BROKE THE 25GB LIMIT!

[Bud Solem]

Thanks for posting this.Great to hear of your success.

I have had problems with mutiple timelines and menus for Blu-ray in Encore on Windows.
How many timelines/menus, etc. do you have on the project you mentioned?
Thanks.

[Sloan Warner]

Interested in the above as well. My experience with Encore (even in SD) has been seeing it crash with complicated timelines.

what’s the final version intended for?

[John Ward]

Hi, Bud –

what we wanted to wind up with was a single timeline with 32 chapters and the ability to either ‘play all’ through the whole thing or to go to an individual chapter but come back to the menu at the end of the chapter. The timeline was close to 3 hours long at 1920×1080.
We set up an SD test with a full-length NTSC version of the timeline and used chapter playlists to get the chapters to play individually and an end action on the chapter playlist to get them to dump back to the menu as soon as the chapter was done playing. Then the ‘play all’ was just a button pointing to chapter 1 of the single timeline with an end action to come back to the menu. 2 menus, 18 buttons each: ‘Play All’, 16 chapter selects, and ‘Next Page’ or ‘Previous Page’ depending on the menu. SD version of the project worked beautifully and elegantly and we thought nothing more of it while we encoded the HD MPG’s. But that’s when we ran into trouble.
The HD project was an exact duplicate of the SD in terms of types of assets, types of navigation, number of menus and buttons … everything. Preview in Encore worked like a charm and the file size was only 22GB so we were stylin’. But in the burned Blu-Ray none of the chapter navigation worked. We tried various flavors of this on 25GB and 50GB and we could never get chapter playlists to work on Blu-Ray disc even though it worked fine in Encore Preview. Simply pointing a button to a chapter and giving the button an end action also doesn’t work because it doesn’t bring us back out at the end of the chapter. In addition to all this we were getting outrageous space requirements from Encore depending on the type of navigation we were trying to use. At one point we tried doing chapter navigation by assigning end actions to the chapter points THEMSELVES. This worked fine for chapter navigation but destroyed the ability to use a single timeline for ‘play all’ funtionality because as soon as the 2nd chapter marker was reached it would dump out to the menu.
Now, here was the weirdest part of Encore on this project: using end actions on individual chapter markers caused the amount of space needed to build the project to balloon out to unearthly proportions. One estimate using this navigation method was at 710 GB. By this time, however, we had already figured out that we could burn an image larger than 25 GB and burn it to a dual-layer using toast so all we had to do was figure out how to keep the project size under 46 GB.
Our final solution was to encode each chapter as a separate MPEG-2 file AND to run the entire timeline as we had originally encoded it. So, effectively, there was almost 6 hours worth of HD footage on the disc. This way, each chapter button pointed to its own timeline whose end action came back to the menu and the ‘play all’ button pointed to the original 3 hour timeline. This method of navigation was so simple Encore couldn’t help but get it right and it stopped exponentially increasing the amount of space we needed. Burned the .iso image, mounted it on the desktop, told Toast to ‘copy disc’ to a blank BD-R dual layer and, 90 minutes later, tested it out on a set-top Samsung Blu-Ray and all was good with the world.

That’s probably a lot more information than you wanted but it may also help.

Good luck burnin’,

John Ward

Editor / Animator,
Synergetic Productions

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

[John Ward]

Hi, Sloan –

project was for planning a utility route. Timeline was 3 hours of aerial helicopter footage in 1080i showing entire proposed route. In addition the company wanted to be able to hilite particular areas to talk about but be able to come out at a pre-determined place. Thus, the 32 chapters which had to return to the menu when they were done. Menu navigation was labeled by area. Project was designed to be part of an overall presentation which would include lots of other elements.

Hope that helps. Any other questions, let me know.

Thanks,

John Ward

Editor / Animator,
Synergetic Productions

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

[Bud Solem]

Hi John,

I really appreciate all the detail, it helps very much.
We have also used separate mpgs for each segment and then one big one for play all. Where I’m having difficulty is in a project with 30 timelines and 35 menus. The reason for so many menus is that after a segment/timeline plays it end jumps to a still (menu) of the product that allows a viewer to study and then choose to return to the the category menu or the main menu. The SD version created in DVDSP works perfectly. Encore does not like this Blu-ray version. I am going to test this in a smaller version to see if I can discover where the limit is.

Thanks again,
Bud

[Walter Biscardi]

Thanks for all the great info John! What a huge project you had there.

Interesting to see you use Toast too. We’ve been trying to work with Adobe to find out why Encore CS3 won’t burn discs correctly but everytime we send them a sample project their first answer is “Well the first problem is you created a Standard DVD” but we know the projects are created as either 720 or 1080i BluRays from the start.

We’ll have to try a Dual Layer disc project sometime, but so far all we’re working on are 30 and 60 minute documentaries. But it sure is sweet to see your HD work look just as good as the original product on a consumer machine when you play back the BluRay, ain’t it?

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow!

Read my Blog!