Hi Chaps,

I've not been around much recently, so when the question of what software to use for making BluRay discs came up the other day, I thought I'd better search the archives first. I found several threads on the subject, but all a year old, or more. Most people at that stage were recommending DVDit Pro HD, though there were one or two mentions of Adobe Encore and one recommendation for the TMpgEnc authoring program. Surprisingly, I didn't find any mention of Studio as an alternative for BluRay production.

Anyway, my question is, how have things moved on in the mean time? What new programs, or new versions, have appeared in the last year or so and are they recommended?

(I was hoping that Media Chance, the makers of DVD-Lab which I've used for DVDs for several years, would come up with a BluRay offering, but no sign of such a thing yet.) 

Thanks in advance.

TMPGEnc Authoring works is an 80 dollar app that doesn´t reencode fused files from a Liquid standard hdv timeline and also creates bd popup menus, they have a trial.

You know Tomas this is a pretty impressive program for Blu-ray authoring.  I have not downloaded yet but from what I can tell it is a pretty solid program.  It seems to be able to handle a good chunk of the basic authoring specs.  There are of course some advanced features I would have liked to see such as sub picture delay but the features seem to be on par with what Liquid can do for authoring.

I noticed it can only do Blu-ray with mpeg2 and not AVC.  Not a huge deal for most people since AVC is so slow.  Mpeg2 also offers a pretty solid work flow from Liquid since it can naively fuse your video track at very fats speeds.  On a good two drive raid-0 I have fused a 60 minute HDV project in under fifteen minutes.  That's not bad to get a raw file to use for Blu-ray authoring.

Tomas have you found any decent work flows with the Tmpenc authoring program for 5.1 audio from Liquid?  I recently heard a person on here mention exporting from Liquid a 5.1 channel Windows media audio file in order to get 5.1 channels of audio from Liquid.  Would this work to import into the authoring program and transcode into Dolby 5.1?

The menu system seems pretty flexible as well.  You can even add your own button graphics from Photoshop for endless creative options.  For those on a tight budget Gimp should work well for this as well.

With this $99.00 software and software such as gimp to make button graphics I just don't understand how anybody could think Liquid doesn't have a good work flow for Blu-ray authoring.  Liquid may not have a direct project frame serving feed into the authoring program but Liquid does have fusing which is a very fast process.  Just think it would actually be faster to make a Blu-ray from a HDV project in Liquid then it would be to make a internal DVD with Liquid.  When you make a DVD from a HDV project in Liquid you have to encode which can be pretty slow in Liquid.  For Blu-ray authoring however you don't need to encode at all.  Very nice.  Now if I actually did any Blu-ray discs this would be pretty cool.  I would try it out at work but we already have 3 blu-ray authoring programs and I doubt we would really have the need for another one.

I have found that TmpGe makes excellent use of all 4 cores on my AMD 940, running at 90+%  for BD mpeg compliant. It also does great SD DVDs from my 30F HDV fused Liquid files.When chosing the progressive encode option, the DVD quality far exceeds what Liquid does with HDV to DVD.

For me, even more impressive is the DVD audio support for 48khz/ 96khz/24bit pcm. 

BD and BD-RE can be burned from the same image, conversly, DVDitHD creates seperate images for BD and BD-RE in the .gi format, a time penalty. 

The only thing that could be called a minus with AW4 is that at the start of the project you must decide wether it will be a DVD OR BD.

DVDitHD will allow you to chose either option at compile/burn time.

I was an early adopter of DVDitHD, but Roxio(Sonic) has done little with the App in 2 years, and the forums are all but deserted.

I recommended TmpGe AW4 to a few members in our "circle" and the reviews have been mainly positive.

Perhaps for the nGen, Pinnacle should consider bundling this app, much as Avid packages DVDitHD with MC. 

 

You know Tomas this is a pretty impressive program for Blu-ray authoring.  I have not downloaded yet but from what I can tell it is a pretty solid program.  It seems to be able to handle a good chunk of the basic authoring specs.  There are of course some advanced features I would have liked to see such as sub picture delay but the features seem to be on par with what Liquid can do for authoring.

Yes, I really like it, and if you mean with the sub picture delay that you can have another view as a slightly later one as just after a transition when using animated buttons this can be done, both with the main menu and the popup menu ( for bd ) I just made made one yesterday.

I noticed it can only do Blu-ray with mpeg2 and not AVC.  Not a huge deal for most people since AVC is so slow

Yes, I did a test with Encore CS3 a while ago, took 27 hours or something to create an AVC disc image, length one hour, from a QT ref DNxHD.

  On a good two drive raid-0 I have fused a 60 minute HDV project in under fifteen minutes.  That's not bad to get a raw file to use for Blu-ray authoring.

Yes, and I made a test yesterday, creating a one hour bd folder from a readyencoded file with 2 pages of animated buttons ( that took most of the encoding time ) took totally 8 minutes.

Tomas have you found any decent work flows with the Tmpenc authoring program for 5.1 audio from Liquid?  I recently heard a person on here mention exporting from Liquid a 5.1 channel Windows media audio file in order to get 5.1 channels of audio from Liquid.  Would this work to import into the authoring program and transcode into Dolby 5.1?

I leave all the 5.1 testing, with great confidence, to John

With this $99.00 software and software such as gimp to make button graphics I just don't understand how anybody could think Liquid doesn't have a good work flow for Blu-ray authoring.  Liquid may not have a direct project frame serving feed into the authoring program but Liquid does have fusing which is a very fast process.  Just think it would actually be faster to make a Blu-ray from a HDV project in Liquid then it would be to make a internal DVD with Liquid.  When you make a DVD from a HDV project in Liquid you have to encode which can be pretty slow in Liquid.  For Blu-ray authoring however you don't need to encode at all.  Very nice

Fully agree, Thomas, and they have a - 20 dollar campaign currently, don´t know for how much longer or maybe it have ended recently. This is the first bd creating app ever that supports Liquids standard fused hdv files without reencoding them.

I was an early adopter of DVDitHD, but Roxio(Sonic) has done little with the App in 2 years, and the forums are all but deserted.

I recommended TmpGe AW4 to a few members in our "circle" and the reviews have been mainly positive.

Perhaps for the nGen, Pinnacle should consider bundling this app, much as Avid packages DVDitHD with MC. 

Fully agree to this also John and many thanks for telling me about this app.

 

Helping each other is one of the often forgotten aspects of this forum...

 It is unfortunate that Media Chance has not chosen to extend their efforts into the BD area, as such, while I have the program, it is now unused, also, they have not gone anywhere with the NLE they picked up, too bad, it showed some promise.

I've often wondered why Avid did not take the BD work done with Studio 11&12 and apply the efforts to Liquid. I'm not sure why, but Studio has nowhere near the stability we are so accustomed to in Liquid. It has frozen on me on several pc's I've tried it on.

So far, AW4 seems quite stable. 

Another option that works well with Liquid is a free program called TSmuxer.  With TSmuxer you can load fused m2v and audio files and it will mux them together into a Blu-ray folder structure.  You then burn to a BD disc with a burning program that supports BD burning and you have a video and audio only BD disc.  You can add custom chapters and subtitles but that's about it.  That chapter timecode also has to be added manually which could be a pain.  It should work with 25 mbit HDV, 35 mbit EX1 material and AVCHD video if you want to spend the time encoding it.  You of course have to encode the video yourself but fused m2v from Liquid should work perfectly.

For free it should work very well for Liquid users who just want to be able to give HD video to their clients.  Your clients will still have chapters but no menus.  This at least fills a good chunk of the BD authoring gap in Liquid for no extra money at all.  If you really need menus and a little bit easier to use software for setting chapters then just bump up to the $99.00 BD authoring program mentioned before.

I have not tested it but I think the open source program Imageburn can burn BD folders to a BD disc.  Does anybody with a BD burner and player want to give this a try?

Tomas, looks interesting- is smlabs the home portal?

Thanks everyone, TMpgEnc AW4 has just gone to the top of my shortlist. $99 for a program that doesn't need to re-encode a standard output file from AL7.2 sounds like just the sort of thing I want. I also like the sound of making DVDs from the same "master" that look better than those created within Liquid.

Just one thing. You all mention "fusing" the timeline to produce the 25Mbps m2v files. When I installed AL7.2, I went for the more "modern" Windows/Menu appearence, and I don't think I know where to find "Fuse" in the new menus. Is it the same as the "File; Export To File; MPEG2"?

Thanks.

File>Export to file>Fuse

I have to say, I made some comparing tests yesterday and I cannot see the difference between a fused 25 mbps file created by Liquid and a 2 pass encoded file created with adobe mediaencoder from a DNxHD 185x Media Composer file when watched as a bd disc with my PS3 on my bigscreen.

Tomas,

That is in interesting statement. Isn't the purpose of the multipass encoding to render the video to a higher level of quality?

Denny

If you start from HDV footage however it will never be any better no matter what intermediate format you convert to.  DNxHD may be easier to edit and may maintain the level of quality through multiple generations but it doesn't make HDV better then HDV.  In Liquid the fuse process dumps your raw video data so there is no second generation at all.  In fact sections of your video that have no effects at all will end up being a pixel perfect match on your Blu-ray to what was on your HDV tape.  That is the under rated beauty of the Fuse process in Liquid.  This single process alone makes Liquid in some ways a better system then any other NLE out there.  As long as you stay in your native format you can enjoy a very fast process directly to Blu-ray disc.  I still say Liquid is the best 60i/50i HDV edit system on the market.  This of course only works for those of us who edit with a mpeg2 based format.  Chrome uncompressed and DVCPROHD users are another story of course.

For the Chrome users I'm not sure if AW4 will take a 2VUY file or not.  It says it can import quicktime files so it may work.  AW4 would then have to encode your video which would be much faster then Liquid since it does multi-threading very well.  Then again I think quicktime on a PC is single threaded so it may still be kind of slow.

Multipass encoding doesn't necessarily mean better quality either.  All that it means is that it divides the bits a little bit better.  A single pass encode will guess at what bitrate should be used for a given scene.  A second pass will refine this guess a little bit better if it needs to.  So yes it can look better but not by as much as some people think it would.  Multipass also only helps with extreme low bitrates.  This is because the datarate is so low that any extra better guess work will allow the encoder to decide to use a few more bits for complex sections.  If you already have enough bits which is the case with 25 mbit to 35 mbit mpeg2 then multipass doesn't really have a whole lot of area to adjust the bitrate.  Also keep in mind that the video is already 25mbit in looks so multipass will not magically make it look better.  Even though DNxHD is thrown into the middle it will only ever look the same as 25mbit CBR single pass or slightly worse.

I can also confirm that TSmuxer works very well with fused Liquid m2v files and an exported stereo Wav file.  I have not burned the folder structure to a Blu-ray disc but the files imported and muxed properly from what I can tell.  This gives a super easy and fast raw video dump to Blu-ray from Liquid.

1.  Fuse m2v file.

2.  Export stereo wav file.

3.  Import m2v and wav file into Tsmuxer and MUX as Blu-ray.

4.  Burn.

It would have been nice to skip step 2 but Liquid will only fuse each channel as a mono track.

Thomas,

Thanks for that enlightening explanation.  I have always been very satisfied with the DVD output from my HDV tapes in Liquid, but in the back of my mind, have always wondered if they could have been better.  I will now put that doubt to rest.

Denny

dmfreeman:

Tomas,

That is in interesting statement. Isn't the purpose of the multipass encoding to render the video to a higher level of quality?

Denny

Hi Denny, I think that Smet summarized it very well

I wholeheartedly agree

Denny

Thanks all for posting.  Makes me want to start doing Blu-Ray... now just to find time and money...

Denny,

Keep in mind though that the lower the target bitrate the more important multi-pass is.  For example if a DVD needs to be encoded with an average of 4.5mbit/s then any little bit multipass may raise this is going to help.  Even bumping up to 4.8 mbits could make a difference between some macro blocks on the screen.  In fact the only time I have ever really felt 2 pass encoding was important was when I tried to cram 2 hours on a DVD.  I hardly have to do that anymore so I never use 2 pass encoding.  In fact I usually encode my stuff live through a hardware encoder which is always 1 pass.  So if you did want to put 120 minutes on a DVD then you may want to consider a 2 pass encoder.  The main reason why I have always used 3rd party encoders was more for speed then it was quality.  I can fuse a raw file in Liquid and encode a 2 pass DVD mpeg2 file in a fraction of the amount of time Liquid can do it.  I just didn't want to make it seem as though I am against 2 pass encoding.  It is a great feature to have when you need it but it is always needed as some people think it is.

Also keep in mind that extreme compressed formats do see a pretty good advantage to 2 pass encoding.  I'm talking about FLV, H264 and WMV.  With these formats the bitrates are usually so low that any little change can make a pretty decent difference.  Sadly these formats are usually insanely slow to encode and adding a second pass seems ludicrous.

Thomas,

My DVD creatons are seldom more than an hour, and I use the default settings in Liquid but check the "Fit best possible quality on disk" button.  So for the immediate future I am good.  I have a BD burner, but because of the short duration of the recording media and the (at this point in time) rediculous cost for the disks, I will stay with the conventional DVD format. 

This thread is beginning to sound a bit like a college course in media creation.

Denny

Newegg has BD blanks for less than $4 (Vinpower 10 pack ) They have worked well so far. The LG 6x burner is selling for $169.

 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010100071%201087422108&name=BD-R

John,

What is the maximum record time on those BD disks?

Denny

About 2 hours with a fused Liquid file and wav sound, you can get more if you use an external encoder doing 2 pass and lower the speed of the videofile a little.

Going from wav sound to DD will let you add 15 - 20 minutes or so more on the disc

A 25 GB disc will hold a little over 120 minutes with 25mbits/s video.  Not bad when you consider how low we had to go to get that much video on a DVD.

A 25 GB disc will hold a little over 90 minutes with 35 mbits/s video.  This is about the highest level of mpeg2 quality you can get on a Blu-ray disc.

Anybody know if AW4 will burn Blu-ray content to a DVD disc?  One of the nice features of Tsmuxer is that you can burn the content to a DVD disc.  Sadly it doesn't work on every player.  Ironically it is the PS3 it does not work on which is odd.  Most other stand alone players will however play BD content on a DVD disc.  Might be a cheap way for some people here to offer small length blu-ray discs for their clients.

Thomas, I'm assuming you are referring to AVCHD on DVD -like what is possible with Studio. The way AW4 structures projects, I do not think so, but I will poke into it a bit.

Sorry Denny, I was out all day...