Assistance requested! Blu Ray Project under capacity max in Encore, but far exceeds it once the image is created

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Matt,

Due to the way GB are represented (or shall I say mis-represented) a 50GB disc has a capacity that is somewhat less, just as a 4.7GB DVD holds more like 4.3GB in reality. So at 48GB, that has to be pushing the limit to start with. Of course that doesn’t explain the 65GB figure, but just saying.

So anyway, how many hours of footage do you have that you need to max out a dual-layer Blu-ray? A 25GB disc can hold about 3 hours at good quality. Any motion menus that can require a lot of extra space if not careful?

I don’t always trust what Encore tells me. What is the actual size of the ASSETS you brought into Encore – did you encode from Blu-ray right out of Premiere, Dynamic Link, what was the workflow?

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[James Kumorek]

Another possibility is, are all your assets already encoded in Blu-ray acceptable codecs and file formats, or is Encore needing to transcode anything? If you’re letting Encore transcode, it’s going to guesstimate the resulting file sizes of the transcoded video/audio when showing how much of the disc’s capacity you are using. And I’ve found Encore’s transcoding to be squirrely, so I’d recommend rendering out all your assets in Blu-ray acceptable formats before loading into Encore.

[Matt Harnick]

Thanks for the replies, gentlemen.

Jeff – to be honest I don’t get into changing the settings in Encore, I’ve never had this problem before. Normally if the project fits perfectly under the maximum in Encore it burns fine…I don’t normally burn directly to disc from Encore as I used to have issues with that – I’ve always made a folder or an ISO and burned from there.

I have approx. 3hrs 40m of footage. I have four motion menus but each times out at :15s so they’re not that lengthy. The physical size of the two main streams of video are approx. 20G and 21G. There’s a third smaller stream at approx. 4G. The associated audio is nominal. I encoded in Compressor, which I always do, with their preset for blu ray.

James – to answer your question – as mentioned above everything is already encoded with Compressor, and Encore is showing the transcode settings for each of the assets as ‘untranscoded’- and the transcode settings are showing as automatic for each of the same assets. Do I need to mess with these settings somehow to get the desired result?

thanks very much to you both for your assistance!

[Jeff Pulera]

Looks like Encore wants to Transcode your material, so something is not up to spec in the assets from Compressor. And for 4 hours to max out a dual-layer Blu-ray, must be encoding at the top of the scale. There is a point of diminishing returns when encoding for Blu-ray.

I’ve encoded videos at 20mbps that to me looked very good, so it’s not like encoding at 30 or 35 or 38 is going to look twice as good. No need to push the max. Try 30 for instance.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Matt Harnick]

So to make sure I understand it appears it’s a Compressor setting then? When looking at the preset I use for Compressor now it shows an average bitrate of 30Mbps, max of 35. If I bring this down to a max of 30 would that make enough of a difference? And again – as you said before – where’s that extra 18G coming from between the Encore project and the ISO? Could it be something else as well? Thanks!

[Jeff Pulera]

It is certainly possible in Encore to accidentally use an asset TWICE, thereby doubling the size of that video clip on the disc. Gotta be careful with how menus and links are set up in there

Jeff

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Bill Stephan]

As I recall, Encore CS-5 does not have the “Do Not Transcode” setting. We first saw that feature in Encore CS-6.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City