Blue Ray and FCP7

[Mark Raudonis]

[Ernie Santella] “Not exactly true. You can burn HD-DVD’s in DVD SP that will playback in HD on the now extinct, consumer HD-DVD players that came out to compete with consumer Blu-Ray players”

Also “not exactly true”. Just today, I created a disc that will play back on most all new BLU Ray players. It uses the AVCHD format, which many Blu Ray players will now recognize. The best part of it? I used a “red laser” SD DVD to do it. Cost me .25 cents.

Here’s what I did. I took my 7 minute XDCAM HD timeline, and exported a quicktime at full rez. Opened up compressor (FC studio 3 and Snow Leopard), and clicked on the “make blu ray” button. That’s it! In less than an hour, I had a disc that played back FULL HD on my Sony Blu Ray player attached to my plasma. Looked great.

Here’s the catch. My segment was only seven minutes… and took up approx 2.5 gigs. I think you’re limited to approx 12-15 minutes of media before you top out above the 4 gig limit of red laser single sided DVD media. Also, if the BLU Ray player doesn’t handle AVCHD, this won’t work. (Hint: almost all Panasonic or Sony Blu ray players will handle this). This will NEVER work for a full length feature project, but it sure works great for short form.

TEST out your target player BEFORE you really need it.

Good luck.

Mark

[John Ward]

Hi, Simon –

we haven’t used FCP7 Share yet but we’ve done several big Blu-Ray projects using FCP / Encore / Toast. A couple of things to note: we’ve found some of the more complex navigation through Encore (i.e. using ‘stories’ to jump in and out of a single track) work well in simulation mode but not on the burned Blu-Ray. Using separate tracks for each jump point solved this … it’s less elegant but effective. We’ve also seen some compatibility issues if the encoding rate through Encore is set too high, even if we’ve used Compressor for the MPG-2 files. And, last but not least, I’m not sure if Encore still has the 25GB limit for Blu-Ray projects but you can get around it by outputting the project to an .ISO image from Encore and then using Toast to burn that to a BD-R DL. We actually fit a 3+ hour HD program onto a Blu-Ray this way.

Cheers,

John Ward

Editor / Animator,
Synergetic Productions

john@synergeticproductions.com
https://www.synergeticproductions.com
315.437.7533