buy a third one. Prices? The first one I bought used for $300 (originally sold for $1000), the second for $170, the third one will be for less than $100. This is the price of buying ahead of everyone else

Archiving usually means preserving as is, in the source format.


This is weird. I can select several bytes shy of 26 Mbit/s on Vegas 10.d when I use ".AVC" mode (I have to render audio separately). Also, why do you want to re-render if this is an archive of the original footage?

Pity you bought -R discs not -RE which are RW by the way, but any software worth its salt will make Blu Rays of the sorce material quality,i have made 68 on far from elaborate software.If you want a simple edit get all the clips on your time line then in make movie choose BLU RAY option for render,remember not to have more material than best quality Blu Ray will allow.

Why would not you drag the original clips to DVDA? Only because you want a single file? Why? For non-destructive cut/join you can use HD Writer or tsMuxer. The latter has an issue with audio sync, but this is solvable with additional tools.

No idea, really. I had the same problem with DVDA and turned to MultiAVCHD, which works. The problem with MultiAVCHD is that it does not allow more than 255 files and is quite slow when building the title.

Get Pinnacle ,click on the first of the captured clips press CTRL A wait for them to load then drag useing the first clip to your timeline they will all then load onto the time line,you can use as much of captured clips on your BD up to 1hr 57m on pinnacle at best quality other software may vary.

Avoid Sony BD burner at all cost

I have an older LG burner and whatever BD disks I can find. However, I don't generally use it for archiving off my AVCHD camcorder content. I will burn off raw files, but not for the express purpose of archive. The disks go off site and get stored elsewhere as a final backup.

Otherwise I have a RAID1 box with 8.5TB of room (for that and other stuff). With the cost of HDDs crashing, why would you put them soley on media that has not been around long enough to know if it will survive long term storage?

Seggers

MultiAVCHD uses tsMuxer behind the scenes, which may not be desirable for everyone, for example I noticed that most clips from my HDC-SD600 have -33ms or -34ms audio delay, but tsMuxer changes it to -3ms. Not a big deal for most cases, still I would prefer to burn unchanged files. I guess I will be returning to my old approach of taking full card backup, add/remove directories for BD compatibility, and burning it onto DVD or BD. It is much faster that going through pains of DVDA or MultiAVCHD.

This is what I used to do couple of years ago. Then I stopped doing that, I decided that I would accumulate 25GB worth of clips and burn them to BDs instead to minimize number of discs and to increase reliability (BDs, at least the non-LTH ones, use inorganic layer and have scratch protection). Turned out that MultiAVCHD cannot create more than 255 clips in one title, DVDA wants to re-encode sound, and other tools want the full directory structure, which I did not preserve. So I am back to square one :-)

I think of backing up 16GB cards onto 25GB BDs, I have no 32GB cards, but if I did I would try to use only about 24GB or so and back them up onto 25GB BDs. As for my 4GB and 8GB cards, they go onto single-layer and double-layer DVDs.

My older player did not play AVCHD, but could be tricked into playing sort of BD content on a DVD disc. For modern players fewer changes probably should be made.

Archiving critical data is banned @ my work (VERY LARGE COPORATION) due to unreliablity of optical media.

I do not trust burnt discs at all due to personal experience - worked perfectly just after burn, but just 24hrs later the disc was unreadable. A mate in IT ran a recorvery program for 48hrs, and reocvered about 60% of the data.

Anyhow, spinning dics are just about redundant. Nearly all my mates, family and people in my office, rip CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays etc direct to their media player drives - BEFORE they even use this material for the first time (my self included).

Yesterday I hired 6x 3D Blu-rays - the sales guy said 'you do know that these are overnight hire...? - I just smiled, all discks ripped to HDDs in a couple of hours, and returned the next day.

The point is, that after burning over 2000 optical discs of all types, I haven't burnt a single on for 2 years now - there is just NO NEED to.

I also use 2 identical HDDs for the photos and videos I produce - Seagate USB3 drives are currently the most reliable and fastest USB3.

Workflow
- move your SD files to the PC HDD asap
- delete all the obvious dodgy stuff or quickly rough cut out the junk (eg using the excellent, and FREE video cutter STREAMCLIP).
- move the rough cut files to a portable USB3 drive labelled MASTER
- copy the changes in your master drive to another identical SLAVE drive.
I use the excellent, and FREE, program SYNCBACK.

The MASTER drive stays in your bag, the SLAVE drive stays @ home connected to the media player, so my missus can watch the video and photos anytime on the TV.

If either drive is slolen, lost, or becomes faulty - so what !

I also carry a tiny media player in my bag if I am visiting a some one who may not yet have a media player.

Optical discs are no needed, or desired.

BTW - there is no need to recompress your original footage (ie reduce quality) as HDDs are dirt cheap.

I prefer one copy on an external HDD, another on an optical disc. I have 15-yr old CDs that are still perfectly readable.

Being someone who's worked in the authoring/duplication industry for 6 years I can say this; media Verbatim. Second only to (some) Taiyo Yuden. Burners, Pioneer - no question.