Blu-ray authoring Out of FCP into Sony Architect

Steve Shovlar

Steve Shovlar

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Posted this in the FCP forum but might have been better here.

OK I edit in FCP. 94 minute movie which I want to send to Sony Architect 5 for full blue ray authoring. (Architect 5 gives full menues)

Now the movie was shot on an EX1 and in 720P50.

So I export-> quicktime conversion-> best quality and it takes about, well hours and hours using H.264. Could be as much as a day (24 hours) Currently it says 14 hours remaining. I have a quad Mac Pro with 8 Gb ram.

When I import the footage into Architect 5 it works fine but has to be re rendered out for Blu-ray. Quality is great, but all that time, man it's killing me.

So is there a better way to do this out of FCP and into Architect and keep the picture quality perfect?

Whats better to use out of FCP other than H.264 which will still give a great image that will import into Architect 5?
 
Ok here's an update. I made a quicktime 720P50 movie which took the best part of a day to render on the Mac Pro. Looks great. Copied it over to the PC, all 41Gb of it.

Imported it into Architect 5 and made full menues. Looks good. Stuck in a blu-ray rewritable in the drive and its now making the movie and buring to Blu-ray dvd. But it is going to take at least 24 hours to render out again and burn.

This is crazy. best part of a day to render on the mac, followed by a day of rendering on the PC just to get it to disk.

There must be a better way.
 
I don't know, I mean a 94 minute video is a pretty tall order, especially if your exporting in h.264.

In fact, when I was experimenting with getting the best looking h.264 compression my 3 minute video usually took about 6 hours to render, if your doing it right and trying to get the best quality this is pretty normal. Of course I'm working on a 2.2ghz macbook pro with 2 gb of ram, significantly slower then your computer, but I would still say about a day of rendering is WELL within the ballpark of such a long video like yours. If anything, I would expect it to take a lot longer even with a mac pro.

But if your really concerned about time and willing to sacrifice your video quality try outputting the video in compressor, there are a few settings you should check:

on your frame controls tab, the settings that make all of the difference i've found (and take a LOT longer to render) are the resize filter (if its set to best statistical prediction this takes a lot of time to render), de-interlace (if its set to best motion compensated same deal) if the details level is set to anything above 0 (I usually set mine to about 7) and if the rate conversion is set to best (high quality motion compensated).

of course, if you want the best looking hollywood quality h.264 you would make sure that all of these parameters are on their highest quality, and it will probably take you a long time to render that video, usually I think these kind of operations are done on a small farm of computers rather than just one.

h.264 takes time, the price of amazing looking video.
 
Agree with you. Trouble is I have a wedding a week at the moment and the time is killing me, although I can of course multi task. But to have the mac and pc locked up while this is going on means I might have to invest in yet another mac.

I was wondering if I used something different from H.264 that would be much quicker and give almost as good results.
 
You might want to explore that, I'm in pre production for a full feature that I'm shooting, and I'm going to be editting in pro res hq, so this is something I'm looking into too.

I would look into setting up a small render farm (just having 2 computers would help), you can pickup some desktop pc's that have great specs for about 600 bucks (little gaming computers) or cheaper if you buy them used, and if you google "put osx on my pc" there are some pretty easy ways to install mac osx on them. Maybe buy a few used gaming pcs, install osx on em, and link em together and you'll be doing a lot better.

Weddings are tough, because if bluray or HD is one of your selling points there is probably no way to get around using h.264, so grabbing another cheap pc with osx on it to manage the rendering or complete a render farm would probably be worth its weight in gold.
 
PS: actually if you want to get REALLY tricky I know there are ways to buy xbox 360's (which are incredibly fast computers that are priced cheaper because they will make money off of you buying games) and install osx on them. its a hack, and it will take a little effort and some searching on google, but if you setup like 2 or 3 of those bad boys you'll be rendering like a pro, and you can put them to work as your own server for online streaming or personal use when your not using them as render horses.
 
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Yes thanks for that I will look into it next week. I am shooting a wedding a week ( in fact I have two in two weeks time) and that goes right through until the end of September.

All but one are Blu-ray. Its my selling point and keep me ahead of the game. Most can't yet watch the film in blu-ray but they get a copy anyway and are future proofed, so I tell 'em!

Cheers
Steve
 
Thats the thinking, if I find anything else out on my own research I'll put a post on this thread, good luck with everything!
 
Steve, are you importing on the sony software a Quicktime file, or a .mp4 file?

Because- and you probably know this- if you export an H264 quicktime movie from quicktime conversion, it is wrapped in a QT container. Simply Open the H264 QT movie you have (the 41gb one) in Quicktime Pro, go to Export, select mpeg 4, deselect basic and select improved, then, there's a parameter that says "passtrough", click it. Quicktime pro then simply wraps it to an mp4 container. This should , in theory, work directly in the sony software and not need to do a new render for burning to blu-ray.

This is all theory, please do keep us posted!
 
Thanks for the reply SPZ and I have followed your advice.


Unfortunately Architect 5 still wants to render the whole movie. It says that MP4 is not a compatible format and wants to convert to MPEG2. So again I am left with the long render time.

Edit. Looks like the rendering time has been slashed. Currently saying 2 hours rather than 24+. Of course the source file is 41 Gb so it would have to be rendeed down anyway.

Will add more info later on.
 
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Ok an update. Thanks to SPZ for saving me hours.

This is what I did. The result is a beautiful Blu-ray dvd with full menues and chapters. However You need a mac and a PC if you are FCP for editing.

OK I capture and edit on the mac. The movie was 1 hour 34 minutes, 720P50.

I exported quicktime conversion as an MP4, passthrough.

I then networked the file ( 41 Gb) over my network onto my PC, then brought it into Sony Architect 5. Made the menues, chapters etc. Looked great.

Went to burn Blu-ray and it said it needed rendering. before when I had imported a quicktime movie and it said over 24 hours. Now with the MP4 it said 3 hours 20 minutes. Much better.

The result is a beautiful Blu-ray dvd which the client will be chuffed to bits with.

Thanks to SPZ.
 
Glad it worked out, Steve! There should be, however, a way to do it without the need of re-encoding. There's an option in compressor to export in mpeg 2 HD. However, I'm not sure if it will look anywhere as good as the method you did right now, but, and agai, theoreticaly, the mpeg2 HD file out of Compressor wouldn't require encoding from Architect.

Anyway, that way works, so, at least you've got a workflow!
 
Thanks for the info David. I will check it out. I have now made some stunning looking blu-ray dvds.
Edit in FCP. export as quicktime conversion 720P50 mov. Open in quicktime and convert to
MP4 passthrough (basically getting rid of the wrapper) bring into Architect, make the menues etc then out to blu-ray. The image is beautiful. Architect takes about 4 hours from pressing the make blu-ray dvd button until it pops out of the PC. NOt bad at all seeing as an hour of that is burning the disk!
 
Well I can't get it to go any faster. 2x speed blu-ray dvds so burning is an hour. Architect excepts mp4 and I cant get it to not recompress.

Is there anyway around this? Any button to click to stop recompression?
 
ok, I've been following this for a few days; I'm interested in bluray too.

I have FCP 5.04 and G5 dual processors 2.7 and 4 MBs RAM. What do I do to produce blueray discs?

Is there an external bluray burner for the G5? And what program can I use? I don't need menus.

I want to make 90 minute bluray DVDs. Is that possible?
 
filmman said:
ok, I've been following this for a few days; I'm interested in bluray too.

I have FCP 5.04 and G5 dual processors 2.7 and 4 MBs RAM. What do I do to produce blueray discs?

Is there an external bluray burner for the G5? And what program can I use? I don't need menus.

I want to make 90 minute bluray DVDs. Is that possible?
Click to expand...

The only sure way I know in a G5 is either by Adobe Encore ( and I don't know if this is even compatible with Power Pc macs), and toast 9.

In encore, I assume this would work:

Export the master file from your FCP timeline- I assume you are either HDV or DVCPRO HD-

For DVCPRO HD:

If Encore doesn't recognize your native DVCPRO HD MOV file:

Open QUicktime Pro

Go to Export, select h264, and set these settings: screen size- current size; No internet streaming, video quality " High"; audio aac 192 (I choose this, by the way). After the long encoding process, open the H264 clip again with quicktime pro, select export, and select mpeg 4. Select passtrough. This will only take a minute or 2.

Open Encore and it should recognize the file.

For Toast 9:

Drag and drop your master file to Toast 9 (with blu-ray encoding key purchased), and let Toast do the job for you. Reportedly, word of mouth is that Toast's Blu-Ray encoding is not very good.

A Blu-Ray burner that works is the Lacie Blu-ray external burner. Others might work too, but this one works for sure.

Notice that all this workflow explanation is theoretical. What I do for HD delivery is either tape or an H264 high quality file that can play back in PS3's. This is ideal for small, bellow 30 minutes projects- just put the file in a 4gb USB pen (pretty cheap nowadays) and there you go- a deliverable HD master.

EDIT- I have the same powermac as you. I bought a new 2.8 quad to futureproof a BLU-RAY workflow when I need it. Macs (booting OSX) are definitely not ready for primetime yet with blu-ray, so switching to windows you have more options for this- like Steve's sony architect workflow.

And be careful with your Mac- look for liquid coolant leaks. I had a major liquid cooling leak a couple months ago that destroyed my motherboard and CPU's- this is happening everywhere.
 
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Steve Shovlar said:
Well I can't get it to go any faster. 2x speed blu-ray dvds so burning is an hour. Architect excepts mp4 and I cant get it to not recompress.

Is there anyway around this? Any button to click to stop recompression?
Click to expand...

Steve, here's a way to speed up your compression (on the front end on the mac.) Compressing to an MP4 out of FCP is REALLY slow. I would suggest setting up a "quick cluster" on your mac and exporting your MP4 out of compressor. That way, your Mac will use ALL 4 of your processors instead of just 1 or 2, like it is doing now.

PM me if you need help setting it up.
 
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