There are many solutions for burning out high quality DVDs, and with the new High Definition players on the market some new tricks to be learned. The two software packages which can burn HD-DVD — that I know — are Sony’s Vegas w/ DVD Architect and the Ulead Video Studio 10+. I recently got a chance to work with the Sony Vegas tool kit and found it an amazing package for editing DVD quality video as well as a nuts-and-bolts solution for putting together professional quality DVD’s (standard and high-def).

There are cheaper and even free packages out there in the open-source world which will edit video, but nothing I’ve found which is currently up-to-par with the software on the market side. For years I used Adobe’s Premier and found it lacking in many ways, but it was the best thing out there, and so you did what you could. Then Ulead VideoStudio came along and that is a good package; not quite what I was looking for but the price was right, and it was better than the more expensive Premier. Now that I have the Sony Vegas system however, all bets are off. The price was a bit high, but the hours it has saved, and the quality of the product it can create paid for itself in three projects time.

When you are capturing HDV with Sony Vegas, it comes in as M2T format, which is a highly compressed variant of the MPEG-2 format, and native HDV cameras. The quality at this point is virtually unchanged and the data rate is no higher than that of regular DV so capture isn’t an issue. Sony Vegas allows you to edit at this quality, but really there aren’t readily available computers with enough processing power to edit the M2T files effectively. The solution is to use an intermediate file, perform your edits and adjustments and then swap out the intermediate for the original footage. All of your edits, adjustments and processing such as color correction etc. are transferred to the original footage for final render. It really is an amazing package.

Even with the intermediary code, you are probably going to want a machine with at least a 2.6 Ghz or faster processor, and 1gig of RAM.Once we are done with our editing, and have our finished product, we want to burn a SD DVD. Vegas comes with a very good MainConcept MPEG encoder which will do the down-conversation for us before we bring the files into DVD Architect. For SD DVD we are going to be converting down to SD 720×480. There are some advantages to smart rendering HDV, but for our purposes we are going for an SD DVD so these don’t come into play right now.

To render the video we are going to use the template “DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream”. Set the bitrate based on the length of the video, like with any SD Mpeg render. In the custom tab, under project, set the Video Rendering Quality to “Best”. This is unrelated to the Mpeg bitrate setting, and instead effects what method Vegas uses when rescaling the video. When you are changing the image size (which we are down to 720×480) it is important to select “Best” for this option.

For the Audio, we want to use the AC3 format, rather than wave or MP3.Make sure the timeline for the project set to 1080i HDV, for the best quality, if you have it set to NTSC Widescreen, instead of HDV 1080i you will get very soft images. Another trick for crisping up the images is to add a very mild Unsharp Mask filter to your timeline.

The last thing we want to make sure of is that we set, in the Project Properties, the deinterlace method to “Blend Fields”. While you are not deinterlacing when downconverting like this, if that setting is set to “none” the output looks rather hideous.

Now, we set the rendering process, and when we bring our files into DVD Architect it won’t have to re-render those files before burning and we will have the best quality we can get out of a SD DVD burn.

Intermediary Codec:

I may have lost you back there when I just glossed over this concept. At some point you just have to push on through and clean up later, so let’s go over a few items before we get to editing and burning our next movie.

The HDV transport stream coming in from your HDV camera is much to heavy to process, so we use what is called an Intermediary codec so we can edit files with computer own by mere mortals. It is a translation or an “in-between” codec. Connect HD (for Sony Vegas) Aspect HD (for Adobe Premiere) and Lumiere (for Final Cut Pro) are all intermediary codecs. You capture in either native MPEG from the HDV camera, and the video is converted to the intermediary either in real time after capture, or during capture. When you render to print to tape, if you wish to print to your HDV camera, the intermediary will re-convert the intermediate stream to the MPEG format once again, providing you with a great image. Now you might be thinking that you are going to loose some quality during this process, but the fact is that if you don’t use an intermediary codec and edit the raw MPEG transport stream directly, you could loose a significant amount of quality in the process.

The audio format for HDV is MPEG 1 Audio layer II, which has a bitrate of 384 kbps and can be very good quality, but not if we want to edit the tracks. So again, it is best to send this to the intermediary as well (which is done automatically for you with the video). Something that might surprise you is that he sound tracks in HDV are not at the same level as CD standards. DV camcorders record audio in PCM format, which is basically as good as a .wav file. HDV’s audio spec is more in line with a very high bitrate MP3 audio. When you use the Cineform intermediary, audio is converted to a 48K/16 bit format, so you won’t need to worry about the audio quality in editing.

 The Sony Vegas package really does give you everything you need to create and produce professional quality video files and DVDs. Again the price can seem rather daunting, but for the ease of use, and quality of the tools, it is well worth the price tag, and the short learning curve.