Burning 720 x 480 SD clips to Blu-ray

[Kent Frost]

Just last year, I had a VHS-to-disc job that someone hired me to do for them. She brought me an entire box full of tapes, resulting in nearly 20-30 hours of footage. She wanted 4 copies of each tape made into discs for her to give out to family members. I did the math and found that the better way to go - if they all had a Blu-Ray players - would be to try burning them all to Blu-Ray discs, narrowing something like 15 DVDs per person (the math was done via which tapes belonged to which person, not how much can fit on a disc) down to only about 3 Blu-Ray discs per person. It worked, and it's actually very easy to do. When you do your burning project, you simply tell it you're using a Blu-Ray disc, but that you're burning SD footage. It calculates it as if you've simply given it a 25GB DVD and burns it that way, it just has to be played on a Blu-Ray player.

[Chuck Engels]

That would be very good Kent but Premiere Elements does not have an option to burn SD to Blu Ray as far as I know. Did you use Premiere Pro for that project?

[Dave McElderry]

I've done this with DVDAS. Even mixed SD and HD in the same project, if I recall.

[Di Hansen]

I've done this with DVDAS. Even mixed SD and HD in the same project, if I recall.

Thanks, Dave. I am not acquainted with DVDAS. Is that an acronym for a longer program name?

[Dave McElderry]

Sorry Di. Sony's DVD Architect Studio. It's sold stand-alone for about $35.00 if I recall. Originally for creating fairly sophisticated DVD menuing/burning and then upgraded to work with Blu-ray. With discs falling out of favor it hasn't seen any upgrades lately, but it still works fine for that purpose. It has somewhat of a learning curve but Steve did write a good book on it. You edit your project in your favorite editing program, output your finished product as MPEGs and then import into DVDAS where you create your menus and output to disc.

[Kent Frost]

Chuck & Dave - I also used Sony DVD Architect for my burning software. It's pretty intuitive, actually. You simply tell it HD or SD, then how large a disc you're using. It adjusts to size automatically. I found that getting much more than about 7 or 8 hours on 1 disc and your quality tanks pretty quickly.

[Di Hansen]

Sorry Di. Sony's DVD Architect Studio. It's sold stand-alone for about $35.00 if I recall. Originally for creating fairly sophisticated DVD menuing/burning and then upgraded to work with Blu-ray. With discs falling out of favor it hasn't seen any upgrades lately, but it still works fine for that purpose. It has somewhat of a learning curve but Steve did write a good book on it. You edit your project in your favorite editing program, output your finished product as MPEGs and then import into DVDAS where you create your menus and output to disc.

Perfect! Thank you!
I may consider this program if I am confronted with a project of this nature again.

[Di Hansen]

Chuck & Dave - I also used Sony DVD Architect for my burning software. It's pretty intuitive, actually. You simply tell it HD or SD, then how large a disc you're using. It adjusts to size automatically. I found that getting much more than about 7 or 8 hours on 1 disc and your quality tanks pretty quickly.

Grateful for your input, Kent. Helpful!

[Chuck Engels]

Much more powerful dvd authoring from DVDAS than from Premiere Elements, that's why a lot of the elements users also have that program for authoring DVDs. I always used Adobe Encore DVD and that was nice as well. Thanks for the great input guys, I learn new stuff here every day

[Di Hansen]

Much more powerful dvd authoring from DVDAS than from Premiere Elements, that's why a lot of the elements users also have that program for authoring DVDs. I always used Adobe Encore DVD and that was nice as well. Thanks for the great input guys, I learn new stuff here every day

Great to know! I will try Adobe Encore DVD.

I do not see a Mac version of Sony DVD Architect Studio. Is it just a Windows/PC program?

[Dave McElderry]

I do not see a Mac version of Sony DVD Architect Studio. Is it just a Windows/PC program?

According to the specs it's Windows only. I take it that's a deal breaker.

[Chuck Engels]

Unfortunately Adobe Encore DVD is now a thing of the past, Adobe quit making it a couple years ago. Not sure if the prior versions will work with Windows 10 but I assume they would.

I don't see a MAC version for DVD Architect either, someone here must know if it exists or not...

[Peru]

There is no Mac version of DVDAS.

[Di Hansen]

There is no Mac version of DVDAS.

Thank you! I will cease my search.

[Bob]

Adobe Encore CS6 is the last release of that product. But, it installs as part of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. You can also get it if you subscribe to Creative Cloud with either a full cc subscription or a single application subscription to Premiere Pro CC. With the subscription route, you are allowed to install Premiere Pro CS6 which will also install Encore CS6.

If you've been thinking of moving to Premiere Pro either CS6 or CC, this might be a viable route.