Burning Blu-ray disks on the cheap!

Anyone who has checked the price of a blank 25 GB Blu-ray disk has surely gulped as I have. The local electronic box stores have a tiny selection with individual disks costing $17 CDN or more!!! Also, a dedicated Blu-ray burner is required which is certainly going to set you back $400 - $500 at least (correct me if I'm wrong here; haven't sourced 'em out yet).

For those of us who produce small 5D2 (or other dslr video models) clips and would like to screen them on your huge home LCD 1080p TV from your Blu-ray movie player, here's a way to do it on cheap DVD blank disks using an ordinary DVD burner:

First, purchase (less than $90) from Sony online (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope) their current version of Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0c. Yeah, it's gonna set you back $84.95 US, but you can download their free trial first to try this out and THAT will cost you nuthin'!

Second, fire up Sony Vegas and start a "New Project". Import your clips to the timeline. If you're going to do any editing first go to "edit", click on "select all", then hit Enter. Then go make a pot of coffee and relax for a bit -- Sony Vegas is "pre-rendering" your raw .mov footage to make it run smoother within the program as you edit it. This makes is much better (and accurate) for snipping, adding effects/transitions, etc......but it does take some time for this pre-rendering to complete, depending on the power of your PC cpu.

Once all your editing is done, again go to "Edit" and click on "Select All"

Click on "Make Movie"

Select "Burn DVD, Blu-ray, or CD"

Then enter these settings:

http://upload.pbase.com/daverilstone/image/117643512/original

Put a fresh blank DVD into your chosen DVD burner and hit "OK"

Go finish your coffee

The freshly-burned DVD should play quite nicely in your home Blu-ray player.

Let me know how this turns out for you. Again: get the free trial version of Sony Vegas first, so if it doesn't work you simply expended a bit of time (and wasted a single cheap DVD disk).

Good luck!