[phnxcoyote]

Software companies like Nero and Cyberlink still have a ways to go with their Blu-Ray disc authoring offerings, at least when it comes to dealing with AVCHD video. I've owned a Canon HG10 AVCHD camcorder for about 4 months now and have hours of high-def M2TS video footage archived on my network. I purchased an LG GGW-H20L BD/HD-DVD burner for my Duo-Core PC over a week ago in hopes that I'd be able to start burning Blu-Ray disc compilations of my HG10 footage, with nice-looking navigation menus, playable on my PS3 and high-def television. Not too much to ask for, no? Thankfully I purchased a blank rewritable BD-RE disc along with the burner because so far I haven't been able to burn a BD compilation I'm happy with.

I'm expecting to be able to take my HG10's M2TS AVCHD footage and author a Blu-Ray BD-MV (with menus) with NO loss of video quality. So far I've tried the latest version of Nero Vision and Cyberlink PowerProducer 5. The biggest issue with both applications is they waste hours and hours re-encoding video that's already AVC Blu-Ray compliant! The end result of the unnecessary re-encoding is a Blu-Ray disc with degraded video quality. Comparing footage from a BD authored & burned using Nero Vision or PowerProducer 5 to the original AVCHD clips, I see additional compression artifacts that do not exist in the original raw footage. Especially in scenes with motion. Or even looking at a scene with a green lawn. I see the same 'swimming grass' resulting from compression that I see when watching an NFL broadcast on my cable provider's HD ABC channel. Degraded video not acceptable. There should be no need to re-encode AVCHD clips that are already Blu-Ray compliant, provided you're encoding to Blu-Ray using AVC (not MPEG-2), and you don't apply any effects, titles, fades etc during the authoring process, in which case re-encoding would be necessary for at least some of the clips. What I don't understand is why the latest update to Nero Vision DOES implement SmartEncoding, straight transcoding of AVCHD compliant video without re-encoding, when authoring AVCHD DVD-5 & DVD-9 discs, but not Blu-Ray. From what I can tell, AVCHD on DVD-5/DVD-9 and BD are pretty much the same disk structure wise, so there's no reason SmartEncoding shouldn't work when authoring BD in Nero Vision. I've tried setting the encoding options in Nero Vision, making sure it's set to MPEG-4, not MPEG-2, with 1440x1080 resolution and 15 Mbps bitrate matching the source M2TS files. It still re-ends up encoding the video. It took Nero Vision over 12 hours to re-encode 2 1/2 hours of M2TS clips. About the same amount of time for PowerProducer 5. Tying up my PC for all that time, only to end up with a BD disc with degraded video. No thanks! Cyberlink PowerProducer 5 isn't worth purchasing in my opinion. I downloaded the trial version. The interface looks slicker than Nero Vision, that's the only good thing I have to say about PowerProducer 5. The menus PowerProducer creates look like crap with very little in the way of customizing, other than changing the background image and menu audio. It only comes with a couple horrible looking menu templates. You have to spend extra $$ to download additional template packs from Cyberlink's online store. Nero offers additional templates for download free of charge. And they look MUCH nicer than PowerProducer's menus, especially the motion 3D menus. Another negative about PowerProducer 5 is that it doesn't give you any options for encoding like Nero Vision. All you can do is either select AVC or MPEG-2 for Blu-Ray. It doesn't let you set the resolution, bitrate or option of 2-pass encoding like Nero Vision. Not that I'd want to select 2-pass. 12 hours for one-pass is enough wasted time tying up my PC!

If Nero can get the SmartEncoding working with Blu-Ray authoring to avoid re-encoding, that'll be my choice unless I find something better. Is there another affordable BD authoring package out there that will properly handle AVCHD clips without re-encoding? I've already researched Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 6+. It'll import AVCHD clips, but ends up re-encoding to MPEG-2 for Blu-Ray as it does not support BD with H.264 AVC.

I am aware that I can burn AVCHD clips to PS3-compatible BD data discs or BD-AV without loss of quality, but I don't get the navigation menus with either option. I prefer to have menus over having to fast-forward or skip chapter after chapter to get to the footage I want to watch.