Hi8 to Blu Ray with X5

[Rich]

Hello. I decided to start a new post about this. See Burning Files to BD from Handycam HDR-XR500 if you want to see how I ended up here.

Anyway, I have captured Hi8 (digital 8 will be later) to X5 for inlaws. There were about 30 tapes although I am editing out blank tape. My goal is to give as few discs as possible to my siblings-in-law and mother-in-law. This led me to use double sided blu ray (50gb). I provide an index when I give out disks so that family can simply go to a chapter/scene number to see what is recorded. I don't expect anyone to sit through 8 hrs of video. I'm trying to save and share these films, including video of my deceased father-in-law, before the tapes are lost or damaged. I already finished a similar process for 60 VHS tapes for my folks which was about 7 blu ray discs. I tried to use a similar process with the Hi8 and ran into problems (see the Handycam post) I'd rather not hand out 4 times the number of DVDs and several family members are not savvy enough (or have not invested in the technology) to use a thumb drive with their TV.

The following is the properties of a 60 min clip of the raw captured video:

I have had problems converting this to blu-ray compatible, but think I might have gotten it to work. The test file is below. I used the 60 min raw clip above with the following work flow: Create Video File>Custom>.m2t.>AVCHD>12000 kbps video data rate. I came up with the following:

When I loaded this into the Disc Burner. I chose h.264, 12000, 1440x1080 and got the Create Menu I believe I needed to see.

Are there any settings I can tweak to cram more video onto the Blu ray disc? Are there any settings I can tweak to avoid degrading the quality of the original Hi8? It would seem these are mutually exclusive, but I only know enough to be dangerous. I apologize in advance for my ignorance.

Thanks,
Rich

[skier-hughes]

The more times you convert the more info you will lose as you are dealing in a lossy format.
If you could capture as dv.avi then any editing and saving you did would not lose any quality. Conversion then would go to your bluray file.
Space can be saved by choosing a lower bitrate, the lower this figure is the smaller the file, the lower the quality. You would need to run some tests to see how low you wanted to go without losing more quality than you want.

[asik1]

I don't see the point of inflating SD video to HD+ datarate.
SD will look bad on 65" screen no mater what data rate is.

[Rich]

I am familiar with changing data rate and have played with that in the past. I will look at this again. I have difficultly finding a significant visual difference except at extremes, ie AVCHD 4 Mbps vs MPEG2 35Mbps. I'll probably use AVCHD 8Mbps to 12 Mbps.

Is it work tinkering with frame rate, frame type, or frame size? How about the Audio Speed Settings?

[canuck]

Do all your recipients have a BlueRay player? Do they all have a HD TV? Are they going to play the video on the computer?

[Rich]

They all have blu ray players and HD TVs. Some may use a computer to watch the films. Again, I am using DL BDs to try to avoid handing out a large stack of DVDs when I provide copies of the Hi8, VHS, etc. A single layer DVD can hold about 4 GB and a double layer BD can hold up to 50 GB. I realize that this is changing from SD to HD. As long as I keep similar picture and sound quality, I am not concerned about this conversion. Again, I have no illusions about improving SD quality to HD quality. If there is a better way to share 60+ hrs of SD video, I'd be interested in what anyone has to say. I don't understand why this is such a big deal.

[asik1]

my 2 cents,

As all your captures are as MPEG2 SD 9Mb files
I will convert them to 3Mb Xvid/divx files and burn them as such with proper names
I think no menu is needed as any modern DVD player will simply list the files upon auto run.