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davidd57765569
Known Participant
December 26, 2018
Question

How Do I Make SD Video Blu-ray Legal While Preserving File Size?

  • December 26, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 2391 views

Hi, I'm trying to build a Blu-ray project that has a mix of HD and SD video. All of the HD video files I bring into Encore as M2TS files are accepted as Blu-ray legal (as indicated by the transcode settings defaulting to "Do Not Transcode"), but none of the SD video seems to work without Encore wanting to transcode it. I can make it Blu-ray legal by taking it into Premiere Pro and exporting it as an MPEG2 Blu-ray file, but even without the audio track (which I've demuxed separately), that nearly quadruples the file size (1.32 GB up to 4.68 GB).

This thread from 2010 has someone encountering a similar problem which they were able to solve by demuxing the streams and using TMP GENC Authoring Works to save the video in a Blu-ray legal format without needing to re-encode, but that software is both expensive and not compatible with macOS which are both problems for me.

Does anyone know of ways to accomplish this same goal without using TMP? I'd like to be able to fit this on a single BD-DL which is absolutely doable with the original file sizes, but is impossible after PrePro makes them 3.5 times larger.

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1 reply

Stan Jones
Community Expert
Stan JonesCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 27, 2018

lol. That was one of the threads I was going to link for you. There were non-TmpGenc options.

If you are not providing a Blu-ray legal format, it must be DVD legal, i.e. MPEG2-DVD. It can't just be SD. So what format is your SD you are wanting to use?

But you don't have to transcode it to MPEG2 Blu-ray. Use MPEG2 DVD. And the regular DVD bitrates are fine, which keeps the filesize down.

I just did a test, and a classic SD avi and a 4K h.264, both exported from PR as MPEG2-DVD, imported to Encore as "Do not transcode" for the BD status.

However, an odd wmv I had that is 1280x720 would not work.

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davidd57765569Author
Known Participant
December 27, 2018

The original files I'm working with are in MKV packages. The first thing I tried to do was to use tsMuxer to remux the MKVs into M2TS files. This worked for the 1080p content, but anything lower than 1080p Encore doesn't seem to like (even HD video at 720p).

In order for Premiere to output an MPEG2 DVD file that gets even close the file size of the original MKV, I have to have a target bitrate at 1.5 Mbps. I'm currently exporting a video with those settings to see if it'll be useable (it's an SD bonus feature; it doesn't have to look stunning), but it's frustrating that I have to re-encode it at all when remuxing the MKV into an M2TS file works perfectly for 1080 video.

UPDATE: Yeah, encoding at 1.5 Mbps is a no-go. Just looks awful. There's got to be some way to make SD video Blu-ray legal without massively increasing the file size while still preserving the original quality.

Stan Jones
Community Expert
Stan JonesCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 27, 2018

No, not necessarily. mkv does not have to be DVD or BD legal. So no guarantee you can get the same quality at the same, or smaller, file size. But yes, that is the challenge: to repackage (no transcode of the video) or transcode to a format that Encore (or some other app) will accept as legal without transcoding yet again.

What is actually in the mkv? Post a screenshot (in "tree" view) of mediainfo of a file.

FYI, I can't tell if you already know this. As of PR 2018.1.1, there is limited, undocumented support for mkv. So if you haven't, see if you can take an mkv directly into PR and export. If that is what you are doing, let us know.

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