studio1972
Well-known member
OK, I got my Blu-Ray player and a burner today at last after much deliberation. I am now working out the best workflow. The Burner is an LG external model BTW, and it worked straight away without having to install drivers etc.which is great.
There seems to be 3 main options when it comes to burning the blu-ray disks:
Adobe Encore - The best option but very expensive as you have to buy Premier Pro which I have no need for.
Toast - Pretty crude looking, costs about $150 so not exactly a bargain, but a lot cheaper then Encore. From what I have seen it would be very time consuming and frustrating to use and the end result will fall fay short of iDVD for example (if only iDVD could burn Blu-Ray).
Final Cut 7/Compressor 3.5 - It is possible to create a Blu-Ray disk either directly within Final Cut or within Compressor. From what I can tell the process and results are the same either way.
For now at least, I intend to go for this 3rd option, which has the advantage of being free from my point of view (as I already have FCS).
The process is a little odd to be honest, the way it works seems to allow you to include only 1 video file, meaning that it is impossible to create a normal menu with different videos to select. However, chapters can be created so at least some basic navigation is possible. The menu screens are basic and not very customisable. You have to select at the start which drive you will burn the disk with, this is important. If you select a DVD burner it assumes you are creating a Blu-Ray on DVD (AVCHD) disk and encodes at up to 17mbps, if you select a Blu-Ray burner it assumes you are using a Blu-Ray disk and encodes at up to 35mbps (so it won't let you burn a DVD type disk in a Blu-Ray burner which is a bit odd.
By my calculations, this means you get something like 35 mins of video onto a 4.7GB DVD-R and 95 mins onto a BD-R 25 disk. I have tried the DVD-R type disk and I found the quality to be excellent, so it's a shame that you cannot lower the bitrate for BD-R disks to enable more footage on a disk.
One weird thing I have noticed is that it doesn't seem to warn you if your video is too long for the disk until you actually put the disk in (up to this point I guess it doesn't know which type if disk it's going to get, it knows if it's DVD-R or BD-R but not if it's dual layer) so you can encode all the files and find out at the last moment that the media is too small to fit the files onto.
It seems to me that the Blu-Ray support in FCS is a bodge to keep people happy until either iTunes kills Blu-Ray, or Blu-Ray takes off (in which case they will produce something like DVDSP for Blu-Ray). It's better than nothing and will do for now, but hopefully not for too long.
There seems to be 3 main options when it comes to burning the blu-ray disks:
Adobe Encore - The best option but very expensive as you have to buy Premier Pro which I have no need for.
Toast - Pretty crude looking, costs about $150 so not exactly a bargain, but a lot cheaper then Encore. From what I have seen it would be very time consuming and frustrating to use and the end result will fall fay short of iDVD for example (if only iDVD could burn Blu-Ray).
Final Cut 7/Compressor 3.5 - It is possible to create a Blu-Ray disk either directly within Final Cut or within Compressor. From what I can tell the process and results are the same either way.
For now at least, I intend to go for this 3rd option, which has the advantage of being free from my point of view (as I already have FCS).
The process is a little odd to be honest, the way it works seems to allow you to include only 1 video file, meaning that it is impossible to create a normal menu with different videos to select. However, chapters can be created so at least some basic navigation is possible. The menu screens are basic and not very customisable. You have to select at the start which drive you will burn the disk with, this is important. If you select a DVD burner it assumes you are creating a Blu-Ray on DVD (AVCHD) disk and encodes at up to 17mbps, if you select a Blu-Ray burner it assumes you are using a Blu-Ray disk and encodes at up to 35mbps (so it won't let you burn a DVD type disk in a Blu-Ray burner which is a bit odd.
By my calculations, this means you get something like 35 mins of video onto a 4.7GB DVD-R and 95 mins onto a BD-R 25 disk. I have tried the DVD-R type disk and I found the quality to be excellent, so it's a shame that you cannot lower the bitrate for BD-R disks to enable more footage on a disk.
One weird thing I have noticed is that it doesn't seem to warn you if your video is too long for the disk until you actually put the disk in (up to this point I guess it doesn't know which type if disk it's going to get, it knows if it's DVD-R or BD-R but not if it's dual layer) so you can encode all the files and find out at the last moment that the media is too small to fit the files onto.
It seems to me that the Blu-Ray support in FCS is a bodge to keep people happy until either iTunes kills Blu-Ray, or Blu-Ray takes off (in which case they will produce something like DVDSP for Blu-Ray). It's better than nothing and will do for now, but hopefully not for too long.
