Store on Blu Ray vs DVD

[Rich]

I'm very much a newbie at this video editing thing, so please bear with me. I recently started a project to transfer all home movie media to hardisc and then to BD and/or DVD. My goal has been to transfer home movies to discs with a menu and chapters... nothing very fancy. The media includes VHS, digital 8, and probably video 8 (in-laws videos). I'm also looking at a Sony Handycam HDR-XR500 that I plan to back up to hard drive and probably disc for easier viewing. I've only just started with one VHS tape and about 25 digital 8 tapes. I essentially used the default capture settings for the VHS (NTSC DVD, 8GB, MPEG-2, 720x480, 30 frames/sec). I used the DV Quick Scan to capture all the digital 8 (microsoft AVI, 720x480, 30 frames/sec). I then started fiddling with the Create Disc under Share. This is where I've started to run into questions.

I had assumed that it would be better to start recording to BD. I've read that they have a longer shelf life than DVD although I'm happy to keep copies on hardisc. It seemed intuitive than I could fit more files on a 50 GB BD than on an 8 GB DVD. It appears I am wrong. When I test out BD and DVD recordings under Share, it seems I can't fit many more films on BD.

I had hoped to use the greater capacity of BD to store as many movies as possible and not have a large number of DVDs. Is this possible for digital 8, VHS, or the the anticipated video 8? If so, what capture settings should I use to keep reasonable quality? I suspect I'll need to recapture the original VHS at a lower bitrate which is ok. I'm looking at a box of about 40 VHS tapes from my folks that are untouched.

On a related note, I have found that I can label chapters when editing. These chapters are picked up in the Share-->Create Disc-->Add/Edit Chapter-->Auto Add Chapters, but none of the chapter labels are imported. Is there a way to do this without manually typing each label again when editing the menus?

Finally, I plan on capturing some of the video to external hardrives. If using USB 3.0, will the editing and capturing still work, or will I need to work with files on C?

I appreciate you patience in advance. I would appreciate any links to references.

[Ken Berry]

First off, if you just want to store your captured video -- without menus and chapters -- you can of course simply transfer the captured/edited videos to a BD disc, though as data as opposed to Blu-Ray video. If you have a Blu-Ray player either in your computer or attached to your HDTV, then you could at least simply manually access the video on the BD and play it either on your computer or your HDTV. But equally, you can do that with an external USB hard drive or USB stick drive attached either to your Blu-Ray stand-alone player or directly into your HDTV if it is a model which can play video directly this way. Many recent ones can.

Personally, most of my high def video these days is stored on external hard drives which I plug into my PlayStation 3, which as you would know is an excellent Blu-Ray player, though the USB drives have to be formatted using FAT 32 as the PS3 cannot 'see' NTFS drives... Moreover, I edit video stored on such drives, which I think answers one of your other questions about using external USB 3.0 drives. I find that even USB 2 drives are fast enough, so there should be no trouble with USB 3.0 drives.

Now, I realise you are probably more interested in having menus and chapters, so that means, if you are burning to a BD, you are having to convert your captured video (which is of course all standard def) to high def Blu-Ray formats such as either transport stream mpeg-2 or AVCHD. And these use a much higher bitrate which translates into much bigger files than your original standard def ones. That's why you are finding that you still can't fit much more on a BD than you could on a standard def DVD.

But here's the rub... since your original video is either analogue VHS or digital 8 video, the quality is never going to be any better than standard def. So you don't need to use the default higher bitrates for BD. Instead, if -- for example -- you wanted to burn a full Blu-Ray disc but lower its bitrate to something reasonable for the quality of the video, then you would select Share > Create Video File > Custom, then choose MPEG Transport Stream as the output format. Then hit the Options button on the dialogue box which appears and go to the Compression tab. There you could select either mpeg-2 or AVCHD as the output formats, and also lower the bitrate from the default 35 Mbps for mpeg-2 or 18 Mbps for AVCHD, down to, say 8000 kbps. This should create much smaller Blu-Ray files and still give you as good a quality as you would get if burning a standard def DVD. And lowering the bitrate to, say, 6000 kbps would probably not lower the quality to any noticeable degree but allow you to burn even more to the BD disc.

As for labelling Chapters, that is a persistent bug in successive versions of VS which Corel has been unwilling to address. Most of us know not to label the chapter points in the editing module, but to only create and label the chapters when actually building the menu.

[Rich]

Hello Ken. Thanks for the very prompt response and useful information. I tried what you suggested and noticed a small change in video quality for the digital 8 files, but otherwise it looks pretty good. I was able to make an AVCHD file. Now for the next stupid question... how do I burn this file to BD? Do I need a separate program or can Videostudio do it? Any suggestions on a program, if needed?

I've been thinking about your USB drive approach to storing/playing files. It makes sense for my videos, but I'll probably still make BDs for my slightly less tech savvy family members. Thanks again.

[Rich]

Nevermind. I figured it out. Instead of rendering an MPEG-2 or AVCHD file from a .vsp project and saving the file to C, I am just manipulating settings as follows: Share > Create Disc > Blu-Ray > Project Settings (icon) >change MPEG settings > Customize > Compression, and manipulating settings as discussed above. I had been saving new AVCHD files from .vsp projects, then loading them in the Share module... which did not work well. I'll still use the aforementioned method to make test AVCHD and MPEG files (with much smaller .vsp projects) to see how quality changes with various settings. Thanks again for the help.

[Ken Berry]

Just be aware, though, that AVCHD files are also Blu-Ray compliant, so you can burn them to BD discs as well as the Blu-Ray mpeg-2 files.