Exporting Blu-Ray MPEG Files for Authoring

[Chuck Engels]

With my first project I have had to export all sequences at least 3 times trying to get the file size down far enough to fit on a Blu-Ray disc.
I am wondering if anyone has a setting that works well without any noticeable loss in quality. What I have seems to have worked but I will know more when I can actually watch the movie (see other thread about viewing Blu-Ray movies on my computer).

I captured the video using HDVSplit, originals are m2t files captured over firewire from Mini DV tape.
Imported the files into a Premiere Pro Hi Def project 1920 x 1080i
There is over 2 hours of edited video for this disc and it seems that 2 hours of high quality hi definition video will not fit on a 25gb single layer Blu-Ray disc.

I then exported each segment, once as standard AVI which works fine, and once as Blu-Ray preset using the Adobe Media Encoder. There are a few different presets and I started with the High Quality 1920 x 1080i Blu-Ray. I ended up using the Medium quality setting and dropping the quality to a 2 (default is 3) and lowering the bit rates, low 15, target 20, max 25. This produced files small enough to fit on the disc.

Is there an easier way or any better settings to use that anyone knows of? What about using the H.264 format instead of MPEG m2t?

As always, all help is greatly appreciated

[Paul LS]

The Blu-Ray format supports the authoring to Blu-Ray disc of both MPEG and H.264 files. H.264 is more compressed and so maintains the same quality at a lower bit rate. So you should be able to fit a longer movie on a disc.

For example I used to burn HD-DVD MPEG2 to standard discs at 25Mb/s and could get 20minutes on a single layer DVD, when HD-DVD was killed off I moved to AVC/H.264 for playing on a Blu-Ray player. So now I burn 15Mb/s H.264 files to standard DVDs and get around 30 minutes.

[Chuck Engels]

Thanks Paul, I was trying to stay away from H.264 if I could because the m2t files don't need to be transcoded but the H.264 files would. It is just a time saving thing. It may be necessary to just do the H.264 format and leave it at that, especially for very long movies. I might not have another 2 hour wedding video, but if I do it would be nice to fit it all at high quality. I have found that even low quality HDV is still very high quality
Thanks again for your help.

[Chuck Engels]

I ended up exporting using the HDV 1920 x 1080i Medium Quality preset and changing the Quality to number 2.
I also changed the bitrates to: Minumum = 15, Target = 20, Maximum = 25

That cut the files sized almost in half from the High Quality Preset exports. This was still not enough of a reduction in size to fit all 2 hours on a single layer Blu-Ray disc. I am not sure how much actual space is available on the disc but in the end there was only 20GB of video. Then it adds in the audio, motion menus, background and whatever else, it all must have totalled close to 25GB. I say that because in the end I only cut out a 1.8gb segment and it fit everything on the disc just fine, but with that segment the project totalled over 26.5gb.

Anyway, at least this one is done