I wish to make a blu-ray video-album with all the family video-recordings I've done with various recording devices through-up the years. Most of the recordings are 720p 30fps, recorded with my cellphone.
As many others before me I have now learned, that simply saving my video-project as a 720p 24fps rendering, results in a lot of jerkiness due to the missing frames. Not good.
But what to do then?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Media_format my other framerate options for 720p are 60fps (59.94fps) or 50fps. So as I'm writing this I'm trying to render my project into a 59.94fps video. Logically, if my recordings have 30fps, there'll be a little jerkiness here too though?
Another option I seem to have, is to save my project as a 1080i 29.97fps video. This is as close to the 30fps I can get, but again: 29.97fps isn't 30fps, so what happens with jerkiness here?
Also, saving my 720p 30fps recordings as either 720p 59.94fps or 1080i 29.97fps logically results in a bigger filesize. Filesize is somewhat important too, as I expect this blu-ray collection to contain as many videos as possible. (720p recordings should give at least 11 hours on a standard 25gb blu-ray disc).
And finally, there's also the theoretical option of converting my 30fps recordings to smooth 24fps recordings, but as far as I can understand in my searches, this is extremely tricky / almost impossible to do?
Surely it can't be this tricky to put everyday recordings onto a blu-ray disc? I must be missing something?
The overall question is: What is the best solution for putting 720p 30fps and 1080p 30fps video-recordings onto a blu-ray disc?
Thanks!
EDIT:
Two possible answers I'm expecting to hear:
1) Best practice to put 720p 30fps and 1080p 30fps videos onto a blu-ray, is to just stick to 720p 30fps and 1080p 30fps. Although it is not a blu-ray standard, the majority of players will play them anyway.
2) Best practice is to use 720p 59.94fps. That's the only way to make sure the video plays on most devices. There are simply too many devices that will only play the blu-ray standards. So you can forget about using anything else.
I'm surprised no one can answer this. I thought this was common knowledge among the video-processing people, but apparently not.
While waiting for an answer, I've done some tests: I rendered the same video to the following formats:
I then created a blu-ray disc with those 7 different versions on, and tested on the following players:
Only Toshiba BDX3400 and Samsung BD-F5100 refused to play the 30fps versions. They played all other versions fine, and all other players played all 7 versions fine too.
In other words, to answer my own question: It looks like the way to go when wanting to make a blu-ray disc from 30fps video, is to use the 29.97fps versions.
I'll continue testing on various blu-ray players when I have the chance, but since all of these 9 players had no problem playing the 29.97fps version, despite it not being a blu-ray standard, I'm sticking with this.