Transfer your 8mm, Super 8mm or 16mm family movies to High Definition on Blu-ray or DVD media.

High Definition Film Transfer Services

MPEG-2, H.264 and AVCHD Solutions

HomeDVD offers to burn your transferred 8mm, Super 8 or 16mm home movies to either Blu-ray or DVD recordable media as HD compliant video files.  The choice of recordable media brings with it some differences that should be highlighted at this point.

Blu-ray media provides 25GB of disk storage (50BG dual layer), an equivalent to about 3-4 hours of excellent quality high definition video at sweet spot encoding rates.  The Blu-ray specification supports a choice of H.264 AVC/MPEG4 video, the venerable backward compatible MPEG-2 and SMPTE VC-1, a Microsoft variant of the popular wmv file format. 

All compliant Blu-ray players must play all of these video formats, so there is a great deal of flexibility on which CODEC to use for a planned video production targeting Blu-ray as the end use media.  Most Blu-ray based Hollywood releases are encoded to H.264, just because of its highly efficient compression method, yielding smaller files without a quality compromise.  HomeDVD does not support SMPTE VC-1 at this time. 

Blu-ray recordable BD-R disks are still on the costly side with respect to the DVD media, but as usual will drop in price over time.

As an alternative to Blu-ray media, the mainstay DVD recordable disk can be used to store HD sized movies in AVCHD format.  Native HD resolutions of 1440 x 1080 and 1280 x 720 in addition to SD resolutions of 720 x 480/576 are supported using a variant of H.264.  The DVD AVCHD compilation is still burned using a standard DVD burner.  Quality may be an issue due to the encoding bit rate being capped at 18mbps (15mbps to 16mbps guaranteed).  For this reason using the alternate HD resolution of 1280 x 720 instead of 1440 x 1080 would supply more encoding bits to increase the image quality. 

Some Blu-ray players do not support AVCHD, though many manufacturers have introduced firmware upgrades that can make AVCHD encoded files operate on those players.  See the list of AVCHD Blu-ray players in our resources section of the web site.

AVCHD is the popular HD camcorder video format adopted by many well known consumer electronics companies like SONY, Panasonic, Canon and JVC.  The compressed AVCHD video or uncompressed YUV4:2:2 video can be drawn off the camcorder (depending on make and model of camcorder) using the built in HDMI interface if the proper host computer hard ware interfaces and software is available.  Other than some complaints by technically inclined consumers that the AVCHD format is difficult to work with and that video quality is in question, it is a format that has been designed to work with low cost standard DVD-R media.  The image resolution is made to be a full 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution from the native 1440 horizontal frame size due to the 1.33 anamorphic properties that can be applied to the video.  

Though AVCHD video encode rates can be made similarly high as a Blu-ray disk target, the final DVD disk may not play properly on an AVCHD enabled Blu ray player, simply due to the built in 18mbps cap on the encode rate as per latest AVCHD standard update.  As a result, depending on the final encode rate used, the playback time can range from 10 minutes to 40 minutes, just due to the 4.7GB storage limit of the DVD disk. 

As usual, higher encode rates do not automatically translate into readily obvious changes in visual quality.  There is always an optimal sweet spot, where high quality can still be obtained at lower than expected data rates, thus saving storage space.  The small incremental increase in quality at higher data rates is not worth the additional storage space.

The other caveat that is worth repeating is that the AVCHD encoded DVD can only be played back on AVCHD enabled Blu-ray players.  Don’t bother to try the burned disk on your DVD player.  It will just eject the disk as a bad one.

Several software manufactures offer Blu-ray and AVCHD HD edit, authoring and burning, like Pinnacle Studio, Nero Vision, CyberLink and SONY Vegas.