This is the official discussion thread for the AfterDawn Blu-ray Encoding Tutorial. It is a series of guides intended to walk you through the process of preparing video and audio for authoring to Blu-ray. The following installments have been published so far: Lesson 1 - Prepare Source Video Lesson 2 - Create AviSynth Script Lesson 3 - Chapter Points and Bitrate Lesson 4 - Encode Video Lesson 5 - Encode AC-3 Audio Lesson 6 - Advanced Bitrate Calculation Lesson 7 - Advanced Audio Processing Lesson 8 - Convert Text Subtitles To Images Lesson 9 - Prepare A Still Menu Background Lesson 10 - Make Menu Buttons With GIMP Please post any questions or comments here and I will try to respond to them as quickly as possible. If there is something specific you need help with, especially if it is not covered in any of these guides, I will do my best to help. If you have Blu-ray authoring questions you may be interested in the next series of guides I am working on which cover that subject.
Awesome tutorial Rich...had no idea about blueray editing but thanks to you have a much better understanding...appreciate your work...Cheers
You're welcome! But just wait, what you've seen so far was just laying the groundwork for a much more ambitious project. Valery Koval of DVDLogic Software generously provided a license for his company's EasyBD Blu-ray authoring software and two different menu creation programs (IGEditor and Quick BD Menu). Tonight I will have three more Blu-ray encoding guides added. The first deals with converting text subtitles to Blu-ray compatible subpictures and the last two cover the creation of still backgrounds and buttons for menus. Immediately following that I will be uploading the initial parts of the tutorials I'm working on for each of the DVDLogic programs. I expect to have all that finished some time tonight.
It's encouraging to see Staff still active and contributing new content to this side of the site regularly.
The tutorial has been updated with three new lessons. Lesson 8 explains how to convert subtitles from text (SRT, SSA, or ASS) format to Blu-ray compliant image-based subpictures (BD SUP or BDN XML). Lesson 9 goes into detail about creating and encoding single frame videos, something primarily used for creating menu backgrounds. The following operations are covered: -- Using MeGUI's AVS Script Creator to select a single frame of video. This expands on the steps in Lesson 1 and Lesson 2. -- Creating a video encoding profile in MeGUI which is optimized for a single frame source. These instructions are based on the x264 settings detailed in Lesson 4. -- Producing another specialized AviSynth script (once again from the AVS Script Creator) to extract your single frame script as a still image, such as a PNG, BMP, or JPEG file. Such a file may be helpful, or perhaps even necessary in some cases, for designing and/or authoring Blu-ray menus. -- Writing a simple AviSynth script for loading a still image as a video source. The resulting file can be encoded as a x264 video file using MeGUI. This allows you to use a menu background created with an image editing program like GIMP, Photoshop, or even MS Paint. Lesson 10 is an overview of Blu-ray menu button images and how they fit into the menu design process. The following topics are covered. -- The role of images in making buttons visible on menus and communicating information to the viewer. -- Using the free image editor GIMP to create a full set of (3) images for a single button. -- Using GIMP to test menu layout incorporating an extracted video frame (see Lesson 9) with your newly created menu buttons and additional elements as appropriate.
This is such an amazing guide. I'm sad to see that it was never finished. Is there anything I could do to help revive it? I would love to know how to finish the process (i.e. create the actual BD menu structure and build the ISO file).
