Burning hi-def HD-DVD video

[HankCastello]

There STILL are no HD-DVD burners, except for a single model of Toshiba laptop that comes with one.  There are, however, a couple of software titles that will burn hi-def video onto DVD-5 or DVD-9 (single or dual layer standard DVDs) DVDs that will play in HD-DVD players.

So I ordered Pinnacle Studio Plus 11 upgrade.  I still had my old Studio 9 (upgraded from seven) and figured it was worth eighty bucks to be able to burn up to 36 minutes of hi-def video onto an HD-DVD playable disc.

I was ready, however, for the bugs, patches and problems that had beset my Studio 7 through 9 versions.  Surprise!  No glitches.  None.  Nada.  (OK, it did bomb when I went to exit, but I was all done by then and when I re-ran, my project file was fine.)

It installed so easily, my grandma could have done it (and she passed away nearly thirty years ago!)   It captured my HDV video without a single complaint.  I did a little editing and then burned to a dual layer DVD blank (Verbatim DVD+R) and in less than an hour, I was watching hi-def video that I'd shot myself.  All this, without cracking open a manual or clicking "Help"!

There was absolutely no slugishness, the workflow zipped along just fine on my Dual Core Intel PC with 2gig RAM and a terrabyte of drive space spread through three internal drives and a Radeon X1950 video card.  I don't know what might happen if I were editing with three or four video tracks, all hi-def though.

Now, if there were only some HD-DVD burners, so I could get an entire wedding onto a single disc!

Premiere Pro can save mpeg2 files in hdv 1080i/30 format.  I think Nero 7 may be able to burn these onto DVD-5 or DVD-9 discs so that HD-DVD players can play them.  Also, Ulead can do this trick.  I'm not sure if there are any other simple ways of making hi-def HD-DVD compatible discs.

[kwshaw1]

I still had my old Studio 9 (upgraded from seven) and figured it was worth eighty bucks to be able to burn up to 36 minutes of hi-def video onto an HD-DVD playable disc.

This is an intriguing option if you don't have a proper HD-DVD or Blu-ray burner, but what do you do if your typical videos are more than 36 minutes long? I'm about to give in and buy a Blu-ray burner because that's what's shipping which I can use now to deliver complete wedding videos in HDV format.

Does Pinnacle Studio 11 support encoding to AVC or VC1 format before burning an HD-DVD? That would allow you to fit more (heavily compressed) HD content on a red-laser disc, but it would take a very long time to encode a complete wedding video.

[HankCastello]

I didn't see those in the file type pull-down menus, but Pinnacle's website would be a better source for questions like that since there could be an update, patch or other workaround for some things.