High Def editing

[cgflembo]

I have just bought a High Def camcorder hoping to get a better picture result onto DVD. I have been using VideoStudio 12 (pro2) for some time now and have only transfered normal camcorder video onto DVD in the past. Do I need to do anything different in the editing/ DVD stage to gain the benifit of High Def ? and would using a Blu Ray disc change anything? Can I get recordable Blu Ray discs, and do I have to have a High Def / Blu Ray recorder on my laptop to get the result I need?

[DVDDoug]

Standard DVDs are not HD, so Blu-Ray is probably the best way to go.

You can burn a limited amount of AVCHD onto a regular DVD, and apparently it will play on most (all?) Blu-Ray players. But it's non-standard, it will not play on a DVD player, and playing-time is limited. (I've never tried it and I can't help you with the details.)

[Ken Berry]

Being in Britain, you will certainly be able to find recordable Blu-Ray discs in your local audio/video shops. But they are still expensive. Moreover, you will need a Blu-Ray burning drive to be able to make such a disc, and of course a Blu-Ray player to play them back. Some high-end computers come with such a burner, and these can of course also play back Blu-Ray discs. But otherwise you would need a separate Blu-Ray player connected to your HDTV.

Otherwise, you are limited to standard definition DVDs, and they require standard definition mpeg-2 videos under the international DVD standard. So you would have to downgrade your high def video from your camera in order to be able to burn an SD DVD. And that of course rather defeats the purpose of having a high def camera in the first place.

As DVDDoug has already indicated, you can burn AVCHD high def video to a standard definition DVD, but it is not a video DVD such as you will find in shops selling commercial movies on DVD. It is burned in a Blu-Ray folder on the DVD disc, and requires a Blu-Ray player rated to play such discs. Not all Blu-Ray players can do this, and those that do will have a sticker on the top edge of their box saying "AVCHD". Burned at the highest quality bitrate of around 18,000 kbps allowed for such discs, you can fit only around 20 minutes of video on a single layer DVD. You can reduce the bitrate to allow more video to be burned, but that of course will also reduce the quality of the final video.

[aljimenez]

...or get one of the new "Media Players" (there must be hundreds of them) so you can bypass making DVD's altogether and play HD files directly to your HD TV... Al

[Ken Berry]

Yes, forgot to mention that. I also have my PlayStation 3 networked to my computer system, and connected via HDMI to my big HDTV. (The PS3, in case you did not know, is an excellent Blu-Ray player.) I use a network server on my computers (I use a specialised PS3 server called obviously enough 'PS3 Media Server', plus Nero Media Home plus Windows Media Player as backup servers) and stream my multimedia, including video, to my HDTV that way. AVCHD can, however, be a bit iffy for streaming unless your network is fast. The alternative, which works just fine, is to put my AVCHD clips on an external hard drive or USB stick drive and insert that in a PS3 USB jack and play it that way, which works marvellously well. Many (all?) Blu-Ray players also have USB jacks which can be used similarly.