How does Hollywood make (UHD) Blu-rays?

roxics

roxics

Veteran
Adobe and Apple and others don't seem to offer any support any longer for any disc authoring or burning solutions, so how do distributors of bigger movies even author and make DVD/Blu-ray and UHD Blu-rays anymore? The latter is particularly confusing since UHD Blu-ray came out after the tools were pretty much discontinued as is. So they never offered UHD authoring/burning support to begin with. So how are those made?

I would love to make some 4K Blu-rays myself. I still love disc media. Although I would be happy with just regular Blu-ray at this point as well.
 
roxics said:
Adobe and Apple and others don't seem to offer any support any longer for any disc authoring or burning solutions, so how do distributors of bigger movies even author and make DVD/Blu-ray and UHD Blu-rays anymore? The latter is particularly confusing since UHD Blu-ray came out after the tools were pretty much discontinued as is. So they never offered UHD authoring/burning support to begin with. So how are those made?

I would love to make some 4K Blu-rays myself. I still love disc media. Although I would be happy with just regular Blu-ray at this point as well.
Click to expand...

I don’t know about UHD/4K Blu-Rays but I certainly
can easily make normal Blu-Rays easily in FCPX.
They are pretty basic but can do the job….
 
I'm not sure now, but back in the day it was either proprietary which a studio developed in-house with some random name none of us ever heard of, or they used some random technology/hardware/software company that specialized in different services like film transfers or selling duplicators, etc. There were a lot of companies out there and I don't even remember almost any anymore...feels like it's been so long since "tape" or "disc".
 
alaskacameradude said:
I don’t know about UHD/4K Blu-Rays but I certainly
can easily make normal Blu-Rays easily in FCPX.
They are pretty basic but can do the job….
Click to expand...

P.S. Apple changed the name back to FCP a few years ago...they dropped the "X" (which I personally liked because now it's just confusing).
 
Sony Blu-Print was and I think is still the software that Sony and many other BD authoring outfits used to use. Hasn't been updated for ages. The last lot of BD master images I needed for a production I created in DVD Architect. DVDA can create master images with zoning if required for both 25 and 50GB BD discs. You create a master image of your finished authored BD and send it off to a BD replication house and they bang out the BDs... or DVDs as the case may be.

Blu-Print was very pricey back then.
https://www.sony.com/content/sony/en/en_us/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-media-software/2010/bluprint-6-and-z-depth-now-available-from-sony-creative-software.html

DVDA comes with a bunch of templates but you can import any artwork you create and design in your favorite graphics program. Back in the early 2000's we created over a couple of hundred titles in both PAL and NTSC in DVDA with no problems at all. I still use it occasionally when asked for a DVD or BD master. Check out Gary Rebholz overview here.

For the best encoding of DVD and DB master files to use in DVDA or any authoring package I find it very hard to get better quality than using MainConcept's Total Code Studio. It's incredibly powerful if fine tuning video quality features, forced I frames on scene changes etc. Which on fast moving highly detailed images makes a big difference.

Chris Young

https://www.mainconcept.com/totalcode-studio



 
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cyvideo said:
Sony Blu-Print was and I think is still the software that Sony and many other BD authoring outfits used to use. Hasn't been updated for ages. The last lot of BD master images I needed for a production I created in DVD Architect. DVDA can create master images with zoning if required for both 25 and 50GB BD discs. You create a master image of your finished authored BD and send it off to a BD replication house and they bang out the BDs... or DVDs as the case may be.

Blu-Print was very pricey back then.
https://www.sony.com/content/sony/en/en_us/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-media-software/2010/bluprint-6-and-z-depth-now-available-from-sony-creative-software.html

DVDA comes with a bunch of templates but you can import any artwork you create and design in your favorite graphics program. Back in the early 2000's we created over a couple of hundred titles in both PAL and NTSC in DVDA with no problems at all. I still use it occasionally when asked for a DVD or BD master. Check out Gary Rebholz overview here.

For the best encoding of DVD and DB master files to use in DVDA or any authoring package I find it very hard to get better quality than using MainConcept's Total Code Studio. It's incredibly powerful if fine tuning video quality features, forced I frames on scene changes etc. Which on fast moving highly detailed images makes a big difference.

Chris Young

https://www.mainconcept.com/totalcode-studio



Click to expand...

I completely forgot about DVD Architect. I used it myself for a film or two back around 2005. In late 2006 I started working at a production company that was all Adobe and switched to Encore then. In 2010 I personally switched to Mac OSX so continued with Encore for my personal use as well, but then stopped making discs for a number of years.

Thanks for the info. I had never even heard of Blu-print.
You said it's old, but I'm guessing it had to at least have been updated to author UHD discs right? Not only is that a new codec, but also introduced 66GB discs along side 100GB discs.
They've got to be using some kind of software to be making those discs.
 
Talking to an old mate in the industry today. Mentioned the BD thing, he is still involved with optical authoring and he said most BD producers these days are using Scenarist. I now recall Scenarist had a top rap but I never had anything to do with it. I see one version of it does in fact support Ultra HD Blu-ray Authoring. It is a subscription model app only.

Chris Young

Scenarist UHD

https://www.scenarist.com/suhd-landing/today.

They do also have specific BD and DVD software I notice:

https://www.scenarist.com/scenarist-live/
 
There are not many full featured authoring disc software left. DVD Architect is the only one I can think of... There is burning software like Toast that has very rudimentary templates menus or the simplest method is have the video play automatically without a menu.

Scenarist is not affordable for individuals. I believe $80,000 last time I checked. They don't list prices on their website like a high end French restaurant.
 
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Interesting. Thanks for the information everyone. I've noticed that most of the disc creation software these days is Windows only. The one solution I found for consumer UHD Blu-ray creation included. I wonder why that is? Oh well, the mac I'm currently working on is old anyway and still running Mojave. It's not compatible with the newer operating systems like OS11. So I think it's time to dual boot it to Windows anyway.
 
roxics said:
Interesting. Thanks for the information everyone. I've noticed that most of the disc creation software these days is Windows only. The one solution I found for consumer UHD Blu-ray creation included. I wonder why that is? Oh well, the mac I'm currently working on is old anyway and still running Mojave. It's not compatible with the newer operating systems like OS11. So I think it's time to dual boot it to Windows anyway.
Click to expand...

Toast is available on the Mac just make sure to get a the version that's compatible with your operating system.
 
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In the freeware/open-source web there are tools for most everything. One of the wedding clients I shoot for distributes on Blu-ray and flash drives. It had been years since I created and burned Blu-ray but I still have the burner and printable BD media so I decided to give it a whirl again. DVDA is okay, nice for creating menus and playlists but it re-encodes your video and is very slow. TSmuxer is freeware that doesn't do menus but is speedy and also makes chapter stops which is the only really necessary thing. It can do UHD Blu-ray and also mux separate video and audio files. I would convert 2ch to 5.1 DD and mux these. TSmuxer does not re-encode your video so there is no generational quality loss. Then I would burn the compilation with another freeware called IMGBurn.

The really cool thing I did was with IFOEdit and Hex Editor Neo, I would edit one byte in the .IFO file and spoof the computer reading a USB flash drive into thinking it was a Blu-ray disk player so that the Blu-ray project would play from the flash drive exactly as if it was a BD disk with menus, chapter skips, FF/FR.
 
Tom Roper said:
DVDA is okay, nice for creating menus and playlists but it re-encodes your video and is very slow.
Click to expand...

Sorry, what? Say that again Tom?

Something is horribly wrong with your DVDA workflow then. You never encode in DVDA if you are doing it correctly. You can but who would do that? Outside of DVDA you encode a fully compliant VBR or CBR MPEG2 DVD video stream and then encode a fully compliant Dolby audio stream. With BD discs you have a choice of either MPEG2 or AVC video streams. Us the same name for streams. Import the compliant video and Dolby AC3 streams, author your disc menus, and then go "Make Disc". It will build your files and compile a one-hour disc in about sixty seconds. A couple of minutes for a two-hour disc. Done it literally hundreds of times. For stream creation I use MainConcept's TotalCode Studio for the video and audio elementary streams, You can encode program streams with TotalCode but you have much more flexibility in encoding parameters by creating individual streams. DVDA will then mux them together during the disc build.

Shudder! If DVDA was as slow as your experience has been and only offered to re-encode I wouldn't be using it.

Chris Young
 
Tom Roper said:
In the freeware/open-source web there are tools for most everything. One of the wedding clients I shoot for distributes on Blu-ray and flash drives. It had been years since I created and burned Blu-ray but I still have the burner and printable BD media so I decided to give it a whirl again. DVDA is okay, nice for creating menus and playlists but it re-encodes your video and is very slow. TSmuxer is freeware that doesn't do menus but is speedy and also makes chapter stops which is the only really necessary thing. It can do UHD Blu-ray and also mux separate video and audio files. I would convert 2ch to 5.1 DD and mux these. TSmuxer does not re-encode your video so there is no generational quality loss. Then I would burn the compilation with another freeware called IMGBurn.

The really cool thing I did was with IFOEdit and Hex Editor Neo, I would edit one byte in the .IFO file and spoof the computer reading a USB flash drive into thinking it was a Blu-ray disk player so that the Blu-ray project would play from the flash drive exactly as if it was a BD disk with menus, chapter skips, FF/FR.
Click to expand...

Thank you. I will try that software out. Nice that there is a mac version as well.

As for DVD Architect, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem to be available anymore. The official website doesn't list it at all in the bundles or as a stand alone product. So it looks like it too has gone the way of Adobe Encore and others.
There is this message board thread that mentions it has been dropped:
https://www.vegascreativesoftware.in...ro-18--122836/

Although I did find a link to the trial version:
https://dl03.magix.com/trial_vegasdv...tect.exe?dwl=1

Which Videohelp.com lists as DVD Architect Studio, although the link doesn't say studio. Whatever if any differences there is there.
Plus if it's just a trial, one would need a product key I assume to continue using it.

It's a bummer all this software keeps getting discontinued. It would be nice if these companies open sourced them or something if they don't plan on developing or selling them anymore.
 
Chris Young

I already had h.264 versions in 2160p and 1080p with AAC audio for the USB flash drive that is being provided. To use DVDA with Quicktime h.264 from Resolve it's going to force a re-encode.

I realize 25 Mbps mpg2 MainConcept 8bit from Vegas would have worked without re-encoding but I didn't want to make a separate mpg2 version and didn't need to with tsMUXer.

I have stacks of Blu-ray that I made from my XDCAMs of yester-year. Most of them were straight-from-the-camera-smart-rendered end-to-end.
 
Roxics, DVDA was bundled with Vegas Pro back when I bought it V11. By V12 or 13 Sony had sold off Vegas assets to the new company and I switched to Resolve.
 
Tom Roper said:
Chris Young

I already had h.264 versions in 2160p and 1080p with AAC audio for the USB flash drive that is being provided. To use DVDA with Quicktime h.264 from Resolve it's going to force a re-encode.

I realize 25 Mbps mpg2 MainConcept 8bit from Vegas would have worked without re-encoding but I didn't want to make a separate mpg2 version and didn't need to with tsMUXer.

I have stacks of Blu-ray that I made from my XDCAMs of yester-year. Most of them were straight-from-the-camera-smart-rendered end-to-end.
Click to expand...

Ah, right, understand Mr. Tom. Also following up on roxics' comments on DVDA. Yes, it has apparently been discontinued by MAGIX. I shall hang onto my copies of DVDA as every now and again someone still wants optical media.

Chris Young
 
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