Here is a tutorial illustrating how to convert camera videos to Blu-ray movies and burn it on Blu-ray Discs.

What You Need:

High-def Camcorder: or called HD Video Cameras, used to record HD videos for fun, such as Sony HDR-XR100E and Cannon HF200.

One piece of blank Blu-ray Discs: Insert a blank Blu-Ray disc into the computer’s drive.

Blu-ray Disc Burner: Sony unveils BWU-100A Blu-ray burner, for example.

Blu-ray Burning Software: Sothink HD Movie Maker

Step 1: Transfer Camera Videos to PC

Attach the camera to PC and transfer the video from the camcorder into PC.

Step 2： Add and Edit Video

Add Files

Launch Sothink HD Movie Maker. Selecting “Add Files” from File in the Menu or directly clicking button “Add Files” on the Toolbar, a dialog pops up for choosing movie files to the program. You can add more than one movie file at one time.

Trim Video

There is a window on the bottom of the program for previewing the video added in. You can click button “Play” to preview your source video and, if you just want to burn a part of video content into Discs, you may realize it with Trim function:

Select the video you have added into the program, go to “Edit” – > “Trim” function, and then you can decide which part can be burnt by dragging the left/right slider to set start/end time.

As the picture showing above, drag the left triangle to a position you want it be the start of the converted video and drag the right triangle to a position you want it be the end of the converted video. Then the video will be trimmed before being converted.

Set Disc

After you’ve finished adding files and editing video, it’s time to set the recording parameters and burn to disc. This is the tricky part, as it’s the only step of the process where things can go very wrong.

Go to General Settings or Advanced Settings panel and do some settings for the disc.

Under tab “Settings”, there are four general setting items in the Settings panel:

• Target disc size: Click the arrow and select the target disc size from the drop down list.

  There are four options: “DVD-5 (4.7G)”, “DVD-9 (8.5G)”, “BD-25 (25G)” and “BD-50 (50G)”. Since it is to burn the video on Blu-ray Disc, here choose “BD-25” or “BD-50.

  Tip: If the video size is less than 8.5G, you may burn the video onto DVD and create AVCHD movie on DVD discs, which also needs to be played on Blu-ray player.

• Disc label: Write the label here for the disc.

  The default label is the current date. Here you can input other words for the disc.

• Video dimension: Click the arrow and select the target video dimension from the drop down list.

  There are three options: “1280*720″, “1440*1080″ and “1920*1080″.

• Video frame rate: Click the arrow and select the target video frame rate from the drop down list. There are two options: “25 (PAL)” and “29.97 (NTSC)”.

  Tip: “PAL” (short for Phase Alternating Line) and “NTSC” （short for National Television System Committee) are the two standards of TV broadcast.

If you are advanced users and familiar with video code, you may set more parameters, like Bit rate, frame rate, zoom mode and channels, for your Blu-ray Disc under Advanced Setting panel.

Step 3: Start Video Burning

Make sure the checkbox besides the video file(s) you want to burn is been ticked. If there is none movie ticked, the program prompts when starting burning. When all the checkboxes are ticked, the movie files added in will be burned following the order of the file list.

Select “Burn” from File in the Menu or directly click button “Burn” on the Toolbar, and then it starts burning:

Note: If there is no disc in the drive, it pops up a dialog for prompting and HD Movie Maker automatically creates a folder for saving temporary files.

The burning function requires Windows XP SP2/Windows Vista SP1 or above versions. If the system doesn’t meet the requirement, HD Movie Maker will automatically create a standard folder to store the generated Blu-ray movie.

Sothink HD Movie Maker supports multiple CPUs and multiple core CPUs, and supports concurrent conversion for multiple videos with high speed, so if your computer has multiple CPUs and multiple core CPUs, you may go to Options-Encoding dialog and choose the maximum number of CPU cores to make burning faster.

Step 4: Play Blu-ray Disc

When the burning is completed, you may enjoy the high-def BD video on HDTV with various Blu-ray players, for example, Sony PS3.

Here is a review from Rob Boirun, focusing on creating Blu-ray movies with Sothink HD Movie Maker:

About the Author
Rob Boirun —- Head of the BurnWorld BurningBits Team, or also known as the Operator and Webmaster for BurnWorld.com. Constantly researching the optical industry for the latest and greatest hardware and software available. Now he will share his Blu-ray burning experience on HD videos with us. This time he used hardware like Lacie D2 Blu Ray Burner, AMD 5000+, 4GB Ram and Windows Vista Operating System. Hope this information is useful for you.

“Thinking in HD
…This year we are starting to see the first wave of HD video converter/editors for easy Blu-Ray or AVCHD creation. One such tool is from Sothink called HD Movie Maker. The first thing I noticed about this software was the well laid out interface that didn’t look to overly done. Everything is where it is needs to be.

Basically here are the steps involved to create a Blu-Ray movie:

• Load the videos you want on the final result
• Choose your burner, disc size (DVD5, DVD9, BD 25GB, BD 50GB), Video Dimensions, and Frame Rate
• Insert your Blank Disc and click the Burn Button

Now simply walk away or go to bed and when you get back to the computer you will have a disc ready to watch in your favorite player. Note: My first test took about 4 hours to burn a 2 hour avi upcoverted to AVCHD which took the full 4.38 single layer of the DVD. I am please to see that the quality from the original avi to the DVD was dramatic.

Also note that this software is simply a HD Video Converter/Burner, you can not author/edit video.

…

The ease of use and final video quality of the discs are what is impressive of HD Movie Maker. So far this is one of the easiest HD Video apps I have used this year.” (Read more reviews)

Thanks to Mr. Boirun and HD Movie Maker is always looking forward to hearing more users’ voice. Download Sothink HD Movie Maker right now and tell us what you think about it!